The next day, she got breakfast at school. She hadn’t even realized it had been a few days since she’d actually eaten anything. She got a milk carton and a granola bar, just something quick to snack on, and went back to the art room with it. Arrow was already in there with two of their friends, Charlie and Dakota. They greeted her and turned back to their conversation. 

Emma sketched in her notebook, just a few little drawings, random practice things. A few characters from memory, some cartoonified, some abstract. Arrow, Charlie, and Dakota left for reason unknown and Emma laid her head down as the silence took over. She wasn’t asleep, but she still visited her Dreamworld. It was harder to control without being fully asleep, but still accessible and visible to her. 

The sound of the bell had her sitting back up again. She sorted out her things that didn’t need sorting at all.

“Welcome back,” Abbi said. 

Emma nodded, looking at her through hooded, red eyes. She downed her milk. A chunk of it slid down her throat. The school didn’t know how to provide very good milk. She winced and then walked the carton back to the garbage. 

Arrow gave her a fistbump. Then gave Abbi one. Then they went back to reading. 

Emma’s lids fell heavier and heavier. She willed herself to stay awake, but it was too much, no matter what she did. The last thing she saw was Becky’s wicked smile. It wasn’t milk, she thought. She laid her head down and fell asleep. 

Emma was teleported to a Dreamworld, but it wasn’t hers. Not exactly. The clock should have read six am, not three pm. She stared at it, willing it to morph into six, but she couldn’t. 

The bed wasn’t hers. Neither was the room. It wasn’t the room she’d given herself, where she had her walls painted a perfect white, dark wood edges, and a polished wooden floor.The curtains were black to match the walls, and translucent gray shades hung from the top frame of the bed. It was the same, but everything was dark and moody. More crystallized, more magnificent, and much, much more expensive. 

Her head hurt. She opened her bedroom door and got herself some water, ignoring how the rest of her house wasn’t exactly hers, either. 

Down the hall, in the shadows - where shadows shouldn’t have been - was a door she’d never added. No, she had her door, her parent’s door, the bathroom door, a closet door, and a guest room - if she decided to have anyone stay over that, for some reason, wouldn’t be allowed in her room (she tried to keep the parent rules realistic). It was… majestic, really, with a firm black frame that wound unnaturally like it had been made with painted twigs. It was a completely solid black door with a raven or crow - the silhouette was hard to decipher - perched on a branch that stuck out from the middle of the door. It had been sitting so still, so far in the shadows, Emma hadn’t realized it was real. It cawed and flew around as she approached. Definitely a raven. 

Emma’s hand lingered on the knob. It was ice cold to the touch, like a thousand needles were sticking into her hand as she held it. She glanced over her shoulder once, then again, and opened the door. 

Inside was… nothing. Like a black screen had been set up in every direction. The door slowly creaked farther open, revealing more and more nothingness. She stood at the edge staring inside. Nothing. Nothing? How could there be nothing? She eased forward, taking a step. She didn’t feel her foot touch the ground. She was hovering in the nothingness.

The door slammed shut behind her and suddenly the gravity canceled. She fell, fell too far, and she kept falling. There was a breeze pushing her hair upwards and in her face and she opened her mouth to scream but no sound would come out. 

Suddenly, everything exploded at once. Bright lights, flickering flames of torches that lined the walls, a black rug with gray raven silhouettes lining the path to a throne of thorns where a man with gray skin and glassy white eyes sat. Jet black hair matching a jetblack suit, a crown of false twigs painted black, and an evil grin on his face. A scar fractured half of his face from his forehead to his jaw. 

A woman in beautiful robes of gold and black stood beside him, and in her hands, a large book. She had a sword in its hilt at her hip and another small blade at her ankle. 

“Emma Good,” he said. His jaw rested in an L made with his fingers, his legs crossed, right over left. He rose to his feet, his black cape falling behind him, just an inch above the ground. He, too, had the emblem of a raven pinned to the left side of his chest, one matching the woman at his side. She expressed no emotion, only stared at Emma with dead, dull eyes. Emma wasn’t even sure the woman was looking at her rather than through her. 

“How do you know my name?”

“You know your own name, I would hope.” He advanced. 

She was frozen in place. She shook her head, looking around once again. “I didn’t make this place. It shouldn’t be here. Where am I?”

“Think.” He waved a hand in front of her face. The world around them changed. They stood in an opening of a dark forest, nothingness behind a few layers of dead trees, a dirt path that led in multiple directions, and a broken, infested stone devil in the center of a dried fountain. “An Oneironaut, a Dreamwalker, can walk through dreams and control them. You do have control, Good. But not all of it. I have more control, and you cannot control me. That is because this-”

“Is not a dream,” they said at the same time.

“Good,” he said, nodding once. “Learning fast.”

“I can’t learn. Not here.”

“You can only cover what you know. Yes, I’m aware. But these things you know, your knowledge, your memories, they’re locked away when you’re in here, in your Dreamworld. You access them. It’s how you study. If you did it in person, you wouldn’t be learning anything, you would just read it again and again and learn nothing. Here, you quiz yourself. You make yourself forget, then re-learn it again. Am I wrong so far?”

He took Emma’s silence as a no. 

“Here… here is what we call Dysphoricauts.”

“Nightwalkers,” Emma answered. 

“You didn’t know that,” he said, cautious of his words. He stared down at her, moving his jaw. Emma didn’t say anything. “You did not have that information when you came in here.”

She thought maybe he didn’t know entirely what he was talking about. He would not have been able to use the word if she hadn’t known it prior to entering this… this land of Nightmares. But she brushed it off. “No, but it was an easy guess. I can guess things, you know? Dreamwalker. Oneironauts. Dysphoric dreams, or nightmares… Dysphoricaut. Nightwalker.” She changed the topic before he could say anything. “Why am I here?”

“Instead of falling into a sleep, sleep was forced upon you, which took part of your control. You were not meant to have any control, but having already planned to sleep, you took some part in bringing your own power with you to our world.” He stopped, a smile hiding at the corner of his mouth. “My world.”

“I don’t remember creating you.”

“You created me at a much younger age. I’ve been here every day, every night, almost your entire life. Seconds for you can be minutes, hours, or years for me. Yet I continue to look the exact same. Everything everywhere is the exact same, waiting for you, watching you from afar. Do you remember that, Emma? Creating me? Creating us?”

Emma searched her memories, but they were locked away. She couldn’t find them, she couldn’t access them. “No.” She shook her head. 

A raven landed on his shoulder. He held his hand out towards her. It, too, was ice cold, prickling her as she took it. “I guess an introduction would be best, then. Lord Reyvon.”

“Lord,” Emma echoed. It was more of a question of astonishment, but it hadn’t meant to be answered. She stared up at him, intimidated by his colorless eyes. Her hand fell numb in his icy grip and the world around them froze. There was no life, no movement, but the air seemed stiller. Time had stopped. Lord Reyvon didn’t blink or move. 

His grip on her hand began tightening. It tightened until she could feel pain, then agonizing pain as she tried to rip her hand from his grip. She screamed and screamed as she leveled her foot to his chest and kicked as hard as she could. Her hand tore free from his grip and once her foot disconnected from his sleek black shirt, he froze again, laying midair. 

Heal, she willed, staring at her throbbing hand. Her fingers that seemed out of place slowly returned to their original placement. She swiped at her tears with the back of her hand and flexed her fingers to make sure they worked properly. Good, she thought. If I have control over anything, that’s the best thing for it to be. 

The ground began to shake. It started with a simple vibration, then the statue was crumbling, trees were falling, and ravens were cawing. Lord Reyvon fell flat on his back, looking up at the endlessly dark sky. He sat up and swerved just in time for a free to come down inches from where his head had been. “What did you do?”

“What did I do? What did you do? You shook my hand then tried to break it! Then this happened. I didn’t do anything!”

“You’re doing everything, Emma. You just don’t know it.”

Emma stayed silent. 

He glanced over his shoulder as a raven came back and perched on his shoulder. He waved his hand again and not only was Emma somewhere else, but Reyvon was gone. Another raven was perched on a branch close to her, its dark, beady eyes watching her every move, cawing every now and again while Emma assessed her surroundings. 

Trees with faces, laughing, pointing, watching. She spun around. She was surrounded by the half-living beings. Sounds seemed to emit from their trunks and out the carved mouths. The pitch was low. Low but loud like a boat horn was being blown from every direction. The open ground around her crept in, the trees getting closer and closer. 

The car of the raven grew faster, more urgent, then it flew up and out of the circle of trees. Emma followed, dark wings spreading from her back, lifting her from the ground. The trees grabbed at her, their twigs poking her, stabbing her, tugging her clothes, wrapping around her ankles, but she kicked free and hovered above, getting higher and higher as the limbs grew toward her. She searched for the raven and spotted it in the distance. She flew after it, gradually getting higher as the average height of the trees seemed to rise. 

“Where’s the castle?” she asked the raven. It only cawed. She willed herself to understand, but that was in the raven’s language, not her own. Caw after caw, then it took off. She followed on wobbly wings, able to control them the slightest bit. Cold air blew past her as she went against the wind that got stronger and stronger. The raven seemed to get faster, but the trees beneath her said she was falling slow. 

Then falling altogether, the wings not protruding from her shoulder blades anymore. She fell, fell, fell, and the trees grabbed at her, wrapping around her arms and legs, holding her down. Her back was placed against the ground and she felt a rock stabbing at her lower spine but she couldn’t move. A branch slowly wrapped around her neck and tightened. Black spots threatened her vision as she choked for air and tears pricked at her eyes. 

A branch dragged across her stomach with a wild flair of pain as it left a bloody mess, exposing her insides with minimum blood. The hand-shaped branch plucked something from the ground and pushed it inside Emma’s stomach. A seed. It sprouted and grew, its roots burying themselves in her organs, wrapping around her heart and lungs, breaking her ribs as it pushed through. Emma felt everything. She couldn’t scream. She didn’t pass out. She couldn’t. She was right on the edge of consciousness, the laughs around her echoing from the walls of Nothing. 

The roots squeezed until she felt her heart explode. All she was now, was a consciousness. A set of eyes. An existence. Nothing but a Watcher as her body sprouted another tree that laughed in her face, her small intestine hanging like Christmas tree decoration as it grew up and up and up. She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t feel anything. She wasn’t sure she was breathing anymore. 

Mushrooms grew along her quickly-decaying flesh. They protruded from her arms and throat, then out of her mouth and clogged her throat. Maggots began piling at the base of the tree that tore her stomach open. A vulture pecked at her eyes and suddenly she couldn’t see the dark sky anymore. 

Wake up, she thought. Don’t stay here. You’re asleep. Wake up!

Her eyes cracked open. The trees were gone. Everything was gone. She was falling again, falling through the Nothing, and she was back where she began. Back at the other end of the black rug that ran to the thorned throne where Lord Reyvon was perched. 

“Nice job,” he said. He rose to his feet and, again, strode toward her. This time, with amazing speed. 

“What the hell was that?” Emma demanded. Tears threatened to come again but they stayed put. 

“A test. Azeria?” He turned his head in the slightest, speaking to the woman with the book. She strode closer. Emma didn’t know what was more unsettling: Lord Reyvon not having iris’s or pupil’s, or Azeria - Madam Azeria - having them constantly glued to Emma. 

“Where are my parents?” Emma asked as Madam Azeria handed Lord Reyvon the large book with golden trimming and a gold raven on the front. 

Black, gold, raven. Black, gold, raven. Everything was the exact same. Everything was black and had gold and/or ravens. Everything. Her world was lighter, prettier, more calming. She had made everything, from every sunset to sunrise with beautiful splashes of color. She made the dresses and the button-ups and the knickers and the fragile houses worth fortunes. 

Black, gold, raven. 

Lord Reyvon flipped through the book and stopped at page six hundred sixty six. He dragged a finger down the page. “Assess a newcomer with a test to understand if the traveler is worthy of the power they have been given by their ability.” He shut the book and handed it back to Madam Azeria. 

Emma looked at her long black hair, the two braids in front with golden clasps in certain spots around the braids. Her irises were gold and her nails were painted to match, and pointed like talons. She took the book and walked back to her place, watching the two of them from afar. 

“Test. A test? That was a test?”

“Indeed.”

“No. No, I need to wake up. Why can’t I wake up?”

“Think.”

“Think, think, think,” Emma whispered to herself. She didn’t get much time to think before the dark walls were replaced with a clear border of nothing, and the ground was made up of the pebbles in an aquarium. She was outside the castle - an average, basic castle from every cartoon and kids drawing, and water filled her lungs, but it was welcomed. 

She could see Lord Reyvon in the entrance to the castle, the size seeming like he was the only one that could fit, and he floated above the pebbles. He was changing, his being was… “Abbi?” she whispered. No sound came out, but bubbles floated upward. Blood dripped from Abbi’s eyes and mouth and she began falling backwards in slow motion. Emma rushed to help, rushed to catch her, but she couldn’t quite navigate her way through the water. Then the rocks disappeared, the water flowed away, and the ground was gone. She slipped through a thick black substance that covered her like she’d laid in oobleck. 

She was falling through the sky, falling from the Heaven’s, wings burning on her back as she sped towards the earth. The wind pushed against her and she was falling, falling, falling, and the Earth was getting closer and closer-

She stopped. She landed, but like she’d never fallen. She let out a confused and surprised exhale, relieved to find out that she was breathing air again. 

Emma was on something soft. She sat up and grabbed a handful. It was soft and light, almost like she’d landed on a cloud. Looking around, she realized that was exactly what she’d done. But the cloud beneath her quickly turned to a stormcloud and it shot a jolt of lightning straight through her, sending a wild shock through her body. She felt paralyzed, nonetheless, but was over it in mere seconds. She fell through the cloud and tumbled closer to the ground, wings no more. 

She landed lightly in the arms of a man dressed as a clown. He helped her to her feet and forced her to dance a little, jumping around hand in hand. Emma hardly complied, but he was happy either way. She ended with a spin, taking a few steps off to the side, right into the Hall of Mirrors. She stopped abruptly and frantically looked around at the mirrors surrounding her, mocking her. Her heart pounded. Every reflection was a different, horrifying, gorier version of her. 

One reflection had a torn dress and an inhuman smile with glowing, menacing, red eyes. Another was covered in blood that leaked from under her chin, her clothes in shreds, the clothes she was wearing in the Realworld. Another had blood-covered hands and an expression as if she was snarling, finished with black eyes and a still-pumping heart in her hands. She took a bite. 

In the distance, there was a terrifying cackle. It startled her as it broke through the silence and she stumbled backwards as the room spun. She fell into one of the mirrors and melted through it, falling on her back. The mirror she fell through shattered with piercing volume and each shard that lay around her showed a different reflection. She couldn’t focus on one. They all glared at her menacingly, eyes burning, moving, dancing, reaching for her…

From one shard, spiders emerged like it was a portal. They multiplied, piling up, a moving cluster of legs and eyes. They crawled up her leg and her leg turned black before she knew what was happening. They crawled up and up, paralyzing her with their violent bites. She tried to move, to run, to scream, but she couldn't. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head as spiders wedged their way into her mouth, through, into her lungs, into her ears, and she was sure one had tunneled its way through her left eye. 

The ground rose above her - or, rather, she sank through it. Down, down. The spiders on the outside disappeared as she moved through rough dirt and soil, scratched by rocks and buried twigs, down until she was six feet under. Dirt filled her lungs but she couldn’t cough. Were the spiders still in her lungs?

The oxygen was ripped from her lungs and she gagged, but it had no effect. Everything was dark.

She reached up and winced as a wood splinter jabbed into her finger. She choked on the dust that sank through the cracks in the wood. Dust, then freezing water. It engulfed her. She shut her eyes as tight as she could as the taste of salty water entered her mouth and the feel of it burned her good eye. It went up her nose and she sputtered but it was useless. She tried screaming again, but got nothing but silence in return. 

Wake! Up!

She needed air again. She kicked and clawed at the coffin walls, her nails shredded, legs weak, and oxygen long, long gone. It was like she could feel her cells dying as they begged her to take a breath. 

The taste of salt left the water.

Emma took a deep breath, a last gasp for oxygen, but the water, it did more than burn. It gave her the oxygen she needed. She breathed again. Perfluorocarbon!

Just after her discovery, the water drained away. She breathed fresh air, the transition feeling like what she might associate with being birthed again. Her breaths were deep and antagonizing, but better than ever. She blinked a few times and coughed up the remainder of water and what could have only been spider eggs. She heaved and heaved until nothing else came up, until she was on her hands and knees in broad daylight. She was completely dry, her clothes not tattered nor bloody, her hair back to its normal blonde and brunette stripes. 

A lady kneeled beside her. She put a hand beneath Emma’s chin and tilted it up. 

“Madam Azeria?”

“Azeria is fine,” she said with a kind smile. She looked so… different.   She had a long white dress, simple yet elegant, with a gold string belt and some golden jewelry. Instead of a mean glare she had such kind eyes and a gorgeous smile. Her hair was a much lighter brown instead of jet black and she still had one little braid in front but without the small clasps. She seemed to glow in the calm sunlight as she offered a hand for Emma to help her to her feet. 

Emma’s hair changed into two, small, low pigtails. Her clothes morphed into a flowing dress that matched the meadow to her left.

The second she let go of Azeria’s hand, everything decayed. 

The flowers in the meadow withered and died. Reduced to ash in the dry dirt. 

Azeria herself, her perfect, glowing skin cracking with deep black gashes that oozed an unknown black liquid. She gave Emma a pleading glance before she, too, crumbled to dust. Dark clouds filled the sky, casting shadows over her. 

Her fingertips were turning black. She scratched at it, but it was part of her skin, and layer after layer, it was all black. It was spreading slowly, slow enough for her body to be completely black in a good twelve hours. 

