“Fuck,” Tyche swore and attacked his seat belt, fighting to get it unlocked. “We need to get moving. Hurry! Out of the car!”
“Ty, what’s going on?” Shey demanded, his calm voice taking on an edge.
“I’ll explain when we’re moving. We need to be moving. Now.”
Tyche jumped out of the vehicle and searched the area. Everything appeared normal…ish. Some people were acting strangely, but most were unaffected. His perception of the world felt right. No flying elephants nor octopi slithering up to offer him coffee.
“Ty?” Shey repeated, calling out to him.
Tyche’s head whipped around to see Shey staring at him across the roof of the car. Adrian and Haru were also standing by their doors, watching him.
“Cirina is here.”
Shey paled. “You’re sure?”
“Cirina? Didn’t you say she was Yesuntei’s sister?” Adrian demanded.
“The Goddess of Dreams,” Haru filled in.
“Yeah, that’s her. We need to find her.” Tyche drew in a shuddering breath. That was wrong. He couldn’t bring them into this. Not into a fight with a god. That was insane. Even if one of them were a dragon, it was still wrong. “No, I’ve got to find her. Y-You need to get away from here.” His eyes darted to Shey. “Good. You’ve got the bag. Go. All of you. Take the long way back to the hotel. I-I’ll catch up later.”
He reached down and grabbed that pearl of Yesuntei’s powers through his pants. If he could talk to Cirina, get her calm, he could hand it over and let her take it to Brightspire. But he wasn’t expecting Cirina to be calm or reasonable. And if she wasn’t, there was no way in hell he was giving her Yesuntei’s powers.
“I’m not leaving you to deal with her alone,” Shey stated. He lifted the strap of the messenger bag from his shoulder. He held it out to Haru. “You and Adrian take this to the hotel. You can start sorting through the paper work and see if you can get into his electronics.”
“Hell, no!” Adrian snapped. “We came all this way to find you. There’s no way you’re leaving our sight. We stick together.” His eyes jerked to Tyche and stopped. “All of us.”
Tyche wanted to argue with them. Send his new friends away.
Friends.
He froze, his eyes locked on Shey. His gaze drifted to Adrian and Haru. They were all watching him, expectant. Ready to jump in and help him.
In the weeks that he’d spent talking to Shey through a stone wall, in the days he’d spent in the hotel goofing off with Haru and Adrian, they had become friends. He’d actually made friends for the first time in his life.
“Tyche, what’s wrong?” Adrian asked.
“Huh. I was just thinking that you’re my friends. I made friends, and now I’m going to march you off to fight a pissed-off goddess. For the God of Luck, I have really shitty luck.”
A slow grin spread across Adrian’s face, and he chuckled. “Yeah, your luck is pretty bad if your first friend is Shey. You should work on that.”
“Enough. Let’s go see if we can reason with Cirina before anyone gets killed,” Shey admonished.
Yeah, reason with her. Tyche knew that wouldn’t be possible, but they had to try.
He turned toward the direction they were headed and pointed down the street clogged with stopped cars and angry drivers. “She’s that way. I can feel a pressure in the air from her magic.”
They began walking, weaving their way between the cars and around the confused citizens. People shouted and cursed, but the most disturbing were those lost in a dream. They danced, skipped, and meandered in a kind of daze. All of them were smiling, happy to be wherever their minds had taken them. But that was the danger of a dream. They were warm, inviting, happy places that a person would never want to leave. Sometimes, the dream was so subtle that the dreamer wouldn’t even realize they were no longer attached to reality.
“Ty, do we need another weird phrase to pull us out if we get caught up in Cirina’s powers?” Shey asked, following a couple of steps behind Tyche.
“That won’t work this time.”
“Huh? What do you mean?” Adrian demanded from the other side of a small blue sedan.
“We were hit with Yesuntei’s nightmare magic, but before it happened, Tyche gave me this weird phrase to remember. As soon as it popped up in the nightmare, I understood what was happening wasn’t real and I woke up,” Shey explained.
“That’s the difference between their two magics. In Yesuntei’s nightmares, things are scary or heartbreaking, but they stick close to reality. Insert something absurd, like a green sky, and you know it’s not real. You wake up. But in Cirina’s dreams, everything is happy and light and fun. You can have exactly what your heart desires.” Tyche cut past a car and briefly walked beside Adrian. “If your king were to walk up and hand you exactly what you dreamed of, would you refuse him?”
