Chapter 3 Baz #2
“You really want to know how things have been going for me? Ask your dad about all the horrible shit he’s had to see me conjure up from his nightmares.
Henry too. It’s getting out of control. I’m pulling things out of nightmares without wanting to—fears I have no intention of bringing to life, things that should stay buried forever.
Even when I’m not actively trying to absorb a nightmare’s darkness, it clings to me anyway and follows me back into waking.
And the things I bring out are taking longer and longer to disintegrate. ”
Like the epilogue, Baz thought. They’d been puzzling it over, why the epilogue Kai had found in the sleepscape hadn’t turned to dust like all other things he pulled out of nightmares.
It was still perfectly intact, perhaps following a different set of rules since it was a physical thing that had been put in the sleepscape to begin with.
But if other horrors were now staying intact in the waking world…
“It’s only a matter of time before I bring a fucking umbra into the lighthouse,” Kai said. His jaw tightened. “Or something worse.”
Baz shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold. “I thought you said there were less umbrae, after what happened.”
“For a few days, maybe. But more came. And it’s not just that.
There’s this… wrongness in the sleepscape that’s making the umbrae act bolder than ever.
It’s like they’re clamoring for souls. For mine in particular.
” Kai fidgeted with the cap on his flask.
“And I keep getting these glimpses,” he added, avoiding Baz’s eye. “Of Emory.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell if it’s real or not. And it’s never anything concrete. Just an impression of her, all tangled up in the darkness of the sleepscape. Like she’s drowning in it. Like we both are.”
Baz’s mind raced. He thought of the sleepers who’d woken up shortly after Emory had gone through the door.
News of it had spread quickly, how most of the Cadence Institute’s sleeping Dreamers—eternal sleepers whose consciousness had been devoured by the umbrae in the sleepscape, leaving behind comatose bodies in the real world—had awoken.
There was not a doubt in Baz’s mind that it was somehow Emory’s doing.
The timing was too odd to be a coincidence.
Whatever she’d done in the sleepscape—whatever power she’d unleashed that had blasted a horde of umbrae out the door along with a dying Keiran Dunhall Thornby—must have woken up the eternal sleepers. Restored their minds.
According to the papers, some of these Dreamers had been asleep for decades, tended to at the Institute with little to no hope of ever waking up.
And now they were awake and alive and absolutely fine.
None of them remembered anything from their time in the sleepscape, or if they did, they weren’t talking.
That kind of power… If Emory had indeed wielded such magic as to wake the umbrae, undo what had been done to the sleepers whose souls had been lost to these nightmares, surely she must have Collapsed.
And though Collapsing wouldn’t destroy Emory—Baz, Kai, and Jae were proof enough—Baz couldn’t help but fear for her.
A Tidecaller was already limitless enough as it was, but a Collapsed Tidecaller?
And now Kai, who was struggling with his own Collapsed magic, was having dreams of her drowning in darkness.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Kai said quietly, though there was an edge to his voice that Baz didn’t understand. “Anyway, she probably only shows up in my head because of you.”
“Me?”
“You dream of her constantly. And while I’m happy to be rid of that damn printing press scene of yours, I can’t say Dovermere is much better.”
Baz was glad for the darkness hiding the flush that crept up his neck.
He’d hoped Kai wouldn’t have noticed the shift in his nightmares, the way the printing press scene now bled into the caves to show him one of the many horrors he’d witnessed inside Dovermere: the umbrae feasting on Baz’s fears, dragging Emory to her death, bending to Kai’s will.
Emory going through the door. Keiran dying in his arms. The portal whispering in his mind.
Sometimes, when the nightmare involved Emory—which was more often than he cared to admit—it shifted out of the caves to show Baz other moments with her, all twisted up with the horror of his subconscious.
The pain of losing her. Her betrayal of his trust. The moment she’d pulled away from him when they’d kissed that one time, the rejection starker and crueler in the darkness of his mind.
Now he knew Kai had been present for at least a few of those nightmares and had seen how much it ate away at him, this childish pining for someone who was gone, who might never come back.
Of course, Kai had never said anything about it to him.
It was like Emory was this unspeakable thing between them, the one subject they never broached.
Until now.
Baz cleared his throat, kicking at the snow. “Sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was apologizing for.
“Not your fault I keep getting pulled into your nightmares.” Kai took a swig from his flask and stared angrily out at the darkness. “If Collapsed magic is supposed to be limitless, you’d think I’d have better control over it. Not whatever the fuck this is.”
