Chapter 11 Familiar Nightmares
Familiar Nightmares
Day three started off great.
I rolled out of bed with a grunt and nearly fell flat on my face. “Yep,” I muttered. “I’m definitely dying tomorrow.”
Carl-Two handed me my staff like it was a ceremonial torch. “Your final day of training, Miss Liss.”
“Don’t jinx it,” I said, accepting with a wince. “One last day before I fail miserably in front of everyone.”
“You won’t,” Tarran said from the doorway. She didn’t offer a smile, just that steady quiet that put me on edge. Her words said one thing, but her actions screamed another.
The training yard was colder this morning. Maybe it was my nerves, or maybe the looming dread that tomorrow, I’d be facing a challenge designed to maim me for sport, and I didn’t even know what I’d be fighting.
Rena was already there, leaning against the fence, looking as fresh and put together as always, and not like it was god awful early in the morning. She nodded toward the center. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
We didn’t start with warm-ups.
No practice.
She lunged.
I moved. Not gracefully, but not stupidly either.
I blocked her first strike. Spun out of the way of the second. Managed a jab to her side that made her grunt and step back.
She grinned, a toothy, feral gesture. “Well damn. You’re actually learning.”
“That sounds dangerously close to a compliment.”
Tarran, watching from the edge of the ring, tilted her head, her eyes amused. “The book is helping you.”
Rena raised and eyebrow, and I froze. “What does that mean?”
Tarran shrugged slowly. “Sometimes, the book accelerates certain things.”
“Wait—so this isn’t me being impressive?”
“It’s both,” Tarran said with a smirk. “You’re impressive…with a little bit of literary magic.”
I groaned. “Of course. Figures.”
Still, I couldn’t deny it. My body moved without me having to think so hard now. My reactions were cleaner, instincts sharper. Three days couldn’t possibly have been enough. And yet, here I was, not dying every five minutes.
It was almost insulting but…kind of great at the same time?
We trained until midday, Rena pushing me harder than ever before. We didn’t take a break until my staff struck a training dummy hard enough to splinter its wooden neck.
Carl-One actually gasped while Carl-Two began humming what I assumed was meant to be dramatic background music. When we finally stopped for the day, I collapsed onto a stone bench, gulping a lungful of air.
Rena stood over me, arms crossed. “Tomorrow, the arena opens at dawn. You’ll be called forward. No announcement, no instructions, just a gate and a fight.”
I wiped sweat from my brow. “Any hints?” I asked hopefully, knowing she wouldn’t have any to give me. I’d been peppering her with questions for three days, and she’d never once had anything to offer me.
She shook her head, as I knew she would. “Whatever it is, it’ll try to break you.”
I glanced at Tarran, who nodded once in agreement. “Mentally and physically.”
Cool. No pressure.
Rena placed a hand on my shoulder. “But you’ve got more grit than a lot of warriors here.
Not many would have withstood a three day training gauntlet with me.
Foreverland magic or not, you’ve impressed me.
I’m rooting for you.” Her hand lingered for a beat longer than necessary.
“You’ll survive,” she added. “I’m sure of it. ”
That night, I didn’t sleep much. I sat on the floor of the room with the staff across my lap, watching the moonlight spill through the one narrow window.
Tarran sat beside me, humming a tune I didn’t recognize.
“What is that?” I asked her, trying to fill the silence. She hummed it often, I’d noticed, especially when she was nervous or anxious.
She looked at me, her violet eye bright in the dim lighting, then frowned. “I’m not sure,” she said finally. “I don’t…” She trailed off before falling silent. “Are you scared?” she asked instead, changing the subject as quickly as it’d come up.
“Terrified,” I replied honestly. Even with Rena’s confidence, I certainly didn’t have any.
Tarran nodded. “Good. That means you care.”
Carl-One peeked in, Carl-Two right behind him. “I packed you a post-battle snack bag. Lots of muffins!”
I smiled. The little guys were growing on me, even if they were entirely silly and not really much help. Even in the chaos of magic, kingdoms, and combat training, I had them to keep me company.
We retired to our cots, wanting to get as much sleep before the trial started.
I nodded off for a few, but when I startled awake, it was still dark out, an empty cot right where Tarran should have been.
The moon was high when I slipped out of the room, staff in hand, hoping a walk might burn off some of the adrenaline coiling in my stomach like a viper.
The corridors of the castle were quiet at night, almost eerily so. The sound of clashing weapons and commanders barking orders had given way to silence, which should have been peaceful.
Instead, it made my skin itch. I padded through the halls, not sure where I was going, until I found her.
Tarran sat alone at the edge of the training yard, knees pulled to her chest, her hair loose for once and spilling over one shoulder like a shadow made of ink. The moonlight turned the gold into almost silver, reflecting the gentle beams. She didn’t look up when I approached.
