Skylar's Reawakening, Memory 1: Light a Candle and Make a Wish

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To the store!

A boy, alone within his family, stormed into his room, slamming the door shut in his wake. Seconds after being alone, the tears he fought to hold back burst forth. He let them fall through choked sobs, until his nose started leaking too. He wiped his eyes with the underside of his wrist and looked around for a tissue. A dark night permeated his room through the open window, and moonlight touched the edges of the bed and bookshelf in its path. The boy walked across the stiff carpet, kicking aside his few toys as he made his way to a tissue box on a shelf. Hastily, he grabbed a thin tissue and blew his red nose, knocking over some neighboring books.

He sniffled, and, with mild annoyance rising through his overwhelmed emotions, picked up the books. Painted covers, collections of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and legends he felt he was beginning to outgrow, stared up at him. The dated art, from a generation before even his parents’, prompted a memory of a legend that wasn’t recorded in any of these books. He still knew it from somewhere, though from where he couldn’t begin to guess. It wasn’t so much a story, but a simple instruction: light a candle, make a wish, and a passing dream traveler will grant it while you sleep.

Something like that, he vaguely recalled.

The boy didn’t think too hard about it. He dropped the books. With tears drying on his cheeks and intent in his small beating heart, he scoured the room for a candle. This being the 21^st century, a boy his age wouldn’t just have one on hand, unlike the boys of the generation he suspected his fairy tale collections were originally printed. His mind was set, however, and it didn’t take long to remember that his family kept scented candles in the drawer of a narrow hallway table. Automatically his body started for the door, but his hand hovered over the handle, frozen in icy hesitation.

He gritted his teeth and slowly pushed the door open. Immediately, without its solid buffer, loud voices carried from down the hall.

“I am ‘being there’ for them! Who do you think puts food on the table?!”

“That’s not the same! They need their father, and I—”

“You don’t think I know that? My hands are tied—”

“They are not! You’re working too much out of some, some avoidance of something. I don’t know what...”

“Not of reality. Everything is getting more expensive out there, and they’ll thank me later for keeping a roof over their heads, which I don’t see you helping with!”

“You don’t see me helping? What, do you think their diapers just got magically changed, or their school lunches made themselves and drove them there every damn day?”

The boy tuned out the routine argument at the expense of inflaming the pit in his stomach, and focused on sneaking down the hallway. The table stood out of sight from the main room, though the light cast a shadow puppet performance of his parents’ fight on the wall just past it. He knew their disappointed and upset gestures weren’t directed at him, but it didn’t change that it felt like it. With steady yet clumsy stealth, he arrived at the table and began opening drawers until he found a candle encased in a glass jar, next to a long snout lighter.

His attention held by his mission, he didn’t hear the fight escalate. He reached cautiously to pull the candle out without making a sound, when an unknown object hit the wall, his mother’s shadow mirroring her ducking out of the way. The object shattered, and the boy somehow swallowed a scream as glass shrapnel scraped his cheek. He snatched the lighter and candle and darted back to his room with no fear of being caught amidst the noise, finding a twisted blessing in his cursed invisibility to grown-ups in situations like these.

Safely evacuated back into his room, the door blocking out the horrendous noise outside, the boy paused without realizing it for a long moment as his pulse settled. He leaned against the door, eyes blank. Eventually his senses regathered themselves and his purpose returned. He turned over the candle in his hands. A picture of a woman’s lips with a slender, red-nailed finger held up before them in a discrete and inviting gesture graced the label. Secret Rendezvous, a blend of cinnamon, lavender, cognac, and select spices. The boy shrugged, unable to decipher any meaning from the strange label and name he couldn’t pronounce, and took it over to the window sill. The night air was still and cool, awash in spring’s renewal. He got to work figuring out the lighter, and felt an equivalent spark of hope light up in his heart when he got it to work. Carefully, with an elementary education in fire safety, he lit the candle.

The tiny flame bobbed and danced around the black wick. The boy set down the lighter without taking his eyes off its every whimsical move. A pool of warm red wax gradually formed around it, and the light reflected on its liquid surface. He looked to the night sky, his one small light added to the trillions of others hidden behind the clouds, and made his wish.

For the boy, that was it. His wish faded in the seconds it took to say out loud, dispersed into the cool spring air outside the window. He knelt in silence before the candle for a long moment, hoping somehow that just deeply wanting could amplify the signal. After a while, his emotional fatigue caught up to him via heavy eyelids and slower breathing, and there was nothing left to do but try to sleep. As he lay down, alone, he wished that his wish would be heard and come true.

He didn’t know it, lying there in his bed, but his wish began a journey as soon as his voice gave it form. At the end of the sound wave’s reach into the night, before it became one with the silence all around, a stray wave broke off, curled up, and compacted itself into an untraceable particle. The particle floated on currents not dictated by the Earth’s atmosphere or winds, finding its way to an invisible fissure of within our physical realm. It slipped inside, where the current grew stronger, joining with other branches and streams all flowing towards one greater river carving out the space between the Waking World and the Dream Realm. This place has gone by many names throughout its long, parallel history with humanity—the Textrinus, the Nexial River, the Greater Web—but in the time of our story, dream travelers most commonly referred to it as the Noble Current.

The particle carrying the boy’s wish grew into a small ball of warm yellow light, with streaks of varying hues within it arcing like the beams of a plasma globe. It flowed along in the total darkness like it was being pulled on a string, gently colliding with invisible obstacles and dragged around them, continuing its journey through the fissure between worlds. It bumped into and passed other clusters of yellow balls of light, until it finally descended deep enough. Then, like someone flicked on a light switch, the Noble Current revealed itself: a deep, deep canyon of ever-fluctuating blue, pink, and yellow structures of dust and light akin to astronomical molecular clouds. Colossal and translucent, they shifted around and through each other, forming new colors and shapes in continuously unfolding fractal patterns at their overlapping boundaries. A river of a similar color-changing substance in a liquid state snaked in the valleys that formed between the painted and patterned canyon walls. The boy’s wish glided like a dandelion in the wind, hovering over the multicolored river and bouncing back up as it made contact.

Further up the river, a man lay in a blackwood canoe, with an arm and a leg dangling over the side. His bare foot hung above the water, but his fingers trailed in it, changing the color and adding ripples of reds and greens to the water’s blues, pinks, and yellows. Dark messy hair fell over his closed eyes as he relaxed, the other hand over stomach softly rising and falling with each breath through his nose, aimlessly floating along the Noble Current. No oars or possessions occupied the canoe with him. The dream traveler had nothing except for what he wore: a brown long coat with a blue plaid interior and accents over a black shirt and pants. He sighed and resettled where he lay as the canoe bumped against the canyon walls a few times before being carried back out towards the river’s center.

The wish appeared around a bend, and drifted towards the canoe magnetically. The dream traveler’s face tightened, sensing it coming. Sure enough, it found the canoe and circled around him, its light gently pulsing. He grunted and swatted at it like an alarm clock, but it dodged his hand effortlessly. The canoe spun in place from the movement.

