Cedric’s Dream and Andie stared at each other for a little while longer before Andie finally had to admit that, yes, this thing was definitely trying to ask her to move. That… couldn’t be right, could it? Mindscapes may have been “real” in the sense of being factual and important, but they weren’t real real. They were metaphors - a projection that allowed dreamwalkers to interact with something intangible, but not in and of themselves a “something.” Like a reflection in a mirror, they showed something… but were neither the something they showed nor a something of their own.

So no matter how “alive” a mindscape was, the things inside it should have been automata at best - utterly lacking in free will or theory of mind. Only Nightmares had ever acknowledged her presence before, and even then they didn’t seem to “recognize” her. All they saw was a glitch in the system or, more likely, they were simply instinctively responding to the powerful energy her dreamwalker form was made out of. The nasty things probably just lashed out at her the same way they would lash out at a Dream. Maybe they even thought she was a Dream.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Sure, Dyllan’s Nightmare had been a little odd in that respect - but it only really responded unusually to Dyllan’s presence. The person whose mind it had been born from. Even then, it only seemed to understand that the mindscape was changing, and that Dyllan was the cause of the change. So even though Cedric was a dreamwalker, and also… well… Cedric, Andie found it unlikely he’d be an exception. Yeah, it was odd how the clockwork birds watched her - but they watched anything that moved. Maybe it was a property of Dreams that made this different? Or maybe…

…she should probably wait to finish theorizing until after she’d changed islands. Cedric’s Dream hadn’t stopped staring at her, and she didn’t want to wait around long enough to see if it was capable of getting impatient.