Baz’s gaze drifted to the unmarred Eclipse tattoo on Kai’s hand. “I know how you feel about this, but… my offer still stands if you need it.”
Not long after their escape from the Institute, Baz suggested using his time magic to bring back the Unhallowed Seal on Kai’s hand—temporarily, of course, just to give Kai a bit of a reprieve from the uncontrollable nightmares.
It had been a thoughtless question, asked in a moment of despair after seeing Kai struggle against invisible demons in his sleep.
Kai had told him to fuck off. Baz had apologized. And they’d never spoken of it again.
Kai looked like he might throttle him now that he’d dared bring it up again. “You sound just like your dad. He’s been playing around with his Nullifier magic to try to help me suppress my own magic. Keep the nightmares at bay.”
“That’s great.” Baz beamed. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?
“But it’s not a solution, is it?” Kai bit back darkly. “It means your dad doesn’t sleep so long as he’s helping me get some nightmare-less rest. It means I have to stay here.”
“If that’s what you need to make this work…”
“What I need is to be closer to Dovermere and to try opening the portal again. What was the point of that damn epilogue if I can’t go through the door?”
Kai had gone back to the caves shortly after Emory went through the Hourglass, trying to get it to open again at his touch.
If Clover’s epilogue had any truth to it, both Kai and Romie were like Emory in that they, too, had the power to traverse worlds.
But the door would not open at Kai’s touch, no matter what he tried.
Baz would never dare admit to it, but the truth was that he would give anything to hear the song of Dovermere, the same one that had called to Romie and Emory and Kai.
He’d come to terms with not seeing himself reflected in Song of the Drowned Gods the way they were.
He had no role to play in this story; he wasn’t the boy of nightmares or the girl of dreams or the scholar on the shores who went through worlds.
He was the reader, doomed to watch his favorite heroes from the sidelines as he’d always done.
He could try to put the pieces together, but he would never have the power to push the story forward.
And Baz was okay with that. He had to be.
The magic of the night seemed to have died around them, and Baz didn’t know how to reignite it. The wind picked up suddenly, and he tightened his coat against it. “Want to go inside and play a boring game of cards?”
“Fine.” If Kai minded the abrupt change in subject, he was good at pretending otherwise as he slid off the tree trunk with a mischievous smile. “But we’re making it into a drinking game.”
Baz couldn’t help his own smile or the inexplicable warmth that went through him as they walked quietly back to the lighthouse, their shoulders occasionally brushing.
But even this tiny sliver of normalcy couldn’t mend the magic for long.
Before they reached the door, it burst open to reveal a frantic-looking Henry hurriedly slipping on his coat, an everlight lantern swinging from his hand.
“What’s wrong?” Baz asked.
“The tide’s swallowing everything up!”
As if on cue, Baz realized the night was no longer quiet: earsplitting roars came up from the shoreline, and he thought he heard some sort of siren blaring in the distance.
He and Kai hurried after Henry down to the water’s edge, where the sea had already swallowed up half the shore.
Large, powerful swells crashed along the smooth rocks, reaching as far as the tree line.
The faint light of the lantern cast a sorry picture: lobster cages and fishing gear were being battered by waves and then pulled back into the sea, and Henry’s fishing barge was now beached, caught in the boughs of trees.
Henry was already knee-deep in what must be freezing water, grabbing hold of whatever he could and tossing it farther up the shore. Kai didn’t hesitate to join him. He threw Baz a dire look as he hauled things out of the water. “The time, Brysden!”
Right. Time—the one thing Baz had power over.
He grasped the threads of it, bending the tide to his will.
The next wave paused before it could reach them, frozen in time, and the three of them worked around it to heave things out of the water.
It still amazed Baz how easy it was to reach for his magic.
Once, this big a feat would have appeared too big, the kind of magic he would have feared might bring about his Collapsing.
But this was only a drop in the ocean of what he could do.
When they’d secured everything, Baz let go of the magic, and the tide resumed its unnatural battering against the shore. Panting, the three of them watched the sea in silence, not daring to voice the eerie reality of what they were seeing.
Baz looked at his watch for confirmation.
It was midnight—the point at which the tide should be at its lowest. If there was one thing they could always count on, it was the rise and fall of the tide, the science behind it.
There truly had to be something wrong with the world for it to be so out of sorts.
And Baz couldn’t help but think it had something to do with Dovermere, and the door they had opened within its depths.