“You should be sleeping,” I said softly.
“Sometimes, I forget how,” she admitted, a sad note in her voice.
I sat beside her, resting the staff across my knees. “You forget how to sleep?”
“I forget a lot of things,” she said, her arms gesturing vaguely around her head. “Dreams are just another kind of noise to me now. It doesn’t always…make sense in here. The world.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, not really, so I asked the one thing I could.
“Are you okay?”
She turned to look at me. In the moonlight, her eyes shimmered, one a deep, chocolate brown, warm and kind, the other a violet so strange, it looked like dusk itself had settled there. There was something wild in her tonight. Not dangerous, just…unrestrained.
“You’re the first one in a long time who’s asked me that,” she finally said.
“That’s depressing.”
She smiled, faint and sad. “Most people here don’t want to know. They want me to guide, to explain, to serve the story. I don’t get to be okay or not okay. Its not written.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing here is.”
A quiet settled between us, comfortable in its weight. I found myself watching the way her fingers moved as she traced a line in the dirt with one nail. Nervous energy, maybe, or habit.
“You weren’t always the guide, right?” I asked quietly.
“I mean…you became her at some point. Or were you always written this way?” It felt strange to ask a book character how they were written, but Journey to Foreverland was self-aware, or so it seemed.
Maybe they knew about their creation, about who wrote this in the first place.
“I think so,” she said after a long moment. “I don’t know how I served the story before this. Sometimes, I catch pieces of it, like a song half-heard through the walls. You can tell there is music playing, but you can’t hear any of the words. And when I reach for it, it slips away.”
“That sounds like a nightmare.”
“It is, but it’s a familiar one.”
“What do you remember? Do you know how old you are?”
“It’s all muddy, and no one knows for certain. We don’t even know who created it or how. Books shouldn’t be able to bring in people from the outside world,” she said warily. “Some kind of magic, I suppose.”
The book could have been around for hundreds of years for all we know, and a lot of girls could have been pulled within its pages. I stayed silent, turning that over and over in my mind.
“What about you?” she asked me instead, leaning just the slightest bit closer to me, our shoulders only inches apart. “I know you come from the sky but not much else. Tell me about your life.”
“Its not much of a life, really,” I said, flinching at my words.
Tarran lived her life between the pages of a book, whereas I had the entire world at my disposal.
I cleared my throat, trying again. “That’s not right.
I live with my mom and my little brother Benny.
We’ve always had a big age difference. I’m twenty, he’s six, but he’s the highlight of my world.
My dad is…dead.” To me, anyways. It was easier to just say that than to dive into what really happened to him.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and after a brief moment of hesitation, she reached over, placing her hand on mine. My eyes burned, and I swallowed hard, blinking away the emotion I’d been stifling for much too long. “How is your mom? I’m sure I had one, but I don’t remember her.”
“We’re not very close,” I said truthfully, a bitter edge to my words.
“We used to be, until I was fourteen and I introduced her to my first girlfriend.” The lump in my throat grew, threatening to suffocate me.
The only other person I’d opened up to like this was Serena, and even then, it wasn’t something I brought up often.
But something about Tarran was so calming, so empathetic, and I knew she’d understand. Maybe she was written to.
“She didn’t accept you?” she asked softly, her fingers tightening around mine. My skin tingled where she touched, but I didn’t dare move a muscle for fear she’d withdraw.
“Not at all,” I said wryly, heaviness in my chest. I’d long ago come to terms that my mother didn’t accept me for me, but it didn’t change the fact that it still hurt. “As soon as I finish college, I’m moving out.”
“I…I don’t think I know what that is,” Tarran laughed softly. “We definitely don’t have those here.”
I shrugged; it wasn’t important. What was important was that I focused on these trials and got myself out of here. I missed Benny, I missed Serena. I could only imagine the chaos that was going on in the real world while I was stuck in here, day after day.
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here,” I told her. “I’m glad you’re the one meant to guide me through this.”
“So am I, even if I don’t always know why.”
We sat like that for a while—no grand speeches, just two people tangled in the same strange story, trying to find the meaning between its pages.
“Tomorrow is going to suck,” I said finally.
She laughed quietly. “By this time tomorrow, it’ll be all over, and we’ll be celebrating your victory.”
“Until the next trial.”
“Until the next one,” she agreed. Another silence. And then: “You should sleep, even if just a little. The more rest you can get, the better.”
I nodded, rising slowly. “You’ll be there, right? Up until I go in?”
She looked up at me, the shadows of her long eyelashes dancing along her dark skin. “Always.”
I didn’t say anything else, just a light touch on her shoulder before turning away. Behind me, as I walked back towards our rooms, I felt her eyes following me.
Like a tether.