"Angels— when did you get so messy, Elle?"

"I— you— my research is not messy."

I wasn’t awake, and then I was.

Instinctively, I groped around for my glasses, before remembering that, here, I didn’t need them.

Dreamspinners could change the dreams of others, often giving them realities that they’d otherwise never see. It only stood to reason that we could change our own, even if the topic was never broached in standardized study. This dream was my own.

An endless field of rustling, even crops, untouched by a winter that would never come. A nest of the softest blankets, and a sky caught eternally between dawn and dusk. A breeze that would bring the sounds of soft lullabies and vellichor. Everything here was as I wanted, no people, no glasses, no snow that’d freeze me to the bone, no dirt that’d cling to all my clothes and grime my nails.

A good place, really, and one I’d made when I was younger, when I sought the escape of sleep more than I did research. It also wasn’t a place I frequented often, nor chose to visit this time around. Which in all reality could only mean one thing.

My Shade wanted to speak.

Which I wasn’t about to have any of. I drew the blankets back around myself, and did my best to will myself back to sleep.

I wasn’t exactly honest when I said there wasn’t any people that existed in my dream. There existed one, who I couldn’t bring myself to remove, even after all these years.

“Awww— c’mon!” she crowed, among the rustling of parted crops, “won’t you stay awhile? I’ve got tea!”

I groaned, before dragging myself up, and coming face to face with— well, myself.

Crouched before me at the edge of where I slept, perching on her toes with her arms drawn around her knees, was me. More accurately, a Shade— a memory built by a younger me, when I’d been new to the discipline. My younger self had done a good job, admittedly, she had the same long, black hair, the same pale-blue eyes, undercut by dark bags that mirrored my own, and the same thin lips that were curled in an uncharacteristic grin. Though she’d been frozen at the age she’d been created, making her a bit shorter than me.

“How have you got tea?” I responded, sighing. I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this. “Last time I checked, I didn’t leave you with any form of teapots.”

Shades— in the most basic term— were memories given form. Despite the fact that my younger self had built a near-perfect replica of us, she’d failed to account for the fact that Shades, similar to dreams, were never meant to be permanent. The Shade before me was a work of art in terms of technical skill, but it was also, first and foremost, a mistake.

“Oh— my dear stupid self—“ I frowned— “don’t you know that you’ve left me with an entire world? How couldn’t I have tea?”

Shades are only really meant to be small fixtures in a person’s dream, to create an illusion of reality. But since they were comprised of memories, they had egos— sentience. Shades were capable of feeling pain and sadness and just about every other emotion available to real people. My younger self had considered nearly every avenue besides from the most obvious, that being the fact that a Shade created would linger.

A Shade created in an unending dream would never disappear. It would sit here, devoid of life, devoid of anything other than an endless field of crops and the same melody playing over and over. It was liable to drive any person insane. Trapping a Shade to eternal confinement was cruel— a mistake I’d carelessly made— even if we ignored the fact that the eternal imprisonment of a person would be certainly against the law.

I knew it was cruel, and a logical part of me knew it’d be better to just erase the Shade and be done with it, but like my younger self, I still yearned desperately for the company of another, even if it was a gross caricature of my own. Every time I’d come close to erasing her, some hesitation held me back.

“So,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair before fixing my Shade with a dry look. “What did you want?”

She pouted, before standing and pacing around me. “C’mon, won’t you at least stay for tea? I really have been trying my best y’know.” She batted her eyelashes, and my frown deepened.

“Don’t play coy with me. We both know the only entertainment you get around here is when you drag me in here.”

“Gosh— you’re always in so much of a rush,” she drawled. “Never even have time for yourself…”

I sighed, leaning back, ignoring the tiny inkling of resentment that settled alongside a year-old guilt.

Ignore her. Ignore her, I urged.

“I guess— that is to be expected though— isn’t it?” She glanced at me, before continuing. “We’re running out of time, dear.” Her grin grew vicious. “Does Arthur know?”

“Did you simply drag me in here to tell me what I already know?” I met her gaze, glaring.

My Shade was silent for a heartbeat, before her face broke out into a soft smile, giggling. “I suppose you are still just a bit of fun… even if the years has made you a bit of a rude bitch.”

I arched a brow at her, silently asking if she was finished. We’d played this song and dance a hundred times already, and even I got tired of doing the same thing over and over. She held my stare before her smile vanished, replaced by a petulantly frown.

“Fine, fine— you old hag— I simply wanted to check in on you.”

“That’s it?”

