Chapter 11
“Again,” Master Zoltan said for the hundredth time, tempting Rose to hurl something from the Dream at him.
Nothing too lethal or painful. A glob of mud, maybe.
Or a gobbet of gremlin slime. One thing about the Dream, you could find most anything there, real or imagined, if you looked long enough.
If someone could dream it up, it lived in the Dream somewhere.
But she was getting distracted.
“You’re losing focus,” Zoltan informed her, echoing her thoughts.
“I’m tired,” she retorted. “And hungry.”
“I’m aware. You must learn to work through exhaustion, through privation.
Especially when it comes to physically entering the Dream.
What if your only possible exit from a losing battle is entering the Dream?
In such a scenario, you would be low on magic, low on physical energy, perhaps wounded.
Will you then ask the enemy to allow you to rest a moment, perhaps share their snacks?
Before they take you captive to torture their enemy’s secrets from you or before the sorcerers employed by the enemy summarily execute you, will you ask if everyone can spot you an hour or so for a nice nap before you escape? ”
Rose glared impotently at him, wanting to reply in sarcastic kind, but restraining herself. This was practice, not a battlefield, and her very first day of trying a skill so difficult that only a few oneiromancers in a generation were able to master it, and …
And she was making excuses for herself.
She could do this. She would prove it to the world, to Master Zoltan, and to herself. With knife-edged focus that she drummed up from somewhere deep beyond her reserves, Rose delineated a portal, the edges crisp, the angles perfect. Exactly the correct size for her to step through, with no slop.
“Better,” Zoltan said, somewhere in the distance outside the circle of her concentration. “Now, open it, observing protocol. Do not allow the portal to admit anything back into the waking realm.”
This was the first time he’d allowed her to go this far.
Suppressing the distracting surge of satisfaction at her accomplishment, she allowed the boundary between the waking world and the Dream to dissolve.
It was afternoon in their part of the world, which meant the Dream was at one of its lowest ebbs.
People dreamed most and longest after midnight and into the morning, so the time after most people had awakened and few had entered the dreaming phase of sleep meant the Dream had thinned.
Of course, the Dream, brewed from millennia of dreamers, never faded entirely, but it did wax and wane with the contribution of active dreaming from living beings, human or animal.
It was no coincidence Zoltan had chosen this hour for Rose to try her first physical entry to the Dream, she knew.
When she’d first begun to deliberately access the Dream—after years of schooling in how to control her own dreams, wall off her unconscious from the Dream, and prevent herself from accidentally accessing the Dream—she’d worked at this time of day also.
As the boundary thinned inside the portal she’d made, Rose realized she didn’t know whether to look or not. “Do I…” she began.
“Yes, you must look,” Zoltan answered before she finished. “I am not going to, for obvious reasons. But you must, to see where you are going. Use your sorcery to maintain your control. You control the Dream, not the other way around.”
She opened her eyes, having habitually closed them while she concentrated, as she’d been taught and, as she now realized, as a safety precaution to keep from accidentally gazing into the Dream while conscious.
For the first time since she was a child, before she developed the self-discipline not to, she looked at the Dream directly.
It was exactly as she remembered and not at all the same.
The Dream changes constantly, of course, in continuous flux both as active dreamers come and go, but also as a manifestation of its inherent nature.
There is no up or down, no right or left.
Dimensions range from nothing to multitudes.
Time passes, advances, rewinds itself, loops endlessly, or stops altogether.
And the colors. Rose had forgotten how the colors of the Dream are so beyond those of any reality.
Dreamers tend to dream in black-and-white, in grayscale, or in lurid spectrums imaginable only in that realm beyond waking.
The colors almost breathed in the Dream, like living beings in their own right, mutable and moving, solidifying one moment and evaporating the next.
It was entrancing and enticing. Rose felt her mind struggling to comprehend what she saw.
“Don’t lose the thread of control, Rose,” Zoltan commanded.
