Cedric sighed and brushed aside the screen monitoring the Nightmare and Dream. As mildly amusing as their Tom-and-Jerry-esque chase was, Cedric was more interested in the wreckage their clash left behind. He placed both his hands on the remaining monitor, then swiped them apart to split the screen into half a dozen, each monitoring a different wrecked train station. Their damaged parts all seemed to be leaking hate goo, supporting Cedric’s hypothesis that any damage to a mindscape would produce the sickly black substance. Maybe the Nightmare was returning later to collect the goo? Or it was burrowing back down into the cracks that -

A bright white flame flickering on another screen caught Cedric’s attention. It seemed to show up wherever the Dream attacked, and rapidly spread to ignite any nearby hate goo. It resembled the flames that had overtaken Cedric and Dyllan’s Nightmares when they completed their awakenings, but was without color and felt… empty somehow.

A pop-up appeared on one of the screens, labeling the white flame as “hollow dream fire”. A bit on the nose - and Andie would be disappointed that she wasn’t here to name it herself… but Cedric liked the term. Still, Cedric needed to decide how worried he should be about this. The label expanded to give a description. “Unlike normal dream fire, it does not convert hate goo to Will to Live. It leaves behind only ash.” That didn’t sound good.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Cedric rewound the monitor’s footage, then replayed it at double speed. The first sparks of “hollow dream fire” seemed to fly out whenever the Dream’s sword hit anything at all. Most of them died out quickly, but those that landed on hate goo buried into the sickly substance like seeds, biding their time for a short period before bursting out into a brilliant blaze. The flames spread quickly, and - just as the pop-up had claimed - left behind only a lifeless gray ash that soon blew away in the wind.

The ash was concerning enough on its own, but Cedric couldn’t help noticing that the hate goo wasn’t the only thing burning. Everything within about a foot of the goo was also scorched away into nothing but ash.

See, this was why Cedric hated asking questions like “should I be worried about that?” The answer was far too often: “Yes. You should be very worried.”