“Go away,” the dream traveler groaned.

The wish persisted and darted up close in his face.

“Not today,” he shot an arm out again, and missed again. “I’m busy thinking of ways to… ugh...” he trailed off, knowing it wasn’t going to leave him.

The dream traveler sat up, stretched his neck, and rubbed a languid hand down his face. Brown eyes blinked to attention, while the wish waited patiently in a bouncy hover bobbing alongside the canoe. The sound of distant rushing water echoed between the canyon walls, mixed with a signature deep and bassy hum near the lower limits of the human hearing range that constantly reverberated throughout the Noble Current.

“Alright,” the dream traveler waved the wish on over. “I’ll listen, but that’s it.”

The ball of light zipped over to him. He touched it and it popped into a wet mist, splitting into three separate pieces that circled in the air long enough for the boy’s fragile voice to speak:

“I wish for a normal home, and that my parents would stop fighting.”

Then the three lights spun in on themselves, like soap around a drain, and went out.

The canoe drifted backwards, passing buttes and towering gaseous formations visible over a low ridge in the cosmic canyon. Ahead, an island forked the river and the horizon. The dream traveler kept an impassive expression, stuck thinking it over. He glanced over the side and caught his reflection’s eye in the water’s surface, waves steadily rippling over his image.

“What do you say, Skylar?” he asked himself and relented with a sigh. “I suppose you can’t ignore one like this.”

Skylar lifted himself to his feet, effortlessly managing his balance. The canoe didn’t just rock. Its shape began breaking down. Changing. Edges stretched, angles open and closed, and new planes rose up from and slid through the sides, like a breath beneath a scaly hide. On the whole, it shrank and slimmed down while the dream traveler kept his bare feet in a riding position.

“Eh, what the hell,” he shrugged. “One last ride and all that business. Some good karma before I go wouldn’t hurt.”

The blackwood canoe finished its transformation into a sleek black wood board, wider and pointed at the nose with lightning bolt fins under the tail. Skylar bent his knees and hunkered down, sending power down into it through his heels. The board lifted up off the water, weighted and shaky, sheets of water dripping from its sides. The power it received and held created a hot underside, boiling the surface into steam directly beneath it. When it was about a foot in the air, Skylar smoothed out his posture and tuned into a temporary homing sense that popping the wish had granted him towards its origin.

“Alright, where are we going?”

He waited, quiet inside, until a small internal pull suggested a northward direction. Turning north, he faced the tall canyon wall, currently a mix of predominantly pink and yellow forms with blue scattering through it in a wood grain pattern, knotting up in pools and clusters here and there. Webbing and interlocking structures within structures could be seen staring deep enough into the translucent walls, but Skylar had his eyes towards the upper edge, some forty feet above him. He scoffed; right off the bat it couldn’t be easy. He bent forward and launched the board into a U-turn, doubling back to a lower ridge he remembered seeing.

Skylar sighted the surmountable ridge and bent low for speed. Colored water and steam kicked up in his wake. He calculated his jump, launching the board. Correcting a sloppy landing, he rode the board up zigzagging inclines along the ridge until he cleared the crest, where the landscape expanded. Chaos terrain of pillars and plateaus littered with deep crevasses and crossing rivers stretched to the boundless horizon. Loops and portals of the semi-hardened light substance reached to the heavens, a striped sky of lights and darks with stars of every color known and unknown arranged in a parabolic grid. Fast moving, shapeshifting clouds crossed through the alternating lanes of day and night, glowing differently under each condition. Gigantic, dark-leaved trees the size of skyscrapers marked the region, with exposed systems of intertwining tunnel-sized roots spiraling down the many canyon sides, their ends flexing into breathing curls. Pools and lakes filled some areas, though no logical pattern based on gravity and physical fluid dynamics determined their formation, and the nature of reflections in their surfaces varied. The low hum of the Noble Current permeated it all, and a kinetic readiness coursed through every living and nonliving thing.

Charting a course through the ethereal labyrinth, Skylar rode his board along a spiny ridge circling around a deep hole with no bottom. A cold air rose from its black abyss, and he couldn’t help a glance down. Suddenly a gust of warm air rose up, and Skylar quickly focused on his route. A wide waterfall opposite of his starting point poured and disappeared down the chasm, and he leapt for it. His board crashed and caught the flowing water at its apex, and he fought against its downward current to pull himself up and over.

As Skylar pulled himself up the waterfall, the air shifted with a colossal presence ascending from the hole. A large, oil-black blob of a creature with a mouth like a whale shark investigated the little dream traveler hopping around its cavern. It raised a dripping arm with calcified horns for fingers towards the waterfall. Skylar shot a burst of energy down into his board and kicked into gear, clearing the creature’s grasp. The spray of the displaced waterfall drenched him as he zipped away, carving his way upstream.

A bone shaking yet lazy groan echoed from the dream creature’s abyssal mouth.

“Relax, I’m not here for you,” Skylar called back nonchalantly, and dodged around some wrinkled vines and roots bathing in the wide channel.

He veered back onto land, picking up speed to dry out his coat billowing behind him. Following his internal compass took him jumping across high hills, gliding through crystal-laden crevasses, and riding up more rivers, slipping around drifting armored otters and other dream animals. The cool wind on his face tingled, his brown eyes squinting and scanning until he found where the wish’s pull was leading him: far ahead, a fissure in the light sat tucked into a high mesa, its area coated in a mirage shimmer.

A portal into the dream world of the boy who made the wish.

Skylar could get his board into an airborne glide over to it, but he needed enough of a runway. He charted the best available path as it manifested before him at his speed, tearing across the Noble Current’s wild topography. He maximized his acceleration in the clear sections, picking turns that he could carry his speed through. Wild winds coursed around him. The board’s underside glowed red hot. His body felt tense and light at the same time, moving only when absolutely necessary and resting in between micro adjustments.

Amidst the thrill of the ride, an unexpected sharp pang shot up his right hand. He winced and examined it. A gray discoloration crawled up his arm, and his fingers spasmed and split, glitching out between six or seven fingers in total at a time.

“Damn!” He scoffed and shook out his hand, though it did nothing to alleviate the symptoms. “That’s what I get for snoozing in the Current too long.”

Throwing his useless hand behind him, he readjusted for balance as he neared a natural ramp in the landscape that would launch him right into the fissure. Hunkered down on the balls of his feet, he channeled as much energy as he could into the board for top speed. Dream animals, sensing his disruptive presence, cleared out of his way and ducked into trees and behind ridges.

Skylar hit the ramp.

The board seamlessly slid over the edge, taking him up higher and higher. He fixed his gaze on his target, and the fissure grew larger as it got closer. Maintaining his delicate balance took all his attention, until another, much harsher, pain pulsed in his right hand again, nearing his elbow. Skylar flinched, and the board responded with a sputter. He lost some air and saw his trajectory towards the fissure shift, almost beyond saving. He grit his teeth and forced himself back into alignment with his board, focusing his energy on it to keep it flying. He steadied his breathing. He could still make it.

