Chapter 21 Dreams and Nightmares Are Not-So-Distant Cousins, Apparently
Dreams and Nightmares Are Not-So-Distant Cousins, Apparently
This can’t be real.
Robin—the closest person to me in the world, the only family I’ve ever known—couldn’t have lied to me about this. And everything else.
But she did.
The Fates that the people of Heartland, the students of Swancrest, live and breathe by… aren’t real.
Which means one person in control has decided every citizen of Heartland’s future, hiding behind the false idea of the Fates.
One person refused to give one to me.
Robin.
Lune parts her lips, but I can’t listen to her placating words anymore.
I just run.
I bolt through the town square, past the sputtering fountain, gripping the necklaces to make my clicking heels become sneakers far more suited to having a crisis of faith and running away.
I shoulder past crowds wearing pastel pinks, everything perfectly in place, hearing protests of “Hey!” and “Watch where you’re going!” trailing in my wake.
But I don’t care.
My tears are distorting this world into a kaleidoscope of pink, my heart is pulsing like it’s trying to beat me in a race, my legs are boneless beneath me, panic is rising up my throat like a tidal wave, choking me, overcoming everything, and I—
I can’t breathe.
I whirl around a corner, almost tripping over myself in the process, and finally stop, pressing my spine to a wall. My lungs are contracting. My throat feels like a clogged straw. I gasp for breath, but it sounds too fast, too wrong.
Everything is wrong.
The sky is spinning. My mind is tumbling.
I shut my eyes against the thoughts, willing them to quiet, but they only grow louder, more insistent.
At first, I think I’m falling into another world, that I’ve somehow gotten hold of another key, but when I lower to the ground, sinking my fingers into the dirt beneath me as if I could root my being into this moment, keep myself from running adrift, I finally open my eyes again and—
I’m still here, in Dreamland.
But it looks completely different.
The land is no longer glimmering pink. It’s dark, as if all brightness has been leached away. The only thing left are the shadows, and they’ve lengthened, left to roam and reign.
I swallow, getting to my feet.
The rainbow above the town is now just a chain of rain clouds. A storm begins to form, as if echoing my thoughts. The air has turned to a chill, as if mimicking the frostiness in my chest, the coldness of my now-shattered heart.
I walk through the silent streets, back to the fountain, which has gone dry. Lune isn’t there. No. There are people, but their faces are cloaked in shadows. All of them are frowning, eyes to the ground.
The once pink path is now as dark as raven feathers. I follow it all the way to the bridge, which is still there—only now, it’s made of bones.
Dread sinking through me, I follow it down, back to the arch, back to where I fell from the sky and—
That’s changed, too.
The cloud in front of the arch hangs heavy with rain. Instead of Dreamland, it now says, Nightmareland.
Instead of Enter here, it says, Enter if you dare.
I swallow as the rain cloud disappears in a sputter of water.
Normally, I might feel indignation, outrage at this world for turning on me so quickly, for having a shadowy underbelly so ready to rise up and swallow me whole.
But all I feel is—yes. This is good. This land reflects how I feel right now. I belong within it.
Slowly, I pivot and start back across the bridge. I make my way through the darkened town.
A woman shoves by me, pressing a flyer to my chest without asking if I want it, before trudging on. It’s an invitation.
Pity Party 5 p.m., it says.
I bristle. Crumble the invitation into a ball and throw it.
I’ll have my own pity party right here and now, thank you.
My life is a lie!
The shame and embarrassment and pain of being left Fateless crashes into me in full force, the memories cutting and heavy. She did that. She humiliated me in front of everyone. She saw me suffer afterward. She comforted me. And the entire time, she was the cause of it.
She made me feel worthless. And angry. And hopeless.
On purpose.
A sob rips through my chest. Something uncurls in the wind above me, fluttering until it falls right against my cheek, stuck to the tears there. A tissue.
I look up and see that instead of a line of streetlamps, there are tissue boxes stuck to poles.
Practical.
Something worse than sadness overtakes me. Anger, flashing hot, sears through my veins.
Robin has been lying to everyone in Heartland, telling us the Fates control our futures when, in fact, it’s been her all along.
She lied to me about my mother, never telling me about her magic, never suggesting there could be magic inside me, too.
She hid these things from me, these truths central to my very existence, and even in the midst of my outrage I can’t help but wonder why.
Did she want to be the only one with magic? Was she afraid that one day I would discover what lived inside my blood and threaten her control—of me, of Swancrest, of all of Heartland—with it?
Yes. That has to be why she refused to give me a Fate.
For years, I’ve done everything I could to express my gratitude to her. I’ve tried to be perfect. Flawless. Worthy of all the gifts she’s bestowed upon me.
She is the only mother I have ever known, but she’s not a mother at all.
She’s…
My enemy.
I set off at a fast, angry clip, turning down a path that the rain cloud hanging above lets me know is called Doomspiraling. My thoughts rage, hurtling through me like daggers in my mind, all finding the same target.
Has Robin always hated me? Was this always her plan?
Did she always know she was going to watch me follow her every rule to the tee, then punish me anyway by leaving me Fateless?
Did she want to be the only one in Heartland with magic… no matter the cost?
I stop dead.
Is it… is it possible that she had something to do with my mother’s death?
No… that can’t be. But why not? I don’t know her at all. She hurt me… Why wouldn’t I believe she could hurt my mother?
I think back to Robin’s face when she saw me pierce through the mists. Of how she looked when she tried to persuade me to return home before I reached Dreamland. Of course. She was terrified for me to finally be crawling out from beneath her thumb.
She was afraid—
That I would find out the truth.
That I would find my magic.
And stop her.
My fists clench, and I’m so lost in my mind I nearly collide with something solid right in front of me. A well.
Welled-Up Tears, another rain cloud sign says, and yes. That’s what I have. All kinds of tears, because of her.
I hate her.
The thought appears in my head as if placed there. I frown. I don’t—I don’t think I thought that myself.
I look around, only to see the shadows of this world inching toward me. I look down—my clothing has changed. It’s dark as night.
Come, a voice says, whispered from the shadowed marshes beyond the well. Join us.
“What? Why?” I ask out loud into the void.
Misery loves company…
I stumble back. Or, at least, I try to.
That’s when I notice my feet are stuck. The black path here has turned to tar. Sticky, gripping me.
Not letting me go.
The shadows are getting closer. And they’re not alone. Creatures are rising from the marshes, twisted, with fangs and claws. They look almost like Lord Evernight from Everland.
Stay… that voice says. Stay forever…
And something within me wants to. It wants to feed into the sadness and rage because then there’s someone to blame.
There’s a target for all this hurt.
All at once, a thought occurs to me.
Was this the place Robin was in when she was little, after she lost her parents? When the magic around her was all cobwebs and storms and haunted houses? I think back to the girl clothed all in black, a single rain cloud above her head like a warning.
She was so sad… so alone…
A seed of empathy starts trying to take root in my heart, and—
No. Robin doesn’t deserve it.
She doesn’t deserve it, the world around me echoes.
But it does give me pause. I don’t need to try to understand what Robin has done, and I certainly don’t need to forgive her.
Yet, as easily as I could continue to dig myself deeper into this pit of despair, and have the shattered pieces of my heart finally freeze over…
I don’t want to live that way.
You don’t have a choice! the shadows around me hiss.
But that’s not true. If anything… my journey here has taught me this.
“I always have a choice,” I say out loud.
Then I grip my necklaces, close my eyes—and choose.