By Donald S. Crankshaw

Illustrated by John Blumen

Collecting the dark of the night sky was a pain. Ordinary darkness was easy: I could just set up the collector in a windowless room and seal it tight. But the night sky was filled with light—stars and clouds, planes and satellites, and brightest of all, the moon. The moon usually flooded the sky with light, making it impossible to collect darkness of any purity. That’s what made the night of the new moon the best time to collect, but I still needed to point the collector at the deepest, darkest part of the sky, and make minute adjustments regularly to avoid the arc of the stars and the path of any clouds. The task required careful attention. All night long.

Once the collector pointed in the right direction, I stood and stretched. I blew on my hands and rubbed them together for warmth, wishing I could find gloves that fit my stubby fingers well. The wind rustled the leaves and whipped my hair. I brushed my hands through my beard and dislodged the pine needles I collected during the climb up to my mountaintop perch. Arguably, this was more hill than mountain, but it was close to my home in Boston and gave me a clear view of the night sky away from the light pollution. I liked coming here, but leaving the security of my home was always risky, especially with my best defense left behind to babysit Sudri. I had my share of enemies, and Ayen, at least, knew that I collected darkness here. So I was alarmed when I realized I wasn’t alone.

My visitor had just crested the rock outcrop we now shared and stood with one hand braced against the tree she’d used to lever herself up. She carried a flashlight in her other hand, and its intense light shone in my eyes. Even during the new moon, I had little need for artificial illumination. I checked over my shoulder, but the collector pointed the other way, so the sample shouldn’t be contaminated by her light.

“I didn’t expect anyone else to be up here,” she said.

“Neither did I.” Once she turned her flashlight to the ground, I could see her better. She was young, with short hair, and had a beefy, athletic fitness, not like those waifs that dominate your people’s ideas of female beauty. She would feel the chill once she cooled off, as she was wearing shorts and a tight sports top.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said as she shed her daypack. If she felt any qualms about being alone on the mountain with a strange, stunted man, they didn’t show. “The trail’s dangerous at night. You could break your neck.”

“I could say the same to you. Besides, I’m not heading down until morning.”

“You’re going to stay here all night? Why?”

I gestured at my equipment. “I’m capturing darkness.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t look like a camera.”

To a layman, my collector looked like a telescope—a hollow cylinder with lenses and mirrors and a little sighting scope on the side, though the dials I turned to keep it pointed at my target were a bit unusual. But instead of an eyepiece or camera at the end, there was something like a funnel emptying into an opaque crystal flask.

“I never said it was. Tell you what, if you tell me why you’re up here so late at night, I’ll tell you what I’m doing.”

She fell silent. I’d figured that would shut her up. People are eager to know your business, but never want to share theirs. Except on Facebook or their web log or whatever the Internet fad of the moment is.

I peered through the sighting scope, and I adjusted the collector a fraction of a degree.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

I looked back at her. “So you hiked all the way up the mountain?”

“Not all the way. I volunteer at the campsite a mile along the ridge. You know, keeping it clean, collecting money from the campers, stuff like that.”

I didn’t know, never having liked backpacking myself, but I nodded sagely as if I understood. Nodding sagely is a big part of my business. Intrusive questions is another. “There’s more to it than a sleepless night, isn’t there?”

She looked at me for a long moment, before whispering, “I have bad dreams. I’ve had the same dream, every night, since working at the camp last year. I dream something’s chasing me through endless corridors. So sometimes I watch the stars and…I don’t sleep exactly, but I drift off and it’s almost like dreaming of stars. I can see them best up here.”

I sighed. Of course. They never know what they’re looking for, but they always find me. “Look, I don’t even know your name—”

“It’s Madison.”

“Okay, Madison. You can call me Norton. My point is that I don’t know you, but I do know something about dreams, and they’re rarely what people think.”

“What’s that?”

“What do you think your dreams are? Repressed memories? Omens? Paranoia?”

“I’ve considered all those.”

“Of course,” I said. “What it really is, is an attack.”

“An attack? That’s silly. You’re not going to tell me a witch or demon or something is attacking me through my dreams, are you?”

“Not a witch or a demon. A dwarf.”

“A dwarf? Like in Snow White or, or The Hobbit ?” Madison examined me more closely. I knew what she was thinking. My proportions didn’t exactly match what she’d seen in the movies, but they were close enough.

