Chapter 24 #2
I eyed an especially beautiful strawberry, unable to ignore the hunger prying at my insides.
Maybe I’d spoken too soon. Why wouldn’t I want to partake in a feast fit for a king?
Plopping the berry into my mouth before I could think otherwise, I closed my eyes, awaiting a delicious, tart burst of juice.
Instead, rancid slime filled my mouth, causing me to gag.
“A hatred for strawberries. Interesting.”
“What? No. It was rotten—” I choked as its taste clung to my tongue. Grabbing the nearest cup, I motioned for the Bringer to fill it. “Fill this—please—ugh.” I took a drink before the liquid had even pooled halfway up the glass, desperate to rid the foulness from my mouth.
Except I almost spit that out, too.
I hadn’t taken more than a few sips of wine in my entire life, but the taste of it never bothered me. No, normal wine was fine. It was the fact that the Bringer’s concoction tasted watery, mud-like, and vaguely sour.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
I gaped at him. “Do you not taste it—or smell it? It’s all wrong.”
At first, the food and drink appeared perfect, pristine. But now the truth of each smell was unmistakable: The fruit was rotten, the meat was burnt leather, and the dessert looked to be powdered with ash, not sugar.
“Ah.” His eyes widened behind his helm, a rare glimpse of mortification dawning there. “My ability to conjure food was stunted in the castle. I may have forgotten the taste of things.”
His sense of taste was forgotten? More like absolutely destroyed.
“How long has it been since you ate something from outside of the Dream Realm?”
The Bringer stopped to consider, still drinking from his glass. “Five hundred years, give or take.”
My mouth dropped open. “Five hundred years? Maker, stop drinking that—you’ll poison yourself.”
“It is fine enough for my tastes.” He avoided my attempts at stealing his drink, waving the glass just out of my reach. Still, when he took another sip, his mouth twitched in displeasure. “But if it does not suit yours, craft your own.”
I inspected an empty cup, willing it to fill to the brim with a rich, fragrant wine. When nothing happened, I sat back in frustration. “It’s not working.”
“In my castle, you walked into an entire dream from memory. A cup of wine or a slice of bread should be simple.”
“Coming from someone who can’t even make a strawberry taste edible,” I muttered, earning a stiffening of the Bringer’s posture. “What?”
He moved closer, the wine stain on his mouth looking more and more like blood. “You insult me casually for someone who desires my knowledge.”
“Show me how, then. It can be the first thing you teach me. As per our bargain.”
“That’s what you want your first lesson to be? A tutorial on the art of food?”
“I’m just interested in the act of creating, is all,” I said, bristling.
And it was true. I wanted to be free from the Dream Realm, but part of me also wanted to learn more about it.
What it meant, how it worked—how to move within it and become powerful enough to withstand a demon’s attack.
Dreaming had proved itself to be a double-edged sword of beauty and pain, reality and illusion, and I couldn’t deny that parts of it were fascinating.
If that meant cooperating with the Shadow Bringer, then so be it.
“Are you, now?” With a slight furrow to his brow, the Bringer grabbed my empty cup. “Perhaps I’ll attempt to explain. But I expect you to produce something edible.”
I couldn’t help it. I almost smiled.
He must really miss food—even though he’s trying to hide it.
“Then I’ll make you the finest wine in all the world,” I said.
He tilted his head, nearly smiling himself. “We will see.”
The Shadow Bringer explained the process with a surprising amount of care, detailing the importance of past experiences and memories as key ingredients when crafting something in a dream.
Even if the creation was a new object or special ability—something like wings, or erupting fire from one’s fingertips—it needed to be drawn from memory to be fully functional.
Effective wings, for example, required the memory of birds in flight, the feel of feathers, and the sensation of jumping and falling.
But when honed correctly, imagination could be even stronger.
A dreamer with a strong imagination could craft extraordinary, lifelike creations, drawing from thoughts as powerful as memory itself.
Untamed, however, imagination held risk.
An imagined sword might erupt into a serpent. Or a candle. An inferno, even.
As I concentrated on the glass in front of me, I leaned into both techniques, remembering a summer drink of plum juice and crushed rose petals but also imagining what it might feel like to taste liquid silk.