She walked. Her walk broke into a jog, then a full-on sprint as she saw the top of the Dark Castle against the horizon, hiding in the shadows. It was raining, but only on her, just a little cloud following her, soaking her through. She tripped on her dress, then grabbed it between her teeth and tore it to a good length for running. She kept running. She ran until she couldn’t feel her legs anymore. 

The castle was no closer than it was before. 

“You’re not trying hard enough,” Lord Reyvon told her. He waved a hand and the back wall of the giant room disappeared, shifting into a view of a kingdom. One she hadn’t passed through after the meadow, one that she couldn’t even be sure was really there. “This place. I have been running it for the last millenia, making every decision. You have been making every decision. You don’t fully know or understand it because you always had much different scenery, but you are in the land of the Opposite. The Underworld. Beneath your Victorian feet.”

“So, what you’re saying is: Every time I decide something, the same thing happens down here?”

“In the manners relevant to us, in a way. It was not verbatim. But the more decisions you made there, the more we could decipher what moves to make that would be moves you would make. I may be the Lord, their King, their Ruler… but you are their God.”

She shook her head slowly. “I could never be a god. I never meant for any of this. I don’t even know any of you!”

He stared at her, his white eyes glowing against the darkness of the half-room around them. Like two little versions of the moon had been shoved into his eye sockets. Another wave of his hand and the fog that hovered above the sophisticated, dark town, faded back into the wall as it belonged. 

“Just let me wake up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“What can you do? What is your purpose here?”

“Here I am the Lord. To you? To you, I am your opponent.” He leaned close to Emma. “I am your Nightmare.” He exploded into a flock of ravens with glowing red eyes and sharp talons. They attacked Emma, pecking at her with their pointed beaks. She looked to Azeria for help, but her gold eyes were stuck in place, her feet held their place, and she held the book like a statue. 

Emma screamed, swatting at the birds that drew blood and offered her throbbing, painful sensations from every nerve. 

She fell to one knee screaming as a raven pecked at the back of her knee and took hold of her tendon, tearing it away, mutilating her calf. She brought a fist down and crashed the bird's skull. 

Opponent. 

She held her arm straight out, her palm down, and from the tip of her finger, a white droplet formed and stretched down, then grew larger. A dove sprouted from her hand, followed by another one, then a third and a fourth. They fought the ravens, the blood showing on their light feathers. The ground was nothing but a fit of feathers and blood and as Emma laid on her back, she kept her hand outstretched. One dove went down, another one emerged. 

Emma laid there, staring at the ceiling, turning her head to dodge the occasional feather. She listened to the cawing and clawing and scratching and spurts of blood as the birds sent themselves to war. It all stopped. She pushed herself onto her elbows, her knee almost fully healed, then got to her feet. 

Lord Reyvon stood five feet opposite her, breathing heavily, his hair a mess, and blood covering him, showing through tattered clothing. Even without pupils, his glare was menacing. Emma walked towards him, stopping just inches away. She had to look up, way up, being hardly five feet and him being nearly six, but she didn’t let that stop her. “Leave me alone.” 

“You must learn, Good.” 

“Oh, I’ll learn. I’m going to figure out how to get the hell out of here.”

“Quite the journey you’ll have,” he said. 

“That I will.”

Azeria sat in the War Room, sitting in a chair while she watched Emma fight one of the many warriors they’d set out to fight the beasts in the woods. She had a tight white suit while he had black, just like everything else in the Palace. Swords of gold clanged together, both with metal balls on the end. One jabbed her in the chest. 

“Again,” Azeria said. 

“How long do I have to do this?”

“Until you win.”

More fights were lost. More ball-tipped sword ends were jabbed into her chest. Into her stomach. Her neck. Then powers were brought in. He became a being of dark energy. She made herself light. 

Everything still fell pitch black.

Another jab in the chest. 

Wake up!

She tried again. 

His sword went up and hers followed, clanging together as an X between them. She spun to the side and thrusted her sword out again, but he was quick. He twisted the sword from her hand and tossed it aside. She jumped, flying ten feet in the air, and landed gracefully past him. She picked up her sword but the top of the Koa’s was already at her chest. 

“Again.”

He jabbed at her and she twisted, the edge of the sword barely nicking her top, but when Azeria didn’t yell “Again!” she knew she had yet to continue. She sped around him, the world blurring for a split second, but he matched her speed and twisted to face her. 

Her blue eyes emitted a glow. His brown eyes matched. 

She sped around, trying to get a jab at him, but he matched. 

She levitated. So did he. 

Anything she did, he did. 

The power to manipulate him was useless. 

He had no power to manipulate her.

Everything. Fair and square. 

Emma dropped to the ground. He stood across from her, his chest puffed a bit, staring at her from a downward glare. His eyes reflected his ego and self-impressed life. Emma steadied herself, staring right back at him as menacing as a thirteen year old girl could. The boy may have looked sixteen or so, but Lord Reyvon himself, a billion or so years old, looked like an average late-twenties man that needed a few more hours of sleep. 

She held her sword at her side, ready to strike, all while he waited for her. She swayed on her feet, actively healing herself from the constant action of losing for the last… was there time in the Nightworld? Time besides millenia? 

There was no sun. No moon. Probably no rotation of the so-called “planet” that really was no planet but an x-dimensional state of mind. And there was no escape. Not until her body woke up, and she seemed to have no control over that body due to the drug. 

She struck the Koa, the clattering of swords echoing over the grayed, sophisticated walls. She struck again, lower, blocked again, and repeated that again and again, high, low, up, down, until he was backed into a corner with the ball-tip at his throat and his sword at his hip. “Ha!” Emma cheered.

“Again,” Azeria said.

Emma spun to face her, her triumphant look twisting into a confused sneer. “But I won.”

Asteria raised a brow. “Does a warrior win one lucky battle then disappear?”

“How many of your warriors are trapped in their dreams? I could be leaving any second. You shouldn’t be training me if I’m just going to leave.”

“You know. Deep down, you do. And I know you know.”

“Oh, so you have access to my Knowledge Locker Room but I don’t? Great. Fantastic. So exactly what is it that I supposedly know? Because I can’t access it,” she said, using the last words as a line of mockery towards her and Lord Reyvon as he walked into the room, the black door with the raven-wing knobs swinging shut with a loud bang behind him. He stood there, a cane in his hands, a raven’s head, of course, because he was a random goth boy obsessed with birds or something, and he held both hands on the head of it, standing sophisticatedly. Emma sneered, “Glad you could finally join us.”

“Are you?”

“No,” she replied honestly. 

“Good. You wouldn’t like my news, anyway.”

“I have to learn what I know. Great. Yes, yes, go on, my Lord, tell me about me.”

He stared down at her like she was nothing, no one. Like she was Emma Hazel. “You created us. You got drugged and you sent yourself to this world. You may not have control over anything now, but you had control over that.”

“If I had control, I’d be with my parents in a good life.”

“No, no. You would be in any nightmare you’ve ever had before you learned to dreamwalk the way you do. You chose this one from all of your other options.”

“What were the other options?”

The raven's head on the cane popped off and morphed into a crystal ball which he held with one hand. Emma’s visions within the ball grew until the edges of the nightmares engulfed her and changed the room around her like she was standing in the middle of the nightmare. 

Not like she was. 

She really was. 

She couldn’t move her hands, legs, or head, then the world shifted around her and she was on her back, on a table as a man dressed in a blue gown leaned over her. She tried to shake free but her body was completely still as he cut her open. He reached into her past her ribs and into her open chest and pulled out her still-beating heart, then pulled down his mask and took a bite. Blood dribbled down his chin and his mouth twisted into a wicked smile as he stared her down. She felt the tendons being ripped in half as he took another bite. Blood spurted from the unattached arteries, spraying in her eyes and mouth. He welcomed the taste of it and drank from it like a fountain, harvesting her other organs. He ate her intestines like Fruit by the Foot given to an energetic child. 

He tore at the ribs. Emma listened to them snap as he moved them aside to stand up, giving him more space to reach into her chest and pull out her flesh. He replaced her insides with someone else’s and stitched it all together. The sounds would have made bile rise in her throat but she wasn’t sure there was anything to throw up… if she even had that ability now. 

She could feel the new organs inside her rearranging, hear them squelch against each other from within her torso. It was… unsettling, to say the least. 

A mask came down over her face and casted a shadow into the trees that surrounded her as she sat by her mothers grave. 

Amber Hazel-Good

1974-2001

Emma read it, squinting through the darkness. That wasn’t right. She didn’t die in 2001… she died in 2015, when Emma was only eight years old. She leaned closer, wondering if there was a five engraved after the one, even when the two zeros were fairly clear. 

She leaned and leaned, only stopping when a blood curdling scream echoed from everywhere but, at the same time, nowhere. 

Her mothers hand reached up from the dirt and grabbed Emma’s ankle. She tried to run, tripping as the firm grasp tugged her back down. Amber’s other hand came out, grabbed Emma’s knee, pulling her into the dirt.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up!

Emma screamed as her mother dragged her down, through the dirt, through the wood of the coffin, then… nowhere. 

She was in the room of Nothing again. No walls, no floor, just levitating. 

There, she could see it. Just out of reach. The misshapen handle of the door she’d entered this dreadful place through. When she took a step, she plummeted. 

She landed on her back in the war room, the wind knocked out of her. She lay there, breathless, unblinkingly staring at the ceiling. Azeria and Lord Reyvon stood over her, looking down with disappointment. 

“You’re getting stronger,” Azeria said. 

Lord Reyvon lifted his head to look at her. He shook his head then turned his eyeless gaze back down to Emma. “You conquered the ability to return here at will. But I must remind you; here is the farthest place you can be. You cannot get out there now.”

“How much longer?” she groaned, finding her breath again.

“It could be ten seconds.” He shrugged. “It could be a century.”

“I’m not waiting here a century.” She pulled herself to her feet and felt her pulse. She did not have one. It wasn’t reassuring but she didn’t really expect one after… that. Yet another thing to heal. Or had it disappeared when she’d left the dream? 

It was possible it was someone else’s organs she still felt moving around inside of her. It wasn’t a great thought or remotely normal but she kept reminding herself that it wasn’t real, that none of it was. She couldn’t die in here, and getting close to it wouldn’t get her out there. It wouldn’t wake her up like any normal nightmare. It wasn’t a fun thing to find out the hard way. 

“I want all of your books on nightmares. I want to unlock all the knowledge I could possibly use to get the hell out of this place.”

“Didn’t like your other options, did you?”

“Would you?”

He did not respond to that. He stood still for a second, then, “We do not have the key.” His eyes seem to shift, the moon-like silvery substance swirling differently than before. 

Lord Reyvon and Emma moved to the library. For a second, Emma couldn’t tell if she’d forgotten the walk there or if he’d transformed the room, but the books were just as real as any. 

Lord Reyvon pulled one book off the shelf, then sped away, slowing to grab another, then another, and ended with seven books. They were all different shades of gray from black to white in gradient order and sat on the table in front of Emma. The table that wasn’t there when she walked in. 

“This library contains every piece of information you’ve ever known. From something a stranger said when you were a baby to you being drugged in the Realworld.” He flipped through the first few pages of the whitest book. “These seven are the only things about your knowledge of your lucid dreaming. Everything is in chronological order through the gradience.” He waved an arm around the room. “You have been alive four thousand eight hundred sixty two days. That is how many books are in here.”

Emma looked around. There were no white or even gray books on the shelves. Just black books with gold on the spine saying the title - or, well, topic of what was in the book. Lord Reyvon noticed her questioning glance from the books on the table to the books on the shelves and strode over to the shelves. He read a few titles, then used one finger to tilt the book back. 

He grabbed the one beside it, then pulled the other one off. As it came off the shelf, the black shade began lightening. He held them side by side. “Book one,” he said, shaking the black book. “Book two.” He shook the lighter one. 

“What are those about?”

“December fifth and sixth.” That had no meaning to Emma.

He put the books back and then pushed the stack of seven closer to her. “Read up all you want. None of it will help.”

Emma had never had the thought throughout her days to look up anything about Dysphoric Dreams or even How To Wake Up From Being Trapped in a Lucid Nightmare. The books proved it. 

July 19th, 2015 she’d been on a computer in the library and she looked up everything she could on lucid dreaming. 

She reread the article she read five years ago. 

Everything in it, she’d already tried. Screaming, yelling, reading - how humorous and ironic - sleeping, and blinking repeatedly. Everything it listed. It also claimed lucid nightmares were very, very rare. But these were all normal cases. Of course she’d have nothing on it. It all only gave her what she already knew. Or… unlocked what she knew. 

“There has to be something here,” she whispered. 

“There isn’t.”

“Stop telling me that!”

“You just have to wake up.”

“How do I make time pass slower?”

Lord Reyvon stood on her left, peering down at the useless white book she slammed shut. She shoved it away and Lord Reyvon took them, sped them to where they belonged, watching them regain darkness as they reunited with the shelves again. He left the room. There was no answer to her question. It was a question for the Timekeeper.

And he had long since been killed.

“Why did I make this place?” she mumbled to herself, her head in her hands. “When?” 

There was no way she’d find it searching through every book in the room. That would take forever. Though, she had the time. 

But not the patience. 

She slammed her hands on the desk and pushed herself out of the chair. 

She could go anywhere she wanted in the blink of an eye but she needed a walk. She needed to figure out the castle and town for herself. And she needed to blend in while doing it. 

Emma summoned a full-length mirror. It hovered within a purple glow of magic, bobbing up and down. She couldn’t steady it while she was focused on changing with the swipe of a hand, but it was good enough. 

Her sweater and jeans turned into a black dress that barely dragged on the floor and didn’t anymore after she gave herself inch-soled boots. The black from her fingertips had spread as if they were gloves that nearly reached her elbows with patchy endings. There was no pain. No wound to be healed. No will to make it disappear. So she ignored it, hoping it meant something. She wore her hair cropped to her shoulders still but now black, finished with a gold crown on top of her head. But she needed color. Just a splash. So with her black, advanced eyeliner, she had blue eyeshadow that matched her eyes. Maybe the lightness of it didn’t match her dress or jewelry or the Kingdom as a whole, but it was something to her. 

She was perfect. Maybe not what she liked for herself the best and maybe not in other people's eyes, but she blended as well as she could. A sweater would have been nice. Maybe a green one. But that wasn’t an option. 

She left the library. A raven landed on her shoulder. She flinched, but Lord Reyvon’s voice popped into her head as if he was speaking through the raven. “To keep an eye on you.”

“Not like I’ll need it,” she said. “But the company is okay.”

Her dress fluttered behind her as she strode down the long, dark hall. Bits of gray sunlight leaked through the ceiling-to-floor windows of the forty-foot-high ceiling lined with reflective chandeliers of gold. There was staircase after staircase winding down, up, everywhere, all leading to an exit through giant, heavy doors. They were opened by two otherwise-stock-still guards. 

The fog casted a wall of gray ahead of her, a bare outline of a stone bridge. She walked along it, the raven on her shoulder flying away, then five more coming to her. She held an arm out and one perched on her elbow, her shoulder, and her wrist. She held her other arm out and was flocked. They landed, flew again, landed on the ground, jumped around, cawed, then flew off. She was left with what she assumed to be the original raven. 

Reyvon’s Raven.

She walked over the black feathers strewn on the bridge that fluttered away with the light breeze that brushed her hair back. 

I could get used to this, she thought. I could make it mine if there was more color.

The idea of giving herself wings to flow behind her - just as decoration - popped into her head. She decided against it after a moment of thought. It would only be more dead weight and she wouldn’t quite blend in like that. 

She crossed the bridge, standing in an open area with a large water fountain in the center. This one was made from obsidian and was an exact replica of Emma wearing the exact. Same. Thing. She stared up at it, up at the unmoving black eyes that cried into the fountain. “Theá tou Kaloú,” cried a little voice behind her. Emma spun around. “Theá tou Kaloú,” the girl repeated.

Goddess of Good. 

“Hey.” Emma kneeled beside the little girl. The girl looked at Emma’s hands and forearms, able to tell that those were not gloves, and looked back up at Emma with fear in her eyes pushed down because there was no denying that there was a goddess in front of her. “How old are you?”

The little girl held up four fingers.

“Where’s your mother?” she asked and glanced around, not seeing anyone at all. There was talking and other audio just out of sight, like it could’ve been just a few streets down, but she couldn’t see anyone at all. 

“Which one?” she asked in a heavy accent of something Emma couldn’t place.

“Either. Any. Someone.”

She pointed to where the sound of distant talking came from. Emma rose to her feet and held out her hand for the little girl to take. She hesitated to touch the weird, discolored skin, but Emma reassured her that there was nothing wrong and she couldn’t even feel it. It had gone up to her elbows by then. The girl took Emma’s hand and led her toward the talking. 

The second Emma stepped out of the stone circle that surrounded the fountain, dozens of people appeared, talking and chatting and laughing with one another, all much louder than before. 

Like the houses of more twisted, fake twigs of all black and metals, their clothes were all black. Everything like it was the only color ever available to them. 

“What…” Emma turned around to face the fountain. Sure enough, there was a ten foot radius that appeared to be completely empty. The bridge was not there. She stepped into the circle and the bridge was visible again. She stepped out.

“Circle of Silence,” the little girl said. 

“Explain it to me,” Emma said. Not meaning to sound so demanding, she added, “If you can, please. 

“There are other people in there. But we can’t see them. They can’t see me. They can see you. I’m… invisible in the circle. Like the others. We can’t see unless we want to. Lots of people go in there to make other people shut up.”

Emma hardly understood what any of that meant. Was she basically saying it was a portal to silence? Like a magic library? “Why can they see me but not you?”

“You are the fountain. The Theá tou Kaloú.”