“We were around before Tolkien, or even the Norse Eddas.”

“You’re saying that you’re a dwarf, like something out of a fantasy novel?”

Despite the disbelief in her tone, she made no move to leave. They never did. There was an affinity between me and those who suffered dwarf-forged dreams. That was probably why she didn’t leave the moment she saw a strange man here. Why she was still listening as I talked about fairy tales. The curse—though I had long since stopped thinking of it as one—affected her as much as me.

“Yes,” I told her, “but not like you imagine. The problem with these books and movies is that they’ve taken the magic from us. We’re not smaller humans. We’re supernatural creatures, more like fairies or elves than like you.” That was painful to say. The divisions between our clans are deep and bitter. The worst bad blood is that between siblings.

“What do dwarves have to do with my dreams?”

“Some dwarves forge dreams,” I told her. “We make them out of moonlight and darkness, wind and cold, memory and emotion. It’s alchemy and magic and forgecraft.”

“And you think a dwarf made my dream?”

“If you’ve dreamed the same dream every night for a year, then it was dwarf-forged. No one else could make a dream that long-lasting.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Someone paid him. Could be a rival, or an ex-lover, anyone.” I knew a thing or two about ex-lovers and what they could do to one’s dreams.

Madison shook her head. “I can’t think of anyone. Who would even know how?”

The silence stretched between us, and I returned to adjusting my collector. Finally, Madison asked, “Is that what you do? Make bad dreams for whoever pays you?”

“No. I don’t make dreams anymore.” Not since the curse.

“Then what do you make?”

“Countermagic for bad dreams.” I waited for her to accuse me of teasing her, or maybe trying to con her. That’s what I would do in her position.

“Can you make something for me?”

I turned to face Madison. If she had any doubts, they didn’t show. She was earnest, desperate. I felt like I was taking advantage of her, but business was business, and I was helping her.

“Magic isn’t cheap,” I told her. “But I can do it.” I saw the questions before she could ask them—I’ve heard them all before. “You want to believe, but you want proof. Fine.” I pulled out my pocketknife and flicked it open. “You’ll want to be closer for this.”

She hesitated, but approached where I stood. Once her flashlight illuminated my hands, I sliced my thumb. Madison gasped, but didn’t back away. The blood began to bead immediately.

“Turn the light off,” I said. She showed a hint of reluctance, but did as I said. I lifted my thumb to my mouth and breathed on my blood.

The red bead began to glow with a steady white light. Madison’s eyes widened. “What is that?”

“The simplest bit of dreamforging. Blood, breath, and darkness make light.”

“But this isn’t a dream.”

“No, but that’s how dreamforging works. You create something in the waking world that also exists in the dream world. If I were dreaming, this drop of blood would still be alight in my dream, but the correspondence can be less direct. An iron nail might be a spear in the dream, or a wooden carving might be the whole dream.”

“So my nightmare has a physical representation?”

“Yes, there’s a dreamwork for your nightmare in the physical world. Not much we can do about it unless you know where it is?”

She shook her head wordlessly.

I shrugged. “Didn’t think so. We need to counter the dream another way.”

“How?”

“Come to my shop in a week or two.” I handed her one of my cards, careful of my glowing blood. “That should give me enough time to prepare a dreamwork for you.”

Madison turned on her flashlight so she could read the card. “Thank you so much, Mr. Dwere. Norton, I mean. I never thought anyone could—”

“Don’t thank me yet. This is my business.”

She left soon after, and I went back to collecting darkness. I’d need it if I was going to make what she needed.

Madison walked into my shop in Boston two weeks later. She was wearing a yellow summer dress rather than hiking clothes, and carried a large purse instead of a backpack, but she was easy enough to recognize, though her face was drawn and eyes swollen. I glanced up from fiddling with a sextant-shaped dreamwork to watch as she browsed my shop. To most people it’s just an alternative medicine store, with herbs and supplements and even crystals and other New Agey whatnots. None of that was as effective as what I kept behind the counter.

Madison stopped to stare at a large stone cat, bigger than most wolves, with golden gems for eyes. Malachi didn’t even blink. He always behaved around my human customers.

“Mr. Dwere?”

“I told you to call me Norton. Good to see you again, Madison.”