Another flash seared his right arm so severely he experienced the distant recoil of his sleeping body in the Waking World reacting to it.

Skylar lost it and doubled over, flipping in mid air. His board spun out beneath him. It tumbled down to the valleys far below. One of two things would happen next for Skylar. Either he’d fly through the fissure, land on the other side and be okay, or he’d hit the canyon wall beside it, plummeting downward, probably passing out and thus increasing his exposure time in the Noble Current to a fatal degree. The decay in his arm would consume his entire dream body, and his brain in the Waking World would cease to function, killing him. He thought of this as he tried to make sense of his spinning surroundings, wondering where he’d land.

He collided with a wall. Fearing the worst, he braced to fight for consciousness, but he didn’t fall for long. He hit a carpeted floor almost immediately after, its thin fuzzy layer not the greatest impact absorber, but it was enough. Skylar scrambled to his hands and knees as his senses settled from his flight.

The first thing he saw was the fissure at the far end of a dark and subdued living room, and through it the multicolored chaos terrain of the Noble Current and its many rivers. He’d cleared it, which meant he’d arrived in the wisher’s dream. He let out a sigh of relief. Then a couch-sized glass vase hit the wall beside him and exploded into shrapnel.

Instinct took over. With his left hand, Skylar summoned a blackwood barrier that formed a half-dome around him, protecting him from the glass rain. His face read confusion, still harried from his near miss in the Noble Current. The pieces tittered and tinkled against his makeshift umbrella, and he turned to locate the source of the attack.

The living room morphed with the turn of his head, as settings do in dreams, and stretched out into an ovoid gladiatorial arena, complete with rings of amphitheater seating. Staticky and fuzzy apparitions clustered sparsely in the nosebleeds, viewing motionlessly and silently. Aside from the living room, which sat wall-less in the middle of battle area, the arena was entirely constructed with a dusty red clay, with limited detailing in the pillars, trim, and other fill areas. Skylar stood in the exposed living room, between two giant robots with disproportionately oversized hands and feet running at each other in earth-shaking bounds.

They aimed to collide right over him. Skylar cursed and manifested another blackwood board out of nothing. He kicked off away from the living room just as one of the robot’s junkyard magnet of a foot crashed down on top of it, crushing the dollhouse furniture. The robots locked their arms, multi-jointed assemblies of cables, pulleys, and gear systems, in a grapple wresting for dominance. Skylar skirted around the outer edge of the arena, building momentum and sizing up the two opponents of the fight he found himself in the middle of.

“I am ‘being there’ for them!” The larger robot bellowed, throwing a punch. “Who do you think puts food on the table?!”

The other robot caught his arm under hers. They were both androids, one male and one female, with gigantic, boxy monitors for their heads, each displaying a hiccuping image of an angry face.

“That’s not the same!” The female android shot back. “They need their father, and I can’t go on like this alone!”

Their voices rang out distorted, hissy and watery, with harsh mechanical clicks and whirs as undertones. With her body locked around the father droid’s arm, the mother droid spun with a torrential windup and threw him across the floor. He stumbled to the side of the arena, where Skylar was riding. The dream traveler felt the colossus’ shadow fall over him, dropping the temperature. Swearing to himself, he pushed his board on out from under the shadow before the robot collapsed, tearing through the seating in a storm of brick and dust. Skylar shielded his face from the debris as his board lifted off, hovering up along the high seats.

The female android kept a fighting stance up. The downed robot shifted, displacing more rubble, and lifted himself up.

“You don’t think I know that? My hands are tied. I don’t have a choice!”

He lunged for his opponent with a terrifying burst of speed. She was caught off guard. With a monstrous grapple he brought her to the ground, raising another blooming cloud of dust.

“Mom! Dad!” a small voice barely made itself heard over the aftershocks of the impact.

Circling from a safe range in the nosebleeds, Skylar saw a small form dashing in from the vomitorium tunnel beneath the seats. It was a boy in pajamas, no more than ten years old, crying and waving his arms.

“Mom! Dad! Please, just stop! This is… you’re...”

He choked on the dust, exasperated. He clutched his hands together at his chest, making furtive and nervous glances to the stands, which made his posture shrink even further. Skylar noted the boy’s scared eyes pass over him and the other spectating apparitions. He slowed down to take a closer look at the odd apparitions and saw echoes of backpacks and collared shirts with academic badges on their breasts. Classmates. Friends, or would-be friends, all watching, and some laughing, at the boy’s helpless plight to stop his parents’ fight on full public display.

“Don’t need Jung to figure this one out,” Skylar muttered. “This must be the place.”

The dissolution of the internal sense that guided him there confirmed it. He looked down on the boy who had made the wish, standing like an ant before his parents tangled up in a brawl. Hovering between the phantom audience, he felt a passing shame to be watching, but he ultimately ignored it and started circling the ring again, ready to intervene.

The child continued begging, but it fell on deaf ears. His parents’ robot avatars lifted themselves up, bleeding sparks and oil, and shook out their tightly coiled arms for round two. In a flash they began trading car crash punches. They paced around each other, their heavy metal feet stomping up storm clouds of twisting, oil-stained sands. The boy disappeared in the chaos, appearing out from between their legs only to line himself up to be crushed underfoot by the next step. He called out uselessly, oblivious to the massive foot nearing the crown of his head.

Reflexively, Skylar lurched forward, but it was too late. The boy, however, blipped out as one of his parent’s careless feet trampled over where he stood, only to blip back in somewhere else in the arena, unconscious that he’d even been transported and seamlessly continuing his futile efforts to be heard. Skylar knew the boy wasn’t in any real danger. Unlike his dream body, which held a vital link to his physical body and consciousness, the boy’s was only a mental projection of his own mind. Still, the visual of a child in danger spoke to a deeper part of him that was willing to act regardless.

The father droid landed a harsh blow on the mother droid, detaching a wiry apparatus that crashed like a comet into the ground. The mother droid twitched and spun back into stance, charging forth with a relentless series of punches. Both robots shouted in anger at the other, their words hardly intelligible amidst the screeching metal, screaming gears, and crater-forming footfalls.

“Listen to me!” the boy shouted, fists clenched at his sides.

He stood dumbly, aghast that he couldn’t get their attention, when a sudden presence behind him stole his. Fading into existence behind a sheet of falling sand, a small, deactivated child android sat with its knees up to its chest and its TV monitor head down. The fear and sorrow in the boy’s wide eyes only deepened at the sight of it. He shook his head, backing away from the inert yet beckoning robot with two high levers poking out of the cockpit in the back.

A robot foot landed over the boy, but this time it just phased through him. He stood anchored in place, looking back and forth between his android, dark and inactive, and his parents, wild and alive, as if he was trying to find a way out in between them. The moment’s momentum made up his mind for him. With a gulp and a tightening of his fists, he marched over to the android and got in.

The tiny robot whirred to life with a computerized startup sound, the revving of engines, and coughs of exhaust. The monitor tilted up, and a lined image of the boy’s face appeared looking down, refamiliarizing himself with the controls, before orienting outward into the arena with a shaky determination. He and the machine stumbled forward like a fawn learning to walk.

