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THE SPOILS OF THE HUNT!
Chapter 16
When I can’t be with Ash, I walk in a world where I speak a secret language. I sprinkle in a few words here and there to see if anyone else knows it, but they never do.
This was the world Alissa inhabited. A place where all the people who spoke her language were online, and even her best friend didn’t share in her most important interest.
If I’d started playing sooner, would she have felt like she belonged? Could we have made a place for people like us here, offline, where she felt safe? When the real world is such shit, and the world of Fenhallow is so comforting and predictable?
I don’t know.
In the days leading up to the Dreambreaker release, I keep my gaming secret from Mom and hold my spot on the raid list. If I play for too long, I start getting paranoid that she’ll find me, but worse than paranoia is the guilt. The guilt is a dog training collar, and I’m constantly getting zapped. I know she’s just trying to help me, I know I hurt her, and I don’t want to keep hurting her. So when she’s home, I make sure to eat dinner with her, help her keep the house clean, ask her how work was. She relaxes. Starts watching her shows at night again. When she seems like she’s settled in, I retreat to my room.
I play CoH for a while, then read the fourth book before bed. I’m still enjoying the books, but reading them is more of a task than anything now, a way to contextualize the characters and locations in the game. I finish book four the day before the Dreambreaker release. The first person I think to talk about it with is Alissa, but that’s impossible. Then I think about the receptionist, but I don’t have another therapy appointment until next week. I text Ash.
Tuesday, April 8
10:37 p.m.
That’s where she left it for FIFTEEN YEARS?
??
Children of HypnosThe books
Oh lolYeah, it’s messed up
Fans just had to deal with not knowing theending for fifteen yearsWhy’d Olivia Kane decide to finish them now?
DunnoShe had, like, a mental breakdown before.Maybe she got better?Or they offered her a ton of money.
If Emery dies in the fifth one, I riot
Lol
I’m mad that I didn’t read these before
It wouldn’t have changed anything.
I stare at his last text for a while. The meaning he parsed wasn’t exactly what I’d intended, but now I’m thinking about it again. That reading these sooner might have given me a window into how Alissa was feeling. That she was being hunted. That if she didn’t fight it, she would die.
In Children of Hypnos, all the characters suffer under mental illness, because that’s what being a dreamhunter is. As the story goes on, the characters get worse, some succumbing to their illnesses, some fighting like hell to escape them. There is hope, in the later books, that there is a cure or a fix or some way to reverse the process, but it depends on the dreamhunters. Others can help them, but they must help themselves too.
I can see the logical progression into the fifth book: Will these characters heal themselves? Can they understand the depths of their own minds and, with the help of their support structures, harness what they have suffered and become something greater?
But the fifth book never came out. That question was never answered. We were left with a cast of characters drowning under the weight of their demons. Olivia Kane, the author, disappeared. Until this fifth book was announced, no one really knew what had become of her. Had she disappeared into the aether of the Dream? Been killed by her doppelgänger?
For someone who identified with these characters and wanted—needed—to see them healed, that lack of a final book would have been crushing.
Alissa knew a fifth book was coming out, though. She knew there was light ahead.
It still wasn’t enough.