“You too.” She took a breath before rushing on. “How much will it cost to keep the dreams away? I don’t have much money, but I’ll pay what I can.” She looked down at her oversized canvas purse.

I could have named a price in dollars, but she couldn’t have afforded it. Only my richest customers could pay in cash. The conversion rate for American dollars was terrible anyway; I preferred a different currency. I stroked my beard as I thought.

“A year,” I said finally.

She blinked. “A year? Of what?”

“Of memory.”

“Huh?”

“I want you to give me a year of your memory. Not all of it.” I hastened to add when I saw her brow wrinkle. “You’d remember all the facts, what happened and why, just not how those things felt at the time. Those sensations are what I want.”

“But why?”

“Memories are the raw material from which dreams are forged. They’re worth a lot where I come from.”

“How can you just take my memories?”

“Don’t worry, extracting them would be easy and painless.”

“I’m not sure I want you rummaging through my head, though.”

“I won’t look, and no one who does will know whose memories they are.”

She chewed her lip. “They really won’t know? A year of memories would have my name, my friends, where I live, where I go to school.”

“None of which is useful for making dreams. A dreamforger wouldn’t want someone to dream they’re you. He’d want her to share your raw experiences as if they’re her own. Those sensations and emotions are all I’d take, not the context.”

“I can’t imagine remembering the past and not remembering how it felt. And you want a whole year?”

“Yes,” I said. “But only after you see that my magic works.” Dreamforgers are always willing to sell on credit. We know how to collect our debts.

Her eyes watered and her lower lip trembled. “I…I’m just so tired. It’s been months now since I slept well. And now I feel like I could doze off any moment and it will be there.” She sniffed back tears and closed her eyes before giving a sharp nod. “I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

“Then we have an agreement.” From behind the counter I retrieved a wooden box and placed it on the countertop. I turned it toward her before opening the lid.

Madison leaned forward for a closer look. “That’s a big knife.”

“It’s a dagger.” The double-edged blade was a hand-and-a-half long and black as the night of the new moon from whose darkness I forged it. The guard was an upswept crescent, and the leather-wrapped hilt warm to the touch. A smooth orb roiling with what appeared to be smoke formed the pommel. I won’t detail everything that went into the dagger. Suffice it to say that some of the materials cost more than money.

“Is it sharp?”

“Very.” I picked up the dagger and held it edge up. Then I plucked a coarse hair from my beard and dropped it onto the blade. Two lengths of stiff, gray hair landed on the countertop. “So be careful.” I slid the blade into its rune-engraved metal sheath before handing it to her.

She accepted it as though it might bite. “What am I supposed to do?”

“A dream like this can’t be ignored or warded off. It must be confronted. Sleep with this beside you. When the dream comes, if you have the courage to draw the dagger from its sheath and confront the terror chasing you, you can defeat the nightmare.”

“I tried confronting it before. I…I can’t. Not again.” She drew the dagger partway out of the sheath and gazed at the blade. When she looked at me, her eyes were wide and frightened, and her cheeks wet. “At least, not alone.”

I sighed. I’ve been a sucker for kids, especially young girls, since I became a father. Maybe Madison was an adult by your standards, but by mine, she was barely old enough to be let out of the home on her own. “I can’t fight the nightmare for you. You have to defeat it. But I can be there. When you draw the dagger and face it, call my name three times and I’ll come.”

“Even in a dream? All I have to do is say ‘Norton’?”

I shook my head. “Norton is an Americanization; my true name is Nordri.”

She wiped her eyes and smiled at me. “Thank you for your help. I feel much better.”

I smiled back, which earned a stern look from Malachi after she left.

“I know it’s dangerous,” I told the stone cat. “But I only gave her part of my true name.”

I’m pretty sure real cats don’t even have eyebrows to raise like that.

“Surely it can’t be that dangerous to enter her dream,” I said. “No Dreamforger would sell a masterwork to some teenager’s ex. That’s—”

“Who was that?” A round face with unruly black hair poked through the balustrade on the stairs in the back, which led to our apartment above the shop.

Speaking of children who can’t be let out on their own. “Just a customer. You know you shouldn’t come down when I’m working, Sudri.”

“But I’m bored .” Though she was twelve, she looked and acted about half that age. Certainly, the yellow jumper she wore was made for a five- or six-year-old. I had no idea at what rate someone with Sudri’s bloodline would age.