“Look, see—but do not allow the Dream to command your attention. Use your magic. If you cannot look through the portal and keep your focus, you are not ready to attempt actually stepping into the Dream. If you have any uncertainty on that front, we must cease this experiment now.”
She refused to fail before she’d even begun, so she gave herself a stern mental shake. “I’ve got it,” she replied in a steady tone. “I’m looking. I have my focus.”
“How are your magical reserves?”
Now he asked, after slowly draining her with making perfect right angles. “Adequate,” she answered, somewhat surprised to find it was true.
“Enough for one attempt then,” Zoltan said. “When you are ready, step into the Dream, keeping a mental grip on your portal. The portal must remain perfectly established as you’ve created it. This is your anchor, understand?”
She did, as this wasn’t entirely new. When she traveled mentally through the Dream, she employed the same methodology, as she’d been taught, to be able to return her mind to her body.
Now she better understood Zoltan’s insistence on a crisply constructed portal.
This doorway would serve not only to guide her back out of the Dream, but to bring her entire physical form back into its correct reality.
“I understand,” she answered, infusing her tone with earnest sincerity.
“The ancestors rejoice,” he replied drily. “I want you to step in and back out again. That will be sufficient for today’s exercise. If you accomplish that without trouble, then tomorrow you may attempt to travel.”
A thrill of excitement struck through her fast and bright as lightning, followed by the dull boom of thunderous dread. What if she screwed up? A mistake on this first attempt could have ramifications from wounding her pride to damaging her career to killing her outright.
Or stranding her in the Dream forever, her sanity gradually eroding until she became another element of it, some dark night terror to plague humanity.
“At your leisure,” Zoltan prompted blandly, “though I shall point out that holding the portal open as you are is draining your magic when you’d be better served using it in the Dream, especially to get yourself back out again.” He paused. “Unless you’re afraid to try.”
Deliberately needling her? Apparently the sensitivity of her pride outpaced her fear of death—or worse—because that worked. Taking a steadying breath, securing her mental grip on the reassuringly crisp and geometrical portal frame, Rose stepped into the Dream.
It was easy. So very natural to her that she felt almost pulled in, a sense of harmony settling in her bones that she’d never felt in all her life.
She fully intended to obey her teacher and step right back out through the portal.
Instead, she paused, utterly captivated.
Being inside the Dream in her physical form was unlike anything she’d experienced or expected.
The landscape felt somehow more real than anything she’d experienced before, the sensations vivid in startling ways.
When she reached into the Dream from outside of it, she’d always maintained a sense of that otherness, that it was a place where she did not exist.
Now, it was as if she participated in one of her own dreams, but with perfect clarity. Her body felt right in exactly the opposite way it had always felt slightly wrong. She moved through the Dream with the grace and ease she’d envied in others. This was home.
The Dream swirled and morphed around her, showing her common aspects of her dreaming life.
Her childhood pony, Aster, came trotting up, rainbow ribbons braided into his mane, sapphire bells in his tail, and when he nuzzled her hand, looking for treats, the visceral memories exploded in her mind.
Those velvety lips, surrounded by tickling bristles, touched her palm.
The hay-sweet scent of his breath overwhelmed her.
The sight of his dewy dark eye, cocked coyly at her, full of knowing and affection.
She had to take a moment to understand, to remember that Aster, already an older pony when he’d become hers, had passed on a couple of years before.
That’s why his presence surprised her so.
The knowledge hit her hard, like a punch to the heart: Aster still lived in the Dream. In this realm, he hadn’t died of old age and loneliness, years after she left for school. Here, he lived forever.
And so could she.
The moment she thought it, the trained student sorceress in her recognized her peril.
Yes, becoming lost in the Dream presented all kinds of dangers.
Losing your way, not being able to find your way back, those posed very real problems. But the greatest danger of all came from longing and love.
In the Dream, she could live forever, with none of the pain of living.
The truest danger wasn’t not being able to leave; it was not wanting to.