Dreams. Such wispy, feathery things.
Creation and destruction played out on a personal scale – one moment nothing, and the next, everything.
Or so it should be.
So it used to be.

This… this was different.
It felt lonely.

Not that Larta considered herself a socialite, she very much preferred her lab over the idle prattle of colleagues. But this silence was deeper, somehow.
More complete.
Almost final.
Utterly still.

She was standing. Or maybe floating.
Yes – floating. Through a grey miasma.
Wrapped in it, part of it. No heartbeat, no breath, no tether to the waking world.
Alone with thoughts that twisted into words unscreamed, then twisted again, no longer her own.

“Welcome.“

​
“Who are you? What part of the Dream is this?”
It made no sense. The Dream was regulated – shaped by creators, mapped and charted by centuries of practised tradition.
There were rules. The most cardinal of them was keeping it pleasant.​

“This is not the Dream.”

​
“Of course it is. Now stop this nonsense, whoever you are.”
Annoyance tightened her lips. Whoever this creator was, she didn’t appreciate their puerile humor.
Truthfully, others’ ability to shape the Dream had always irritated her. In the waking world, it was customary to praise their skill and ‘imagination’. Here, she could be irritated all she liked.

“This is not the Dream. This is… elsewhere.”

​

“No. This must be the Dream.”
A pause.
“You’re messing with me. Klysda, is that you? I don’t have time for this.”
Her patience had hung by a tether all day, and Klysda had already frayed most of it. If she kept this up, Larta would probably snap.
“Come on. I don’t get more than half a night, and you know it. And if you think this to be creative, think again.”

​

“I am not Klysda.”

​

“Then stop the charade. Who are you?”

Silence.

“Answer me!”

Silence.

Stretching on for minutes, hours, days, and months. She perceived neither, and all of it at once.
Larta rarely felt fear. She barely remembered it. It was a feeling so familiar from her youth, but one that had been carefully subsumed since then.
But now, the longer she kept floating, she felt it expand in her chest and crack the haughty countenance she had so carefully cultivated over the years.

​“Please… I… don’t know what’s happening.”

“That’s not surprising.”

​

“I did something wrong, didn’t I?”

​

She hadn’t done anything differently. Not that she remembered.
But she knew when emotions veered towards unpleasantness, the Dream could mirror the inscape of the mind in the most capricious ways.
Then again, she wasn’t a creator. Even if she hadn’t had herself in check – which she was sure she had – it wouldn’t have affected things enough to create… this.

​

“No, not at all.”

​
“Did something happen?”

​

“Yes, several things. But not all of them. Not yet.”

​

She turned – or thought she did – but nothing shifted. The mist swallowed all sense of movement and direction. No figures. No edges. Only grey.

“This feels… wrong.”

The voice chuckled. A mirthless sound that echoed in her mind.

“How do I get out?”

​

“You can’t.”

​

“Of course I can.”
Larta straightened – or at least she thought she did. She wouldn’t play the victim in someone else’s power trip of a dream. And although it was strictly forbidden to seek out companions and adversaries made within the Dream, she would find whoever did this to her.
“I had quite enough of this. You will let me out. Now!”

​Silence.

​But this time, the silence was not absence. It was force. It was pressure. Pressure against her ears and spreading within her lungs, where it stymied her demands until they were nothing but a breath, a whisper, a plea.

“Just… please. Please answer me. How long until I wake up?”

The silence changed then. And when the response came, it was almost gentle.

​

“You are not asleep.”

​