“Have you finished your schoolwork?”

She made a face. “Not really.”

I sighed. “Do you need Malachi to help you?”

Sudri nodded her head so emphatically she bumped it on the balustrade railing.

Malachi gave me a sharp look that I pretended not to see, but he trudged up the stairs, which groaned beneath his mass, to join the giggling Sudri. The silent cat was a surprisingly good tutor. He was at least as responsible for Sudri’s homeschooling as I was. Even if there were some way to avoid questions about her unusual aging, I had no intention of letting Sudri attend a public school, where she’d be outside of my protection for hours each day. She was more valuable to some of my enemies than I was.

A whisper woke me up. I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling as I tried to remember what I had heard. The night was cold on the tip of my nose, the only part of me not covered by blanket or hair.

“Nordri.” This time I heard my name from the whispering voice. Who —?

“Nordri!” My name rang through my head like a gong and I shot upright.

Despite what you may think, I do not give away my true name, or even parts of it, to every young woman who comes to me with a sob story. There was a very short list of people who could be calling my name, and of those the obvious candidate was Madison. Besides, this sounded like her voice.

I am not a witch. I can’t dream myself into other people’s heads like that stalking ex who keeps letting herself into your apartment until you change the metaphorical locks and…(Sorry. I had a bad break-up with a witch once.) The point is, even invited, I need help to enter another person’s dream. Fortunately, I was expecting this visit, so I reached for my nightstand. After nearly knocking a small metal mallet to the floor—I might need that later, if things went bad—I had my dream spectacles in hand. They were old-fashioned glasses with wire rims and round lenses, and Palmer Luckey would give his right eye to get his hands on them. After whispering Madison’s name, I put them on.

I found myself standing on a dirt road ending at the kind of house that would disappoint me if fewer than three spirits haunted it. It had too many gables, and was narrow in the front, but tall and deep. Many of the windows were broken, with shutters missing or hanging from one hinge. If there had been paint, it long ago peeled away and left weathered gray wood behind. Thunder rolled in the distance and cool wind carried a misty rain.

I stomped up the steps and pushed open the door.

All around was a house in disrepair: antique furniture with faded upholstery, carpet that puffed up dust at my steps, wall lamps filled with flickering flame rather than an electric glow. The floor creaked under my weight. I’d have worried about it giving way, but that was unlikely to happen outside of a dramatic moment. A living room and dining room flanked the hallway I stood in, stairs lined the right side, and straight ahead stood a closed door.

“Madison!” I called out.

The response was a child’s whimpering from beyond the door.

I was in somebody else’s dream, at the mercy of a mind under assault by a dreamforged nightmare. Even a novice witch would have more control here than I, as dreams fell under the power of witchcraft’s ability to enchant minds. Telling the cowardly part of myself to shut up, I strode forward.

Life would be easier without the curse dragging me into these messes, but it was part of who I was now. Removing it would be like tearing out a piece of my soul.

I opened the door and stepped into a playroom, toys scattered across the floor. A little girl in a yellow dress sat cross-legged in the center of the room, hunched forward so that long blond hair covered her face. These were not the endless corridors that Madison had described. My stomach dropped as all of the possible reasons the dream might have changed whirled through my mind, none of them good.

“Madison?”

She raised her head, and in the child’s face I recognized hints of Madison’s features, but this girl could be no more than six. “I lost it!” she wailed.

“What? What did you lose?”

“This!” Madison brandished the empty sheath she’d been holding in her lap. “She took it!”

“Who…?” I started to ask, but then the shadows in the corner of the room rolled back and I saw her.

A dark dress and darker hair framed my former apprentice’s pale face, accented by silver patterns curling across her skin. She held the dagger in her hand.

“Ayen,” I said.

“Hello, dear.”

I ignored the endearment and its venom. “What are you doing here?”

“You kept me out of your dreams, so I had to make other arrangements.”

“I kept you out because you were spying on me, not coming to visit. And instead you targeted Madison, because you knew my curse would bring us together. But how’d you know I would enter her dream?”

She laughed at that. “I didn’t think you’d be foolish enough to come to me. I just hoped to follow the sorcerous thread of your curse back to you.”