Emma was well aware of the eyes on her and the excited gasps from the crowd, but no one dared to interact as Emma kneeled in front of the little girl. There was not a phone in sight, nor too many stares. They did not want to make Emma uncomfortable, but knowing they were there, she still was. She wanted to step into the Circle of Silence but if she could still be seen…

This little girl could not answer her questions. Not the way she needed them answered. She rose to her feet, taking the girl's hand again. “Let’s find your mom. Or moms. Where are they?”

The little girl pointed in a direction and started walking. Emma followed close behind until they were off on a separate path that didn’t seem to lead to any houses anymore. Just a dark, foggy horizon in the distance that seemed that it may never end. Emma lost control of her feet. She tried to stop, but the girl kept pulling her hand with immense strength until they were at the mouth of a cave that hadn’t been there before but the fog moved aside, creating a clear path for them. 

She led her just inside the mouth of it then her head twisted around in a full one-eighty and she revealed glowing red eyes and sharp, fanged teeth. Her skin rotted and turned black, hair thickening on her limbs as she shrank. Her dress fell to the ground as wings sprouted from her back and she lifted off the ground, flapping little bat wings. She flew at Emma with immense speed, jaw open and emitting a high pitched squeak that made Emma plug her ears and duck out of the way. 

She yelped and it echoed off the edges of the cave. Hundreds more red eyes turned to her, more squeaking hurting her ears, more wings flapping around her. Teeth connected with her arm. 

The flesh beneath the black “gloves” was still black, so was her blood. Then, she realized with horror as she could only sit, watch, and scream as the bats took bites of her, so were her bones.

“Food,” the squeaks seemed to form. “Food, food, food.”

Emma let out a scream the same pitch as the ugly creatures and a few backed off. She couldn’t feel let left arm. Her hand was dangling by a thin strip of flesh and an uncut tendon. 

She forced herself to her feet, what seemed to be heavy weights on all of her limbs, like she was a magnet and something deep underground was her polar opposite. 

Her feet lifted from the ground and she shrank down to their size, fangs cutting into her lips before they turned into the furry tucked mouths of the bats. 

There was something in their eyes. Not any normal bat, not some fruit bat or vampire bat; these bats had been long dead. They swarmed around her, suddenly lost at the idea she somehow looked exactly like them. She had no idea how to fly and she couldn’t learn things, but she could force herself to cope as the ground plummeted towards her, then suddenly she was perched on a stalactite, hanging upside down. 

Emma couldn’t heal herself in that form. So she waited, waited with ever-open, watching eyes, and she counted to a minute. By then, they had settled down. 

She erupted from the mouth of the cave. The others had followed, but they wouldn’t for long. Her wings grew into feathers and a bone structure that stretched eight feet overall. A tail flew out behind her and feathers grew at an amazing speed. She snatched some of the zombie bats midair, telling the others with an ear-shattering caw to turn back. 

They did. 

Emma picked out a few more and let them drop to the ground after crushing their fragile skulls with her massive talons. She transformed back into herself - the version with the mostly-missing-hand-and-half-eaten-arm, plus the shredded dress and messy hair. It took her a while to heal herself, the throbbing pain that hit her in a rush that sent her to her knees now slowly going away as she walked back towards the city or town or whatever these people of Darkness called it. 

By the time she made the walk back to the city, hardly in the distance, but the first few houses coming up, she knew she was maybe a mile away from the Circle of Silence. It would be best to just stay at the castle. 

Wake up. Please.

Now that people noticed her walking back, they clapped and cheered and welcomed her, crying, “Theá tou Kaloú! Theá tou Kaloú!”

Had they known? 

Had it been another test from Lord Reyvon or whoever the hell was doing all this?

You’re doing it to yourself, she reminded herself. Or, she thought she did. After a second, she realized the voice hadn’t been hers, but when she saw the raven perched on the “wooden” post of a perfect - almost new - gate, she knew. 

Stay out of my thoughts, she thought, communicating with him through the bird. Into the birds soul she stared as if she could see the control mechanism Lord Reyvon was using to speak through the animal. 

We are all your thoughts. We all know everything. That’s what it takes for you to win.

Win?

Yes, win. 

Do you mean get out? Wake up?

She received no second voice to that one. 

“Ma’am?” She tapped a woman on the shoulder. For a second, her eyes glowed a menacing red, but they faded to a dull black. “Do you mind pointing me towards the Circle of Silence?”

Like a robot, the woman raised an arm and pointed a crooked finger in the direction the path she was on continued as. Everything was so foggy, her skin holding water droplets as she walked through, but she followed the crooked finger with a “thank you” over her shoulder. 

She walked on, looking for anything similar to the real world to go off of. It had been… jeez, it had only been a matter of hours. Was it barely a minute, if a second out there? How long would she be unconscious out there? 

The ground slipped from beneath her and she was back in the room of Nothing. She waited a few seconds then, in the blink of an eye, she was in the throne room again. Lord Reyvon was not perched atop the thorny branches. Instead, he appeared behind her, having just come through the doors. 

“What did you mean earlier? Everyone knows?”

He stared down at her for a moment, then, “Everyone knows something, but no one knows everything. There is someone out there who is the key you are looking for.” He shook his head. “We cannot help you find them.”

“Why? It’s my head, why can’t I navigate?”

He sighed and searched for a way to put it for a thirteen year old. “You are in jail. You work there. You are the Ward. You have given each of your guards keys of different cells to different criminals. Instead of having a key for all of the locks - in case the wrong person gets their hands on them - they are all assigned to a specific cell. You, the ward, have lost your copies of the keys. You don’t know which guard has the key to which cell.”

Emma stood, unresponsive. 

Lord Reyvon raised a brow. “Does that make sense to you?”

Emma tried to form a response, either “Kinda” or “Sure” or “A little” but her tongue wanted to form all at the same time. “Ish.”

“Good,” he said. He took a deep breath. “You were gone for quite some time.”

“Yeah, an hour or so. I was-”

“I know what you were doing. And that you got sidetracked. A little… side battle.”

“Your doing, I presume?”

“I am you, Emma. You’re at war with yourself.”

Emma didn’t answer. 

“You were not gone for merely an hour. No, it was more like four days. At least, here, it was.”

Emma gawked. Four days? When was the last time she had- oh. “Here as in the castle or the kingdom? Or in this Dreamworld altogether.”

“We prefer the term Nightworld.”

“I knew that.”

“I know.”

“All of your names are predictable. What is the place out there, Star City? Shadowtown? Moonville? It’s all obvious. This castle. It’s a castle. Everything’s black. Dark. Dark Castle. Dark Kingdom. Lord Reyvon, you have ravens. Hell, the Circle of Silence! What isn’t basic? How old was I when I had this?”

“Find the key.”

“I don’t want to. I want to know.”

“Do you want to go through all of the books, then? The books, they tell you everything you’ve ever known, but they can’t put two and two together. The keys can.”

“This is all so stupid. Why did I do this?”

“You could not control that part. If you had come here by choice, it would be like your little Victorian home. You would not need keys if not for the drug.”

Emma fought the urge to pull her hair out and punch the Lord right in his know-it-all jaw. Stupid Becky, that ugly b*tch, that little wh*re- Emma took a deep breath. That was no way to think, she knew. That was her dad's way to think, not her. 

“What makes this place a nightmare rather than being in the others? This place isn’t all that scary, I only fall into other nightmares at times.”

“It was a nightmare at the time.” Then, he looked away - or what could be described as away - with disappointment. “We were a failure in your eyes. You had just learned control. You needed a place of comfort and this wasn’t it for you. You wanted the sun. Happiness. Colors.” He shook his head. “You got darkness. You were afraid of the dark. You knew what you were doing. How to communicate. You could control things around here without the keys and, for the time you were here, you stood here, where you are now, telling me I needed to fix everything. But you couldn’t fix the colors. The auras. It was all relevant to the mood you had been in when you fell asleep; your soul was in darkness.”

“I haven’t been afraid of the dark in…” Her eyes searched the ground at her feet. “Mom.” She looked down at her hands, her skin covered in the black substance. It had not yet moved above her elbows. “Am I meant to become the darkness?”

“No. I’m not entirely sure what that is. It was never part of your plan.”

“I need the books from the night Mom died.”

“Are you sure?”

Emma steeled herself. “I’m sure.”

It felt like hours. The sky outside the tall windows remained the same dull gray the entire time. There was no night, but also no day. No need for food or water, but she still drank when her throat felt dry. It might’ve been a few days. She hoped that would be how time continued: where hours feel like minutes and days like hours. 

It was one singular book. Only the night Amber passed. October 28th, 2015.

8 year old Emma was already having an awful day. She had a much better house and good friends over in Manhattan, but her day had gone horribly. For no reason in particular, either. As the book had stated: she had woken up in a bad mood and throughout the day sensed there was worse yet to come. 

She was right. She got the news just as she was leaving school. Right before the end of her last hour, actually, she needed to go down to the office and to take her stuff.  She thought Amber would be picking her up. 

Richard was much better back then. A much more normal person. A fine job, kind personality, and he and Amber usually let Emma do what she wanted. It was when Emma had noticed him and his bloodshot eyes and swaying form that she was afraid to approach Richard. He got on one knee, bringing himself eye to eye with her. He explained everything. 

That night, Richard hadn’t said much of anything. He spun the gold wedding band on his finger. Around and around, it went. Emma had her eyes on it, wondering: did this mean he had to take it off? 

They ate dinner in silence. Well, they had snacks that had been sitting around; Amber usually cooked. 

It rained that night. It rained most nights, but that particular rain was especially depressing. Emma had been staring out the window, out at the path, waiting for Amber, hoping that it was a stupid prank or something. Half of her hoped she’d come back dressed as a zombie or ghost since Halloween was a few days away. 

A raven appeared and slammed into the window. Emma nearly screamed but she took a second to even realize it had happened, then her eyes fell to the ground two stories beneath her. Nothing. She couldn’t see all the way down.

Emma read over it again and again. Mostly everything was a summary, just a quick mention. Everything that was long was her conversations with her friends and listening to what the teachers were saying. It made no sense. Had it not been on TV or in a book? Had she thought up a whole kingdom on her own?

Had she thought a king - no, a Lord, a god - could save her mother? Of everything she could control in the dream she’d brought herself to, had wanted to escape from, she hadn’t even thought to bring her mother back, even if it was for a night. She had mostly been occupied. And look, she even created a whole world with her mother where she could continue from dream to dream as she pleased. 

“What have you unlocked?” Lord Reyvon asked, appearing in the blink of an eye in front of her. 

Emma jumped and nearly slammed the book but instead she covered her eyes. “Christ,” she whispered to herself. 

He turned his head to the side. “How did you think it looked on the other end when I teleported?”

“I don’t know, maybe a glow, like a portal, something cool, not just… appearing. But I didn’t learn much of anything.”

“Two and two, Emma.”

“What am I missing?”

“Exactly what’s right in front of you. It’s that or the key.”

“God-” now she did slam the book. She rose from her chair, right beside Lord Reyvon. He did not flinch. Maybe he wasn’t capable. But she stared at the whites of his eyes, rage filling her. “Just tell me! I want to get out of here! I want to know how to fix everything!”

Lord Reyvon’s hands were folded behind his back. His chest rose and fell steadily as he kept calm breaths while the pre-teen in front of him raged on. “Do you want to go home, though? You hate yourself. You hate your life. You sleep when you can so you never have to be home. Why’s it so different?”

“I hate it here!”

“Nowhere is going to be perfect. Ever. There’ll be a day in your Dreamworld where you’re bored. Where seeing your mother won't make you quite so happy, where seeing your father’s small eyes won’t be so funny. You crave adventure, Emma.” He leaned close. “This is an adventure.”

Emma blinked and he was gone. She was left staring at the opposite wall. She thought about a punching bag and one appeared beside her. She used it once, twice, three times, then maybe a few more times until her knuckles bled. She healed herself and the bag faded away. She sat back down in her chair and dropped her head into her hands. 

At least Azeria knew how to knock before she came in. Emma hummed in response to the knock and Azeria took it as a “come in” and pulled up a chair to sit beside Emma. “Dealing with your own mind can be tough.”

“Do you even have a life? Anything that I didn’t subconsciously control for all these years? How do you live like that?”

“Do you know how I’m sitting here right now? Talking to you?”

“No.”

“We may all be connected to your minds, but we are still characters. Sure, we were created, not born, but you made the templates, not the scripts.” Emma didn’t respond. “In your world, I know you have AI. Artificial Intelligence. For it to create a painting, you may type… phoenix as a person on a floating planet. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “You typed that, but did you create the work? Or did it create itself with some help?”

“Latter.”

“You do not know how to run a kingdom, Emma. We hardly are that because we never knew how, either, but since you wanted a higher power, we are the higher power. When you learned, we learned. But you did not continue with us.”

“How does this relate to AI?”

“You wanted a higher power. You wanted a Lord. You wanted a castle and you wanted a calm place. You were not specific. Reyvon is the Lord. He is a higher power. But you did not add “light” or any sort of color in, so you did not get the result you wanted. You got darkness. Of course, you learned better when you made your Dreamworld, but we were the first ones you ever created.”

“Are there other world’s I’ve forgotten about?”

“Surely. Now, I don’t want to sound like Reyvon, but I’m not that Key.”

“What are you the Key of?”

Azeria shook her head dully. “One of us knows every math problem that could be put together at your level. Another can recite entire books just by the mention of the title and author. Geography. Science can tell you every element you know on the periodic table and what it does, what it reacts with. But the only thing they cannot tell you: I am the Key to math. The Key to where you left these items. The Key to this or the Key to that. I know what I am the Key to. You just have to ask the right question.”

Emma laid her head down. “So I basically pick a key out of a bag and pick a singular lock and hope it’s a match,” she said, muffled.

“Exactly.”

“If this has never happened, why do I know what I need to do?” She picked her head up again. She didn’t have to look up at Azeria as much as she did Lord Reyvon which was more comforting. Even when they were sitting down. “How did you explain that to me? I don’t recall ever getting that knowledge. It was already explained that these don’t typically happen.”

“Two and two. You’re figuring these things out on your own. Like if you know how to count to ten and you know two and two is four, you can easily realize three and three is six without needing help or really learning.”

“I think understanding that, in a nightmare, I would need Keys to unlock certain pieces of information… I think that’s a little bit different from three and three.”

“I’m trying to put it in a way that you can get yourself to understand. You may just have to simply accept that there are things you subconsciously acquired within your life.”

“Anything else I should be reminded of?”

“Losing focus could potentially result in falling into another nightmare.” She pointed with her index, yet kept her hands folded in her lap. “I can tell you’re losing yourself while having this conversation. You must remain alert, Emma.”

“I was looking for the pattern there. Thanks.”

Emma wanted to go to sleep. She wasn’t tired, she just wanted an eight hour break. She wondered if she could just lay down for a few hours. Focused on a book or something. If they even had any that weren’t repetition of her daily life. 

“Why can I sometimes summon things when I need them - like when I summoned a mirror - but then Lord Reyvon-”

“You’ve been told this,” Azeria said. The tugged at the end of one of her long braids. “You cannot control everything.”

“Yeah, but-”

“I must go.”

“Why?”

“I’ve told you enough.” And with that, she disappeared. 

Emma was in the war room. She fought a soldier she’d made out of nothing. Someone with armor who didn’t need the ballpoint at the end of the sword. After a while, she’d taken the ballpoint off the soldier's sword, too. It left cuts and wounds, blood soaking the suit she’d given herself. 

She healed herself as she fought, forcing herself to focus on both the pain and the enemy. There was nothing she could do about the blood; she waited until it was soaked through, not a spot of white on the button up and not a dry spot on the little black vest or black pants.

There were no scars. She healed everything completely. Even the throbbing pain faded and disappeared. Her soldier never gave up, for it was inhuman and had everlasting energy as long as Emma willed it to. 

“You’re only hurting yourself,” said Lord Reyvon through the raven perched above, watching. “You are not showing yourself new tactics to be able to win.”

“That was never the goal.”

“It should’ve been.”

Emma rolled her eyes. “Fly away, you dumb bird. I have all the time in the world to do this, I don’t see why my time bothers you.”

“It’s not your time. You created this world and you may be the God, but you have been absent. You do not run this place and you are here on our time.”

“Hope I’m not causing a disturbance,” she snarled. “Why do the rules keep changing?”

“What rules?” The bird's eyes narrowed. 

Emma fell silent, thinking. Exactly what had she meant? “Nothing. I must’ve misheard. Don’t repeat yourself; I don’t care that much. Just go away.” She drew her sword again, and when the bird didn’t move, she took a swing at it. Useless: the bird was perched thirteen feet up. A five-foot-something little girl plus a three foot sword still had nothing on it. “I just want to go home. Is that too hard for you to understand?”

“Your home is a different dream.”

“Yeah, and I can get there after waking up.” She suddenly felt a little extra stupid for talking to a bird. She ignored whatever Lord Reyvon’s next words were - some short sentence that probably didn’t matter - and went back to her war with the lifeless soldier. 

This time, the soldier’s sword ended up on the ground. She had the tip of hers to their chest, drawing blood, but the soldier didn’t react to that. She retracted her sword and the soldier bent down to grab theirs. The wound in their chest stopped bleeding and slowly closed up. They were nothing more than Emma’s creation so whatever she could do to herself, she could do to them.

Again and again. Until Emma was covered head to toe in her own blood, sweating like a wet dog, and her lungs begging for fresh air, then she would stop. 

Looking at her was like looking at a monster. Evil and anger in her eyes, her chest heaving, fists clenched by her sides, one holding a sword, hair matted to her head with a dark liquid. Like she’d taken a chainsaw and gotten up close and personal with many, many victims. 

The blood, the blood, the blood of the lamb. It’s worth two lions but here I am. And I slept in last night’s clothes and tomorrow’s dreams but they’re not quite what they seem.

