Cedric turned his gaze back toward the void below him. Something felt off… incomplete, even. Maybe it was nothing, and he was just bad at celebrating victories - but if it was easy to shake off worries just because “they weren’t rational,” then the world wouldn’t need dreamwalkers. Plus, he actually knew why he felt like something was off… but even if he knew the reasoning behind his hunch, it was still just a hunch. That meant the only thing justifying his paranoia was a handful of gut feelings that hadn’t even been watered with enough evidence to bud into hypotheses.
“Hey… Cedric? It’s good to know Dyllan is okay, but are you alright?”
Cedric’s eyes flicked briefly back toward Andie before refocusing on the worries beneath him. “I’m fine enough. Just a little worried about how things wrapped up, or, more accurately, worried that they haven’t been wrapped up at all.” He paused to nervously fiddle with his fingers. “Everything feels… unfinished. In the past Nightmares have gone out with a bang, exploding into brilliant light like some monster-of-the-week from a cheesy children’s show. This one just… disappeared.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Huh. Cedric, I can’t believe I’m the one saying this to you… but this isn’t a TV show. It’s real life, and real life -” Andie hesitated, seeming a little hurt by the words she was about to say. “- real life doesn’t always make sense. Good and evil get tangled up, effort isn’t always rewarded, and most importantly: Sometimes things just… happen. No fanfare, no build up, and no foreshadowing.”
“But this isn’t Reality with a capital R. This is Dyllan’s reality. His mindscape. Things here might not make sense to us, but it should make perfect sense to Dyllan. If he felt some sort of wave of relief, shouldn’t we have seen it reflected in the environment?” Cedric sighed and stood up. “Well, either way, healing is exhausting and often painful work, and Dyllan did a lot of it today. He’s going to need time to recover from all of this recovering… and it’s rude to psychoanalyze someone behind their back, so we should be leaving anyway. Any worrying that needs doing - if any worrying needs doing at all - can wait.”