“I can see that you’re dabbling in sorcery.” The silver traceries on Ayen’s face were beautiful and terrifying. Sorcery had the power to alter the soul, the deepest part of a person’s identity, where they connected to those closest to them. That was what made my curse so powerful: the empathy curse tangled around my soul and linked me to those suffering from the dreamforger’s art. “That’s a dangerous path. If you’re showing the soulmarks—”

“Don’t presume to judge me.”

Ignoring the soulmarks was like ignoring a gaping hole where her heart should be. They evidenced the damage Ayen had done to her own soul through reckless use of sorcery, damage that could lead to insanity, death, even the soul’s annihilation. But she was right: what she was doing to herself was none of my business anymore. “Fine. What do you want?”

“My daughter.”

“You can’t have Sudri.” I knew why she wanted her. If Ayen bound her soul’s to Sudri’s, she could stabilize it. Shared blood enabled such magic, but doing so would change them both, and drag Sudri down the same dark path that was consuming her mother.

“Not even for this young woman’s mind? What will happen to you after she is consumed? My monster’s coming. Can you feel it?”

I could. It pressed down upon us like a weight. I couldn’t fight that. Only the dagger Ayen had stolen could.

Ayen was a talented dreamforger, but she never completed her apprenticeship with me, and no other dreamforger would have trained her. Although she had more of our blood than any female I knew save Sudri, there were no female dwarves. Ayen was the daughter of a dwarf and a dwarf-blooded witch, but while a dwarf’s sons were dwarves in every way, his daughters took after their mother. And dreamforgers only trained dwarves.

Except for me. As her only teacher, I knew the gaps in her training.

I placed my hand on Madison’s head. She looked up at me, tears streaming down her child’s face. Did Ayen do this to her when she took the dagger, or had age regression always been part of the nightmare? Madison still clutched the sheath in her left hand.

“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “Close your right hand real tight. Do you feel that?”

Madison’s eyes widened, and she nodded.

“Use it.” I lowered my hand and approached Ayen.

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her not to be frightened.”

“Why? Are you giving me what I want?”

“No,” I said. “She shouldn’t be frightened because, whatever power you may have, you still have only an apprentice’s understanding of dreamforging.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you playing at?”

“The dream belongs to the dreamer, not the dreamforger. All she needs is an edge.”

Both our eyes went to the dagger in Ayen’s hand. “I took that edge.”

“You hold the dream image. The real dreamwork is still in Madison’s real hand, and nothing you do in the dream can change that.”

Madison climbed to her feet, and the dagger Ayen held faded away. I grinned as Madison brandished the true dagger and began to grow, her hair becoming shorter and darker, as it had been when we first met. I’d been taking a chance. No weapon is stronger than its wielder, and I hadn’t been certain that Madison was strong enough. Now I was.

The door burst open and my smile vanished.

Ayen’s monster was like nothing I had imagined. I had expected a troll, or a dragon, or something equally dangerous from our world, but this was something alien. It was a black cloud of darkness, filled with wings and claws, eyes and teeth, and I couldn’t tell if it was one creature or a whole swarm. White light began to radiate from the dagger, but when the nightmare surged forward, Madison stumbled back and fell, her weapon no more than a candle against a hurricane.

“Madison!” I shouted as the darkness rolled over her. Why wasn’t the dagger working?

“Still think your magic can beat mine?” Ayen asked.

“Madison!” This was more than just dreamforging. Ayen was combining her dreamforging with witchcraft to counteract the dagger.

The nightmare couldn’t kill Madison, but it could do something worse. It would eat her mind, leaving only a hollowed-out nest for this nightmare. Then it would consume me, reducing my wards to shambles so Ayen could take what she wanted. Madison was helpless, and so was I.

No! Maybe I couldn’t defeat the nightmare, but I wasn’t going to stand here and do nothing. With a backward glance at Ayen’s gloating face, so different from the one I remembered, I waded into the darkness.

Whatever this monster was, it wasn’t solid. I moved through its wriggling mass as though through a viscous jelly, slimy on my skin. Sharp claws and teeth tore at my hands and face. Maybe the nightmare was more swarm than creature, but a single, overwhelming presence focused on my intrusion.