Fall Out Boy was never really something Emma cared for. But Richard always had the radio on when they were driving back in Manhattan. It was a new song, Emma knew, back then. Not out for very long - then she never heard it again. She just knew that singular line had haunted her for a while, running through and through her mind until she’d forced herself to overcome it. 

With a roar that finalized the fight, she slashed the soldier’s throat so deeply that when their head rolled back, only the spinal column held it on. Blood and viscera sprayed everywhere.

Not hearing Azeria’s “again” after each fight made her feel better about herself. Like there wasn’t someone standing over her shoulder, disappointed. 

The soldier fell back and Emma bent down to realign their head on their neck. Blood stopped spilling after a minute, and after two, the major repairs had been done. A few more minutes and all that remained was a thin scar that lined their neck from side to side like a wicked smile. It faded slowly but surely. The soldier said nothing. Did nothing. They laid there until they were fully healed, then they were back on their feet. 

Emma was done with her inner war. For now. She waved the nameless and faceless soldier goodbye and they disappeared in a cloud of pale blue. She sheathed her sword and looked down at her blood-soaked clothing. 

With the wave of her hand, her clothes changed. She doesn’t know where the dirty, stained fabric went, but she didn’t really care all that much. She wore color now; she gave herself a break from the boring black and strict elegance. Instead, there were two colorful clips in her cropped blonde hair, army-green jeans with a rip here and there that bagged the slightest, and a light gray shirt with no design. There was no telling what the temperature was; she felt slightly cool no matter what she was wearing, so it didn’t really matter. 

Was she still able to eat? She’d been fully healed, but would eating do anything? Her real body wasn’t getting food so it’s not like she’d get the energy from it, but she sort of missed the idea of chewing up something that tasted good. 

Emma wandered around the castle, memorizing the halls as well as she could, but all the tall black doors that formed a point at the top all looked the exact same and there were no labels. She didn’t know quite where she was within the winding halls. She looked for clues then finally found one: a raven flew along the ceiling and rounded the corner. She followed, speeding up a little. 

She stood out against the darkness and the raven more so blended in. The ceiling was black, a few inches of the chain on the chandeliers and the walls at the very top were painted to look like the ceiling was covered in a black fog. Light reflected off the raven’s feathers.

Emma followed until the doors were a wonderful gold with a false black branch went across the middle, only a foot long, split right down the middle where the doors would open. She took a hold of one side of the branch and pulled.

Nothing.

I hate this place.

She pushed the doors open and was back in the throne room. The raven followed close behind, swirling around and landing on Lord Reyvon’s armrest. 

“I’ve noticed you still think you need help getting around.”

“Did you add “think” in there to mock me?”

“I did not. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but teleportation is an option.”

Emma gave him a wary eye. “For you.”

He shook his head and rose from the throne. Emma wondered if he sat there constantly, just waiting for someone. Anyone. Or maybe he had many visitors that she just hadn’t seen yet. “Picture the library. Will yourself to go there. Everyone in Star City can. Even the Shadow’s.”

“Shadows?”

“The poorer areas. Mostly hidden away, not a very… good part of the city. It’s as simple as having a car.”

“Don’t people steal things? You know, pop in, grab something, pop out.”

“You never created stealing.” He took a breath. “Teleportation inside and outside the castle is prohibited. If you are in the castle, you can only teleport within the castle. If you want to get from castle to kingdom or vice versa, you might want to walk outside the doors. Any version of teleportation along the bridge is also prohibited, giving our soldiers time to see if an enemy is approaching.”

“What happens if someone tries? And what do you mean ‘version?’”

“There’s an agonizing shock seemingly emitting from the brain that potentially immobilizes the teleporter. By ‘version’ I mean teleporting behind, under, or around the bridge works just the same. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the castle is approximately three hundred fifty feet from land in any direction. Teleportation within those feet - anywhere within the water surrounding us - will notify me immediately and I shall find them.”

“And do what?”

“I make sure I know their reasoning first. If they were attempting to break in,” he shrugged innocently, “then they would lose their hands.”

Emma hardly hid the shock in her eyes. She couldn’t exactly say Lord Reyvon looked like the kind of man to never harm another, but to take their hands… and do what with them? “What are the reasons that don't result in that?”

“Well, one year, maybe a decade ago, a little girl and her friend were kayaking. The boat tipped and the girl didn’t know how to swim. Instead of panicking, she teleported to the bridge. I found her out there, freezing cold, sobbing. She knew the consequences. But seeing as she was completely innocent and only trying to spare her own life, she lost nothing. As for her friend? She made it to land safely and waited at the end of the bridge, at the edge of the Circle, for little Mariana to return.”

Emma nodded. “So if I did it-”

“I’d personally kill you myself.”

Emma swallowed. “Okay.”

“That was a joke,” he said with a small flick of his head. “I understand your intentions due to being part of your head. I know that right now you’re thinking I don’t know how to make very good jokes.”

“Wrong.”

“That’s because you just changed your thought cloud to ‘pizza.’”

“Goddammit.”

“We do eat here, Emma. We are not all immortal.”

“All?”

“I’ve been blessed with immortality, gifted from my father before me. He was the first king, yet you only created this place while I was king. That does not mean we did not have a past. Azeria is immortal because I’ve blessed her, but she is still fairly new to it. In your world, she’d be considered fourteen.”

Emma gazed past Lord Reyvon’s shoulder at Azeria, who nodded once in agreement. She didn’t look fourteen, but Emma hadn’t been too focused on what she looked like besides gothic and creepy and focused more on waking up.

“The other’s in Star? They are all the ages they appear. You, me, Azeria, and my soldiers: we are the Blessed.”

“How old would you be?”

“How old do I look?”

“I don’t know. The idea that you’re, like, a billion… it kinda diverts the idea that you might actually be twenty-something.”

“I haven’t been keeping track of my years, but I do know that I was blessed the day of my eighteenth birthday. Father passed not long after that. He had known the sickness was coming for him and Mother, so he hurried the process. He was about… thirty-two years early, but he didn’t have that kind of time.”

“So if someone asks you how old you are, do you say eighteen or… an estimate?”

“Who would there be to ask me how old I am besides you?”

Emma shrugged. Then squinted. “If they were immortal, how did they die?”

“There has to be something to take out an immortal. Exactly one sickness can take any immortal at any time. It is unavoidable. If you were near it at any point, you’re as good as dead, but at any random time. You can get it when you’re five and die in the next five minutes or the next five hundred years.”

“So you spend your life both alive and dead?”

Then, at the same time, they both said, “Like Schrodinger's cat.” Emma said it as a question, Lord Reyvon as a statement, but the room fell silent after that. 

“It’s called Schrooding. Or the Schrood.”

Emma stood there, thinking. “I didn’t know what Schrodinger's cat was when I was eight.”

“But you do now, and due to that, the information has been brought to this world and rewritten and shoved into the past. Just like my father. How he was technically never here - except he was.”

There was no good way to react. None of it made much sense. 

“Don’t lose focus,” Lord Reyvon said. 

“Focus lost, dude, I don’t know what to-” when she looked him in the eyes, he suddenly had pupils surrounded by red irises. A wicked grin grew on his face and Emma cursed under her breath. Lord Reyvon flung himself at Emma, throwing her twenty feet backward into the large doors. Her back hit the handle with a sickening crack and her legs fell numb. She coughed, trying to move her lower half as she laid on her stomach, only resulting in her elbows pulling her an inch forward on the blood-soaked floor. The blood rose, now an inch deep. 

Emma closed her eyes and pictured the library. It didn’t take long for the blood to engulf her motionless body and fill her mouth and make her world go dark, but the light leaked in and the blood was gone. Books surrounded her.

Azeria was there, a hand out to help Emma to her feet. 

“You’ve overcome a nightmare,” Azeria said like a robot. “You’ve efficiently pulled yourself out. And teleported at the same time. Good for you.”

“Good for me,” Emma echoed with no enthusiasm but a hint of sarcasm. “Now how do I get myself out of here?” She didn’t have to gesture or explain for Azeria to know.

“I’d like to introduce you to someone.”

Just as she finished her sentence, the large library doors swung open slowly. A boy no different from every other villager or citizen - whatever they were to be called - walked through. He stood very particularly in an all black suit with a golden tie and raven pin on the left side of his chest. He did not look like Lord Reyvon, but a version of him. Younger; maybe thirteen. 

Emma knew that this was Lord Reyvon’s younger brother, Ryder. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. Probably because it was her own world. Maybe.

“This is Ryder.”

“Why do I need to know him?”

“The answer will come to you.”

Emma made eye contact with Ryder. Lord Reyvon’s eyes were completely white, while Ryder only had black slits down the middle like some kind of predatory snake. It was discomforting but it had taken… She wanted to say three days but if an hour was a few days and a day was a few minutes, she had no idea… to get used to Lord Reyvon’s.

Ryder was only a little taller than her. Not like Azeria or Lord Reyvon, who towered over her at either a high five foot or low six foot. Ryder had a good inch or two on her, still.

He did not say a word.

“I cannot tell you what he is a Key to, but he may be useful to you,” Azeria said, noticing Emma’s obvious discomfort and thoughts of wishing him away. Receiving no answer, she strode out of the library. 

The doors closed. Ryder spun to face them, then looked around like the room was new.

“What are you doing?” Emma asked, squinting at the back of Ryder’s head. 

“If there’s one thing I know about my stuck up brother, it’s that he’s always spying on everything through the damn birds. Now,” he blinked and turned back to Emma upon finding no raven’s along the ceiling or walls, “not that there’s anything I could tell you at the moment that could potentially cause some sort of downfall or even enrage Reyvon, he knows I don’t like when he sends his pets after me.”

“Okay.”

Ryder continued standing like a professional, his arms bent behind his back, his spine straight, and his weight on both legs. Meanwhile, Emma’s weight shifted from one leg to the other, her clothes still colorful and different, hair messy, and back slouched. Emma wondered if she should copy him or not.

“No need,” he said. “I do what I do. You do what you do. I am indifferent to what others think or feel towards anything.”

Quit reading my thoughts. It’s annoying.

“Understood.” His eyes did not waver from hers. “Now, unlike them, I’m not immortal, and I’m from Star. I moved out of here the second I could due to having an annoyance of a brother. While not being immortal, I’m still much older than fourteen due to legacy.”

Emma had the question “When…?” in her head but she had no idea how to complete that sentence. 

Ryder continued. “I would prefer it if we were outside of the castle.”

“Okay.”

Ryder teleported them to the circle of silence. Emma looked around, suddenly worried about going from inside to outside. 

Then Lord Reyvon appeared beside them and gave his little brother a snarky look. 

“Piss off, brother. We are breaking no major rules.”

“You watch your tone with me, young man.”

“Are you my father?”

“I’m the closest thing you have to one.”

“I have nothing to lose, brother, punish me how you wish.” He acknowledged Lord Reyvon’s silence. “That’s what I thought. Keep your pets away from me,” he said and nodded over Lord Reyvon’s shoulder at a raven perched on the gray brick of the bridge.

Lord Reyvon leaned down. “You boss me now, and yet you still have your pupils. My raven’s are for protection of my kingdom.”

“Don’t you trust me, dear brother?”

“No.”

“Understood. I’ll make sure to break as many rules as possible.” Another glance to the raven. “While it watches.”

Lord Reyvon sighed, which was followed by a sly grin. “You’re a good kid, Ryder. Don’t go messing it up just to impress some pretty girl.”

His attempt at embarrassing Ryder failed as Ryder smoothly replied, “There are many things you have never learned about me, Reyvon. Impressing girls is not one of my interests.”

The corner of Lord Reyvon’s mouth twitched. He turned his gaze to Emma. “Emma Good, you make sure he is nice to you.” Back to Ryder. “She’s been through a bit. And she is a evidence and a primary witness that I’m giving her permission to hurt you if you step out of line.” To Emma again. “I will not have eyes and ears.” A step closer, out of Ryder’s earshot. “Don’t believe the lies he tells you that he is not the Key to. Other than a singular subject,” then, louder, he said, “he is nothing.”

“Everyone’s a liar sometimes,” Ryder said, but Lord Reyvon had disappeared. Ryder held an arm out for Emma to loop hers through. “Shall we go?”

One of Ryder’s beginning lines had stuck with her. She didn’t know if he was the Key to the subject or not, but “War is coming” sounded very promising. He claimed to know about the past - or, that was when Emma could tell from him only stopping when he sensed that Emma had a question.

His brain was… advanced, to say the least. He explained the timeline, the equations and events appearing on the walls of houses as they passed if Emma needed a visual. 

“It’s not that there is no sense of time, but that there is no time. All of these people? They were ‘born’ at the ages you see now. You created children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly. You created me at fourteen and my brother at eighteen. That was just our creation. Our pasts were fed to us. I have memories from long, long ago, when I was just a small child.”

“Like how your dad technically never existed?”

“But everyone remembered him. Only the Night Mare’s know that the past is false and there is no future. There is only now.” He threw his arm out and drew a line. “I’m here. Everyone is here.”

The year read 27NK9. Emma had no idea when that was in this fictional universe - then she reminded herself there was no “when.”

A few more dots appeared on the left of the “HERE” lines. “Some people have memories from here. Others here and more here. The little boy that will pass on my right in approximately ten seconds, he remembers things from here-” he pointed to a dot closer to the “HERE” line. “-Except it never existed. We are here constantly.”

“Don’t people age?”

“Very, very slowly. The boy has been ‘alive’ for what you would call eight years. That’s how he looks. He’s been alive for seventeen.”

The boy passed, appearing as eight years old.

“Someone else might be different. Someone who appears to be ninety might be thirty.”

“And no one finds any of it weird?”

“It’s natural for them. I’m sure if they were in your world, they would find the sense of time weird. This is what you created, Emma. You may not have understood how to contribute time due to having less control than you might have liked, and now that you do, you can’t fix it.”

“This is so…” She stared at the timeline against the smooth black surface.

“Don’t lose focus.”

“Don’t boss me.”

“Understood.”

“So… there was a past. But it wasn’t real.” She shook her head. “How much of this is a lie?”

“About half,” he answered. Emma wondered if that, too, was a lie, but there was no way to tell. His words were that of a slightly angry teenager reading a presentation to the class. “I won’t be answering if you ask me what parts were lies.”

“Thanks for letting me know…?”

They walked along, falling quiet when someone passed, then began again when out of earshot. Like their conversations were top secret or something. Not that having your entire life be a lie is a good thing to eavesdrop on. Unless they knew Ryder was a pathological liar, but the idea that he had been living on his own for whatever part of his past was real told her otherwise. 

Unless that part was a lie.

What Lord Reyvon had told her before about his father told Emma it was a pretty good chance that that part wasn’t a lie. 

“I know you told me not to read your thoughts but it is a process I cannot turn off, only ignore. Having fallen silent, I searched for something to listen to.” Emma shot him a glare but he brushed it off. He shook his head. “My brother isn’t the most honest man either, Emma. I won’t say if he was lying on that specific topic, but he is not an honest man.” His eyelids flickered a few times and he reached up to rub one eye.

“So how am I supposed to understand anything? Because I created the place? Ask strangers?”

“Yet another lie,” Ryder muttered under his breath. 

“What was that?”

“Hm? Nothing.”

Emma sighed heavily. “How can I trust you with the things you’re telling the truth about?”

“Observe.”

“Observe what?”

Ryder didn’t respond. 

After a little more walking, Ryder pointed to the cafe at the end of the stoned path. “You wanted food earlier, didn’t you?” 

“I told you not to-”

“I wasn’t. I’m part of your mind.”

“Right.” 

“Are you still - do you have the illusion of hunger?”

“Eh.”

“That’s not a very good answer.”

“Yeah, like your nonsense answers are any better.”

“Understood.”

They walked past the cafe and continued. Emma noticed a certain street they’d passed a few times going in their circles around Star.

“I forgot to ask. The Night Mare’s you mentioned earlier-”

“Parts of the castle. The animals, the workers, guards, Madam Azeria and my brother.” He blinked again.

“Animals?”

“Learn their language and they can be your Keys too.”

“I don’t…” she almost said she didn’t have time for that but it appeared to her that she had plenty of time. “How many different ‘cells’ of knowledge do I have?”

“One for each person you’ve had a conversation with, every subject you’ve learned in school, different ones for graphs and equations, everything you could possibly know. How many people have you seen in Star? Then there is one of each animal that has your answers.” Blink.

They stopped and sat on a bench facing the fountain back by the entrance of Star, sitting within the Circle of Silence. Ryder’s slitted eyes focused malevolently on one of the raven’s circling around a house in the distance. “Let’s go.” He took her hand and dragged her along, then checked around for any more ravens. He spotted none.

Emma pulled her hand away and folded her arms across her chest. 

“What’s the point of talking to you and getting information if all you do is lie?”

“First off, I tell the truth sometimes,” he said with a flinch. “Second: you’re simply not seeing. As Arthur Canon Doyle once wrote: you see, but you do not observe.”

“What am I not seeing, then?”

He got close and personal. “What is something I have been doing in the time we’ve been outside of the castle that you have never once seen Reyvon do? I’ve done it a good handful of times. And I won’t be repeating myself.”

“Is it a word?”

“No.”

“Is that a lie?”

“No.”

“How can I know both of those aren’t lies?”

“What did I do both times?”

Emma’s expression softened with partial realization. “What color is my hair?”

“I can’t exactly tell the truth on that no matter what since you have both blonde and brunette in your hair and I can’t say I’m sure which one is natural.”

“So lie.”

“Green.”

Emma nodded once. “What color are my eyes?”

“Blue.” Truth.

“My shirt?”

“Pink.” Lie.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” She put her hand behind her back and held up three fingers. 

Ryder tried to peek around. “I cannot see through you.”

“Guess.”

“That won’t help what you’re trying to figure out. But seven.”

