The Falcons that Eat Dreams

 ...I dared not speak of the beak of the King's falcon, but well I knew
how it flew through my sleep as now; a slither of wings beats on my face and
brings a hot iron to my heart....

Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, Charles Williams

The king is troubled by bad dreams and a unquiet spirit. The usual solution has failed, due to the lack of a nearby shepherd boy with anything like the degree of necessary musical talent. But an alternative has emerged from an unseen quarter.

The falcons of the Argelephantine Mountains are said to be swiftest of fowls. A dream moves as quick as thought; a dream need follow no road or path or any track along the ground; a dream is an elusive thing, fading at the break of day. Therefore that which must pursue them must be keen-eyed, swift and possessed of the power of flight. So the king's falconer reasoned.

He set to training his birds, hitting a number of snags along the way.  Inducing them to pursue dreams was a troublesome process. One attempt, involving quantities of opium smoke, may have made the falcons of the Royal Mews see dreams, but did not do so in such a way as spurred their raptor's instincts. 

An alternative was found; the falconer found a broken-hearted young page-boy - whose dreams are transparently obvious, near to the surface of the mind and (if transient) quite potent in their composition. He was induced by alternate beatings and bribes to recount his dreams over several dead rabbits, which were used in lures to train the falcons in the pursuit and taste of dreams. 

The process needed to be repeated several times; fortunately, the court is a place where many dreams can be found, and the falconer is a strangely charismatic and masterful man who was able to suborn more than a few servants and courtiers for his purposes. In time, the falcons took to the air and began to feed on dreams themselves, removing the need for rabbits. They have developed since a certain, disturbing fixed gaze (even by the standards of raptors) and faintly purple eyes; the falconer has taken to making them new hoods, with a layer of silver leaf. They turn on a gyre woven of maidens' hair. Rune-graven bells ring at their talons.

But the falcons did exactly what they were meant to: plunging and seizing the fell dreams out of the sky at twilight. The king sleeps soundly. The falconer basks in acclaim and royal gifts. The page-boys are both beaten and bribed less. 

Of course, the applications for this kind of oneiro-accipitrarian technique have not gone unnoticed. What else is a spell, that sits in and over the mind of a wizard, but a kind of dream? Could not the falcons have some wider use?