“Mom, Dad! It’s me!” His voice projected, tinny and clipping through the android’s speakers.

The child android stood before the dueling titans, waving his arms, still failing to hail them. He assumed a pouting posture, when a notification in the form of a trophy icon appeared on his cockpit’s heads-up display. The boy accessed it, and found the robot came equipped with leverage in his ongoing battle to be seen and heard. He pressed go, and rallied again at his parents.

A porthole spun open in the palm of the child robot’s hand, and a tube emerged. It turned perpendicularly to fit in his grip and expanded like a scroll, displaying an elementary school report card.

“Look!” the boy cried. “I got my report card. All A’s! Look, just like you wanted!”

The mother android’s giant head pivoted to him, blocking an attack from the father android. A double of her upper torso split off from the original, bound at the waist like a Siamese twin. The original upper body continued the battle against her attacker, while the second bent down and took the report card. Her finger trailed down the charts, reading his grade in each subject. Then she looked up with a Stepford smile, all teeth and rendered too wide through the screen’s distortion.

“All A’s!” she proclaimed, her voice hollow and forced. “That’s my little man!”

Balloons and sparkling confetti and glitter shot out in jets from vents along her back, while her other half continued the fight against her other half. Celebratory and off key kazoos buzzed through her speakers, and a warm light radiated out from her chest onto the child android. Hearts and star emoticons swam up on the boy’s screen.

“And see here,” the boy summoned up another letter of accomplishment in his other hand. “These are acceptance letters from the tryouts I did, Dad. I know you said you wanted me to push myself to play with the other kids more, so I’m doing chess club and basketball. I start both this week.”

The father droid’s whole frame shook like it was about to burst, then he too formed a duplicate attached at the waist like the mother android. It didn’t matter that matter overlapped with matter when their fighting bodies moved in a way that should have collided with their split forms. They simply passed through each over in that dreamlike fashion, phantom limbs made visible but and only selectively physical.

The second father droid turned his attention away from the continuing battle, pulled out a pair of comically oversized spectacles, and examined the letters.

“Excellent, son. Excellent!” He patted the bot on the shoulder. “You’ll build more character than you’ll know what to do with!”

“This makes you both happy, right?” the boy asked breathlessly.

“Yes, yes. You make us both proud.”

“Our pride and joy.”

More balloons and streamers emitted from all over, accompanied by kazoos reminiscent of broken-winged beetles. Compartments in the parent droids’ chests opened, revealing the spotlight emitting the warm light the child basked in. Their bent forms leaned in and hugged and clamped his shoulder, while their other torsos wailed on each other behind them, metallic fists collided and ripping off chunks of bent and twisted steel. The noise of the fight faded as the boy successfully pulled the dream’s focus away from it.

“I cleaned the living room, too,” he added, as the living room in the center of the arena reassembled itself in a blink.

“Oh, such a good boy,” the mother shook her head approvingly, her hand over her heart.

“What did we do to deserve you?” the father chuckled.

“This right here!” The boy seized his opportunity and pleaded, “This way we are right now. Can’t we be this way all the time? Instead of fighting? Can’t we stay like this? Please?”

The battling half of the parent androids stopped and straightened, standing like obelisks for a long moment. The sand, glitter, and confetti settled. The apparitions in the stands watched on, and the whole arena held its breath. The looming forms of the parent androids turned to their halves bent down with boy. They leaned in too, splitting off from and leaving behind a third upper torso, still and watching.

“Oh, of course, honey...”

“But only…”

“...only if everything is perfect. Everything,” their radio scratchy voices stated in unison, “must be perfect.”

The word appeared mirrored across the boy’s screen, flashing in bright red directly over his eyes and into his brain. The screen glitched in and out of static and color renderings, before settling on a grainy filter, too glossy and too bright. The boy smiled, too wide and too forced, his face sporadically distorting as the signal skipped. Slowly, his monitor head nodded, and he took the hands of the androids of his parents, disappearing into the nest of chaotic metal forms.

Gliding up across the seats, Skylar winced and decided he’d seen enough. He sighted the vomitorium the boy had originally entered through and smoothly steered his board over to it. With a hop he leapt over the edge of the seats, keeping a hand low to the ground for balance. Too late he realized he extended his bad arm, still damaged from lingering too long in the Noble Current. He maintained his balance at the expense of a tearing and scratchy pain in his forearm, his hand already numb. He scoffed bitterly at the reminder and rode into the dark tunnel.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly. The edges of the tunnel were lined with strips of lights spaced out like road lines, and, quicker than real distance covered would have suggested, the light from the mouth of the tunnel vanished, leaving just Skylar riding between the lights. An all encompassing silence followed, a merciful break from the cacophony of the arena. Beneath his feet he felt a force akin to repelling magnets between his board and the ground. The lights passed by. The silence deepened. The dark thickened. More lights slid by, then two new rows appeared, crossing over his path.

Skylar breezed through the intersection. Another lane of light strips cut across at an angle, then another. The ground dipped, and riding down the incline revealed a whole course of winding roads. They bent and folded in on themselves like shapes from a topology textbook. Out of curiosity, Skylar neared the edge of his lane, wondering how he could see the labyrinthine network of paths ahead through the tunnel walls. He stuck his good hand out and confirmed his hypothesis; the walls disappeared, leaving just an endless black chasm over the edge marked by the thin lights. His body sensed the empty space with the crawling shiver of a near fall. He set his mind to the task of navigating the shifting course before him.

The dream traveler’s body relaxed, and he rode gently despite the hazards. Understanding the logic of dreams, he trusted he would get to where he needed to go sooner or later. Time wasn’t a concern, and neither was thirst or hunger. If he got lost or trapped he could just wake up. The projected dreams of individuals still held the potential for bodily danger and harm, but generally weren’t nearly as unstable of environments as the Noble Current, and Skylar knew his way around them.

Sure enough, after a series of precarious loops, curves, hairpins, and corkscrews, the road leveled out again, punctuated with a door up ahead. Carrying his speed, Skylar stepped off his board and dematerialized it as he approached the door. Without breaking his stride he swung open the door and walked through into a room both wide and cramped.

The floors, walls, and ceiling were all constructed with long planks of wood, nailed unevenly and curled up like cowlicks here and there. A large circular lens like a glass pool occupied a majority percentage of the floor, surrounded by a narrow ring of floor space mostly occupied by wooden crates and boxes stuffed with straw and antiquated scientific tools. A quarter-activated tourist telescope stood at the north end of the floor lens. A low, warm light with no source lit the room.

Skylar stepped between the leaning storage stacks and knelt down before the giant lens in the floor. Through its shimmering surface he viewed the boy who made the wish sleeping in his bed. The bed sat beside a bookshelf and an open window with a lit candle on its sill. Traces of cinnamon, lavender, and cognac drifted up from the Waking World, through the lens, and into the boy’s dream world.

