His lips began to slip down. “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this — the Reverie, the velours — when I had first arrived?”

“I suppose telling you about the secret reality I’ve been researching along with the living decorations around the manor would have put your mind at ease?” Rowan said with a knowing smirk.

He blinked. “Ah, I see what you mean.”

“Besides, simply knowing of the Reverie and experiencing it are two different things. Finding yourself here requires a deeper awakening, for one must be both awake and asleep to walk these lands. This lucid state can only happen when the mind is opened up to it, bit by bit. Otherwise everyone would be aware of this place. As it currently stands, most people slip directly between the waking world and the sleeping world, being none the wiser.”

“So the lessons you and Fielding were giving me were to ‘open me up’, then.”

“More or less,” his uncle said. “We’ve found that a person’s preconceptions often get in the way of what is possible. Everything we do pre-awakening is about pulling those barriers down.”

Beck let the explanations sink in. Somehow, the strange behavior by everyone at the estate and the peculiar experiences he’d had made sense in the context of the otherworldly existence his uncle described, the one he claimed they were currently in. The possibility of a madness overtaking his uncle was one Beck had seriously considered in his short tenure, but now if that was true then that same madness had overtaken him as well. At the very least, what his uncle took to be true had far reaching implications that made Beck uneasy.

“If Nora made the sleeping serum I took, that means she knows about this world. Who else is a part of this?” he asked.

“Come now, you’re making this out like we’re running a hustle!” Rowan gave his nephew an awkward smile. “We’re merely seeking solutions to the quandaries of life, same as any other researchers. Isn’t that right, Patch?”

The bear on Beck’s shoulders grunted. “It’s as you say, Master Rowan.”

“As for who’s involved, everyone in the mansion is privy to what we are looking into in one way or another, even the cooks, although most never enter the Reverie. Myself and Fielding are the main ones to actually travel through here.”

Beck carefully weighed his next inquiry. “I wasn’t sent here to learn psychology,” he said quietly.

“No. Your father entrusted you to me, specifically to try and awaken you to the Reverie. I apologize for the duplicity in that, but Whit and I knew, as you now know, that there are little alternatives in this initiation.”

For as long as Beck had known his father, he had been a quiet but steady anchor. His father was a level head, even if that made people outside the family assume Whit simply didn’t have emotions. Beck understood his father’s cool nature, but what his uncle just told him painted Whit as cold. He couldn’t remember a time his father had withheld information from him. Beck could only conclude that this was another unspoken signal, that this endeavor had his father’s blessing.

From the little time Beck had spent with his uncle, it seemed that social quirks ran in the family. Rowan wasn’t shy like his father, but lacked a social awareness that put Beck on edge. Before, he supposed his uncle’s constant unpreparedness was a symptom of that, but his awakening to the Reverie was met with immediate action. Beck recalled what Fielding had mentioned during their first lesson, how the initiation was used on all of Rowan’s students. “How many people have you brought through this process, uncle?”

His uncle gave a nonchalant roll of the shoulders. “Dozens. If you were wondering where all of those students are, many never made it to the position you are in. Those that did are either helping with our work behind the scenes or have moved on. You are the only one we are teaching right now.”

Before he could continue that line of questioning, Beck heard a strange sound coming from the fox around his uncle’s neck. He realized the creature was snoring. Recollecting himself, Beck let out a long sigh. While understanding his family’s intentions was important, what interested him now was his present surroundings. “Why does this place look identical to the Barclay manor? Is the Reverie just a copy of the real world?”

“In some ways, but there are —” Rowan titled his head, as though trying to knock loose the phrase that was stuck in the folds of his mind. “I suppose you can call them edges, where what appears real and what is fantasy meet. The Reverie is a very compelling illusion. Come, it would do well to show you some of what I am talking about.” He walked towards the stairs. Beck followed.

While they ascended to the second floor his uncle continued, “There is a lot to the landscape of the Reverie, but let us focus on where we are currently. Everyone who enters the Reverie has their own space, their own dream world that becomes manifest. I have my own. So does Fielding. This is your dream.”

“Patch has one too?” Beck asked.

He felt the velour on his back shake its head. “This only applies to humans,” it said.

“Since this space belongs to you, the architecture is dictated by your mind. When someone is first awakening to the Reverie, that person will subconsciously project a place they are familiar with. I guess you like my estate.” His uncle looked around the space as they reached the promenade. “Like I mentioned, the size and detail of this world you’ve made is impressive. Usually a novice will only manifest something small and simple, like a single room.”

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“Why wouldn’t this dream look like my family’s home back in Britain? Obviously that’s the place I would be most familiar with.”

His uncle raised his eyebrows. “You’d best ask yourself that, this is what came most readily to your mind. Of course once you are experienced enough with the Reverie you’ll be able to reconstruct your own space.”

As they headed down the hall, Rowan suddenly stopped at an alcove to the side which contained a vase on a small stand. He started rotating it slowly, staring intently at the filigree at the base of the decoration.

