around the spire, making Casey shriek with each new bolt, even though the offshoot of the coils was harmless.
“Don’t be frightened,” I told her. Maybe if I said it to someone else, I could take my own advice. It wasn’t very far to step into the rain of castoff electrical charge, to stand myself between the two iron bars that made up the main part of the Gate.
“What are you
This time, though, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt as if I’d always been meant to be here, standing in the center of the only Gate to reach past Iron, past Thorn, and directly into the dreams of everyone in every world. This wasn’t a machine I was touching. This was the fabric of reality itself. I nudged gently, and I felt the vortex grip me.
Just one more step.
17
The Dreamer’s Domain
WHEN I STEPPED into the center of the Gate as it came to life, power humming through its every mechanism and rivet, I felt it close around me. The energy snapped off my skin and sent blue streams of electrical fire arcing toward every corner of the small room. “Don’t worry!” I shouted at Casey, who was plastered against the wall, eyes as wide as they would go. “I’ll be all right!”
Of course, I really had no idea. But I didn’t care. My Weird filled my mind, cool and deep as diving into a bottomless pool.
My vision turned into endless light as the coil arced brighter and brighter. The Gate was too powerful, no longer part of me but a tide pulling me under and replacing what made me Aoife with the unrelenting strength of the Weird.
I spread my arms, embracing the ride, feeling electricity arcing from my fingers, my hair, my eyelids. The violet light of the aether whirled around me, obscuring the ice tower, obscuring everything.
The falling sensation gripped me, and it was far stronger than the
Fading, the light bleeding away into blackness, I saw the thousand skies above me again and was frozen for a moment before I felt the breath sucked from my lungs and the stars blinked out, one by one, as I passed into unconsciousness.
I felt something brush across my face. Not a hand. Something more like a feather or a cobweb, light and insubstantial as breath on my cheek.
Opening my eyes was a tremendous effort. Everything about me was heavy, most of all my thoughts, which were moving at the pace of sluggish snails.
Was I lying unconscious somewhere, or dead? Was any of this real?
It was my dream, I realized, but tethered to the painfully real, as every part of my body could attest. Above me, I saw a glass ceiling looking out onto a gentle blue sky studded with a few white clouds, delicate as spun sugar. A wind blew them apart and re-formed them into new shapes. Pink sunset blushed at the edges, and for a moment all I could do was stare through the spiderweb cracks in the glass.
“I like this time of day.”
I rolled my head to the left and saw bare white feet surrounded by the hem of a black robe, moth-eaten and nearly gray from wear.
The figure in black was no longer shadowed and covered by illusion and my own mind’s dream projections. His chest was bare, plain black trousers hidden under the robe, which he shrugged off and let fall to the floor. His hair was slicked back from his face, curls gathering at his neck. His eyes were strange, not silver like a Fae’s but white and ever-changing, like smoke under glass. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The dream figure was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.
“You’re the first person besides me to see it in a very long time,” he said. “It happens in the winters of the worlds, the same sunset all at once, when things are desperate and broken and on the verge of cataclysm everywhere else.”
The sky darkened to blood-red, blood dried to puce, turned to crumpled blue velvet and then darkness, studded with winking stars. The figure sighed. “And it’s over.”
I swallowed. My throat was tight and sore, as if I’d been screaming for hours. My voice, when I found it, was barely a rasp. “Am I dreaming?”
“No,” the figure said sadly. “You’re awake, Aoife.”
Then I’d made it. The Gate had worked. I felt like screaming for joy and sobbing with relief all at once. “I’m … This isn’t my dream?”
“No. You’re here, in the center of all worlds, the place that is not a place,” the figure said. “The real here. The here that can no longer hide under the veil of sleep.”
“I’ve been here before, though, and thought it was real,” I said as the ticking of the great gear reached my ears. I was still unwilling to believe that after all I’d been through, I’d finally done something right. “I’ve dreamed exactly this a lot of times. Standing here and talking to you.”
“I know, but dreaming you’re here isn’t the same,” said the figure. “People dream their way here sometimes, or at least they used to. They put their images up on that glass there, make this place what they want, not what it is when you actually exist in it or when you come to it through a Gate. Except you. You could see most of what was really here in your dreams, but not all. Part of you still saw what you wanted to.” He gestured at the place. “Does it really look anything like you wanted? Now that you’re standing here with your body and not just a fragment of your mind?”
I swiveled around to take in my surroundings from my vantage on the floor. The floor itself was thick with dust and grit, and covered in the skeletons of small birds and mammals, feathers and bones decaying under my hands and feet, which I could feel with the realism of the waking world. It was as if things had been trapped behind the glass of the dome and never escaped. The throne and the great gear so prominent from my nightmares were in reality dilapidated, the seat propped up under one broken leg by thick cloth-bound books, the regalia flag tattered beyond recognition. It blew back and forth in an invisible wind. Actual cobwebs swam from the ceiling in thick banks like rain clouds. The gear itself was rusty, and it ticked with a sonorous groan each time it moved. The air had changed when I stepped through the Gate, was stale and sour and ancient against my face.
In the light, in reality, it was as far from what I’d expected as a true face was from a blurry photograph. I felt crushing disappointment. This place couldn’t help me. Nothing here was more than a poor imitation of my dreams of setting things right.
“You’re disappointed,” the figure stated, as if he could read my mind. I didn’t deny it.
He sighed, moved away from me, and sat at an ornate dining table hidden in a shadowed corner, large enough to seat twenty. A tarnished candelabra was at his elbow, candle wax flowing across the surface. The single chair wobbled under even his slight weight. “It’s been unseen for a long time,” he said. “I used to have a place across every world, even if it was only in people’s dreams. But when they put gates and guards at all the entrances and exits …” He sighed, his breath kicking up some dust from the tabletop. “Those things are broken now. The dreams have stopped coming.”
I flashed on Dean.
How could I not have seen it? The broken Gates were fracturing not just all the physical Lands, but the metaphysical one as well. This dream place was drying up. That fact left me with one burning question.
“Why do I still have dreams?”
The figure shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious. “You’re not dreaming when you visit me. You’re touching something you can’t quite grasp. Like the man who built that contraption you used to get here, you can lift the veil, the perceptions put in place by space-time, and you can see the worlds as I see them from here. It’s your gift, both of you.”
“Tesla? Tesla came here?” My voice came out a high squeak, and I felt an impending sense of panic of the worst kind. This was all wrong. My dreams were dreams. Reality was reality. Without that, I might as well be