Pressing on toward the heart of the darkness, I raised my hand to my mouth and bit my palm. When the blood began to flow—in the real world as well—I breathed upon it and drew in some of the creature’s darkness like a black hole draws in light. My blood burst into radiance. The creature writhed in agitation and drew back from me, so that my tiny bubble of illumination ended at a wall of squirming darkness. At my feet lay Madison.

If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn she was dead. Her dress was torn to shreds and drenched in blood. Deep gouges marked every inch of exposed skin, and blood pooled beneath her. I reached down and shook her shoulder as gently as I could.

“Madison, you need to get up,” I whispered urgently.

She turned toward me. Blood streamed from the socket where one eye had been, and a gash in her cheek revealed the teeth beneath. “I can’t,” she croaked.

The creature began to press against the shrinking ring of light as the flow of blood feeding the makeshift dreamwork dwindled. I reached to my side, feeling at the nightstand beside my physical body that still lay in bed. My hand closed on the metal mallet. The tiny mallet, used to break glass in an emergency, became a huge war hammer with a wooden haft carved in runes as it manifested in the nightmare. I seized the handle with both hands, and the light holding back the nightmare creature vanished. In the moment before the creature rushed to fill the darkness, I brought the war hammer crashing down onto the floor. The mallet dreamwork remembered its purpose. Wood shattered like glass, and Madison and I tumbled into the darkness beneath.

“Madison, you need to get up,” I whispered urgently.

She turned toward me. Blood streamed from the socket where one eye had been, and a gash in her cheek revealed the teeth beneath. “I can’t,” she croaked.

The hammer poked into my shoulder when I rolled over. I tried blinking the stars out of my vision, until I realized they were supposed to be there. I was staring at the night sky, with no moon in sight. This was the mountaintop outcrop where I first met…

“Madison!” I called.

“Here,” her voice whispered back.

I crawled over to her. She lay on her back in her ruined dress, her face covered in blood. I’d have been worried, but she looked much better than a moment ago, since despite the blood, her flesh appeared whole. The dagger was still tightly clasped in her hand. Good. I glanced up at the moonless night. The night sky’s darkness in the dreamwork would resonate with that of the dream, making it more effective here.

“What happened? Was I dreaming?” Madison asked.

“You still are,” I replied.

She sat up suddenly. “The monster! Where is it? Is it gone?”

“No,” I said. “I used this”—I patted the hammer—”to break us out of the nightmare. And you dreamt us here.”

At her blank stare, I realized that she couldn’t see much in the dark. I raised my hand to my mouth and breathed on the trickle of blood. It began to glow.

Madison blinked at the sudden light and put a hand to her head. “It hurts.”

“It doesn’t have to. This is your dream now.”

“Oh.” With that realization, the blood vanished from her face, and her clothes shifted from the torn dress to the hiking outfit she’d worn when I first saw her. The dagger…

“What happened to it?” Madison was looking down at her hand, which held the same flashlight she’d had when we first met.

“The dagger becomes what you need. If that’s what it’s become, then that’s what you need.” I hoped. All that was true, but a flashlight ?

After another moment inspecting herself in the light of her flashlight—had it always been that bright? —Madison turned to me. “So…ex-girlfriend?”

“Something like that. I’m sorry you got caught up in this. If I’d realized she was behind this, what she could do, how far she’s gone…” Ayen’s witchcraft was dangerous, but more so to Madison than to me. Those with the mental discipline for dreamforging were notoriously resistant to enchantment. Her sorcery was another matter. “I should have prepared for this. I knew she’d come after me eventually, but I didn’t expect this.”

“What does she want?”

“Our daughter. Ayen abandoned Sudri when she left us. Now she wants her back.”

“Wait, this is about custody? Don’t you guys have divorce courts?”

“Trust me, no court in the world would let her have Sudri, given what she has planned.” I was not going to let her do to Sudri what she had done to herself.

Most of what my curse had taught me about sorcery was terrifying. And my curse was incomplete, the sorcerer having destroyed himself before he could make me experience every dream that dreamforgers forced on others. I experienced the dreams I created, but only had an affinity for those afflicted by other dreamforgers. If Ayen could do even a fraction of that, I, and Sudri through me, were in real danger.

I should have taken the spectacles off and abandoned Madison to her dream, letting Ayen take her anger out on her while I made sure Sudri was safe.

But I, or maybe my curse, couldn’t let that happen.

