The three of us fought the horde of cloud dragons, the battlefield looking like a doctor’s convention from the 1950s with all the smoke filling the air.

I was careful not to use Smoldering Caress again.

Luckily the smoke dragons were weak, and so easy for even me to dispatch. They weren’t vulnerable to my regular attacks, but my summoned weapon Horde worked just fine against their horde.

Despite the healing from Blood of the Phoenix that I’d got when I’d ignited the psychedelic cloud, and the healing I got from stealing mana with each attack due to my hobby ability Devour, I was still damaged from my earlier fight with the undead ice giant, which meant Fiend’s Rage further increased damage output and allowed me to take out the Giant-class, level 1 phantasms with a single hit or two from Horde, which I currently had formed into a wide, multipronged staff.

I felt good about my progress until I saw Vyrania and Koren tearing through multiple dragons at a time.

As we dispatched the phantasms, Bob’s cloud shrank in size, his ability to puff on his vapesticks outpaced by the dragons his cloud was forming and sending after us.

He was drifting closer and closer to the ground as his cloud shrunk.

“Come on, Bob! It’s me!”

“I’m me!” he shouted back.

“Yes, and I’m me, Noah Whitehall.”

“Lies come easy to lizards!” he shouted. “I’ll teach you never to wear faces!” Then he laughed, puffing more smoke and letting out a warcry.

Koren stopped fighting the dragons, cocking his head.

So did Vyrania.

“What is it?” I asked. They could hear or sense something I couldn’t.

“We’re about to have company.”

‌

∎ ∎ ∎

The sight I saw before me was both amusing and horrifying.

At least forty people from town, dressed in all manner of attire—including none at all—came charging out from apparently nowhere, closing in on us.

“Don’t hurt them!” I shouted to my companions.

“Some of them are stronger than us,” Vyrania said, worry in her voice.

Even Koren looked uneasy.

“Tom!” I called out. Thomas Turner was one of the celebrity regulars to my shop, the one who always overpaid in US dollars. He seemed to be leading the charge, and was wearing nothing but his birthday suit and facepaint from that Mel Gibson movie, holding up an inflatable hammer.

“Block your ears brethren!” Bob called down to them. “He’s an imposter!”

The crowd roared angrily in response. Weapons suddenly appeared in several hands, and Tom’s inflatable hammer morphed into a giant battleaxe, plate armor suddenly covering him head to toe, others gaining similar attire, none of it slowing any of them down in the slightest.

Something about this fact, and the fact that Thomas now looked exactly like Kral, the character he played in his most well-known series of movies, made something click in my head.

I looked up at Emma again. Wearing nothing but scuba gear and flippers.

The reason it had seemed so familiar was because she’d talked about how she had reoccurring dreams where she was scuba diving, leading a tour group wearing nothing but flippers and scuba tank.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“It’s a nightmare,” I said.

“It’s not that bad,” Koren said. “There’s only a few who are stronger. The rest are weak. Though not hurting them might be difficult. Some aren’t even Copper.”

“No, I mean, they’re dreaming!”

“What?”

“The runes. Reverie. That’s like a dream. We’re supposed to feed the egg corruption and reverie and… something else which you didn’t bother telling us I now realize. Well, this is a reverie, a corrupted dream. A nightmare.”

I opened my artifact storage and pulled the egg free, tossing it to Koren who caught it with a frown.

“Feed it!”

He looked confused for a moment longer, then his eyes lit up and he smiled.

He moved so fast he seemed to disappear, appearing in front of Tom, who had pulled ahead of the others. Koren easily dodged the blow of his battleaxe, then pressed the egg against the armored man.

Tom jolted, freezing in place, then faded out of existence, some dark essence being sucked into the egg.

You have fed The Egg.

It is not enough.

You have awoken a dreamer.

I let out a cheer.

Now we just had to stay alive long enough to wake them all with the single egg.

“My friends!” Bob cried as Koren dashed around the swampy battlefield, touching the egg to the people of Byron’s Bay, drinking a dark energy from each of them as they disappeared.

It only took a few seconds each time, but it added up and it was getting harder and harder to avoid the people trying to swarm us.

Eventually Vyrania and I ended up climbing a tree, which the dreamers seemed to have trouble with.

This made it easier for Koren to awaken them as they were now clustered together.

Soon the battlefield was empty save for Vyrania, Koren, and me, plus Bob, sitting on the edge of his cloud, looking down at us, and Emma, high above, swimming around as though oblivious to it all.

“Well?” I said to Koren.

“Well what?”

“What are you waiting for? Wake him up.”

“You saw what happened last time,” he protested.

“Yeah but you didn’t have the egg. You just need to touch it to him.”

Koren sighed, but leapt into the air, easily making it up to Bob’s cloud. He held out the egg as he soared toward him, collided egg-first with Bob, both of them tumbling off the cloud but only Koren landing, Bob fading away before he had the chance.

You have fed The Egg.

It is not enough.

You have awoken a dreamer.

Koren managed to land on his feet this time, prepared as he was.

“You should have tried knocking him off the first time,” Vyrania said as Koren rejoined us an instant later.

“I—” Koren began, but was interrupted by a change.

It wasn’t a sound, or light, or anything I could put my finger on. But something shifted, and caused us all to look up.

Emma, now glowing like a bioluminescent siren of myth, was swimming through the air down toward us, and she—

‌

∎ ∎ ∎

Noah pulls himself out of memory, realizes he’s gone too deep.

The Interviewer almost got it out of him. Noah is supposed to be the one in control here, the one leading things where they need to go, the one getting information.

He needs to be more careful.

“So,” Noah says, doing his best to remain calm, “we woke everyone up with the egg, then—” He’s stopped by a pull of the Interviewer’s will. “Oh, you want to know what happened with Emma? There was no broadcast for it? How peculiar.”

The Interviewer of course makes no verbal response, but Noah feels it diving into his memories, and quickly but subtly takes control, his superb ability with mana the only thing allowing it against so powerful of an adversary.

“You know, now that you mention it, maybe I do remember something like that. I think the egg blanked me out, probably too much power.

But you didn’t miss anything.

Of course, Koren would disagree. He would say you missed his magnificence.

But that’s Koren for you.

And he was the one who got us through the next part, which is where things really get crazy.

There he was, standing in the center of this football-field-sized battlefield, his eyes scanning the trees encircling it, studying the runes etched into their bark. At Copper my eyesight wasn’t yet good enough to even see them, let alone find the one we needed.

But Koren’s were.

“Ah, there it is,” he said.

The three of us went to the tree with the desired rune.

“Should we expect another frozen lake?” Vyrania asked.

“I’d think not.” He frowned as he studied the rune. “Tree? I think that’s what it says.”

“Well that is a tree,” I pointed out.

“Indeed. Or perhaps it means life. I believe they’re the same symbol in Arcturian.” He reached out to touch the rune carved into its bark. Instead of ice or rot, this one was a simple gouge in the wood.

As his fingers brushed against the rune, mana burst forth from him and into it.

“Oh, that was unexpected,” he said with a grimace. “It’s using my mana to activate itself.”

A wave of mana erupted from the tree, nearly knocking me over.

Vyrania collapsed beside me and it took all my effort just to stay conscious, to fight off the foreign mana.

It wasn’t trying to attack or harm me. No more than a tidal wave intends to drown a city.

But intention is not required for harm.