CHAPTER ONE: She’s standing in the shade of this big oak tree,

out of the sun, which is really hot this time of year. It’s actually kind of uncomfortable because the ground is really uneven, all bunched up from all the roots poking out of the earth, like the wrinkles in someone’s brain. It feels like you could twist your ankle just by standing there long enough. She notices she has a cloak on, and it takes her a while to identify what it’s made of, it’s so strange.
Something living used to have it for skin, she realizes, and then someone had to go out and kill it and then someone else entirely, someone with a lot of skill and practice, spent God-only-knows how long tanning it or whatever it is they do to make animal skins into real clothes. And it was all done by hand.

A feeling almost like awe settles into her at that thought, and she’s reluctant to unzip it (although she notices it doesn’t really have a zipper, of course, and not really buttons either, but carved and painted clasps made from an animal’s bone) as if that might somehow damage it, like she’s renting the thing and when she returns it the man at the counter will go over it with a microscope to see if she took good care of it.

Then she notices the armband. It reminds her of the ones Nazis wear on television, red and white and black, except the white is a thick line that goes all round, so maybe it’s more like a flag of some sort, and there are letters stitched into it in black cord. Nina, it says, which is funny because that’s her name. That’s when she figures out she’s dreaming.

*

The tree, it turns out, is vaguely in the middle of a grassy field that has a road running through it. The summer has made the road dusty and white, the grass into the gently browning color of an old photograph. Further off, there are mountains that look like they might scrape against the moon if it ever has an off day, and there’s a forest in between, promising more of the delicious shade. The air is so thick with cricket-song that she can imagine it pressing against her skull and pushing her eyeballs to the back of her neck.

Isn’t there something about lucid dreaming? She seems to remember reading something about it, how if you can manage to figure out that you’re asleep while you are, you know, asleep, you can take over the dream-world, make it do what you want. It’s all your head after all, and it’s a chance to play God for a little while, making yourself dream what you want to dream.

Well, as far as Nina can tell, it doesn’t seem to be working for her.

Maybe I only dreamed I read about it? That would be kinda funny, in an annoying, solipsistic kind of way.

Then she hears the procession. At first it’s hard to hear over the endless roar of the crickets or cicadas or whatever invisible bug made all this noise, but gradually she can make out a song and what sounds like a very disciplined avalanche, timed with a metronome, that turns out to be a whole bunch of horses all walking in the same time. It occurs to Nina that she’s never seen so many horses together in one place, not even during a demonstration when all the cops came out of their hidey-holes and some of them rode horses like crazy blue knights with batons instead of swords.

Way before she can actually see the procession, though, she can tell which direction it’s coming from by the huge cloud of dust that’s rising in that direction, like someone exploded a bomb under a desert. She can see a city in that direction, far off and mostly hidden by a hill, but there’s a sudden ordered geometry to the shapes that way that you only find in cities, even the ones that turn out to look like they were built by ants on LSD when you get up close. She can see towers that way, and one of those spherical roofs, a cupola.

Then she finally gets a look at the main event itself. It starts with guys in shiny armor carrying big flags that probably started out white, but have picked up a lot of the road’s pigmentation on the march. She can see various animals on the flags, usually portrayed in some sort of aggressive posture if the animal permits it. Then a bunch of guys on foot, less shiny because they’re wearing cloaks over their chainmail. It’s confusing at first because they remind her of protesters carrying huge transparents and signs and placards, so what she’s expecting to see is something like GOD HATES TAXES or CORPORATIONS AREN’T VOTERS or GIVE US BACK OUR JOBS or BEHEAD THOSE WHO OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY or whatever. Instead, the crowd seems to be equipped with a kind of easily portable grafitti, done on bed sheets or possibly sails off a ship, with crazy writing done in a thousand different hands, too small to make out.

Then come the guy with the drums and the trumpets and all the rest of the equipment she has no name for, so maybe this is a parade, but if so it’s the most depressing, soul-crushing parade she’s ever heard of, like they’re celebrating You’ve Got Bird Flu day.

- - - - - - End of Fragment No.1 - - - - - -

Okay, what I'm primarily interested in here is what you think about the language. It's always bugged me that fantasy novels adopt this bullshit formal English that nobody really uses in real life. So I tried for something more casual. I'd say I was gunning for William Gibson if that wasn't kind of presumptuous.

So tell me, what do you think of the language?