I never found my grave. I searched at night, while my friends slept or mated, and I searched far and wide. I went from dream Ludlun to the east, to the west, to the south, to the north, and to every point in between. I climbed the mountains and beheld the world from their peaks. Only once i reached the sea, and It seemed to me like the end of the world. And as the waves broke against a beach of sand so silver, I waddled into the Water and began swimming toward the horizon. I died slammed against a sharp rock formation.

I traveled forests where uncountable beasts fed on my flesh, I spent a night disturbing a wasp nest and wondering why they insisted on attacking me if it had no discernible effect on my wellbeing. I found moths, and taste them like I had the butterfly. None of them was precisely saporous. To the sound I wandered until, past some towns, I arrived to what I thought an endless beach whose sea someone had stolen. I got acquainted with Cacti, and found their exuberant red flowers tasteful. But no grave of mine half buried among the dunes.

After several weeks of pushing further and further in vain, I decided to spend a day in Ludlum, away from my human friends. I needed to speak with those of my kind.

“Yours is a face I haven’t seen in a long time,” said Remelias, still in somewhere we had designed as a bar, still sipping water from her cupped hands.

I sat on the floor and looked up at her blurry face. She wasn’t so well formed that day. Truth is, most Ludlunians don’t have the privilege of wearing detailed faces. Their visages are hastily made, cobbled together from memories of fear and anguish. Panic made dream flesh. I didn’t know why Cirruin remembered my face. It is about the same every time, I have a birth mark on my left hand and it remains there despite the maulings, the deaths. The dragon may forget one day, it’s true, but that was the moment when I began to believe that day to be further away, well past mercy.

“It’s not mine, and you have never seen it. Neither did I. I wish to talk to a fellow dream, Remelias.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Why?” her answer was dry, as it truly were her hands and lips: that water, too, was a dream.

A silence that would have been comically long for a pair of humans came and went. I reckon it should have been ten or fifteen minutes of saying nothing. Dreams can afford it. Dreams have nowhere to be, no people to meet.

“I am doubting, Remelias. I cannot find the grave of the man that gifted me this façade, I wonder if he was a hero, if others loved him. If he is brought flowers by someone, or if the vandals deface his tomb due to how vile he was in life.”

She spat water she had already drunk back onto her hands and asked again: “Why?”

This time, I hurried to answer.

“That’s one of the wrong questions, Remelias. I can only justify it with curiosity, but that shall not be enough for you, shall it?”

“No. It’s irrational. You have no need for naught but to keep Cirruin asleep, in case you wish to cling to existence. I do not feel such inclinations.”

“We are fragments of the same broken mirror of reality, Remelias. I want to know how the ones we shall never stop reflecting were. My wants are not yours, but you know them, don’t you?”

“I know you are acting in detriment of us all. I care not, and neither do the others in the town. Cirruin having a nightmare brought to fruition by your childish bickering would be a nice change of pace. You are the one of his dreams who is not acting on its best interest. Yet there’s no use in telling you to stay put, Terus.” She gave a long sip from her hands. “We are what we are, on occasion the outer world brings us curiosities from abroad. Sometimes I stab them. This allure for reality, this curse you hold fast onto may soon undo us all. What else do you expect me to say that you already know?”

“What do I do, Remelias?”

She shrugged, careful to not let the water drip down from her hands. “Advice… you may never find here. You are thinking about asking Mardhaka for help. To make a deal with a dragon that’s not the maker. In my humble opinion, the one I allot myself after years, this is a barren effort.”

I perked up and shifted to a standing position.

“You used a word I never expected you to, Remelias.”

“Myself. Ha. You are contaminating Ludlun. You are a threat. You are aware of that fact.”

I agreed with a gentle nod, and parted. They would not stop me. Dreams don’t fly or fight. Dreams don’t fear the inevitable return to the void from which we arise from. Or should not. Because Cirruin, with time, with this negligence of mine, has become very adept at dreaming a man and his fears.