Emma brought her fingers to the front. “Damn. I was so tricked.” He nodded to Emma’s other hand at her side. 

Emma sighed. “What flower is this?” She held up her hand and summoned a daffodil.

“You have to ask easier questions if you want answers.”

“How do you not-” Emma recalled that everything was black and there were no flowers around - not even any black ones. Everything was false black wood and paved stone. The trees were black with leaves that turned gray when they fell off. “Nevermind. What color is that tree?”

“Black.”

“And this?” She pointed to her jeans.

“Yellow.”

Emma nodded again, catching the lie. She was almost sure. One more and she would know. Just one more truth. 

“What’s two plus two?”

Ryder stared blankly. 

“Do you guys have the blessing of not suffering through math?”

“What is math? No, we don’t have that.”

“Ha! That’s it!” Emma pointed with a wide grin. “You blinked.”

“Was this a staring contest? You’ve blinked before, too. Technically I won.”

“No, no! You blink when you tell the truth. You don’t need to blink! Like Lord Reyvon!” Emma spoke with her hands flailing each way. 

“You can easily call him Reyvon. ‘Lord’ isn’t necessary. Keep your voice down, you never know where his eyes and ears are. Plus: I’m human, remember? Well, in your sense.”

“So… is that not it?”

“No.” He did not blink. That was when Emma knew she was right. 

But she didn’t remember him blinking during anything he said before. Well, she remembered that he had blinked, but she couldn’t associate with a certain truth. She clenched her jaw. 

Sh*t. 

“What you said earlier. About the war.”

“What about it?”

“You said it’s coming. When?”

“There is no ‘when,’ Emma.”

“So how do you know?”

“I don’t.” Blink. “It will occur. There’s no telling how long it may be. It could be declared now. It could be declared in what, to you, may feel like a thousand years.”

“I won’t be here that long.”

“Don’t be so sure. How long has it felt to you?”

“I haven’t slept so it kinda all feels like one really long day.”

“But there’s no telling, is there?”

Emma didn’t respond. She looked around at the buildings around them, at the people that walked calmly on the pebble and stone paths. No cars, no horses, everyone walked because they had plenty of time to do everything. Some of them seemed to be wandering aimlessly. Others ate like it had an effect as they walked down the street or sat in a restaurant. Everything was so dull and colorless, Emma wondered if the people had emotions and even cared that everything was black.

She’d gotten multiple comments on her outfit. All good ones. They had known about color, they just didn’t… use it. They all collectively preferred black. 

Even the lake surrounding the castle was not blue but an odd shade of gray that gave the illusion of color if you knew of it but other than that… it matched everything else. 

“How many of these people know who I am? When I came here… earlier… a little girl recognized me-”

“And tried to feed you to a cave of zombie bats. Yeah. Everyone knows who you are, but it’s known as bad luck to have a full conversation with a god unless you are a part of Night Mare. So you’ve gotten hellos and compliments, but that’s about as much as they can say. Should have been informed about that by my brother. I’m not sure what his problem is nowadays. Probably just wanted you to figure it out for yourself.”

“Or he wanted me to-”

“Die? You can’t do that. I’m sure you’ve gotten that one already. You can feel pain and agony, you can sit and suffer until you either escape or heal yourself, but you will still be here until the Realworld you wakes up.”

“I know. Unfortunately.”

“Good.”

Ryder had stayed with her the majority of the time. She wondered if he’d lied about turning off the ability to read her thoughts. She hoped he wasn’t listening when she thought to herself that Ryder should maybe… go away for a few minutes. Not that there was any specific reason to, but he was following her around like a lost dog. Even though Emma was the lost one. Mostly.

“So…” she began, her legs swinging back and forth over the edge of her bed. She’d fixed the room to have color. The clock she still couldn’t fix. It sat in its lonesomeness on the corner table, still reading a time that wasn’t real: three pm. Three forty-seven, to be exact. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Hm?”

“The time that clock is stuck on. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” She waited for him to blink. He didn’t. 

“What does it mean?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you.” His eyes were still burning into hers eerily. 

“What does it mean, Ryder?”

“I’m not saying.” He blinked.

“Is it what you’re the Key to? Don’t you have to be honest about that?”

“I cannot say what I am the Key to. It is relative to the clock, yes. Do I have to be honest about it? Yes. But I’m not lying when I say I’m not telling you; it’s just not the truth, either.”

“I can’t wait until you have questions for me. I’m going to give you the least helpful answers ever. Hope that helps.”

“Don’t worry, my brother already does that for me. My whole life, he has never been much of a help.”

“It must run in the family.”

“Our family doesn’t run.”

Emma gave an agitated sigh and flopped back on the bed. She stared up at the sage green ceiling. Just for a second, she closed her eyes. She relaxed like it had been years since she’d slept. She wasn’t tired; she missed the eight-to-ten hour long breaks in the day. Experiencing gloomy clouds 24/7 - if that existed - was not something she cared much for. 

She melted into and through the bed that gave way with a black slime as if she’d walked through Venom. “Crap,” she muttered to no one.

She fell into what appeared to be a huge cave. It took a second of looking around, but there were pools in the walls that were held there by sheets of ice. Within each pool, her friends. From her Dreamworld, not the Realworld, where she didn’t really consider them too close of friends. Arrow, Abbi, and Liv, curled in the fetal position, eyes dug out, skin purple, black veins running over their limbs. 

Abbi opened her empty eye sockets and bared a set of violent teeth. She lunged at the ice and it exploded. The water remained in place against the wall, defying gravity. 

Sharp claws shot from Abbi’s fingertips. She lunged at Emma and Emma jumped aside, only suffering a small scratch in her neck. She healed it while Abbi lunged at her again. Emma was too focused on healing - dammit, she’d tried to teach herself - and didn’t see Abbi coming at her. 

Abbi’s talons dug deep into Emma’s chest and tore her heart out. A wicked, bloody smile crossed Abbi’s face. 

Arrow and Liv broke free from their encasements and came at Emma with startling speeds. Emma disappeared and reappeared behind the largest stalagmite, curled up and hidden. But they could still smell the human flesh.

Emma focused. She closed her eyes and pictured a sword of unbreakable steel. One shone in her hand, light reflecting off the glowing waters and from the entrance of the cave. She waited until the slow, crawling footsteps seemed just close enough and she wielded her sword into battle. She caught Liv in the neck. It healed instantly.

A sword of unbreakable steel that can kill the unkillable.

She swung again and cut Arrow’s left arm off just above the elbow. This did not regrow or even seem to heal. Arrow howled in pain, falling to their knees, clutching their stubbed arm to their chest. 

Arrow looked at Emma with a world of hate in their empty sockets. Emma raised the blade, hoping her Dreamself would forgive her, and just as she was bringing the blade down, claws dug into her back, teeth in her neck, tearing a chunk away. Emma’s vision went black but she could still hear and feel everything. 

Get off!

She kneed Arrow in the jaw, temporarily knocking them back. Emma thrusted an elbow at the intruder on her back, catching Liv in the ribs. Emma swung again, making a diagonal cut through Liv’s face, exposing parts of her brain and nasal cavities. The other half slopped to the ground and sunk through the cave floor with a disgusting hiss.

Abbi still had a hold of Emma’s organ. It wasn’t beating and Abbi didn’t eat it like the other nightmare characters did, but she just held onto it like it was a sacred object from her ancestors. 

“Call me heartless, but you took something that’s mine, and I want it back. Now.” 

Abbi chucked the heart across the cave, lodging it deep into one of the pools on the wall. Emma pointed the sword at Abbi and spared a half-second glance at the pool. One final look at Abbi, then Emma ran and dove into the pool. 

I hate this.

Emma did not find her heart. She healed herself without it, forming a new one. It was a slower process, but it wasn’t like it mattered. The glowing cyan water turned to sage and stilled. Emma realized she was laying on her bed again. “I’m ‘awake’ now, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What happens to me when that happens? Do I disappear? Do you see what’s happening?”

“Absolutely nothing. You just.. Freeze. I’ve never seen anything like that. You just kind of stopped.”

She looked over just in time to see him blink. 

“Is there any time,” she asked, “that you blink when you lie? If you lie all the time, how do I know you’re not lying about lying?”

“We all have our limits. I cannot make everything a lie. Plus, there’s a little fun in it. I am telling the truth, though, when I blink.” He blinked again. 

“I’ll take your words to consideration, then decide whether I should believe them based on whatever evidence I can find.”

“Understood.” Neither of them spoke for what could’ve been a full minute. “Tell my brother nothing of what we spoke. We may both be liars, but we know what the truth is.”

“What has he lied about?”

“I don’t know what he’s told you,” he said with a blink. “Everything could have been the truth. Everything could have been a lie.”

Emma remained silent once more. He’d said a lot of things, but, at the moment, Emma couldn’t recall any of it. A lot of things she’d found out for herself; why she couldn’t lose focus and that teleportation was a real thing here. She really hadn’t paid all that much attention, had she?

“So…” Emma began, looking for something to start with. “The war. With…”

“The Shadows.”

“Is that another kingdom?”

“You could call it that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ryder waved his hand the same way Reyvon did, but he did not have the same power. One wall changed. They were not in the new place, but they had a view as if the room had moved there and the wall had been torn away. 

Part of the room was under water. The other part was not. The water did not make it into the room, but divided the changed wall in half. Emma’s bed was in the middle and she saw both sides. Ryder took a seat next to her.

“Reyvon and I are the only ones that know what they’re saying. Don’t tell him I said that, by the way. He doesn’t know I’ve been stalking him.” Emma looked over as he blinked. 

She turned back to the wall. The underwater side had glowing creatures of the deep with long, gnashing teeth and scaly backs and long fins that flowed elegantly behind them. Some were creatures she recognized: the kraken, serpents, underwater dragons. Others looked like they’d been completely made up. Blue fish with fangs and red stripes that looked like lightning, something that resembled a jellyfish but had no stingers and didn’t move, and more. 

On land, there was more of the same. Dark creatures you only heard about in books. Wendigos, walking trees, venus fly trap forests that rose twenty feet and their mouths could easily fit the average man, and, again, things that were seemingly made up. 

Like Star and the castle, there was no sense of time. Nor was there the moody cloud setting. It was plain midnight for them. No moon or stars in the sky, but still, somehow, visible. 

“This is where nightmare’s are made,” Ryder said, gesturing to a shack that was right on the edge of the water. Giant monsters walked around, their lanky limbs swinging left and right, but nothing touched the shack. Like there was a shield around it. 

Or like it was their kind of castle.

“I thought…”

“Forget what you think, Emma. There are many different kinds of nightmare’s. This kingdom - Shadow - is for the monsters. Usually these are for the children, but not everyone overcomes their fears.”

“Reyvon said I subconsciously picked to be in this Kingdom. Star. Were these… other kingdoms… my other options?”

“Yes and no. Reyvon would know more about you than I would. I can’t say what you picked in a subconscious state, but I can say that, out of the other options, this would be the best one.” He muttered something under his breath. Emma didn’t hear him.

“What are the others?”

“A lot of different things can happen. The land of ghosts - The Haunted - and anything from the Bible, like demons, possessions, angels, biblical wars, God or Satan Themselves. Everything is a different place.”

“What’s this one?”

“Just… a feeling of discomfort. Being in a vaguely aware state. You know you’re dreaming but you don’t know where you are or what’s going on. You can’t run. I don’t know if you tried.”

“I did run, though.”

“In different kingdoms, not this one. What was your last nightmare?” Ryder gestured to the spot on the bed behind Emma. “The one you had a few minutes ago. 

“I was in a cave. My friends… they’re really acquaintances in the Realworld, but they’re my friends in my Dreamworld. They were trapped behind sheets of ice and they were… monstrous. Unkillable without a weapon that could kill the unkillable.”

Ryder waved his hand again. The half-water-half-land wall changed into gray rock that jutted out from every side. “This cave?”

The cave was now crawling with insects and what looked like humans but deformed, deranged in both the mind and body. Their fingers were longer and bonier, nails sharper, mouths slacker but teeth more gnarly, wild eyes, messily cropped hair, and ragged clothing. 

“Beloved,” Ryder said. “Where loved ones turn against you.” He squinted, confused. “You made it into the cave?”

“Yes?”

“Most people just get their beloved, not enter the actual cave in which they house. Not that you, exactly, are considered ‘most people.’” He brushed it off with the shrug of his shoulders and continued on. “What I’m trying to say is: any type of nightmare has its own different kingdom. None are nearly as kind as this one. You were lucky to have made it here.”

Emma changed the topic almost immediately. “Why do the monsters - the Shadows - want to go to war with us?” It felt weird to refer to herself and the kingdom as “us” but Ryder was talking again before she could think too much of it.

“They want Reyvon’s power. You saw their land; it’s a pile of sh*t, basically. They want our land and our power. Them? They are nightmares of the worst kind. Nightmares that haunt people for days on end after their wake; that are with them, flashing before their eyes every time they blink. And a lot of people get those nightmares. The Shadows feel overworked and the ruler - the Dragon - feels they should be able to get whatever they want. So she wants the throne of thorn and to own the entire kingdom - Star itself included - and we have little to no way to stop them after they decide to strike.”

Emma refrained from asking when that would be. 

“But you, Emma Good. You have that kind of power. You just have to find it within yourself.”

Emma stared at Ryder, trying to read his brain, to read the transcript of the words he’d just said. “It’s hard to believe you’re not lying about any of this,” she said after a minute. 

“Truth or not, I can’t control what you choose to believe. I can only hope that you’re believing the right things.” He held his hand out, waiting for her to shake it. “Do you trust me?”

Emma looked between Ryder, his hand, and the wall that definitely wasn’t her wall. Then she stared at Ryder’s hand for a long time, hers hovering near, shaking the slightest bit. Ryder waited patiently for her decision. 

She took his hand. A violent jolt of electricity shook through her and traveled up her arm and to her chest. She tasted iron. Her head flew back, only the whites of her eyes visible as her eyes searched through image after image of a bloody battle.

One that she was right in the middle of. Or… someone that looked much, much like her. She was far away, watching from Star while the girl with the sword slayed the creature with lanky limbs covered in some sort of string or vine. She felt for the girl, feeling the pain of her missing left arm, the gash in her stomach, the pounding in her ears, ringing in her head-

Emma gasped and fell back on the bed, her hand torn from Ryder’s grip. She rolled onto her side and coughed blood onto the floor. “What the hell was that?” she rasped.

“A glimpse of what will be coming.” He did not blink, but she was too busy trying to catch her breath over the side of the bed to notice. She rested her face in her hands. Ryder summoned a glass of water and held it out for her. “This is why you must continue practicing.”

“That was me?”

He did not respond. 

Emma conquered yet another nightmare. She’d drifted off while eating a soft pretzel, the salt melting against her tongue. At first, the inside of the pretzel had turned to maggots, then the pretzel disintegrated altogether. 

Both Lord Reyvon and Ryder were standing in the same position, arms behind their backs, standing with their feet slightly apart with their long black coats to their ankles. Lord Reyvon made Ryder look much shorter than he actually was. Their creepy eyes loomed on Emma as she resumed her state of being. 

“I just wanted a pretzel,” she groaned. 

“Don’t we all,” Lord Reyvon muttered. 

Emma was about to agree with him, then she recalled that she had not been in the throne room when she’d fallen into the nightmare. Nor had she recalled passing the room of Nothingness on her way back. “What am I doing here?” She looked at her empty hands. “Without my pretzel?”

Ryder’s look was stern, angry. It wasn’t directed at Emma, but at his brother. “Someone,” he said through grit teeth, “has more eyes and ears than just his birds.”

Emma’s expression and joking manner fell flat and serious. “So… that means…”

“It means I know my brother speaks the language of the shadows and that he has spread many, many things about me.” Then, he added, “That may or may not be true.”

“Goddammit, what is it with you two?” Emma groaned again. “I don’t want to deal with this.” She meant to walk away, but her legs would not move from their place on the ground. Her view of her bedroom was blocked in her mind by a dark wall she couldn’t seem to get around. Lord Reyvon’s eyes burned into her skull. “Let me go,” she said. “If neither of you can tell me the truth, then I’m not listening to either of you.”

“You don’t have to. But if you do not, you could watch a kingdom fall,” Ryder said.

Lord Reyvon turned to his little brother. “There will be no war. I know what I’m doing. Understood?” He added the last word with a flick of venom. 

“No.”

Lord Reyvon shook his head. “I have things settled out with N’Kotuva.”

“They’re monsters,” Ryder said. “Monsters don’t listen.”

Lord Reyvon leaned down in his face and muttered barely loud enough for him to hear, “It’s little monsters like you that don’t know how to listen. People of higher responsibility are able to understand things that low-lifes like you couldn’t even begin to comprehend.”

Ryder swallowed thickly. “You’ll lose, brother. We both know that much.”

“You are not listening.”

“Can you both shut up?” Emma said a little too loud for anyone’s liking, but she didn’t back down. “I think you both need to get a hold of yourselves. If a war is coming: prepare. Even if one isn’t coming: prepare. Anything could happen. What is the big deal between you two? Get over yourselves!”

“Reyvon’s dying,” Ryder blurted before Lord Reyvon, his mouth already open, could say anything. Now Lord Reyvon’s mouth continued to hang slightly agape for just a second, processing what Ryder had said. 

“Ryder.”

“No. It’s her world. She should know.”

“Ryder,” he repeated, adding more hate into his words.

“What!?”

But Lord Reyvon had nothing to say. 

“That’s what I thought.” He turned back to Emma. “I assume he told you the sickness that can kill immortals. He likely also mentioned that it is contagious; nearby immortals also catch it.”

Lord Reyvon kept his mouth shut and allowed his brother to speak up for him. 