The dream traveler gripped the edge of floor with his good hand and lowered himself down, passing through the glass like it was water. An invasive cold rippled up his nervous system. He shuddered as he always did at the uncanny sensation of his nonphysical dream body passing into the Waking World. He fell into the boy’s bedroom, and continued falling through the floor. Skylar adjusted his belief, electing for his dream body to behave like it was physical and obey the confines of the Waking World’s reality, and the carpet stopped at his shins. A panicked, existential spasm gripped the muscles in his buried feet, out of alignment with the laws of this reality, until he stepped out of the floor and onto it. His dream body settled and acclimated, and he shook it off with another shudder.

Standing as a spirit in the boy’s bedroom, Skylar surveyed his surroundings. The room was organized, neat, and tidy—one could say it was perfect—aside from two toys strewn about, a giant robot and lizard monster action figures. A spring breeze puffed up the window curtains and prodded the candle flame to motion. Skylar extinguished the candle between his thumb and forefinger. He took a moment to feel the air and observe the average American neighborhood outside, then turned to the boy.

The boy breathed in an airy, unmetered rhythm. His face cycled through various twitches, the result of a particularly intense dream. Standing over him, Skylar wondered how it was going in the gladiatorial arena, if his dream was still taking place there. The lens the dream traveler came through still shimmered above his head, a bridge between realms.

“‘I wish for a normal home and for my parents to stop fighting,’” Skylar said to the sleeping child. “First off, that’s two wishes. Second, wording is important when it comes to wishes. You want to avoid words with relative definitions like ‘normal.’ Normal doesn’t always mean ideal. What if what you have is normal? Because the harsh reality these days is that it more than likely is.”

The boy let out a small “mmph” and rolled over with one foot sticking out of his covers. His small, curled up form looked especially vulnerable to Skylar. The dream traveler crossed his arms and sighed.

“But I know what you mean. I’ll see what I can do.”

Traversing the boy’s dream world gave Skylar some direction on how best to approach solving the wish. He exited the room and explored the hallway into the house. It spilled out into a familiar living room, recognizable even with the lights out. A broom leaned over a broken vase and a pile of glass shards that had been swept up near the wall. Evidently there wasn’t much will to clean it further that night. Traces of water still dotted the floor. Skylar wondered where the flowers went.

A mechanical clunk quietly reverberated throughout the house. Skylar perked up, and a flash of lights beamed through him from a front window. Two circles. Headlights. Taking a guess at where to go, Skylar glided through an open kitchen to a door that led into a garage. He opened the door just in time to see the garage door shifting shut. Distantly the sound of a car driving off faded down the street outside.

“Not a good sign,” Skylar muttered with a throw of his eyes.

He closed the door and wandered back in to the house. Making his way through to the master bedroom, he examined wedding invitations on fridge, bills and tax files left out on the kitchen table, and hanging picture frames along the walls, continuing to build his profile of the family, but nothing in particular stuck out to him, other than that most of the photos were taken when the boy was a couple of years younger. None were recent.

Skylar arrived at what could only be the master bedroom. The door creaked as he opened it.

“William?” the mother slurred sleepily from her bed. “It’s okay. I’m alright. Go back to your room. Go back to… sleep…”

The dream traveler believed he was invisible, and his dream body followed his belief. He slipped through the half open door. Lit by nightstand lamp, the room contained a dresser, an open armoire with a TV on the top shelf, and a canvas print of close up flowers over the headboard of the queen sized bed. Skylar recognized the mother from the android representation in her son’s dream. Already half asleep, she lay alone in bed with tear stained cheeks and an open bottle of wine on the nightstand beside her. Two more emptied bottles lay on the floor, half hidden under the bed.

Skylar walked over to the window and waited. Before long, a cloud took form over the mother’s snoring head, up near the ceiling. With a barely perceptible electrostatic buzzing, a glassy pool formed in the center of the cloud. A streak of reflected light ran across the lens’ surface.

Skylar climbed onto her bed to reach the portal into her dream world. He stayed on the empty side, hoping his weight on the mattress wouldn’t wake her. He manifested a short blackwood ladder that rolled out from the shining lens to assist him, unable to hoist himself up with his numb right hand. He climbed up and disappeared into her dream world.

Not five seconds later, he jumped back out, his face white.

“Ho ho, this relationship is screwed!”

Grimacing in hard sympathy, Skylar lowered himself off the bed. The mother drunkenly mumbled something in her sleep, remaining oblivious to the dream traveler’s passage in and out of her head. Skylar took a moment to reevaluate his approach.

“I’ll have to see what I can do from the kid’s angle.”

His mouth hung open, trying to think of something to say for the mother as he parted, but he came up blank and just walked away.

As silently as a passing phantom, Skylar made his way through the house back to the boy’s room. He was still asleep in his bed, somehow having thrown off nearly all the covers and lying in a position like something from an avant-garde dance performance. The cloud and portal to his dream world remained softly churning above him. Skylar summoned another ladder, climbed through it, and stood once more in the wooden lens room.

Skylar paced around the wide lens in the middle of the floor. Its otherworldly light threw wavy patterns over his legs as he passed. Given the tenacity for dream worlds to change between blinks, he checked over the room again, scanning for alterations. Untouched boxes and crates still crowded the narrow floor and his bare feet crunched over spilled hay. After completing a lap around the pool, he stopped.

“William?” Skylar called out. “William, can you hear me?”

A short echo bounced around the room, picking up a weird microtone from traveling over the lens. Skylar waited, monitoring for responses in the environment, and then spoke again to the boy’s subconscious.

“William, I want you to show me where your heart dreams. Can you do that for me?”

The lens shimmered. Skylar thought he felt the room’s sourceless light pulse, but after a minute of nothing he figured it was his imagination.

“I’m here working on your wish,” he tried again. “Show me the way to your heartshrine, so I can help you.”

The room rumbled. It shook the boxes, and some stacks fell over. The lens rippled, and clouds fogged the view below into the Waking World. Skylar remained calm, and the rumbling peaked with the formation of a door on the north end of the room. It rose slowly from the ground, growing like a plant in time-lapse footage, and its doorknob sprouted like a spring bud.

“There we go,” Skylar nodded thanks and marched over to it.

He pushed open the door and a harsh light forced him to squint. An altitudinal wind whipped his hair back. The threshold revealed an acrylic blue sky, with either a ground so far below that it wasn’t visible, or there was no bottom at all, which wasn’t all that uncommon in dream worlds. Herds of white clouds of varying sizes lazily drifted by. No sun and no moon held position in the open and empty atmosphere. Leaning out, Skylar examined that the open door hovered in the middle of the great sky. The room he was in didn’t exist on the other side.

Shrugging, he took a step out, and fell.

He plummeted downward, racing past cirrus scraps and cumulus dreadnoughts. He tilted forward to fall headfirst, keeping his limbs straight and close to his body, gaining speed. Any clouds he hit poofed into dissipating rings of vapors in his wake. No horizon and no landmarks marked any distance covered and no ground ever came in sight. Time started to slip away, until Skylar caught sight of a dark cloud in his peripheral vision. He aimed his fall towards it.

