“Good morning Evan,” said a nurse. He was handsome with incredibly deep blue and apparently caring eyes, yet retained a detached sense of boredom in his demeanor. Evan blinked his eyes deliriously, scanning his environment.

“This isn’t Kingsly,” he stated.

“Of course it is, Evan. You’re still in Kingsly, safe and sound. Dr. Spelk has prescribed an increased dosage of Risperdal. How are you feeling?”

“I--” managed Baker, before screeching white noise filled his head. He winced as the edges of his world dissolved in static. Blue. Managed Evan. Baker was a dream.

Evan looked down at his dream journal, then back up at the nurse. The nurse nodded and closed the door. Evan could see the shadows of his feet waiting outside the room. He grabbed the dream journal and opened it. Page after page of foreign memories, like splinters lodged under skin. Kingsly. Baker.

He stood up from the practically concrete bed and observed his surroundings. The room cast a light blue on him. The walls were painted with murals of a happy field of grass. The window was tempered and filled with a lattice of wires. It overlooked a parking lot, and a sign that said “Kingsly Psychiatric Hospital”.

Ah.

He was dressed in a faded t-shirt and jeans. His hands were covered in scratches. A soft knock came from his door.

“Yeah?” Evan answered, unsure. The nurse opened the door.

“Sorry about that Evan, I know you’re private with your journaling. Anyways, Miranda just called--”

“Who?”

A look of overwhelming pity overtook the nurse’s face at once, be he quickly masked it.

“Your wife, Evan.”

The words rang hollow. They might as well have been meaningless. For all practical purposes, they were.

Cereal. The boring in-between was cut out, edited from existence. Evan stared at a bowl of cereal. The floating bits of grain weren’t exactly appealing, and something buzzed in the back of his head. Easy listening music played softly on a xylophone was pumped from a nearly dead radio, surrounded by nearly dead patients. Everyone had the same glossy look over their eyes. Evan had checked. He did too. Anna hummed loudly and in spurts, random notes overtaking the music. Evan continued to direct his stare down into the cereal, but concentrated his hatred on her humming, hoping that she’d feel it somehow and stop.

She stopped.

Evan stared into his journal, lying back down in his bed. He tried to make some sense of the words written there. The memories in his head he now knew were false; the Kingsly of his dreams was an aggressive rewriting of the Kingsly he couldn’t accept. Dr. Spelk upped his dosage of Risperdal. And the buzzing got louder.

He continued writing in the journal.

He wrote about Baker pulling his hand away from the glass, and telling Romov about the hospital. He tapped the page with his safe-pen; the pen designed to be impossible to kill yourself with. It flopped around as he tried to think of what Romov said in response. But there was nothing there. Just buzzing. Anna was also in the scene, though. What did Anna have to say? He opened a pair of quotation marks.

“

All he could think of was humming. He looked up from his journal and a black haired teen hummed in his room. He hugged his journal to his body as though protecting it.

“What the hell, Anna?” half-screeched Evan. Anna stared, then giggled, then left his doorway and left to the right of his room. Moments later, a nurse sprinted past his room in the same direction, accompanied by the sort of noises he knew he didn’t want to understand.

The vividness of his latest dream had mostly faded, except the cool feeling of glass on his finger, like cold honey creeping up on his skin. He looked at his finger, nearly subconsciously, half-expecting to find something there. Of course, there wasn’t. But still, the feeling lingered, buzzing in sync with the buzzing in his head.

The nurse left a cup with two little red elliptical tablets in them on the table next to his bed. The buzzing was louder and louder. The nurse left the room and he experimentally curled his index, ring, and little finger down, leaving the middle firmly extended. He was surprised by his own lack of manners towards the pills and allowed a short giggle to escape his throat.

Then he slept.

Then it was white.

He hovered in an echoey void.

“Come on now, Baker. To think you’d give up so easy,” said Romov from within his head. Evan looked around himself to no avail. Still nothing. This dream was different.

“You’re not real,” assured Evan.

“They got you convinced so easy, huh?” answered Romov. He chuckled, and the chuckle escaped his head and became a little flickering blue flame in the white void. It flickered in the center of all the nothing, and the Risperdal ate away at it slowly.

“This is just a dream,” Evan continued. He tried to close his eyes, but his eyelids weren’t present.

“Yeah, that’s right, actually. But how far does the dream go? I can’t have you staying here forever, now, pal. I still need my shards back. Think about it from my perspective. Your delusions aren’t selfish.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Evan thought for a second, then lifted his pen. It was a different kind of dream, but he still had to write it down. He thought for a second. Did he?

Why did he have to write it down?

He flipped back in the pages, and read what he had managed. He didn’t remember dreaming of Cardona and Vox. He didn’t remember dreaming of Persephone meeting with Max, or Anna talking to Chase and her other friends. He didn’t remember because he wasn’t there.

The buzzing switched on, then off. Then on, then off. Like someone had jammed a vibrating phone into his head.

“What?!” he snapped frustratedly at the buzzing in his head, before realizing the absurdity. The buzzing stopped abruptly. Then it cackled.

Cereal. Humming with easy listening music, and this time the buzzing joined the cacophony too. He flipped off his pills. Then he dreamt.

The blue flame shimmered.

“The glass hasn’t even completed the ripple yet, Baker. I’ve been trying to talk to you all day, but this construction you’ve made for yourself is quite effective at convincing you I’m not.”

He lifted his pen. Cereal. Morning came abruptly and unwantedly as time blurred into a smudge.