“He could die at any moment. Before or after this war is said to come. And he has not yet pieced it together because he is reckless.” He offered his brother a harsh glare, then explained it to him rather than Emma. “They are waiting for you to die. There will be no one to take your place. That is when they will strike. You have only settled things with N’Kotuva because she knows it’s only a matter of waiting.”

“Isn’t N’K…ove.. Whatever - isn’t she a dragon?” Emma asked. “Can’t she literally just come over and burn us all? Bring her monsters and kill everyone?”

“Without war, a living leader is bound to their kingdom no matter what. There is no overthrowing. You must win the war. So no. If N’Kotuva were to attempt to overthrow us now, she would simply fail to enter the kingdom entirely due to the boundaries set by you.”

Ryder did not blink. Emma didn’t know if it was because it was a lie or simply because he had not been the one speaking. She tried to recall other things Lord Reyvon had said and if Ryder blinked during them, but, again, she couldn’t remember. 

Sh*t. 

Emma shifted uncomfortably where she stood out against the dark room. She caught Azeria’s eye from where she stood over by the throne a few yards back. Instead of her intense, deathly glare, she was simply looking, her face pale with worry. Emma realized that she had also just basically been informed that she had Schrood… just like all of the guards and if there were any other workers that Emma still had not caught sight of. 

“When Brother Dear dies, the guard comes down whether you will it to or not. You do not have power over it anymore. N’Kotuva will not spare anyone or anything and she will make slaves of the unkillable. Not that they’re so unkillable now that it’s only a matter of life or death with any breath.”

“Ryder.”

“I noticed. I didn’t mean to.”

Emma shook her head, not knowing which brother to look at as she spoke. “I don’t think I understand what you two are trying to tell me. He dies, everyone dies. So… take his place, Ryder.”

“Absolutely not,” Ryder responded quickly.

“Ryder likes to pretend he is allergic to the throne,” Lord Reyvon said, his expression deadpan. 

“Look at it. I’m not sitting in that thing. And I’m sure as hell not ruling a kingdom. I’d rather go back to my little house on the edge of the city where I sit and stare at a wall for a good portion of my existence.”

“Okay, so… Can’t you grant some willing, courageous Star person to be the new Lord or Lady or whatever?”

“That’s where you’re not understanding, Emma,” Ryder said. “There is no way I will take the throne. Not only does it disgust me plus, and I must admit this, I would not have the capacity or patience to run something like this, but being human at this time and age… it will not work. And if Reyvon grants anyone immortality, he is near them, only sending them to their end with any breath. That leaves one option.”

It clicked. Emma took a few steps back. “No. No, I can’t do it. I’m actively trying to leave this place, I can’t rule it! I need to wake up! I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. What if this is our plan and I wake up right after the wall comes down? You’re all screwed!”

“As long as you wake up before N’Kotuva enters, time as you know the term stands still. I told you this.” Lord Reyvon took a few steps toward her, bringing them back to the same distance they were before she moved. Ryder moved to be level with his brother. “Before you came along, everything was the exact same. We had not frozen, but if the wall came down and N’Kotuva had not yet entered the kingdom, she never would. Until you came back and resumed everything, of course, but as far as we can all tell, you clearly have no means of return.”

“Damn right I don’t,” she muttered. “So if N’Kotuva does make it into the kingdom before I can stop her, then I wake up, what happens?”

“Then she rules us for all of eternity,” Ryder said with a blink. “After killing off everyone she and her beasts can. And with Schrood being spread like the plague within Night Mare, everyone will be gone.”

“Obviously, we don’t want that to happen,” Lord Reyvon said. “So we need you.”

“You’re asking me to save a kingdom from a dragon and all her creatures of the Shadows. For a minute, just for a minute - and I know you two don’t know what that is, but count to sixty in your heads - I need you guys to remember that I’m thirteen, okay? I know that’s not much for you guys but you have to be sixteen to even be able to make decisions for yourself where I’m from. You can’t expect me to rule a kingdom.”

“Understood,” Ryder said, surprisingly. “But you have to listen…”

Azeria had strode over. She put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. “She is not prepared for war in any sense. If you are to put her in any sort of responsible placement, she must be trained first. You cannot dump this on her the way she is right now. Look at the way she holds herself, for your sake.”

Emma straightened her back. “What’s wrong with the way I hold myself?”

“Do you see how they are standing?” she asked, gesturing to the two of them. She looked back at the men in black. “She dresses differently, fights differently, understands things in a different manner, everything is still so different and so new to her, you cannot possibly expect so much so soon.”

“You are correct,” Lord Reyvon said. It surprised all four of them. He waited a breath, processing his next words. “You, Azeria, and Ryder: the two of you get to train Emma and help her in any way she may need in order to help us. There is not one alternative being in this kingdom that can save us like you can, Emma.”

“I can’t do it.”

“It’s your kingdom. Remember what I told you.”

“What did you tell me? If you haven’t noticed, you’ve said quite a bit.”

“In the library earlier when you were dead set on finding anything you could on this backstory. Ryder will be telling you the truth this time. Azeria will be punishing him if he does not comply with this rule.”

Ryder glared at him. The corner of Azeria’s mouth perked up.

Emma said, “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. In the library. My memory isn’t like yours, remember? What was it you said?”

“I needn’t repeat myself.”

“You do.”

“Were you not listening to me?”

“Maybe not!”

Lord Reyvon turned his head slightly skyward, letting out a slow exhale. “You need not wake, only conquer.”

Azeria and Ryder were in Emma’s room. She felt slightly uncomfortable in the sense that, in the Realworld, she was never allowed to have people over in general, let alone her room. 

Azeria had given her some inspiration for new outfits; what Emma liked to wear simply wouldn’t do with the kingdom and while most didn’t care, it was still seen as unprofessional and lazy to wear whatever was wanted.

So now Emma wore a flowing black dress with short sleeves that left her shoulders uncovered. She was suddenly much more aware, without her comfortable sweater, that the blackness had spread to her shoulders, covering the exposed skin like black-out tattoos with unfinished lining at the end. Except she’d never seen purer black than this. 

She wore no jewelry but a black choker around her neck. Just a simple velvet strip. Azeria and Ryder had noticed the substance, but either wouldn’t say anything or couldn’t say anything. Emma, too, ignored it.

She looked at herself in the mirror she’d summoned once Azeria had completed her outfit. Her legs, too, look like they had pure-black socks on with mangled hems that ended just below her knees. 

Finally, she asked: “What’s happening to me?”

“We do not know,” Ryder answered. He blinked at Emma in the reflection of the mirror. “It has never happened before.”

“We shall train you,” Azeria said, suddenly within her own change of clothes where her dress wasn’t so long and she had a cloak over her shoulders. “We will fight. First in the war room until we think we can move outside. Every time, you will see us as a more powerful being than before.”

“We have allies,” Ryder said. “They have been notified by Reyvon already that you will fight with their best warriors. These allies will be with us in the war, but do not let that allow you to think that your fight isn’t as much as theirs. You are the single most powerful person in here and you need to be the one to do this.”

Emma nodded once. 

They teleported to the war room. 

“I wonder if there’ll be anyone who would believe me if I ever told them about this dream,” Emma wondered aloud as she looked at the swords hanging on the wall, glistening in the reflection of the chandelier above. She chose one that, when stabbed into the ground, went just up to her hip.

“If it’s simply a dream, anyone could believe. Dreams can be anything and everything,” Azeria said.

“And nightmares,” Ryder added.

“And nightmares,” Azeria echoed. “But I don’t believe anyone will believe you if you mentioned the lucid part.”

Emma shrugged, the sudden enthusiasm from her question gone. “I don’t really have any friends to tell about it.”

“You have your classmates. Your acquaintances. Sharing things like such may bring forth friendships if that is what you seek.”

Emma shrugged again.

“You could always make it into a book,” Ryder suggested.

“True,” Emma said. There was a long pause. “Mom would have listened.”

Azeria put an arm around Emma’s shoulders. “She would have. She’d have listened to every… what do you call them? Seconds? She’d have listened to every second.”

“She loved it here,” Ryder said.

Azeria shot him a glare.

“What?” Emma asked, turning to him.

“I said,” he said louder, “She’d have loved it here.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“It is.”

“You’re lying. What did you mean by that?”

“Emma…” Azeria began. 

Emma held the sword out straight, just brushing Ryder’s throat with the sharp edge. “What are you talking about, Ryder?” There were hints of tears in her eyes, red skin around them. She swallowed thickly. “Answer the question.”

Ryder summoned a sword and shoved hers away with his. Azeria took a few steps back before reminding herself that Ryder was human. She forced herself between the swords, barely flinching as the swords cut her arms. “Stop!”

“He knows something about my mother,” Emma said. “I’m not stopping until I get an answer.”

Emma teleported to Ryder’s side, holding the sword directly against his throat. He released his sword and held his hands by his shoulders. He winced as Emma shifted and the blade gave him a small cut. Blood trickled down his neck. He didn’t bother to move to wipe it before it dripped onto his shirt, soaking into the dark material. 

“I’m surprised you didn’t catch on sooner,” Ryder said. “Reyvon and I were both open about being obvious liars.”

“Enough. I want answers.”

“Of course, I knew he had told you that you’d created the place and now had no power over a lot of things due to the drug. While that’s part of the truth, it’s also not. Along with the part where everything is locked away and you can access it through certain people.”

“Elaborate now or it’s going to be more than a small cut.”

“You did not create this place. You have no power over it because you are not the creator.”

“Who is, then?”

“Oh, Emma,” Ryder’s annoyed expression twisted into a wicked grin. “Are you that dumb? You’ve already forgotten why you’re holding a sword to my throat, haven’t you?”

Emma found that she couldn’t remember. Ryder chuckled and took a step back. The west wall turned into a a memorial. Each brick in the wall had a different word engraved on it. “Can’t remember when I blink, can’t remember what Reyvon says, and now you can’t remember why you fight? It’s almost like someone is…” he held his hand out and a black orb formed in his hand. It flew toward the wall and crashed into one of the bricks and disappeared. “...Doing that on purpose.”

Emma shot a desperate glance at Azeria, but her mouth was gone entirely. She had tears in her eyes, a sorrowful look on her face. She shook her head slowly. 

Ryder advanced on Emma. The sword flew from her hand, leaving her defenseless. 

“No,” Emma said. “No, no.” She teleported a few feet back. 

I have a war to win.

She summoned a second sword, silently willing it to be attached to her hand. She held it at the ready. 

Ryder was gone.

Then, there was a blade at her throat, an arm around her shoulders, holding her still. 

“You can’t kill a god,” Ryder said, “But a god can suffer.” He moved the blade down, cutting her stomach open. Emma’s mouth fell open in a silent gasp as blood leaked down her stomach, down her torn dress. 

“Ryder, quit it,” Azeria said with such sharpness in her tone that it could’ve been a blade in itself  used to cut through Ryder’s actions. “Leave her go.”

“You said it yourself, she can’t run this place. I’m just proving it.”

“There is no reason for you to be proving yourself.” Azeria drew her own sword, but she did not move from her position. 

Emma fell to one knee, clutching her stomach. 

She loved it here.

Sword still in hand, she pushed through the pain. She teleported behind Ryder and slit his ankles, sending him to his knees. The rush of blood was not enough to kill him as he healed himself almost immediately, but enough to immoblize him. 

Emma stood over him, her sword aimed at his heart, hovering just an inch over it. 

“What do you know about my mother?”

“Everything.”

Emma was having a hard time keeping her tears at bay. The blade shook over Ryder as he spilled everything he knew about her mother. 

“How do I know you’re not lying about all of this?”

“He’s not,” Azeria said. She was standing, holding her sword, just a few feet on Emma’s left. 

“You just stood around while Lord Reyvon told me all those lies,” Emma said, feeling betrayed. She never thought looking at Azeria in her gold eyes would be so hard to do. “You let me believe.”

“There was nothing I could do.”

“You could’ve told the truth.” Emma shook her head, almost violently, the tears now streaming down her face inevitable to stop. “You’re telling me now that this place is all I have left of my mom.”

“Would that have made you want to stay?”

That seemed to be a question Emma couldn’t answer. Instead, she disappeared, leaving the sword behind to jab into Ryder’s chest but not far enough for harm, then fall uselessly to the side. It clattered to the ground. He waited a breath, looking around to make sure she was really gone, then he rose to his feet. 

Now it was Azeria he had to deal with. 

Emma sat on her bed, her legs criss-crossed in front of her. She had a notebook in front of her and a pen that she’d made to be everlasting. She wasn’t about to deal with the stress of her pen running out of ink just to bother her. 

She wrote everything down like it was a timeline. There were names for their orbit around the dark, unseen sun. Right now, it was currently year 27NK9, or 27.9 Nakre. Emma put that together as 27.9 centuries and wrote everything out, from one to twenty eight, brom “BEGINNING” to “WAR.”

She knew she was never much like her mother. Her mother preferred the dark and everything black. She always wore black clothing when she was younger, and that had been her inspiration for the kingdom. Ravens had been her favorite bird at the time. 

But Amber had not had a creative mind. She named things as they were. She spent every night returning to her palace, ruling her kingdom, loving her creation. She ruled with the man she found herself in love with. 

She loved her world. Cared for it in every way she could. She kept everything the same from when she was just a teenager, to afraid to put much of a change on the people of her Dreamworld. 

Time went on. Events occurred. There were wars, bloody battles, but also events such as the “Light Era” where, for one orbit, they would experience the sun. The people loved it. 

Emma hadn’t realized there were “Sun Children,” the title of those born buring the Light Era. Amber really had kept everything simple. 

The Light Era was during 19-22 Nekra, which would have been five to eight centuries ago. Emma wondered if the Sun Children were still alive or if they’d passed long ago. 

So… there was time, but they did not experience it. They experienced orbits, but it could feel like either a day or a month or a million lightyears to them. It all simply depended on the person.

The numbers caught Emma’s eye. Something about them…

She found a new page and started scribbling numbers.

Born: August 13, 1974

Died: July 21, 2015

Age: 41

Created Night Mare: age 18/19

Years lived: 22

Century of death: 22NK7

Years since death: 5

Current century: 27NK9

Emma held the notebook in front of her. She read it over again and again until she finally made the connection. A year for her was a century for them. The number after NK that ended with twelve then began again, that was months for her.

In here, it was September. It wasn’t 2700, but the years began when Amber had discovered her ability to dreamwalk. When she realized she was an Oneironaut. 

Emma completed her timeline. She tore it out and pinned it to a corkboard on the wall. 

To respect her mother, she drained her room of the color she’d added. She could do without it for now.

She caught sight of the broken clock.

3:47. Amber’s written time of death. She’d kept a clock with her own times so she knew when to wake up, but after she died, it had stopped working.

The kingdom, the entire palace, the power she held… it was all passed from Amber. But how did that ability travel between the two? How was it passed down to Emma after a death?

That was a question that Emma doubted she’d ever get an answer for.

She was ready to face Azeria, Ryder, and Lord Reyvon once again.

“Ready” hadn’t been the right word. The second she saw Ryder, she got a strong urge to slit his throat and show no mercy. But she held her place, her arms held behind her back with her back straight as she had waited for the three of them to make it to her current placement - the bridge.

“My mother has created wars before. She did so to thin the population when they began to multiply, I have learned. These battles, yes, she was the most powerful, but she did not engage the same ways.”

Speaking of Amber aloud had done a number on the wall she’d built to keep tears back. But she managed and kept her stance and forced the waver from her voice.

“I may not be the one fit to rule,” she said with a hard glare at Ryder. “But I’m a better choice than anyone who could possibly die, and I’m the only option there is when it comes to that. I must be the one to lead us to battle whenever the option hits, whether it be this Nekra or the next.” She looked at Reyvon. He nodded once in acknowledgement. 

Emma continued. “Fighting until then isn’t necessary. I cannot find a way to heal either of you due to being unable to change what my mother had set, but I can honor your deaths when you are gone. Until then, I would like to be seen by you, by Star, and by the other people of the castle as the true next ruler. There is never anything wrong with hope, and that’s what the people need.”

Ryder opened his mouth.

“I want not a word from you.”

He mouthed “Understood” and remained silent. 

“That can be arranged,” Lord Reyvon said. “Madam Azeria, send out a message to the city. Phrase Emma as well as you can.”

Azeria nodded and disappeared from the room. 

“In a few breaths, all of Star will know what we’ve just discussed. But they’ll know that you are working with me and not taking after me.”

“Works for me.”

She never counted her breaths, but she didn’t think it mattered to do so. After what felt like it could’ve been a while, she went with Azeria down to Star and walked around. The people were more interactive now after it was revealed that they were able to talk to her without being reprimanded. 

They were all so nice. Of course, maybe Amber hadn’t created such violence for the city of Star.

Suddenly, it seemed more people entered the castle. They were led with a guard as they approached the throne room, where they asked Lord Reyvon questions, but he did not make decisions. He sent a raven to Emma, wherever she was at the time, possibly writing everything down in her journal she’d begun, and would ask her the question or offer her the request.

That was how there became another Light Era. How there became festivals open every breath and how new cities were built so not every house was taken by so many people. 

Many people moved into the new city, Light (Emma wanted to keep things similar to her mother’s world), immediately, leaving Star about half as stacked-full as it was. 

Light had more towers that reached the sky, all a slick black that could easily remind them of home. Emma found that she’d made Light into a beautiful empire. 

The statue of her, which her mother had added in after Emma had been born, had not been removed but turned into a shrine for her, for what she’d done for them. 

“Emma,” Azeria said as they passed a shop full of clothing that was not only elegant dresses and black suits, but any style of clothing, remaining all black. Azeria had since changed to a more simple dress and a fabric belt that hung at her waist. “That looks like one you’d like.” She pointed to one of the mannequins in the shop. It wore a fuzzy black sweater with a ribcage on the front closely resembling the sweater she’d worn earlier except minus the color. 

“It is.” 