The glass filled slowly as I decided upon the right color, finally settling on a shimmering purpled ruby.
I drew the glass to my lips, expecting something dreadful.
At the first sip, it tasted wild. Fragrant rose, oak, and plum.
It wasn’t wine, exactly, but it wasn’t juice, either.
And the texture was exactly as I had imagined: Softer than silk upon the tongue, it slid down my throat like a caress, tingling as it moved.
The Shadow Bringer must have noticed the delight in my expression—or the rapidly dwindling liquid in my cup—because he snatched it from my fingertips, looking quite smug as he brought it to his lips.
“Hey, I wasn’t finished!”
The Bringer gave a throaty, contented sigh as he polished off the drink, likely not intending for the sound to be heard.
His eyes flicked up, a command plainly written there.
For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to not taste food or drink for five hundred years.
Was it really possible to forget something as fundamental as taste?
Based on the Bringer’s euphoric expression, it seemed so.
“Fine, fine. I’ll fill it again. Just—stop staring at me like you want to eat me,” I said, face warming under the heat of his stare. “I have to concentrate.”
This went on for some time. I would imagine some new drink or food, and we’d partake in it together, the Bringer in a constant state of muted awe as he remembered what was lost. And he loved it all—bitterness, richness, sweetness—and demanded more, tempting me to try new and outrageous creations from my own imagination.
Milk in the form of snowflakes. A crispy peach.
A sugared flower, its petals dusted in a honeyed perfume.
We were in the middle of trying an edible moon, its glowing surface made of lemon and airy, cake-like dough, when the whole inn erupted in a cheer. I nearly fell out of my chair at the sound, so used to the quiet hum of the inn’s banal chatter.
“Too much wine?” he asked, leaning forward to steady me.
“Of course not,” I snapped, unwilling to admit that I did, in fact, feel a bit lightheaded. An imagined feeling, but one I couldn’t quite shake.
“Here.” He swept a finger underneath my lip, brushing off a stray droplet. “As I said before, imagination reigns supreme in the Realm.” He examined his thumb, now slightly damp, then licked it. “Experiences feel immersive here. Sometimes more so than they do in reality.”
“Well, I feel more like a ghost, considering we don’t exist to anyone here.
” Alarmingly, I could sense another flush rising on my skin; I hoped it wasn’t visible.
“What about our creations?” I eyed the half-eaten moon, wondering what would happen if I threw it across the room.
“The people here can’t see us, but can they see what we’ve made? ”
“If they can, they’re too hollow to care. The original dreamer, however, may notice.”
“You mean you? We are in one of your past dreams, aren’t we?”
“Indeed we are.”
“Where could you be?” I mused, scrutinizing the faces around us.
None seemed aware that we—or our piles of plates heaped with interesting combinations of food and drink—existed.
And if the dreamer was a past version of the Shadow Bringer, no one looked even remotely like him.
Not that anyone could, exactly. Even with his face still partially covered by his helm, he was deadly in his beauty.
And was his skin a little flushed from the wine, or was I imagining that, too?
Definitely my imagination.
I stood up, ignoring my dizziness, and attempted to see what the crowd was staring at. How much time had we mindlessly wasted? Had we missed something important—some clue that would help us escape his castle?
Among the crowded bodies, I spotted a raven-haired boy, his eyes warm under the inn’s light.
He waved a ribbon overhead, its length glistening like scales, and began to recite some kind of wild, theatrical tale as the crowd looked on, mesmerized by his every word.
I leaned in closer, trying to make out what he was saying.
“Come back here,” the Shadow Bringer protested, vaporizing a few plates to make room for more. A thread of shadow—just a shiver of his power—snaked out and grabbed the back of my dress. “Next I will try a vegetable. A carrot, perhaps.”
“We just ate a moon, and you want a carrot?” I asked, laughing. The Shadow Bringer returned my mirth, a crooked half smile on his lips. I dragged a hand through his thread of shadow, snapping it. “I’m trying to listen to that boy. Maybe he’s important to the dream.”
“I do not care about some pointless child.”