“If this is my own personal space, how were you able to enter?” Beck asked, taken aback by his uncle’s strange routine.

“By default no one would be able to enter your dream, but that’s where the invitation comes in. Like we discussed before, the Reverie operates on figurative logic,” he said, not looking up or pausing from carefully turning the vase. “Your space knows that you belong, but I am an outsider. However, because a formal invitation in the real world is a universal symbol that signifies one’s allowance to be somewhere, that concept has become a law in the Reverie.”

Beck furrowed his brow. “But all that I handed to you was a metal token with my name on it, and you were the one who gave it to me first.”

Rowan gave a chuckle. “An astute observation. To you and me, the procedure is illogical. I don’t believe any person would perceive the token to be an invitation. But the Reverie acknowledges it as such. The token is an invitation distilled to its base form.”

That only left Beck more confused, but his uncle had stopped his bizarre activity and was continuing through the mansion. He followed after him until they approached the end of the hallway. Instead of heading into Beck’s suite, Rowan strode to the doors leading to the East Wing.

“Master Rowan, careful,” Patch warned.

His uncle stopped before the doorway. “You haven’t been through here yet, correct Beckham?”

He shook his head. Beck hoped that attempting to get in wasn’t perceived as entering by the Reverie.

Rowan pulled at the door. For a moment Beck thought it would be locked like in the real world, but it swung open easily. The space beyond was dark, appearing pitch black. At first he thought it was due to the lack of light, but after staring at the impenetrable nothing he realized that was exactly what was there: nothing. Then it dawned on him that there was a tangible something, not a wind nor a sound, but a vertigo that drew him closer to it.

His uncle held out an arm to stop him. “Don’t get too close, there’s a drop-off.”

Beck looked down from where he stood. The darkness went on forever. “What’s out there?”

“It’s a gap in your knowledge, an unmapped area. If you step through you’ll fall out. Please don’t, it’s a hassle to retrieve those that do,” Rowan remarked.

“I would have thought that if this leads to the outside we would see, you know, the outside. Or the edge of this dream or something of that sort.”

“In this world, a house can fit inside a thimble,” the bear said.

“As Patch is alluding to, the Reverie is non-Euclidean,” his uncle explained. “In some places you can travel a mile and end up in the room adjacent. In others the same passage is on both sides of the door.”

The type of unreality they were talking about was hard for his mind to comprehend, but Beck was quite sure that in the real world there wasn’t a void in the East Wing. He retreated from the emptiness, now certain that the mansion he was in wasn’t real.

His uncle closed the door. “Needless to say, you must watch your footing. While the space in there is somewhere you obviously shouldn’t go, there are places where the floor can collapse from underneath you. Not to fret though, that’s why we have velours.”

“As mentioned, my kind has a sense of the Reverie that humans do not have,” Patch said. “Not like sight or smell or sound, but a knowing of the shape of this world. Even before Master Rowan opened the door, I knew what was on the other side.”

His uncle continued from there. “From what I’ve come to understand this isn’t just intuition; I assumed that the East Wing would be unmapped based on my own experiences with the Reverie, but to velours it was already fact. Having a velour with you is essential to traversing this realm in any capacity, they can guide you if any problems arise.”

All of his uncle’s strange descriptions in his teachings Beck had been able to tolerate, but there was an uncomfortable vagueness in his last statement. “What kinds of problems?” Beck broached. “Like if someone uninvited enters your dream?”

Rowan pondered for a moment. “In the unlikely event that there is someone malicious wandering the Reverie then your velour can protect you, but no one can enter your own space without an invitation.” His uncle shook his head, focusing his eyes somewhere beyond the walls of the hallway. “No, the landscape itself is the paramount obstacle.”

Beck hesitated. Something was still pulling at the back of his mind. “I’m not sure if this is true, but in the nights leading up to meeting Patch the dreams I had felt similar to this. Too real for them to be just dreams. And, well, the night Patch was outside my room, someone else came in. Someone I didn’t recognize.”

Rowan snapped his gaze back to his nephew. “What did they look like?” His tone remained the same, but his eyes had become oceans.

“He was wearing a long coat and a short-brimmed hat, but he was a silhouette, as though the light parted around him.”

The fox around his uncle’s neck raised its head, suddenly startled and alert. A deep growl emerged from Patch. But the most startling reaction was from Rowan himself. He regarded Beck, still as a statue. His uncle’s silence was deafening. The two velours’ agitation would have already put him on edge, but the intense scrutiny of the other man was what scared him the most. Beck felt like an insect that lay ready for dissection before the other man.

“I see,” Rowan finally said. He started pacing down the length of the hallway, leaving Beck stranded with his own racing heart. Even when his uncle had reached the limit of the corridor and turned around to pace back the way he had come, Beck still found himself rooted to the spot, not knowing how to react.

His uncle returned to where he stood. His eyes were once again sharp and knowable, conviction lining the man’s face. “It seems we must expedite your training.”