As it neared, the dark cloud clarified. It wasn’t a cloud at all, but a floating temple, the scale of which also became clear the closer Skylar fell. It spanned over a city block in size, with ornate tower complexes at each point of the compass connected by a circular path. Underneath a many-tiered roof held up by hundreds of columns, the central temple housed a massive burning flame like a small sun, white in the center and blue and green at its wispy, flaring edges. In some places the fires spilled out onto and over the ringed path, pouring down like waterfalls into the endless sky below.

“Literally overflowing,” Skylar mused. “Oh, to be young again.”

He summoned his board and prepared to land at the boy’s heartshrine. The board collided with and skidded against the ring around the temple. Skylar flung his arms out to keep his balance, going from edge to edge before straightening out, carrying and dispersing his momentum from the long fall until it was spent, and he cruised at a steady pace. Heat from the burning fires caressed his skin, and he flew over any streams jetting out over the path.

Glowing hieroglyphs of core memories lined the path’s smooth floor. Skylar flew over the images and passed by the ridged columns with their heavy bases holding up the roof, its eaves adorned with horns and curves, giving it a brambly texture. The temple’s entire construction featured an ashy maroon finish, with lighter accents the color of the underside of peeled tree bark highlighting the many smaller shifts in form as each flourish branched off into more flourishes. Each frieze or carving contained another smaller frieze or carving within it, continuing layer by layer further than the naked eye could discern. Skylar caught himself staring too long into the ever-deepening architecture and swerved at the last second to avoid flying over the edge of the path, while central fire burned and pulsed with life.

Skylar completed a lap around the heartshrine. His senses shifted into a lower level of alertness, having seen, heard, and felt nothing in or around the temple besides himself. He geared up for another lap, aiming to take a closer look armed with the familiarity of a completed pass. The mighty columns with their deep carvings and sculptured ornaments flew by. Speed smeared the hieroglyphs below. Dodging around more fire spouts, their proximity hardly fazing him, Skylar finished his second lap.

He slowed to a stop, rocking on his heels on his board. It swayed with the motion, hovering in place. Emptiness prevailed in the surrounding blue sky, and the quiet roar and rumble of the fire dominated the sparse ambiance.

“Given how intense his dream was,” Skylar muttered warily, “I’d have expected some trouble here.” He looked around again. “Nothing, really?”

A scuttling sound against the path’s surface tick-tick-ticked behind him.

The dream traveler whipped around.

A fat, short-limbed lizard with black scales dragged its belly across the path, with its long thin tail hanging over the edge. Milky white eyes with no pupils stared forwardly emptily, and jaws the size of a baby alligator’s took nibbling bites into the fire where it brushed up against the inside edge of the ring. The lizard’s nostrils flared greedily with each chomp, and short snorts escaped through its excitable eating.

Skylar raised an eyebrow from where he hovered about ten feet away.

“You going to eat all that yourself, little guy?”

The lizard ate noisily in gremlin fashion. Its wrinkled, scaly hide protected its long mouth from the fire as it reached in and pulled out another bite, sparks and embers drifting out of the sides of its jagged mouth.

“One little demon, of…” Skylar analyzed the lizard, “...looks like of the shame strain. Which means his shame is in surprisingly good moderation over this.”

He checked around again. The heartshrine remained quiet. With his hands in his coat pockets, he hovered over to the lizard.

“No other demons in sight. Plenty of vitality in the tank. Huh. A classic case of making a wish when you didn’t even need to. Kid’s gonna be allrrr…..”

The lizard hissed at him, a puny little sound like air let out of a balloon. Then something dragged the lizard off the edge by its tail. A black-scaled Lochness arch flexed and flowed over the rim of the path, followed by another huge hump swimming through the air. A massive reptilian head as big as one of the temple towers lifted itself up over the path, with a tangled mass of the smaller lizards hanging by their tails lining its chin and neck in a writhing, hissing beard. Blank, sour milk eyes locked onto the dream traveler.

“...rrrrright—Damn it!”

A massive claw came down towards Skylar with the force of an asteroid plummeting into the Earth. He flew to dodge. The mere passing of the lizard monster’s claw nearly threw him off balance, displacing the air with enough mass to make gravity twinge. His board jumped as the claw hit the ringed path, tilting the whole structure. Skylar adjusted his balance and sped up, just pulling out of range of another clawed limb striking down. The ring shook and tilted again.

Gaining enough distance, Skylar pivoted and stopped to size up the demon. Jaws the size and mass of a bascule bridge extended out from a lumpy head, bent ninety degrees at its lizard-bearded neck to view and snap at the temple and its fire. Its thick neck expanded at the torso, then contracted before expanding into another torso stacked below the upper upper torso. Four bulky, muscular arms stretched outward, and the lower pair gripped the side of the outer path with their long, mucus colored claws. The other two were free to swipe at the pesky dream traveler. Skylar dodged back again, just barely evading the reach of a sweeping arm. Coming close to the edge and unable to avoid peering over it, he saw that, like the sky, the lizard had no bottom. Torsos stacked on torsos all the way down.

The smaller lizards hanging from its head all flared their uneven teeth and hissed in a clashing chorus of disharmonies. The larger moved its jaws in, smashing through the columns’ defense like they were toothpicks, and tore a bite of the flame out from the temple. The whole dream shook and dimmed, as if the earth quaked and the sun went through a quick eclipse. The temple creaked, but before Skylar could assess the damage the lizard spat a portion of the fire back out at him. He flew over the edge to avoid the white hot fireball, the heat of its passing inflaming an existential shiver down his spine.

“That would eviscerate my dream body,” Skylar noted while falling. “I only have one shot at this.”

The fireball flew endlessly into the blue abyss. The light dimmed in and out, and the sky quivered again, telling Skylar that the demon had taken another bite out of the fire of the boy’s heartshrine. Gaining enough speed from his fall, the dream traveler swooped back up to the temple, hovering his board just above the crooked ring. A regiment of the smaller lizards had detached from the larger lizard’s beard and swarmed across the path to feed on the fire like crows to a corpse.

“Nuh-uh, none of that,” Skylar flew in.

He manifested a large fishing net and dragged it behind him as he passed, scooping up the lesser demons too mindless to be shocked. It gained weight fast. He carried it to the edge and let go, depositing the hissing, twisting mass to a long, long fall. A swipe of the master lizard’s spiky claw kept him moving, and he flew high out of reach. He’d taken care of the attack, dodged clear and clean, but something still felt wrong.

Skylar did a quick body scan. Nothing felt off, but then he realized there was a part he still couldn’t feel. He lifted his numb right arm to see a black lizard hanging from it, jaws clenched down to the bone. With a gasp he tried to shake it off, but the demon hung on. Another shake of the dream signaled him to be on alert. He felt the incoming heat of another fire blast just in time to dart away, though the lizard waving around behind him was caught in the flame and disintegrated into a burst of flaky ashes. Skylar reeled in his damaged arm, skin crawling from too many close calls.