Maker, he sounded like a child.
“Well, maybe you should, considering we have no other leads to go on.”
The boy raised his voice, almost as if he knew the Shadow Bringer was ignoring him, and continued on with his story, flinging up his ribbons in a dramatic sweep.
At the same moment, the Bringer sent another thread at me, this time aiming for my feet, and I was too distracted by his half smile to notice.
I twisted, trying to catch myself, only to land squarely in his lap—just as the boy’s ribbons turned into a trio of serpents, writhing their gilded bodies as they soared overhead.
This caught the Shadow Bringer’s attention.
He slid a hand over my waist, pulling me away just as one of the ribbon serpents would have careened into my head.
Unfortunately, the timing was a bit too hasty.
His chair toppled out from underneath him, catching our legs and sending us sprawling.
For a single suspended moment, we were tangled in each other.
A droplet of wine trailed from his mouth, and it took everything in me not to trace it with my hands. Or my lips. The roar of the inn dulled to a muffled growl.
What was wrong with me?
I shoved the feeling down, mortified. I had never been in a romantic entanglement, never experienced what it was like to touch and be touched, never felt what it was like to be loved and cherished in a way that only a lover could.
Logically, my reaction could be blamed on that.
He was a beautiful man, and he was staring at me as though I was beautiful, too.
His proximity was really making it difficult to see him as a villain.
But then, as moments do, it shattered.
“And I battled them all!” the boy shouted, wielding an imaginary sword as he pretended to fight the serpents. “They threatened our lives. They wanted to drag Istralla into the sea!” He ducked as one of the serpents dipped lower. The crowd backed away, muttering in astonishment.
“That boy. Is he someone important?” I asked shakily.
The Bringer muttered something noncommittal, slowly easing us both to our feet.
“But do not fear. I vanquished the demons! So, you are safe now, and you owe that safety to me,” the boy declared, grinning with all the pride in the world. And he bowed low, the hem of his oversized cloak touching the floorboards. “Now,” he continued, straightening himself, “my winnings, please.”
The crowd didn’t move; they were too preoccupied with eyeing the flying serpents.
“Oh. Um, sorry,” the boy said sheepishly, turning the serpents back into ribbons with a wave of his hand. “I had them under my control, you know. You were never in any harm. I promise.”
The Shadow Bringer returned to drinking his wine, no longer interested. “Greedy child. Desperate to rid the poor of their coin, even while dreaming.”
It wasn’t coin that the boy was after, though.
As he moved about the inn, he collected donations of food and drink, using his cloak as a makeshift pack to carry it all.
He arranged his growing collection as he went, ensuring that nothing spilled.
Loaves of bread, a small sack of potatoes, three bottles of milk—he took it all, thanking each patron with a beaming smile.
When he made it to the back of the room, nearing where the Bringer and I sat in our shadowed corner, his eyes lit up.
“Now what is this?” the boy wondered aloud, bounding over to our outlandish plates and scooping up the half-eaten moon. He was a striking boy: fine, noble features and black hair curling to his shoulders. “A ball of cake? Huh.”
“Ridiculous child,” the Shadow Bringer scoffed, making the moon disappear with a quick wave. “These creations are not for you.”
“Was that really necessary?” I whisper-shouted. Even though it was clear the boy couldn’t hear or see us, I still felt as though he could.
The boy stared at his empty hands.
“It’s already happening,” the boy muttered, brimming with great sorrow. “I must hurry. No time to waste.”
He snatched two of our plates, tucking them into his cloak and hurrying away before the Bringer could react. Halfway through the crowd, the boy turned around, rushing back to our table to snatch a cinnamon cake from under the Bringer’s nose.
“Why you—” the Bringer started, grabbing the boy by the wrist. It was useless, though. The boy couldn’t be held. As if he had grasped smoke or water, the Bringer’s hand merely slipped away. But not before the boy glanced up and showed us his eyes.
Expressive and framed in dark lashes, with the beginnings of small silvery shadows dancing within their depths. I didn’t have to guess; I knew immediately who this boy was.
And, based on his stunned expression, so did the Shadow Bringer.