Emma had not made the clothes, but she had added the clothing houses where anyone could fulfill a hobby after a nice class to make any clothing they drew out and found the design pretty cool. Everything went to the shops without passing through the castle first. 

“Things were still pretty different in the 90’s compared to now,” Emma said.

“Huh?”

“Our time.”

Star City and the castle were mostly the same as they had been before. She kept that in respect for her mother, for the original God of the Dreamworld. She’d created Light and it had been her own little place - close enough resemblance to Star but with her own little touches. The threes were still black, but the leaves were gold now, only dulling when they fell off. 

They had flowers now. She added that to Star - one of the minor differences in it now - and people loved them. 

She’d created Color City, too. Black was still allowed, yes, but anyone who wanted to see color - rainbows, flower gardens, colorful clothing - those people lived in Color. Anyone could come and go as they pleased wherever they wanted as long as it wasn’t the perimeter of the castle. 

She could have sworn she caught Lord Reyvon and Ryder with matching green ties before, but when she blinked, they were black. 

What she hadn’t known was that they were indeed green. They’d also had yellow shoes, or blue jeans, touches of color that were gone in an instant. It had brought a smile to Lord Reyvon’s face when he realized that Emma hadn’t caught on after so many times. With only the whites of his eyes and a small, fanged grin, Emma was too afraid to ask what he was smiling about. She kept her distance. 

Emma tried on the outfit. Everything was a trade; there was no money. So she asked the young shopkeeper what she wanted in return of equal value. The girl responded with a small finger pointing at one of the designs hung on the wall behind her. “I have tried again and again for this outfit and I cannot seem to get it.”

“Let me see,” Emma said, holding her hand out. The shopkeeper unpinned it from the wall and slid it across the desk to Emma. It was a shirt and skirt that contained minimal color, a black and gray striped sweater cropped at the stomach and a knee-length skirt of all black with the exception of a little blue heart at the hem. It matched the color of the sky. 

When the shopkeeper looked down, she was wearing the outfit. The sleeves bagged the same way they did in the sketch, the skirt poofed out the same way without an underneath structure, and the heart was sewn in like a small patch at the hem. The shopkeeper's previous clothes sat neatly folded on the corner of her desk. She marveled at the outfit.

“Thank you, Theá tou Kaloú,” she said with a short bow.

“Just ‘Emma’ is fine, thank you,” she replied. She took the outfit in a black bag and carried it in the crook of her elbow as she walked on with Azeria. 

“Emma,” a familiar voice said from behind her as she left the shop. 

Emma stopped in her tracks, hesitating to turn around. “What do you want?”

Ryder strode up to her, breaking between her and Azeria. “To apologize.”

“You’ve already done so. Have a nice day, Ryder.”

“I know I have, but-”

“But it appears I haven’t forgiven you, and for some reason, you feel the need to apologize until I do. Heads up: It’s not going to be today. Go back to whatever dark corner you crawled out of and come visit me in another orbit.”

Ryder sighed heavily, hanging his head a little. “Just listen to me.”

“For the third time? I’m getting bored, Ryder. I still feel time, and it appears you’re wasting mine. Don’t make me repeat myself.” 

She hooked her free elbow through Azeria’s and led her off. Ryder appeared again in front of them. Azeria groaned and covered her face. She didn’t hate Ryder, but she hated the bickering. She disappeared around the corner and waited in the welcoming silence for the two of them to finish. Again. 

Emma spends the majority of her breaths out and about with Azeria, the two of them closer than Emma could have believed imaginable. 

She calculated that, knowing a year in the Realworld was a century in the Dreamworld, a single hour out There was a hundred hours in Here, and the orbit told her that it had been around a hundred sixty eight hours for her - somewhere around an hour and a half out There. She was glad to find that he hadn’t been in a coma for a million years or something. But it felt like she’d been there much longer than a week. 

If “week-ago” her talked to “now-her” then “week-ago” her wouldn’t believe a word she was saying. Actually liking the place? Her mother created? She knew she sounded insane to anyone who didn’t have the story. 

Trying to murder the younger brother of the Lord of the Lies? Yeah, that was a fun one. 

She snickered at her own joke.

“What’s so funny?” Azeria asked.

“No, nothing,” Emma said. “Just thinking about stuff.”

They carried on crocheting. A hobby her mom had taught her and she had never really thought about often, but she read it in a book from the library to remind herself how to do it. She made herself a colorful, striped, sleeveless vest and thigh socks with the same order to match. 

Azeria looked wonderful in green. A deep, phthalo green matched her perfectly. Even Emma wondered how the hell she’d come up with her dress. It was elegant, barely brushing along the floor with flared sleeves that hung low, the front crossing like a closed robe and held together with a golden jewel that matched her eyes, and gold accents in her perfectly curled, black hair. 

She looked as if she could be the next ruler if she had the ability to do so. 

Emma flushed when she got caught looking a little bit lower than Azeria’s eyes. She hadn’t even meant to.

“Maybe I could announce a festival,” Emma said before Azeria had the chance to do anything more than raise a brow at her. 

“What is a festival?”

Emma gasped. No festivals here? What was her mom doing? 

She explained everything, from the color to the fun to the rides to the food and games and laughing and candy. She explained with excruciating detail that could have taken forever if they lived with time and not breaths. By the time she was done, Azeria had told her she definitely needed to get one announced. It wasn’t like anyone really made plans for anything since there was no future.

First, they went to a room in the castle. It was completely empty, every step with their shoes echoing over the black marble walls. There was one large window facing the bridge. That and the gold chandelier above were their best sources of light. 

Emma summoned a long table and Azeria summoned the paper and ink. They sketched out the kingdom sloppily. Land stretched on forever, but there were no households more than five miles from Night Mare. 

“I think it should be here, over by Color,” Emma said, pointing the tip of her pen at the city she’d created.

“Keep it near both Color and Light, then the part by light can be blacklights.”

“Yes, but blacklights are purple, I hope you know that.”

Azeria paused, clearly not knowing that, but claimed to, anyway. Then she “changed her mind” about it. “Yeah, just keep it by Color. What, this big?” She sketched out a rectangular area that, to Emma, was a mile by half a mile, and that worked perfectly. “Here, you sketch some of the rides. I’ve never heard of these.”

“Okay, okay,” Emma said. She drew a circle with a few lines in it. “This is a Ferris Wheel. It’s really big and goes around. It’s pretty slow, most people just watch it to view fireworks or pretty views.”

“Fireworks?”

“Oh, my God.”

Over her last thousand breaths or so, Lord Reyvon had taught her how to do his arm-trick. Instead of showing Azeria other kingdoms or taking them to other places in the castle, she’d shown her memories.  

Over one, tall, blank wall, it changed to a view of the night where colors exploded in the sky with loud bangs. So many colors, each making different sounds when they exploded, and also different designs. Azeria leaned forward, intrigued by such art. 

“They have these things called Grand Finales, too. They’re super cool. It’s like… a ton of them at the same time. But I won’t show you that.” The wall fell blank. “You’ll get to see it in person.” They smiled at one another with excited grins. 

Emma sketched out rides and gates and lines for everything. Concessions here, mini-games here, kids stuff there.

Then she put out the announcement that there would be an event held just behind Color when the sky fell dark. That could have been any amount of breaths, but it wouldn’t be too long for Emma. She’d bring night, millions of stars in an unpolluted sky, showing nebulas and meteors, everything she’d seen from NASA pictures. 

She’d found out from Azeria that announcements were said into a microphone that everyone had connected to themselves - basically built into their ears. And it was completely normal to them! Emma was vaguely creeped out by the idea that at any random breath there would be a voice in everyone’s ears at the same time and everyone would stop what they were doing, listen, and all while there was no sound around. 

Like God was talking to them. 

Their God, anyway. 

It was true, Emma was more excited for the festival than anyone else ever could be. She’d also put in the announcement not to wear black; make things as colorful as possible. White was a very good color to wear. She didn’t say why, but she’d definitely be keeping Azeria’s idea of blacklights. She’d hang them in tunnel-covered lines and people could glow as they waited, wondering how it was happening. 

She was basically becoming her own firework, exploding with pride as she stood in the middle of the large area behind Color, her arms spread wide, creating such intricate machinery around her without needing the knowledge of how everything worked down to the gear, just how it worked from the outside. She added lights, but she kept them off. She’d turn them on when darkness fell. 

It was eerie being there. She’d forgotten what she was doing for a second, looking around at what she’d made, feeling like a trespasser on someone else's property.  The rides weren’t running and everything was dead silent. You could hear a cricket chirp if there were crickets, but Emma had never noticed any. Surprising, giving that they were creepy little black things. 

She’d found that Ryder had been lying about animals also being Keys. There were little to no animals. Cats and dogs were rare, and those were the only ones besides ravens, which no one but Lord Reyvon owned. Or… more like they only obeyed him and no one else. Except Emma now that he’d gotten the message through to them that she was just as important, if not more. 

Ravens were perched here and there around the festival. She clapped the lights off and colors and sights and sounds erupted all around her. The ravens cawed and flew off when music - something unheard of in all of Star, Color, Light, and Night Mare - blared through every speaker, the same song playing at the same time throughout the mile by half mile festival. 

Every ride had rainbow lights. Tunnels that led different places but did not have to be taken emitted low glows from the entrances. 

But there was nothing more beautiful than the sky. No one besides the astronauts would ever be able to truly experience anything like it. But here she was, an oneironaut, staring up at the sky, mesmerized that it was real. Well, as real as it could be to a thirteen year old girl fast asleep. 

Azeria was by her side, looking all around. She’d changed into a white dress with a few horizontal stripes here and there. She wandered into one of the tunnels. Emma followed her in, changing into a matching dress. “These are blacklights,” Emma said.

“They’re beautiful.”

People were already filing in from the entrances set all around. They didn’t have to pay, for there was no money, and they needn’t trade valuables for fun. Emma greeted them with pride and excitement, mirroring theirs, as they entered. People of all ages were coming, even the people that appeared as much older than average. 

The rides were running and lines were beginning. Emma stationed castle guards at each ride, giving them the knowledge of what to do to help people in and get the ride going, along with how many breaths to make the turns and how many breaths between breaks. 

Screams of joy came from all around. She decided to set up a movie where a perfect view of a crescent moon appeared just a little ways above the screen. She showed The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which was easily exact to the real movie and not just how she remembered it. 

When a few different groups of people, some friends, some families, some couples, and some just there, it made her happy. They were enjoying her favorite movie. 

She would pass it from time to time, but she didn’t stop at it. 

“Emma,” Ryder said, approaching fast.

“Fine. I forgive you.”

Ryder paused, confused at the unexpected response. “What?”

Emma shrugged. “I’m not having any conversation that could possibly ruin my mood. So I forgive you.” She smiled sincerely. “If you didn’t tell me all of it, this wouldn’t be where we are now,” she said, gesturing to the festival all around. “Go have fun. Go on some rides. And try the popcorn.” She squinted, trying to peer through the different colors all around. “Is your tie blue?” 

It seemed to change shades after she asked. “No.”

“Hm.” 

“Actually, I was going to ask if you wanted to go on some of the rides with me,” Ryder said. He wasn’t in his usual stance with his arms behind his back. Instead, he looked… nervous. His arms loose over his chest, holding his elbows, shifting from one foot to the other every breath or so. 

Emma lifted one shoulder. “I don’t see why not.”

Ryder physically relaxed with a slow exhale. 

“Did you have a specific one in mind?”

“Not really.”

So they went on some of the closer rides, working outward until they’d made it to the Ferris Wheel. Emma’s hair was all screwed up from some of the upside down rides. Somehow, not a single hair was out of place on Ryder’s head. He chuckled and pointed out that her bangs were sticking straight up and a lot of her hair was out of place. 

She ran a hand over her head, automatically putting it back the way it was. She tied it back in a low bun with a little tie she produced from nothing. It wouldn’t help her bangs, but it would do something for the rest. 

Azeria had caught up with them, two large things of blue cotton candy in her hands. She laid eyes on Emma and Ryder. “Oh, I didn’t expect you to be here. I’d have gotten three,” she said. There was a little edge to her voice. Knowing that Emma was unable to stand him made his presence annoying to Azeria, too. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I forgave him,” Emma yelled over the speaker a few feet away. “It’s all fine. Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I had my own earlier,” Ryder yelled, still on the topic of the cotton candy. 

“I’ve never tasted anything better,” Azeria yelled. 

“I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?” Emma took the candy Azeria offered her and took a bite of it. She wanted to cry from how much fun she was having, from how happy she was. Lord Reyvon was right. If she returned to her own Dreamworld now, she’d be bored out of her mind. 

“Emma and I were just about to go to the Ferris Wheel,” Ryder said. 

“Oh,” Azeria replied, a little hint of disappointment in her voice. “Would you want to go on it with me afterwards?” she asked Emma, then took a bite. Through her mouthful, she said, “I can wait right here.”

“I mean, you can both come, it’s not like only two people can go at once.”

Azeria and Ryder exchanged a hateful but also worried glance. 

“I don’t want to be in it with him.”

“I don’t want to be in it with her.”

Emma sighed. “Fine.”

Emma got in line with Ryder first. She finished her cotton candy during the wait, just glad no one turned around to see her because she already knew - like they had during the last ride - that they would all offer their space for her. But some things she just wanted to experience like any human could. As if it were the Realworld. 

They talked different things out. They went into depth with their conversation about what had been going on - getting all the time they needed from the length of the line - without ever setting Emma in a bad mood. 

They got into the car and Emma thanked the guard-slash-worker. She and Ryder kept talking as they went up, which was very, very slow as more and more people got on and off. 

The two of them sat on the same side, facing the castle. There were a few fireworks over there that Emma had set on a bunch of timers. When the crescent moon lined up with the top of the castle, the Grand Finale would make the sky explode with color. She had made sure that there was a good view of the castle from just about everywhere within the festival. 

His knee moved and bumped hers. She moved her knees away a little, hoping he didn’t notice. But he did. He swallowed thickly. “Listen, Emma.”

Emma knew it was coming. She hadn’t exactly seen it from a mile away, but she could hear it in his voice. 

“I’m not a bad person. Not as bad as I or Reyvon had said I am. I wasn’t taking your memories, I only took that one to show something I could do and start a fight. I didn’t want you to rule Night Mare because…”

Emma could have easily finished his sentence for him. But this was for him to say. They were his own planned words and his own play of emotions. So she stared out at the moon as his eyes burned into the side of her face. 

“Because I wanted you to stay with me.”

Even predicting the words, she hadn’t fully expected the punch they packed. What hurt worse was the slow, agonizing blink that came afterwards. 

Emma couldn’t bring herself to speak. She knew better than to let herself feel pressured into saying yes, which was definitely what Ryder’s burning eyes were doing. Pressuring her. She thought about teleporting down to Azeria, but she knew she couldn’t leave Ryder up at the top of the Ferris Wheel all alone like that. 

So she turned to him. And before she even got the chance to speak, Ryder leaned down and planted a gentle kiss on her lips. Emma allowed it, but pulled away after what would have been a breath. 

“I’m sorry,” Emma said. She forced herself to look into Ryder’s slitted eyes. “I…” There was no way to word it without hurting his feelings and she knew that. So she worded like she thought anyone else might. “I like someone else, okay?”

There was a long moment of silence - from Ryder, but the noises of the festival continued - where they just stared at each other.

“When your mom was here, she didn’t have her husband as the man that ruled with her. This isn’t your Realworld, Emma.” He took one of her hands in his and squeezed it gently. She’d never seen him let down his professional I-couldn’t-care-less guard until the festival. Not only did it feel extravagantly weird, she felt out of place, like she was seeing something she wasn’t supposed to and she was only about to ruin it. “It’s fairly easy to work things out.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, quieter this time. “I have my reasons. I’m going to need you to understand them. I don’t know exactly what this makes us; if you want to go back to hating me, if you want to be friends, or if you just plan to move on and have nothing to do with me and the castle.”

“Understood.”

Her throat burned as she spoke. 

And she had a plan…

“So is it true?”

“What?” Emma was broken from her thoughts about her plan. 

He sighed. “I know it was probably pathetic to think that if you liked someone in here that it would be me. But I still get the feeling that it is someone inside this world, and I can’t shake that thought from my head.” His eyes burned through her more and more with every word that sprouted from his mouth. “Is it my brother?”

Emma almost forgot everything and barked a laugh. Almost. “No. Besides, he’s way too old. I’m only thirteen, remember?”

“Right.” Then, without warning, he added: “So it’s Azeria, then?”

“What?”

“You like Azeria.”

“Uh…”

“You’re with her all the time. You’re always happy with her. She’s caught you looking at places that weren’t her eyes multiple times.”

“Who says I don’t like one of the people in the city?”

“The fact that I can still hear your thoughts and your internal string of cursing and knowing you’ve been caught tells me that I’m right.” The corner of his mouth lifted smugly. “It’s also telling me that you were going to tell her that during the Grand Finale you have planned. Whatever that means.”

“Um.”

“Secret’s out now, Emma. I don’t care. You like who you like. I mean, it sucks for me that it wasn’t me, but you can’t control me and I can’t control you. That’s life. Here, at least, I don’t… never mind.”

Emma was at a loss for words. But Ryder got whatever she wanted to say from her head - along with cursing at him for still reading her thoughts when she’d asked him not too, but it was simply hard to ignore sometimes. 

The Ferris Wheel began to take them back down to the ground. Ryder teased Emma about her little crush on her friend and Emma did her best to ignore every word he said, but like he was in her mind, it was pretty hard to ignore. 

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Just say it. Come on. I said it.”

“I’m not you.”

“Just say it, Emma.”

“I’m not saying it!”

“You’re going to say it to her in, like, fifty breaths. Come on, just say it to me.”

“I like her so I’ll say it to her, okay? I don’t… sh*t.”