He lowered his stance on his board to dive in for another attack. Another detachment of lesser lizards were already nibbling at the fire. They turned their heads when they heard him coming. They opened their molten hot mouths and launched an artillery barrage of fire at Skylar. Slipping around in midair like a skier losing his balance, he formed a blackwood shield and held it out, though it was only good for two or three hits before the fire disintegrated it. He survived the first barrage, but before he could think of a counter strategy another couple squadrons of the lizards detached from the endlessly squirming whole, only instead of dropping to the path, they spouted veiny gray wings and flew at him.

Skylar manifested a sword and sliced them out of the air as they charged him, feeling the cost in focus on the other parts of the demon he was now open to. Retreat overrode all other options, and he crashed down onto the path and into the horde of crawling lizards. Fire flew around him in all directions. Some shot and disintegrated other lizards, and he took every chance to cut at them as he flew through, the flying battalion hot on his tail. The master demon’s blank eyes followed his every move, only needing to turn slightly to keep up with him.

Collapsed columns and debris forced Skylar to put away his sword and focus on traversal. The ring inclined up to the temple’s damaged roof, effectively a dead end that circled back into the lizard’s jaws.

“William!” Skylar called out. “William! I need some help here!”

His appeal to the boy’s subconscious went unheard. A claw slammed down on the path in front of him, then swept across the floor. Skylar corkscrewed around to the path’s underside and back up to keep moving around its deathly grasp.

“I’m the dream traveler that answered your wish,” Skylar tried again. “I’ve come across a bit of a problem, namely a demonic manifestation of your shame in the form of a giant lizard monster that’s siphoning your life force and going to kick me out of here before I can stop it. It’s your dream. You can show me a weak point if you try—or you don’t even have to try! Your subconscious will do it for you. Just let it!”

A barrage of fireballs rained down upon him. Skylar manifested blackwood roadblocks in his wake, but the lizard army crashed right through them. The shadow of another raised claw fell over the path. Skylar sped up and followed his course to the nearing roof.

“You’re ten. You probably play video games. You know how the boss at the end of the level always has a weak point? A big glowing target screaming, ‘shoot me here!’ I need you to show me something, and fast. It’s your wish, William!”

He vaulted over the wreckage of a tower and landed hard onto a flat section of the roof. At the other end, the giant lizard reared its head, staring down at him with a greedy smile. Skylar was locked into a collision course. He could veer left or right and land in its waiting claws instead, or be torn apart by the small army barreling over the tower wreckage behind him.

The demon lizard opened its colossal jaws to greet him. A shine passed over the tip of its tongue, and an orb appeared attached to it, glowing a warm, natural green in stark contrast to the blood red cavern of its mouth and black scaled exterior. Bright and soft and vulnerable.

A weak point.

“Of course it couldn’t be outside his giant gaping maw,” Skylar shook his head, and slammed as much energy as he could down through his feet and into the board. It grew so hot it seared scorch marks into the roof in his wake.

The demon roared, emitting a hot gust of breath and spit. Skylar launched off the edge of the roof and reached for the green orb. He crossed the lipless threshold of spiny teeth. The air around him transitioned to grossly humid, and his view darkened, all the light outside behind him now. An inner sense confirmed that the orb was the key formed by William’s subconscious. He didn’t know what would happen once made contact with the it or how it would help. He certainly didn’t expect it to detach, sprout little fairy wings, and zip deeper down the lizard’s throat.

The jaws clamped shut. Darkness overwhelmed, save for the receding light of the retreating fairy orb. Skylar didn’t have time to think or voice any frustration or disappointment. The lizard’s warty tongue bucked and he rocketed off it, pursuing the green light down an increasingly hot throat. Sweat obscured his vision and he squinted through it. Abscesses of pus and tumorous lumps provided obstacles across the cylindrical course. Skylar half-expected the lumps to be eggs that would hatch into more lesser lizards to torment him. He kept his gaze trained on the green light ahead, when another light appeared, deeper down the long throat tunnel. An orange light, burning like a pilot light.

Fire. The demon was preparing to belch up a fire ball. Skylar’s focus ratcheted up another notch and he closed in on the green orb. He stretched his left arm and fingers out as far as he could. He was almost in reach. Ten feet. Five feet. He swiped at it. Missed. He grabbed again, but it slid away, like it was playing with him. A tremor rumbled through the throat. The orange light flared, then expanded.

Skylar ignored it and strained to keep up with the green orb. The rumble accelerated into an echoing roar and a wall of fire approached. Skylar struggled to keep ignoring it, but stayed with the green orb, when suddenly it dipped into a hole. He unwittingly followed, his body lurching from the fall, and the pillar of flame shot out behind him up the throat. The hole revealed itself to be a branching path deeper into the lizard’s body; its windpipe, Skylar presumed. He gathered himself and fought to regain the distance he lost on the orb, still zipping away in carefree zigzags. The fire finished spiraling up the throat behind them, taking its light with it.

Less pus and lumps clogged the smooth surface of the demon’s windpipe. The dream traveler grit his teeth and caught back up. It was just him and the green orb, descending further and further into the beast. His hand grasped the air just a few inches behind it, and his palm twinged with sensation like he already had it. He prepared to dive for it, when a sudden instinct warned him against the action. A surge of heat followed, confirming the instinct. Skylar’s body backed off and veered to the right, and through another intersection of pipes that he didn’t see, a pillar of fire shot up between him and the orb. It blazed in a column of red and orange light that illuminated a network of holes before disappearing up through one of them where the throat, as it became clear, intersected with the windpipe in multiple places.

“Oh, for…” Skylar grumbled. “Shouldn’t have expected anatomical consistency in a dream creature.”

Streams of fire crisscrossed ahead, like lasers to deter a thief. Skylar hadn’t expected the wish to push him this far, but he knew what to do. He emptied his mind, no longer thinking about what was next. He surrendered to the instinct that had him dodge the first fire, trusting his body to take it from here. His pupils contracted and swept the environment in rapid twitches, as if he himself was in REM sleep, but he didn’t think about what he saw. The visual flow only served to provide information for his body to perform its automatic calculations and move him accordingly. It was a rare flow state, and, distantly, in a long shut down part his soul, the embers of joy glowed faintly.

Skylar rocketed forward with reckless speed. His toes gripped his board, humming like a redlining engine. He spun and danced around the fire spouts as they appeared, singeing the edges of his coat and taking some of the fire with him before the high velocity winds he generated put it out. He chose unpredictable, unthinkable maneuvers in order not to loss speed, and his ride nearly transcended to performance with each wayward spin, last second leap, and grace-juggling twist.

Before Skylar realized it, he not only caught up to the green orb; he passed it.

His flow state lifted, and he blinked in disbelief as he saw the orb coming at him. He caught it with his chest and wrapped his arms around it in a bear hug, in case it struggled or tried to slip out.

“Gotcha!”

He braked his board, skidding between two columns of shooting fire and sparks like they were a finish line. His dream body pulsed in hammering adrenaline. Knowing how unpredictable dreams were, Skylar’s tension sustained itself a few moments longer. He hovered in place, somewhere deep within the demon lizard’s respiratory system, lit by the intermittent, train-traffic passage of fire, wondering what was next.