His hand twitched, and his jaw clenched. He grabbed the pills, crushing the little paper cup around them. He dropped them into the trash can. The buzzing stopped.

“Good boy. Now we can talk.”

The blue flame in the white flickered.

“What do I do?” asked Baker.

“Find number three.”

Pen. Cereal. Xylophone. He tossed the pills. He looked through the window. The parking lot was on fire. Anna melted through a door with a smile. Baker eyed the pills again. The nurse watched him with mournfully concerned blue eyes.

“Evan?”

“Mmm?” replied Baker, unsure of how to form words.

“We found the pills in the trash.”

Those deep blue eyes, and a third set in his forehead. The world froze in divine ecstasy, soaked purple and filled with glittering stars. Baker shrunk -- or maybe the world around him grew, and gravity loosened her grip at his feet. He bounded up glass stairs, easy listening xylophone marking his ascent on the accent beats. Smooth jazz brushes tingled his ears. The glowing third eye was jammed open with a rosewood toothpick, the redness of the sclera contrasting with that deep, soft blue. That beautiful blue, deep within his skull.

He abandoned his steps altogether, floating upwards in a spiral, reaching forwards.

His hand was covered in blood.

The nurse was on the ground, screaming and clutching at his missing eye. Baker opened the palm of his hand to see a hazel eye staring back at him. The thumping of rapidly approaching footsteps jerked him awake.

He pulled his pen from the journal. What had inspired him to write something so sick?

But the eye he plucked from the socket of the nurse in his deluded fantasy called to something beyond his delusion. The eye, hazel and not blue, spoke to the buzzing, they discussed the events of the day, and formulated a plan.

In the white void, he asked the blue flame to connect Cardona’s eye to his own. When he awoke, his eyes remained clenched shut. He saw the third flame hovering there in the dark.

He grasped at it, then pulled it to his chest.

He felt the warmth radiate within him.

The glass rippled from where Baker contacted it, and he fell backwards, breathing heavily. He laughed. Clutched in his left hand was a bit of blue fire. It snaked around his arm and into his head. In his right hand was Cardona’s eye, looking a little worse for wear.

“Alr-oaaAh,” attempted Romov. “That’s a... weird piece. I did some weird shit in there.”

“So, that’s it? All you had to do was touch a piece of glass?” asked Anna.

“That was a narrative manifold,” answered Baker, unprompted by Romov. He felt a sharp spike of surprise at the words coming from his own mouth, followed by even deeper surprise when he realized they hadn’t come from Romov either.

“That’s right, actually,” curiously replied Romov. “How did you know that?”

“I don’t know,” answered Baker. Anna politely pretended she wasn’t watching a disheveled man gripping a human eye in his hand talking to himself.

The surface of the glass burbled again, then bulged outwards, displacing the space beside it. Finally, the silver cracked and a kindly old face emerged, poking out a little and observing his surroundings.

“Oh, hello,” remarked Djymm. The rest of his body followed. Then, clenched in his hand, his staff. Then, in his other, another hand, followed by an arm, followed by a dead nurse missing an eye. He pounded his staff on the ground a couple times, and an echoing string of light connected his lantern to Pepper, who erratically burst forth from an adjacent shelf, spilling books on the floor. Seraph grumbled and stood, walking towards the books on the floor and delicately replacing each.

Djymm opened Pepper and tossed the dead nurse in. He stepped forward as though to enter, but at the last moment he seemed to remember something. He addressed the others suspiciously.

“You two weren’t... mucking about in alternate narratives, were you?” asked Djymm. Baker felt sweat build up on his forehead, and his throat clenched.

“Uhhh,” he stalled. Djymm shook his head and tutted, before following the corpse into Pepper.

“Tell Brooks I said hello.” Pepper flapped upwards, then veered into another bookshelf, books pouring out in every direction. Seraph barked indignantly at the door, then continued to grumble while putting the other spilled books away.

Then tapping footsteps, louder than they had any right to be, echoed in the library. A hand gripped Baker’s shoulder.

“If it isn’t our new staff, Mr. Baker. I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Vox. His grip tightened as he saw the eye in his hand. “And it looks like Cardona has already gotten acquainted.”

He pulled something from his pocket that looked a little like a dentist’s implement, then shoved it against Baker’s forehead.

“Spelk tells me that you’re carrying an unwanted visitor. See, I wanted to get rid of both of you--”

Baker started to scream as Romov was painfully ripped away from his brain.

“--but I happened to meet another young woman who said you were merely being manipulated by our friend Romov, along with Anna over there.”

Anna stood, jaw agape.

“Me? What? I didn’t do anything to help these idiots!” she protested. The ground at her feet turned to sand, and she quickly sank. She struggled against the grains, attempting to run, but it was too late. She vanished under the floor. Vox took the blue flame and dropped it in a small vial. He smirked.

“So I guess you get off scot-free, Mr. Baker. Let’s have lunch some time.” He dropped the vial in his pocket, and walked away, humming as he went. He left Baker on the floor, gasping for breath.

He stood, limbs weak. His hands were uncontrollably shaking, and all he had left was the damn eye. He glanced back at the evershifting glass machinery. Romov, Anna. Everything that made sense, even a little, was taken from him.

Whatever was in there, it felt just as real, and it was safe and things made sense. Everything made sense in there, in fact -- the injustice of nonsense was explained by insanity. He had nothing left in Kingsly, so why stay?

He watched the hazel eye in his hand for a moment, then made his decision. He dropped it on the ground and fell forward into the glass again.