“Ha! I’ll see you later. Let me know how it goes.” He locked eyes with Azeria and then elbowed Emma. She elbowed back a lot harder and he walked off, chuckling. She wondered if he still felt a little hurt after… that… and was trying to play it off, but all other thoughts dropped from her mind as she and Azeria were reunited. 

“Ready?”

“As ever.” 

Azeria had finished her cotton candy, of course, but her hands were still sticky from taking chunks of it in her fingers. Hers had been pink but that wasn’t noticeable on her hands. “I kept an eye on the wheel but I went back into one of the tunnels. They’re so weirdly cool.”

“In the Realworld, they’d put the lights up for parties and things and they’d get a load of neon lights and turn all the other lights off. Everyone always found that a much better setting for everything.” Though, I’d never been part of any of that, she added silently. 

“Your world sounds lovely.”

“It has its ups and downs.”

“What are some downs?”

Emma shook her head. “Nothing we would want here. Bad stuff.”

“Oh.” 

They made it into the car a lot faster than they had before. Emma kept glancing at the moon every now and then. She had full control of it, but if she forgot about it for too long and missed the cue, the plan would fail. 

Emma’s hands were shaking, but while they were in the cart, it was hard to see. Emma was glad about that. She almost told herself “thank God she can’t see that” but really, she had to thank herself. 

She prepared herself.  A lot. For whatever outcome she would get. She hadn’t gotten anything back from Azeria, any signs of emotion that may tell her if she was even into her, but there was only one way to find out for sure. 

“Azeria,” she said, breaking the silence between them. 

So, since we met…

No.

I’ve kind of realized…

No.

Dammit. 

“Okay, skip a speech. I like you,” Emma blurted. Again, she found herself staring at the moon. It was frozen in place with only a breath to reach its destination after moving once again. Like she’d stopped a timer at 00:01. 

That 00:01 seemed to last forever. 

“Took you long enough.”

Then her head was moved to the side until she was facing Azeria. Her breath caught in her throat and she let the timer go. Fireworks exploded in the sky. Azeria looked at them for a few breaths, mesmerized by the beauty from Emma’s world. Emma looked too, not knowing what else to do with her jaw in Azeria’s hand.

Azeria’s beaming face fell in an instant. 

“Az-”

“Something’s wrong.”

“I-”

“We have to go.” Azeria took Emma’s hand. “NOW!”

Emma was going to say something but the sheer terror in Azeria’s wavering voice had her obliging to wherever Azeria was taking her. They teleported to the castle. The guards from the door had started to yell at them and advance before they realized it was just them. 

“What room is he in?”

Neither guard answered. 

So they teleported from room to room. Not the throne room. Not the war room, not the library, not the room they’d made plans for the festival in, not the dining room-

A raven landed on the ground just in front of Emma. 

Room, it seemed to say. It was not Lord Reyvon’s voice. Not at all. 

Neither of them had ever learned where his room was.

“Take us,” Azeria said. 

Azeria’s panic was transferred to Emma and she, too, appeared to be in a rush to get to Lord Reyvon’s room. They - hand in hand, as Emma hadn’t failed to notice -  rushed after the raven as it flew. Though they preferred not to, the ravens had the ability to fly through the doors. This one clearly didn’t care that it had hurt as it flew right through a door after such a long run/flight. 

There lay Lord Reyvon on his bed, his mouth, chin, and sheets soaked in blood. His eyes were closed lazily and his mouth was open, gasping for breath. 

They had made it just in time for the last few breaths. His last few words. 

“Thank you… for being here… for the Nightbound,” he said between gasps. He choked on his own blood, trying to take another breath, but failing. There was nothing Emma, Azeria, or the raven could do. The guard positioned outside his door couldn’t do much of anything, either.

Emma pushed Azeria back a few steps. “Reyvon,” she said in a voice that broke.

She did not get a response.

She took his freezing cold hand. Her warm, altered skin against his felt… odd? 

A tear rolled down her cheek. Azeria put a hand on her shoulder. Emma turned into Azeria’s shoulder. “Not now, not now, not already.”

“They’re coming.”

Emma’s crying suddenly stopped. “The festival.”

Cue the screams. 

“I’m hardly ready!” Emma yelled as they raced down the hall, gathering all the guards they could. “I haven’t practiced enough! I’ve only been here a week and a half!”

“I’ll pretend I know what that means,” she replied. “Sir, you need to come with us. Now.”

The guards all stood, mostly confused, in the room with the doors to enter the castle. “Emma, you get to the festival, you get everyone out of there as fast as you can. Guards! Alert the soldiers, then get your battle gear on. War is upon us.”

When Emma reappeared at the festival, she was devastated. Everything had been torn apart, bodies strewn everywhere. There was still screaming and crying and yelling and cursing from everywhere. Some people put it upon themselves to fight some of the smaller soldiers. Burly men and women fought what seemed to be mushrooms with the tops as large hats and long, long limbs. They were only head-height for Emma, but their limbs stretched maybe twice that.

Mothers and their children ran, crying.

“Theá tou Kaloú is here!” A little boy pointed. “She’ll save us!”

Seconds later, she watched that same kid die. And it wasn’t quick. 

A swamp monster, a pile of mud with stones for eyes and a gaping mouth, laid over the kid, muffling his screams. His mother screamed and screamed, his hand still clutching hers, except she was standing a few feet away and viscera dangled from the arm.

Emma had not lost focus. She knew it. This wasn’t just another trick on her mind. 

This was a nightmare. 

She teleported here and there, taking everyone to Star, the farthest city from the festival. But she could not save everyone. 

A mushroom wrapped a long limb around the waist of a teenage girl. Emma summoned a sword. She lifted it high above her head and brought it down on the lanky limb. It cut through just as easily as cutting through any regular mushroom would be. But the mushroom let out a terrifying screech so high pitched Emma dropped her sword to cover her ears. 

She produced headphones. Then she grabbed her sword again and chopped the head of the mushroom off. Its limbs twitched but could do no more. 

The mushrooms weren’t the worst of it. She’d gotten a lot of people away, but not enough. She left her task to continue dragging people away to Star. Back and forth she went, her surroundings changing with every blink. 

Azeria was approaching. Emma only got glimpses, but an entire army was with her, trailing behind her. The guards were in the front. Everyone had armor on. Emma added in her own armor.

When Emma found no more survivors, she went to Azeria. She moved one side of the headphones off her ear. “These things screech like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Here.” She produced some for Azeria, then started making some at a rapid rate for the guards to hand out to the soldiers. There was nowhere near enough to take on all the creatures that were on their way in the distance, but there was enough to try. 

They slayed the mushrooms with the swords, chopping their heads off, and Emma contemplated the best way to get rid of mud. 

She instructed the warriors to strip from their armor. It was not a pleasant sight, but neither was the battlefield when she flicked the lights back on. Emma swayed on her feet, trying not to vomit at the sight. She looked anywhere but the ground, resulting in her staring right into the stones of a mud monster as it hissed and bubbled, crumbling into dirt as Emma sweated profusely, the sun beating down on her harder than she or anyone in… what had Lord Reyvon called the Dreamworld? Nightbound? Harder than any of them had ever experienced. 

After that were the Wendigos. Their incredible speeds and they, too, had long limbs complete with fur and claws. They attacked, ripping into the soldiers, feasting on them like a child with a bag of sweets. 

Emma knew how to kill them, but an explanation took forever. And there was no time for the hundreds upon hundreds racing towards them. 

Fires were started. Blood covered everyone and everything. Soldiers healed themselves as fast as they could, but there was nothing anyone could do if they were killed immediately. And the Wendigos liked taking a nice bite out of their skulls first. 

The army was disintegrating already. 

A Wendigo’s talon had slit her throat and she’d wavered for a moment, then healed herself. Just before its entire claw was thrust into her chest, Ryder appeared and yanked her back. 

“He’s dead?” Ryder asked. It was the first time Emma saw tears in his eyes.

Emma nodded slowly.

“Bastard. He was supposed to live forever.”

“It’s what we all hoped for,” Emma replied. She shopped another mushroom head off. Being in nothing but underclothes made her extraordinarily uncomfortable but also left her completely exposed without any obstacle to stab through first, unable to wear armor or gloves or steel-toed boots. It proved to her that the altered flesh had given her the appearance of clothing, though, now covering everything below her head, just trailing up her neck like she’d laid in slime. “How the hell do I fix this?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a blink. “Look out!”

A limb wrapped around her throat. She dropped her sword, clawing at the limb, but it did nothing. 

Ryder took her sword from the ground and chopped its head off. “Man, you got yourself a nice one.”

“Thanks,” she said, snatching it from him. “Get your own, you know how.” 

Monsters of all kinds approached from everywhere. “There has to be a portal. This land stretches on forever, they can’t be in neighboring kingdoms! They’re on other worlds!” She screamed out for Azeria, racing off to find her. 

“What? What?” Azeria asked, cutting off Emma’s path before she passed her.

“It’s a portal. We have to find the portal.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. They can’t come from here if this land stretches on forever.” Emma found that she had a hard time looking at Azeria. So she looked out at the horizon where monsters were so far away that the ground looked like a beehive. “Keep it up here. I’m going to find it.”

“Em-”

Emma disappeared. She appeared again and again along the way, slashing monsters when they least expected it. Some were huge and she appeared on their shoulders or she appeared just high enough to decapitate them or slit their throat or take them down in some way. Blood was in her mouth and eyes. She spit it out then produced a cloud that followed her around, giving her the shade she needed. She redressed with some armor and gave the metal a cold touch. 

Emma brought the blade down on skull after skull, through spine after spine, driven into eye after eye. She’d stop for a few breaths, killing what she could before they realized her presence and attacked, then she disappeared again. She’d gotten as close as a claw reached into her chest, tearing at her heart, then she disappeared, remaining just far enough to heal herself as quick as she could, then continuing. 

But the waterfall of Shadows seemed to never end. She couldn’t even see the cities anymore, but she also couldn’t see an end to the Shadows in either direction. She left the fighting behind and teleported for miles after miles. 

A humanoid demon grabbed her arm. She pulled away and drove her sword through its skull. It fell to the ground with a disgusting squish. She spent a breath too long looking at the corpse and other creatures advanced on her. Some had fire breath to which she made it rain. It brought the dried mud monsters back. 

Emma teleported all the way back to the kingdom. She noticed that not only did they have soldiers, warriors, and guards, but they had their allies with them. Unicorns, angels, pegasi, majestic creatures with their own wonderful powers. They fought the Shadows, doing much better than the Nightbound, but still dying at a horrifying rate. 

There were groups of fictional characters that could easily take others in fights. Groups of ethereal beings that kind of resembled the mushrooms but not quite as intimidating and glowed different colors. Emma decided with a single glance to call them Jellyshrooms. 

Emma swore she saw a glimpse of George freakin Washington. 

“I’m about to do something really stupid,” Emma said to Azeria. “If I’m not back… when Saturn rises, forget about me.” She willed saturn to set on a slow path that, to her, would last ten minutes before visible on the horizon. It would be much, much closer than any normal sight of it would be. 

“Emma, don’t.”

“I have to.”

Emma disappeared. 

Azeria kept fighting. She assumed she’d been deemed leader after Emma disappeared to do her stupid thing and she instructed the warriors on her part to keep up what they were doing, even though it wasn’t working and their numbers were rapidly declining.

No one knew how many breaths it would be before Saturn rose. Azeria worried more and more with every breath, glancing at the horizon every few just to be sure.

The allies were doing much better than they were. They’d trained and trained but it clearly hadn’t been enough against the Shadows. 

There was still no sign of Emma. Azeria watched as an angel and a demon fought in the air, white wings of air and lightness against dark lava rock. Their fight ended in an explosion that neither of them made it out of. 

There was no God to save them. And though Azeria prayed, none was answered. 

The tip of Saturn's rings became visible. 

She didn’t let herself lose her faith in Emma. She fought with everything she could, doing what she’d shown Emma, creating things from nothing while she was flying through midair, barely giving the opponent enough time to register what she was coming at them with. She drove axes into slimy creatures, stuck machetes between the rocks of rock monsters, and aimed flamethrowers at the mud monsters.

It was the bloodiest thing she’d ever seen. Most of the monsters didn’t bleed, but the Nightbound did, so did the majority of the allies. Viscera lay everywhere. Limbs draped on destroyed festival rides, the tunnels caved in where corpses had slammed into them, somehow an odd number of eyeballs spread everywhere like marbles in a cartoon. 

Ryder found Azeria. 

“Have you seen Emma?” he asked.

“She said she was going to do something stupid!” she yelled in response as she stabbed the heart of a Wendigo. She twisted the blade and it roared. The ground vibrated in response. Azeria and Ryder pushed their headphones over their ears along with everyone else that had been issued them. 

“Did she tell you what it was?”

“No, but I easily pieced it together. She said if she’s not back when Saturn rises…” 

Azeria froze, hardly noticing the limb Ryder cut as it wrapped around her waist. 

Saturn was entirely visible.

Emma had reappeared in the Shadows. She couldn’t find the portal, but she could find the world. She was an Oneironaut, after all. 

“N’Kotuva!” she yelled, which wasn’t the easiest of names to yell, but she managed. She kicked in the door of the rotted cabin from the image Ryder had shown her. It caved in with ease and there was N’Kotuva along with a Griffin. 

“How did you get here?” N’Kotuva asked without moving her jaw.

“I’m a God. You need to stop attacking us. Leave us alone!”

“No can do, kid. I want to place, I get the place.”

“This is your place!”

N’Kouva leaned back on her hind legs, spread her wings, and let out a billowing wall of flame toward Emma. Emma leapt out of the way, rolling to the side just in time. From her fingertips, she released darts of poison-tipped icicles. 

The Griffin roared and took the darts instead, healing itself too quick for the poison to take action. 

“Stop killing us!” Emma insisted. “We can make you your own place here instead.”

“I want yours,” the greedy dragon roared. 

The Griffin took off half of Emma’s arm.  She cried out, clutching the stump just above where her elbow was, blood leaking from it like it would never stop. It healed quickly but she could only go so fast. 

She clutched the sword in her non-dominant hand. When the Griffin leapt at her again, she drove it through its open beak and down its eagle’s throat. Then she heaved on the ground at her feet. Retrieving her sword from the mouth of the beast was not the greatest feeling. 

N’Kotuva blasted her with another wave of fire, catching her hair. Emma put it out with a raincloud. Then she produced her own wings to match N’Kotuva’s, rising a few feet off the ground.

“Impossible.”

“Anything is possible when you’re a God.”

“You’re no God, you’re just a little girl.”

“I’m the daughter of Nightbound’s creator.”

The room sizzled and burned around them. They crashed through the roof and let the cabin burn as they fought fire with fire. Emma had swords, daggers, and an almost-completely regenerated arm. It was hard to penetrate N’Kotuva’s scales but when Emma had enough time, she could wedge the blade beneath a scale and peel it away.

N’Kotuva had vocally expressed that a single scale loss brought immense pain and that was what Emma focused on. 

N’Kotuva kicked back, sending Emma flying out of the air and into a tree. Emma’s spine shattered and she fell limp. N’Kotuva landed beside her, wings beating loudly then folding behind her back. “I take your kingdom. You must die.”

Emma didn’t respond. She grabbed the branch above her and pulled herself up, unable to let go of the branch. She looked N’Kotuva in the eye, trying to ease her million thoughts, the loudest one: pain. Screaming pain in her back. She couldn’t feel her legs. Her shoulder felt twisted and her hand had almost fully regenerated but it still hurt like hell at the fingertips where they hadn’t grown back.

Black was closing in on her face, creeping in, submerging her farther into the invisible bath of slime. 

She summoned a stream just to her left. Not in the ground, but hovering a few feet from the ground. The stream was not of water, but of milk; something a dragon was unable to resist. 

Like a cat, N’Kotuva lapped up the milk. 

Emma waited. 

She made the branch grow, pulling herself along it to get closer to N’Kotuva as she swayed, trying to balance herself with the tips of her wings. Emma gave her blade a good placement and sliced a large patch of scales off. N’Kotuva roared, giving Emma an immediate headache. Her ears felt like they were going to explode from all the ringing and pounding she was left with. 

“You can’t win against a God,” Emma said, her voice dull, and drove her sword into N’Kotuva’s chest. Blackness closed over her face. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she fell back, a wave of energy sent out like she was a meteorite striking the ground. 

Emma opened her eyes, her blue pupils reduced to black slits among dull gray eyes. She couldn’t see herself. She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t feel the ground or if she was standing, sitting, or laying. 

Then Lord Reyvon faded into view.

“You’re alive?”

“No, I’m not,” he answered simply. “There’s nothing either of us can do about that now.” He put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. The blood was cleaned from his face and neck. He looked good as new. “You won the war, Emma. You led Nightbound to freedom from the Shadows. 

“I did?”

“You did. Azeria, Ryder, and the allies have fought off the monsters, most of which fled back to Shadow after realizing their leader was dead.”

“She lived?”

“She lived.” Lord Reyvon gave something between a scoff and a laugh. “I can’t believe you’ve fallen for my damn daughter.”

“Your what?”

Lord Reyvon shook his head. “I should have known from the start. Ryder told me immediately, of course. But Azeria is alive and will be doing fine in a matter of breaths. You will be missed, though.”

Like Lord Reyvon had done, Emma silently agreed to dismiss the topic. “So… what now?”

Lord Reyvon took her face in his hands. He smiled contentedly, like he was smiling at a toddler that did a good deed. “It’s time for you to say goodbye, Emma Good. He pressed his fingers into her eyes until his thumbs reached her brain.

Emma screamed. 

Suddenly she felt the ground. She’d been laying, but now was sitting upright. The room was almost completely white. She was on a bed. At her sides were Abbi, Arrow, and Liv, all staring at her in confused awe.

She was awake.

To be continued…