The night sky rippled, and I told Madison what I planned to do.

The mountain shifted as Ayen insinuated herself into Madison’s dream. Wind, colder than any on the real mountaintop, coursed through my beard. Madison shivered and crept closer.

“Here you are.” Ayen’s voice came to us from down the trail. “Hiding from me?”

“Waiting for you.” I moved toward her voice. Over the edge of the outcrop, I could see a six-foot drop to the ground below. “On neutral ground, where we don’t have to play by your rules.”

She laughed. “You’re in a dream. Everywhere is my rules.”

I didn’t reply, but tightened my grip on the hammer.

“Really? You intend to bludgeon me like a troll?” I could see her now, deep in the shadow of the trees. Where was the monster? With her, or circling around behind?

“Madison,” I hissed. “Keep your guard up.”

“I know!” Madison had her back to me, the intense beam from her flashlight flickering all around the outcrop. Which was good, because that’s where the monster came from.

A deeper darkness began to flow like a flood onto the stone outcrop from all directions. Chittering, growling, screeching, making noises I didn’t recognize, it closed in on us, forcing me back from the edge.

I glanced at Madison, then turned my back on her and ran. After two steps I leapt over the creature’s writhing puddle of darkness, sailed past the edge of the outcrop, and plummeted to the ground beneath.

I landed hip deep in a squirming mass of shadow creature, where claws tore at my legs and dark limbs grabbed them. I swung the hammer, but the darkness didn’t even waver when the steel landed. The hammer could only do what I designed it for, and bludgeoning supernatural nightmare creatures wasn’t it.

Brilliant light washed over me from behind. When the nightmare shuddered and quaked in its radiance, I finally understood what the creature was. It was the monster that the darkness hid, the unknown sound in the night, the rustling shadows at the corner of the eye, every real or imagined beast waiting in the darkness. Light was its antithesis, revealing the truth behind the fear and obfuscation. So that was why the dagger changed. The blazing beam from Madison’s flashlight cleared the way, and I waded through the monster’s quivering mass and out the other side, then turned to look.

Madison stood in the midst of darkness which now loomed over her head. She held her flashlight like a sword—the dagger having absorbed the darkness of the night sky and responded with its antithesis, a beam so intense that it literally cut through the creature.

Then the nightmare began to reform, and I turned away.

Our plan, if I could call it that, was for Madison to face the monster while I distracted its creator. Even now, my ex’s witchcraft was helping her monster adapt to the dagger’s threat. Madison couldn’t beat it unless I stopped Ayen.

My short legs pumped as I sprinted down the trail. The trees became more shadowy and indistinct the farther I moved from the center of Madison’s dream, to where it grew inchoate and formless. The ground began to shift, and I was soon staggering instead of running. When I found my balance, I spun around, realizing that I could no longer see my target.

Ayen’s laughter echoed through the trees.

When I caught movement through the shadows, I broke into a lurching run. She couldn’t hide from my superior night vision. I almost had—

The hammer was plucked from my hand, and I stumbled and fell. Flopping onto my back, I saw my weapon tightly grasped by twisting tree limbs. Roots tangled around my legs as I began to rise, and when I tried to pull the roots free, I only succeeded in trapping my left hand as well.

Ayen was weaker now than she’d been in a dream of her own making, but here at the edge of Madison’s dream she had more control than I did. I could only control myself and those things that were mine. I couldn’t even summon the hammer, as the hand that held it in the real world was caught in the roots. Damn it!

I twisted my neck, hoping that my headlong charge had distracted Ayen, but Madison was still struggling to keep the darkness at bay. She sliced through it with the flashlight’s beam, but the nightmare instantly healed. If Ayen could strengthen the nightmare and bind me at the same time, she had more skill than I had realized.

Ayen stepped out from behind a tree, closer than I’d thought. “You should have fled once you realized this was a trap. But that curse of yours makes you soft.”

“Madison’s strong.”

“So? I’m not here for her, I’m here for you.”

“But your nightmare’s busy with Madison, and your witchcraft won’t work on me. You can hold me down”—I wriggled against the roots—”but you can’t hurt me.”

“Oh? Are you equally resistant to sorcery?”

“You wouldn’t.”

