The ice held Damon, refusing to let him escape the moment, this newly revealed glimpse of the apparent truth. It truly was as though waking from a dream, one of those cozy, nighttime fantasies he’d be so taken with that he’d find himself closing his eyes and trying to fall back in.
Waking from a dream that’s worse than a nightmare. Fear fades in seconds, but the sting from this kind of heartache only heals like the painful curse of a bad scar.
Damon did try to shut his eyes, but he found that they were already closed. He didn’t need to see to understand, to feel and experience the ice directly. He wasn’t frozen in a bodily sense, but a part of the ice itself.
He understood then why Myr would invent a dream to spare him from this. He hated her, he blamed her, but even more than that, he just felt it was all so horribly unfair. It was the cruelest thing anyone had ever done to him, an injustice beyond what words or actions could undo, and she’d done it all because she loved him. It was weak and petty to blame her for everything, but he could blame no one else.
All of it… just a dream.
No, he thought. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.
“I’m sorry,” he heard Myr whisper, voice everywhere at once. “I was trying to help you. Really, I was. I wanted you to have a life where you could be you . Where you could be the hero, the lover, that you are.”
There was a flash, and he was suddenly in Myr’s crystalline realm. He knew he was, in truth, still in the ice, but he could see her standing in front of him, head sagging in shame, like a loyal hound in the face of its master’s ire. He fell to his knees, too broken internally to be as mad as she was clearly expecting.
“No…” He balled his hands into fists and stuck his knuckles against his forehead. “How could you? Everything… this…?”
“You could stay here with me now,” said Myr, voice weak but hopeful. “It would be no different from when you normally visited my realm. You might eventually find happiness.”
“Happiness…” His throat was scratchy and painful. “Are any of them even alive? If I’m… still in the ice, the people I love could be dead. They could be dying right now. None of what you conjured is guaranteed or even likely to happen. Will I even… come back to the world after five years?”
Myr’s silence was like a knife in his heart. A twist of the knife already there, more accurately. He might have been able to live with having months of his life revealed to be false, undone from reality, if there was hope that he could still bring about a similar future. He had nothing resembling such hope.
“Just put me back in the ice,” he muttered. “I want the truth.”
“Why are you listening to her, then?” came a familiar voice.
Damon blinked, and was frozen again, back in the ice, as he’d asked Myr for. Except, he clearly wasn’t alone. Someone was shouting his name. It took his ears a moment to identify who it was.
Vel stood on the other side of the ice, banging on it with her fists and kicking ineffectually with her feet. His eyes were closed, and he couldn’t see her, but the ice let him know it as surely as he knew anything… which admittedly was an increasingly dubious sort of confidence.
“Damon,” she said. “I’m dreamspelling to you. None of this is real.”
What? He couldn’t answer her with words, his mouth too fused with the ice.
“Just trust me.” She pounded on the ice again. “Don’t be a melodramatic idiot and trust me! It happened to me, too. Not the ice, that’s your fear. Little weird, I might add. But the nightmare!”
She slammed her elbow into the ice and gasped in pain, rubbing her funny bone.
“I… don’t think I can get you out until you’re free of the ice,” she said. “You have to do this yourself.”
He felt his heart start to race as he rediscovered his claustrophobia, like a ghost who’d been standing behind him. He couldn’t do it. He was stuck, and Vel would have to leave, and the nightmare would become true again, inescapable.
“Please!” she said. “You’re the bravest man I know, Damon. Think of everyone that’s waiting for you. All the joy you’ve experienced. Remember when we first reunited in Silke?”
He remembered. He thought of seeing her through the shop window, how pretty she looked, the same, but different. One of his fingers wiggled within the ice.
And that was it. He shifted, shattering the ice into thousands of jagged little shards. The ice, and the nightmare.
***
Damon started to suck in a ragged breath, but a hand clamped down over his mouth. He was on his back, on the floor within the dungeon of the Ocean Klykia. The mist swirled across his vision, smelling and tasting sickly sweet up close.
“Stand up first,” she said. “You don’t want to breathe too much of this stuff in. It’s what created that nightmare for you in the first place.”
He slowly drew up to his feet. His body ached as though he had slept wrong, and his sense of time was completely askew.
“I was… Myr was…” He could only mumble through his confusion.
“I was shouting at you!” said Myr. “I was terrified! I thought you were… dying.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t do something like that.”
Vel furrowed her brow at him. “Something like what?”
“Talking to Myr,” he said, gesturing to his head. “How long was I out for?”
“An hour, at most,” said Vel. “The same thing that happened to you happened to me, at least I think. We all got split up in the maze while breathing the condensed essence. Either the structure itself or some hidden monster has the ability to dreamspell in some capacity and doesn’t want us going deeper in.”
“How did you… reach me?” He felt for his chest, confirming he wasn’t wearing the amethyst amulet. He was pretty sure he’d lost it over five years ago.
“The condensed essence,” she said, with a shrug. “It works both ways. My dreamspelling is far, far stronger here than it would be normally. I was able to see you through my own nightmare without too much trouble. Jilou used to play pranks like that on me sometimes.”
“I remember.” Damon sighed, still feeling a bit out of sorts in his own body. “We should… go looking for the others.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” Vel took his hand and threaded her fingers through his. “So we don’t get lost again.”
As much as an achievement escaping the nightmare had been, a single look around their otherwise unchanged circumstances was enough to dampen Damon’s spirits. They were in the center of an intersection identical to the ones he’d lost himself through earlier.
“Any idea which way we should go?” asked Vel.
“That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”
He rubbed his chin with his free hand, examining each of the four corridors they could proceed down. He still saw no meaningful physical difference between them, but there was a visible flow to the condensed essence. It was coming from one tunnel and flowing through into the rest.
“Let’s head toward the source of the mist,” he said.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“No, but it’s the only idea I have.”
Vel squeezed his hand. “Lead on.”
They made their way forward, soon encountering another copied intersection and using the same method for determining their route. Vel’s hand felt soft within his, solid and reassuring and most importantly, real.