She hated that they’d parted on such angry and uncertain terms, but while she would miss him, Sebastien’s absence would give Rose the opportunity to reallythink, to dwell on her dilemma as broodily as she wished. While she recognized and valued the sunshine Sebastien brought her life, uplifting her from her moody tendencies, she didn’t want to give this very important decision short shrift. Sebastien didn’t appreciate the ramifications of her choice, arguably because he’d never had to worry about ramifications before.
Rose had and did. And she needed time to consider her options—and their consequences—without even the unspoken influence of what he wanted. What she needed to do was work, so work she would.
Settling herself in the oneiromancy studio, Rose deliberately took deep, even breaths, counting out twice the number on exhale as the inhale. The meditation helped to calm and clear her mind while she waited for Master Zoltan to arrive.
In the wake of that new clarity, it occurred to Rose that Madame Hendricks had deliberately turned a blind eye to her relationship with Sebastien. They hadn’t been that clever about hiding the fact that he slept in her room every night. It could be that the academy had actively allowed Sebastien to court her, as His Majesty King Soren had wished. And her father hadn’t objected either, so he must want her in Soren’s court, though he’d never said so. She truly wished she could talk to her father, but she wasn’t progeny of His Majesty with royal license to ditch school at will. And this wasn’t a conversation that could be trusted to written correspondence, obviously.
“Ah, excellent,” said Master Zoltan, briskly entering thesmall studio. “I can always count on you to commence meditation without prompting.”
Rose smiled, pleased by the praise, not confessing she’d been stewing over her love life rather than properly meditating.
“Today, you will learn to physically walk the Dream,” he declared.
She physically started in surprise. Imagine if she’d gone with Sebastien and missed this opportunity! Master Zoltan tsked at her.
“You must learn not to abandon the calm you’ve attained via meditation,” he chided. “Soon you will graduate and be on your own and then where will you be?”
Rose restrained an impudent answer. Zoltan had no sense of humor, except for his own jokes. “I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready to learn this difficult skill.”
“You show much of Oneira’s same promise, so I am hopeful.” He frowned a little, and Rose knew it must be for the continuing mystery of Oneira’s disappearance. The late unlamented King Uhtric’s court sorcerer, Stearanos, had been missing since before solstice, too, which seemed like a strange coincidence except that the two hadn’t even known each other. Instead, they’d famously been lifelong enemies. The puzzle had led some students to speculate that some greater enemy of the known world was picking off the preeminent sorcerers in some diabolical plot. But so far only those two had vanished—though some darkly reminded everyone “only those twothat we know of.”
To Rose’s mind, it was all useless gossip and, while she found the mystery intriguing in the abstract, it had little to do with her. Mostly she felt bad for Master Zoltan, who’d been gloomier than even his usual amount since the news had arrived at HASP.
Master Zoltan cleared his throat. “It would be remiss of me to not at leastattemptto teach you what I taught Oneira.”
Rose didn’t much care for the emphasis on “attempt,” which thoroughly mitigated any pleasure from the implied complimentabout her not being just any oneiromancer. She should be beyond that sort of flattery anyway. Her father had always taught her that inborn talent was worth nothing without the application of dedicated effort to acquire the skill to use it. It didn’t matter if she possessed the most potential since the famed Oneira; only that she become as skilled as possible at her sorcery. She had pride in her ability, but that same pride had been stung. “I look forward to learning,” she said calmly, betraying none of her unsettled emotions.
“Excellent. Let us commence with a review of the dangers.” Zoltan began pacing the small studio, occasionally pausing to gaze out the wall of windows. “First and foremost, when you open a portal into the Dream—and you will need a larger one than usual, so that you can step through it—you must not look directly at the Dream, as much as possible.”
Rose knew this. She’d opened large portals into the Dream before, sometimes very large ones, and she’d always found it easy to do, as natural as breathing. A dragon or other enormous monster couldn’t be easily admitted via a small opening into waking reality. Slightly impatient, but hiding it, she replied, “Because gazing into the Dream with a conscious mind can lead to madness.”
Zoltan glanced over his shoulder at her, expression wryly damning. “You are impatient with what you believe is elementary information. Yes, I know you know this, and you’ve worked with large portals before, but I do not reiterate this first rule for no reason. Indulge me.” He turned and folded his hands behind his back. “Tell me the steps for reaching into the Dream to bring an object out.”
Curious now, Rose took this request very seriously, thinking back to the initial instructions for what had first been intuitive—and potentially disastrous with the nonexistent control of a child—then relearned as a painstaking and meticulous process, and had become second nature again over time.
“Remove external distractions. Internally, clear my mind ofextraneous thoughts and emotions,” she recited, not verbatim, but from her own understanding, as Zoltan would expect. “Keeping firmly in mind the object or dreamer I wish to locate, I open the Dream and reach in with my sorcery and intention. Depending on what I’m seeking, I—”
“You can stop there,” Zoltan interrupted. “What is the salient detail about this method for reaching into the Dream as opposed to physically entering?”
She almost argued, then realized his point. “I don’t look into the Dream with my conscious mind using my standard techniques. A portal is open, but Ilookwith my sorcery and my will, not my physical eyes.”
He nodded, pleased, giving Rose a flush of satisfaction. “Exactly so. We become so practiced in this method—indeed, you have been relentlessly trained to avoidlookingwith your eyes as a safety measure—that we can forget there are other ways. When you physically travel the Dream, and forgive me if this sounds obvious, but it bears repeating, you not only look at the portal with your eyes and conscious mind, you take them with you into that alter realm.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted, then wished she hadn’t said that aloud.
Zoltan, however, seemed to approve. “When we discuss the dangers of entering the Dream physically, this is the primary one. There are many dangers posed by the Dream. It does not obey the laws of the reality with which we are familiar. It is endlessly mutable, responding to not only our own thoughts and emotions, but also those of the countless dreamers, alive and dead, who spun the fabric of it from nothing more than the stuff of sleep. The Dream, being formed of a different medium, is not a place for the waking mind. While you insert the intention, as you phrased it, of your waking mind into the realm of the Dream, your mind, your physical being, yourself, remains in reality. When you physically enter the Dream, you takesomething formed of this world into an alien one. Do you understand the distinction?”
She was beginning to, the awful prospect of what her teacher suggested she attempt slowly dawning on her. “So, I’d be losing my anchor to physical reality,” she said, “taking my entire conscious mind and physical flesh into a place where they don’t belong and where everything I perceive is guaranteed to drive me insane.”
Zoltan gave her a slight bow. “There you go.”
She stared at him, appalled. “How can anyone do this? It doesn’t sound possible to survive.”
“I cannot do it. Very few can,” he told her, without inflection, though something about the absolute neutrality of his face and voice made her think he deeply regretted his failure. “The short answer to your question is powerful sorcery. I didn’t have enough of it. The skills, the understanding, yes. The sheer potent ability? No.”
“I don’t understand how powerful magic overcomes this fundamental incompatibility,” Rose said, trying to remain logical, reasonable, but battling a deep terror. What would happen to her physical self inside the Dream? She’d heard of people becoming lost in the Dream, either as their projected mind or as their full physical selves, but not what they were like when they managed to extract themselves. If they ever did come out again.
“No one quite understands how the sorcery operates, except that it seems to act as a sort of buffer, a bubble of your waking reality, if you will, that encases you as you walk the Dream. Those who learn to do it are able to retain their individual reality, to navigate and manipulate the Dream without succumbing to its power.”
