Insightful Dreams
In early Summer during the Year of the Rebuilding, Solister followed a mare into the Chasm of Souls, and then returned without memory of what happened, carrying a heavy burden. "I know not what happened exactly, I can't remember clearly… but I remember being in the Chasm of Souls, and feeling a great headache greater than others I had felt so far, almost as if I were ripping in two, pain so fierce it caused me to lose coherence from the dream momentarily." He had experienced great fits of pain and fever before his avatar began to break. Finally, he split into two avatars - Sol, his being of order, and Trok'ter, his being of chaos.
Trok'ter struggled to unravel the order of the Dream City, while Sol crusaded to eliminate all chaos, and continued to weaken. Each art he evoked triggered further deterioration, until at last Sol's avatar shattered, absorbed into the dream itself at the Rings of Woe. One with the dream, Sol could no longer hold talismans, use arts, or communicate through conventional means. He became an entity of insight, a shapeless form that shifted through the City, only perceived by some eyes and minds.
Very few were able to communicate thoughts and ideas to Solister at this time. Erasmus recalls: "It was as if he was a being of memory. He could even place memories within your own mind, sometimes even memories that weren't your own. It was a truly remarkable thing."
By the seventh month of that year, Solister began to feel lonely and sought to discover a way to once again join the Dream City. He asked his student Erasmus to help devise a way to bring his form cohesion. Employing the cones in the power room in the Alliance of the Eclipse, a score of dreamers evoked arts to make visible, purify, make silent, mold and block visions, so that Solister's insight could infiltrate the cones and flow into the minds of dreamers. The ceremony was moderately successful, and the power cones broadcasted insight to the thoughts of those on the Lambent Flats plane, permitting dreamers to see and understand Solister.
Nziri, another of Solister's students, tried to help him gain permanent cohesion to the City. Through a ceremony of sacrifice, Nziri employed a shadow ring, a puzzle box, and the chaos around her for the necessary foci powers to forge a dreaming ring for Solister: sacrificing a permanent Dreamsoul in the process. With the ring, Solister again found footing on the conventional pathways of the Dream City.