Ayen did not speak, but her soulmarks began to glow. I could swear I felt her prying at my soul, like a dreamforger altering the dreamwork at the core of a dream. A dreamwork forged of the passions and fears, the ideals and duties, the loves and hates that drove my life. Including my connection to Sudri. If Ayen took that away, I’d willingly hand over my own daughter for the right price.

Pain shivered through me. Reforging a soul is a delicate art, and Ayen still had a clumsy hand. I writhed and twisted as I tried to escape, searching for some weapon, anything I could use, but every inch of the shadowy wood belonged to Ayen.

Then my breath caught when she worried loose a strand of my curse.

I am not a sorcerer. I could not have done this in the waking world, would not have known how if Ayen hadn’t shown me. But in the dream, where I was what I willed myself to be, I could reach into myself and seize the golden wire of the curse. Inch by inch, I wound the curse around my hand, feeling every bite as the sawing wire dragged across the surface of my spirit. Until only a tenuous thread held it to my soul.

I hesitated at the last. If I removed the curse, I would change, and I didn’t particularly like who I was before: a mercenary who would willingly sell a dreamwork to my dearest friend’s worst enemy, not even questioning how it might be used. Was it any wonder he had cursed me with his dying breath?

I felt Ayen’s fingers on my soul and knew I could either remove the curse and hope I had truly changed for the better, or be remade into Ayen’s compliant ex-lover. So I yanked the curse free, and held a golden flame in my hand.

Ayen’s eyes widened at the sight and she stepped back, but I tossed the curse after her. It was drawn to her because of our history, because of the dwarf magic in her, but most of all because of my faded but never forgotten love for the young woman who begged to learn dreamforging, who delighted at each new secret I revealed, in whose dreams I walked and with whom I shared my own, who left because I could not accept the growing darkness within her. It was an empathy curse; I could only pass it on to someone I loved. As it reached her, tendrils of golden light latched on to her limbs and chest. Ayen struggled, the silver lines on her face glimmering as she flailed, but the flame slipped through her grasp and burrowed into her.

A quiet moment passed as we stared at each other. “What did you do to me?” But her eyes no longer saw me. “Get back!” She was sharing Madison’s dream now, seeing the monster through her victim’s eyes.

The light behind me grew brighter than ever, and I strained my neck to see. Madison’s light beam tore great gashes in the nightmare’s shadowy substance, and it recoiled from her, driven back by the flashlight-dagger and maybe Ayen’s witchcraft as well. Swing by swing, Madison carved larger and larger chunks from the monster, until what was left withered under the blazing light to nothing but a slinking shadow, and even that dissipated.

Ayen turned her hot eyes toward me. “I will come for our daughter,” she said before vanishing.

Madison found me before I could get away from the dying roots, and she helped me pull free.

“What happened?” She was breathing heavily, but grinning.

“I gave Ayen my second most precious possession. It should keep her distracted.” Depending on how many dreams she had forged, living through nightmare after nightmare might drive her mad. That nearly happened to me. But while the curse might destroy her, there was a chance, however slim, that it would save Ayen’s soul. I just hoped I had not lost mine in the exchange.

“What now?” Madison asked.

“Now you wake up.” The dark sky was beginning to turn gray, and I saw light on the horizon. “I’ll see you at my shop within the next week, I trust.”

“For what?”

“Payment.” I took off the spectacles.

I rubbed my eyes to clear my vision before staggering to my feet. After a brief moment of dizziness, the room stopped spinning. The spectacles were very effective, but the transition between the dream and the real world was a killer.

I was steady on my feet again by the time I reached my bedroom door. I wanted to go back to bed, but I needed to make sure. So I went into the hallway without flicking on the light switch, comfortable with the illumination filtering through the windows.

The door to the other bedroom was still cracked open, and I slipped inside.

Malachi was curled up on the floor. The guardian raised his head at the creak of the door and blinked once before lying back down, his unsleeping eyes focused on the form in the bed. I went to sit beside my daughter.

Sudri was sound asleep. I brushed some of her dark hair out of her eyes. She looked the same age Madison appeared under Ayen’s spell, and I wondered if Ayen had intended that. Her eyes fluttered sleepily.

“Shhh,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” She smiled and closed her eyes. It was my job to keep her safe. And Malachi’s, of course. The stone guardian doted on her.

I kissed Sudri’s forehead and left her in the comforting embrace of her wholly natural dreams.