“Yep!” Her face lit up, grinning wide and disquieting, like she expected me to laugh. “Though Dmitri wasn’t much of a lead, was he?”

“Why ask if you already know?”

“Why ask if you already know?” she mockingly echoed back. “Don’t ask stupid questions, dearest.”

I bit back a retort, shoving out the unpleasant memory of my mother that bubbled to the surface. Ignore it. She’s just trying to get a reaction out of you. She can’t actually do anything. Ignore. It.

Clenching my hands under the blankets and doing my best to keep my face and tone level, I bit out, “Then we’re done here, yes?”

“You’re no fun.”

“Can you ever find any new insults?”

“Ha!” my Shade snorted, “like I need to. We both know how you really feel. Ever the stupid little girl our mother called us, yes?”

“I’ve changed,” I said. Though we both knew I didn’t really believe it.

“Liar,” she singsonged.

Now, what happened next, I must preface was a moment of indignity, born from the fact I’d barely slept in the days leading up to Mr. Lestine’s Wake, as well as the resounding failure that’d resulted hours earlier. I am, normally, by no means a violent person. I’d been in spars, but I’d never actively sought out fights. This was, in the moment, an action I made born of thinning rationality.

I rose, gripping a lead pipe— because why wouldn’t I have a pipe in my own dream?— and slammed it over my Shade’s head.

The scent of iron blossomed, heralded by a wet, metallic thwack as she yelped and briefly stiffened, expression frozen in shock before collapsing like a puppet with cut strings.

[][][]

Evening made itself known through my thick sun-drenched drapes, casting my room in dim, muddled light.

I wasn’t a morning person, and years of chronic sleep deprivation never made me anymore amenable to it.

I blearily groaned, absently staring at my ceiling for a moment before reaching for my pocket watch. Its hand had barely passed the two, and I lifelessly dropped it back into my covers. Ten hours, give or take. Ten hours, I had slept, and I still felt lifeless. It was almost as bad as waking up in that shallow leaf-covered ditch. Almost.

But my ridiculous number of blankets and pillows beat a dirty ditch any day. Though the sun wasn’t a point in its favor, despite being being softened by the drapes. Limbs sluggish and muscles a little sore, I barely got myself sitting up before I briefly considered just going back to bed.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

It’d be fine, a tired part of me reasoned, it’s not like you have any obligations this morning.

Yet, responded the quiet, rational part of my sleepy mind, doing so would be admittance that three days of near-sleep deprivation, repeated failures, and dismal ether reserves would be too much for you.

My gaze drifted to the sun-draped windows, my dropped pocket watch, and my book-littered room. I settled on the windows, trying to gauge how much time I’d have left before the sun went down. I was fine with sleeping in till afternoon, but I drew the line at literally waking up at night— then all of Arthur’s teasing about me being nocturnal would have more basis in truth than jest.

It’s perfectly fine to rest, the tired, useless voice whispered again. I ignored it.

A knocking that barely registered came again, louder now. I muttered something, groped blindly for my glasses, and quickly gave up when I couldn’t find them within a couple of seconds. I gazed confusedly to look around for them, but the rest of my room only appeared as a hazy mix of soft browns, rugs, and parchment.

Damn those glasses. To say the least, they were annoying, and the years didn’t do anything to help their case. It didn’t help that I was practically blind without them. Of course, the first thing I tried to do when I got them were find workarounds with magic— I had a depressing amount of material stored in a drawer somewhere— and while the spells I found worked, they weren’t practical for long stretches of time, or had some other assortments of problems.

The knocking came again, quick and precise, pulling my gaze back to my annoying, closed door.

“Coming, coming…” I muttered, achingly dragging myself out of bed, trailing blankets onto the book-strewn floor. Squinting, I picked a careful path through the pile of books, reaching the door and struggling with it for a moment before opening it. On the other side, green eyes framed by dark hair and an innocent expression met mine, looking prim and proper all for a moment before shying away.

“… Esmerelda.” I muttered, my sleepy thoughts finally catching up.

“Good morning, Lady Estelle,” Esmerelda quickly said, bowing. “I— I came to get you for breakfast.”

“… This early?”

She glanced up in confusion at that, before the expression vanished as quickly as it had come. “Uhm— Sir Arthur said something about getting you…”

“Oh.”

Esmerelda fidgeted on the spot, before bowing again.

I frowned. “… You can tell him I’ll be there in a bit.”

A bow. “Of course, Lady Estelle.”

“And—“ Esmerelda turned— “stop bowing. It makes me uncomfortable.”