Suddenly, the green orb’s glow strengthened, and emitted a rippling wave that saturated everything inside the throat in its healthy green light.

Standing at the center of its glow, Skylar panned his head in awe at the light’s effects. The decaying tissue lining the walls weaved themselves back together, regaining a healthy color, and the warts and pus dissolved and melted without leaving a scar. The demon reeled from the cleansing, sending Skylar scrambling for balance. It shook and fought harder as he rode forward, expanding the area touched by the healing light. Skylar accelerated back the way he came, finding his way back up the throat as the green light changed the demon from the inside out.

Building speed and energy, he neared the exit in the form of a gateway of closing teeth. Skylar grinned; as if that could stop him. The green orb’s expanding energy propelled him forward like an erupting volcano.

Outside in the endless blue sky between neither ground nor space, the demon lizard quivered, hunched over the tilted edge of the ravaged heartshrine. Some of the lesser lizards looked up from their feast on the fire, curious for only a moment before turning back to gorging themselves with reptilian thoughtlessness.

Skylar shot into the air through the demon’s teeth in a hail of shattered and splintered bone chips. The orb flashed and blinded all for a glorious moment. A tiny, high-pitched bell rung and the green light enveloped the entirety of the demon, traveling all the way down the repetitions of its torso to its bottom somewhere, if there even was one. The demon’s form, in a luminescent green silhouette, wailed and waned. Skylar hung at the apex of his flight, turning to descend as another light overtook the entire dream. Blinded for his entire fall, his whole body sighed when his board bounced off the heartshrine’s outer path before finding a stable hover.

The light faded, revealing the torn up temple as Skylar had left it. While crumbled columns and caved in roofs marked its outer housing, the fire inside burned as bright as ever. The demons had hardly made a dent in its strong flame and it already flowed freely over the edge in places again. Skylar stood amongst a few of the lesser lizards too preoccupied with gluttony to even recognize him. The shadow of the greater lizard fell over them, changed.

Its black scales had grown a layer of soil, out from which sprouted a shaggy coat of green grass coating the entire lizard. Claws and teeth, previously a rotting bone material, were now formed by a strong wood and lumber with pleasantly hypnotic patterns of grain. Mushroom-spotted antlers crowned its soft, long-snouted head, and reflective brown eyes peered through the grassy fur like a golden doodle. A wind blew, running waves through its majestic coat.

The reformed lizard moved slowly, as if waking from a dream. It raised its long arms and inspected them curiously. Then, guided by newly hatched instinct, it raised its great palm over the Skylar and the lizard fodder below. Skylar remained still as it lowered, while some of the lizards sensed the threat and began to scatter. It gently touched one of the lizards with its wooden claw and a sphere of green light engulfed the small creature. When the light faded, the lesser lizard emerged having underwent a similar transformation. Grass-coated, wood-limbed, and dotted in mushrooms, they darted around, finding their bearings. When they did, they attacked the remaining black-scaled demon lizards. A small scale battle broke out, with victory clearly on the side of the reformed.

“Let’s leave a couple,” Skylar rode in and broke up the fighting. “A little bit’s okay. They serve their purpose in the ecosystem of dreams. Little carrion eaters.”

The black lizards retreated into the wreckage of the temple, disappearing in shadows. Some of the green lizards gave chase but backed off after their prey hid, choosing instead to posture and threaten should they ever come back.

Smirking at the lizard’s cute display of toughness, Skylar hopped off his board and dematerialized it. He walked along the edge of the temple, watching the lizards fall into their new roles. The greater lizard lifted the broken roofs and began clearing away debris. It carried a pile of smashed stone in its claw like a crane, its large shadow slowly panning over the dream traveler. Scattered pieces rained out of its grip, clattering onto the ring to be swept up by the smaller lizards. It deposited the load over the edge somewhere, where it fell down the sky without a sound.

A strong jolt pulsated through Skylar. He glanced over his dream body, becoming transparent and fading away.

“And not a moment too soon,” he said. He looked to the temple, then to the sky, “Alright, William. I’m outta here. These guys will help you with your self-reliance, instead of powering your shame. It’s not exactly what you wished for, but it will serve you better in the long run. Later, kid.”

The guardian lizards continued their work cleaning, maintaining, and protecting the temple, indifferent to Skylar. Another waking sensation rocked him. He took a deep breath and let it, harkening to his physical body in the Waking World calling him back to its reality. He closed his eyes and felt the dream fade out around him. The metaphysical presence of the heartshrine and its new guardians disappeared, leaving only the sensation of empty space. Skylar felt his body floating, drifting, like an astronaut without a tether, only he did have a tether, unseen as it was, pulling him back to his real body in the real world. The blackness of the back of his eyelids fluctuated and deepened.

Second by second and piece by piece, the physicality of the real world, the Waking World, faded in. Skylar felt a soft surface beneath his head and a crook in his neck. His body rested on a hard moving surface that was slowing to a stop. Sounds bounced around off corrugated steel walls: Hushed voices muttering. Brakes squealing. A train whistle.

Skylar, the dream traveler, woke up.

He sat up, opened his eyes, and massaged the crook in his neck. Dressed as his dream body appeared—barefoot, black clothes, long brown coat with a blue plaid interior—he felt around for the red and green patchwork velveteen backpack with yellow buttons he used as a pillow. His nose wrinkled first at the smell of diesel, then at the smell of himself. He ran a dirty hand through his oily and greasy hair, feeling how his sleep distorted its usual shape. Then he stood up and stretched, resurveying the train car from his corner of it.

Open bay doors in the middle of the two long sides let in the fresh morning light through harsh cut angles. Rolling green hillsides passed outside as the car swayed on its axles. In the corner beside Skylar, ratchet straps held fast against rocking shipping crates containing containers containing boxes of boxes within boxes. In the shadows on the other side of the car, keeping their distance, other vagrants, wearing loose, unwashed clothes hanging over faded and sagging tattoos, either slept or spoke in low tones amongst themselves. A huddled together couple, leather-skinned and thin-limbed, snuck glances at Skylar through glazy eyes.

He gathered his pack and slung it over his shoulder. A few of the vagrants flinched at the motion. He walked over and stood framed in the open door, letting the sun touch his face and taking in the misty morning countryside. The train traveled along its rail slow and leisurely. Skylar watched and waited for a good place to disembark.

A veteran hobo with a long face and longer hair appeared out of the dark beside him. He laughed through a cough, looking upon Skylar curiously.

“You looked like you were having an interesting dream there,” the man spoke through a toothless grin.

Skylar said nothing and expressed no reaction.

The alcoholic smell of the man’s breath lingered in the air. The train slowed for a curve, and Skylar took his shot to jump out. He rolled through his landing down a slight grassy ridge and got up seamlessly, dusting off and smoothing out his red and green patchwork pack. The weight of the train displaced the air behind him until the caboose passed, leaving an empty railway and the hills all around.

Skylar started walking.

Next Memory: A World Black and Blue