Page 104 of In Somnis

“Mm.”

“You…” I gesture widely at the universe he’s constructed around us. “You have all of this, and you write horror?”

“I’m better with dark things, apparently.” He says it simply, like it’s obvious, and when I follow his gaze out toward the edge of the planet, the landscape has shifted. Just at the periphery, where the golden fields thin out and the light doesn’t quite reach, something moves.

It doesn’t touch the ground.

It drifts in spiraling loops. Beautiful at a distance. A thing your eyes want to follow, but the longer I watch it, the more wrong it becomes with how it turns and its shape against the sky.

My stomach turns cold, even though the air around us stays warm.

“Is that⁠—”

“That’s the monster from my first novel. Took me about six months of coming here before it felt true.”

“True,” I repeat, carefully not looking at it anymore.

“That’s what horror needs.” He lets the flower go. “It needs something true underneath. Fear you can recognize.” He finally looks away from the edge. “That book was my first bestseller.”

I turn to stare at him. He doesn’t offer anything else, just leans back into the flowers like he hasn’t handed me anything significant at all.

“Why horror?” I ask. “You could write anything. You could come here and build… I don’t know, whole worlds, and you choose to conjure up things that… ” I stop myself from looking at the edge again.

“Horror stories don’t need happy endings.”

“That’s… bleak.”

“That’s honest. I trust a story more when it doesn’t promise everything’s going to be fine.”

I look back at the flower fields and the rainbow curving softly over the water. “I think if I were as good at this as you, I’d only ever build things like this,” I admit. “Nice things. Safe things.”

“That’s more dangerous than the monsters.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

He nods toward the warmth, the light, and the beauty he has made. “The monsters, you know to be afraid of. You stay alert and don’t forget where you are. But this?” He lets out a small, humorless exhale. “This, you could live in. This, you’d stop wanting to leave. You have to have something worth coming back to. Otherwise, you start preferring this place, and that’s how you lose your grip.”

A weight drops into my stomach.

“That’s what happened to Tessa, right? She fell in love with a dream guy… and lost her grip.”

Ridge’s head snaps toward me. “She fell in love with a dream guy?”

“Well…” I swallow. “I think so.”

“Explain.”

“I don’t know…” I hesitate, then push on. “She wrote about him, how real he felt, and how safe it was with him. She stopped wanting to be awake.”

“Fuck. That’s not simply losing your grip. That’s something else entirely. Or rather someone.”

“What are you saying?”

He studies me for a long second, then exhales slowly through his nose. “You really have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

“I never said I did,” I shoot back. “I’ve known about this dreaming thing for, like, five minutes.”

“Yeah,” he says dryly. “And somehow you’ve already skipped to the boss level.”