I shut the door before I could hear her answer, turning to crawl back into bed for a little longer, before I stubbed my toe on an errant book. It was a heavy thing, evident from the fact I even jammed my foot against it in the first place. Books don’t usually outweigh people, even if said person barely weighed a thing.

I quietly swore under my breath, hobbled my way back to bed, and made another valiant effort in finding my glasses. Which is to say, I jammed my toe, bit down a very loud curse, then proceeded to hobble-trip over more books on the way back to bed. There, I lay, groaning and bemoaning the sudden decline of my life.

Estelle of the prestigious house Laurent— prodigious mage, defeated by mere books.

Groping blindly for my glasses, my hand found their thin-silver rims tucked under some wayward fold of the many blankets I owned. For a couple heartbeats, I kept laying down, glasses on, body and toe aching and blankly staring at my room.

My room wasn’t exactly messy— I typically had everything important stored withins arms reach of the bed. Sure, the floor was practically eaten by the growing piles of books I’d left over the years, but that wasn’t my fault! I had to move the extra reading material I was interested in somewhere and I needed the space in the library far more, so everything I deemed less important ended up here. Mostly, that had been little novels I’d been obsessed with as a child, and little baubles that had claimed the desk space before the books. While the lack of a proper space— floor or otherwise— made it awful to come back to, it was justified in the fact that it was one of the closest rooms to the library, which was practically the only room I regularly used anymore, bar the baths.

Eventually, having decided that I’d spent enough time moping, I grabbed a set of clothes, two towels, and made to find Arthur.

[][][]

Steam curled away from the water, coiling and dissipating as it rose and pooled onto frosted glass and old-hewn cobbles.

“What, so you’re allowed to read the newspaper, and I’m not allowed to have breakfast?”

“Those are really different things,” Arthur replied from behind a partition.

“So,” I said, watching the steam curl around my finger. “You’d hand me a copy to read?”

“You don’t even read the newspaper.”

“Got me there… what about the breakfast?”

“Elle,” he amusedly chuckled, “you’re bathing.”

“And?” I whined, mostly out of boredom.

“Do you really want to eat soggy sandwiches?”

After a moment of consideration, I lied, “Yeah.”

In case you’re confused, Arthur and I had settled into a bath— well, I’d settled into the bath, Arthur sat behind a thick partition where I could his silhouette— to settle and talk. He’d asked why he couldn’t just wait till I was done, and I’d reasoned that I’d woken up late enough, and had enough pressing obligations, to warrant combining our mornings into one. Though he’d firmly planted his feet on the breakfast bit, stating, and I quote, “it’s bad to eat right after getting out of the water!” Did it really count if I was still in the water? I wouldn’t know, I’d never tried it.

“Anything exciting happen?” I asked, sinking a little deeper into the water.

“Uhh—“ his newspaper rustled— “The Empress announced plans to divert funding from the reestablishment effort to fortification.”

“Meaning?” I bobbed my hand in the water, watching the ripples it created.

“Reclamation efforts will probably stop.”

“… The Empress is strange.”

No surprise, the nation we lived in was an empire, but unlike the rulers before her, our current Empress had focused much more on practical reforms, rather than traditions or military efforts. Which made sense, I suppose, when you thought about it. The wars had ended decades ago, and after that… Wartime demanded one person, but peacetime demanded another. People had to move on, even if they didn’t want to.

A memory of my Shade’s face bubbled to the surface, grinning, on the verge of laughter, and with it, the words she’d spit in my face. We both know how you really feel.

I took a deep breath, dunked my head underwater, shoving away the thought before coming back up.

“Elle?”

“… You think our exams will be affected?” I asked. “From the funding shift, I mean.”

If he caught anything, he didn’t press me about it, instead responding, “Maybe— I hope not. Seeker and Keeper relations were always a bit tense.”

“What do you— oh.”

Arthur and I were enrolled at a military university, which is to say, it had a mind-boggling amount of funding devoted to the courses it decided to host, as well as the equipment it procured for those courses. Research there came easily— whether from supplied equipment or literal experts helping you. In my case, it was the former, and maybe parts of the latter, if you could count scrounging through the words of a thousand dead mages any expert advice to go by. Regardless, because Belfaust was a military academy, it expected students to become either Keepers or Seekers by the end of their years.

“You still want to become a Seeker?” I asked.

“Course I do. You’re becoming a Seeker too, right?” His newspaper rustled as he turned the page.

“Yeah.”

“… You sound sad, Elle, what’s up?”

I was a terribly contradictory person. On one hand, I could be silent one moment, and crying from laughter in the next, and immediately return to being solemn again. When I was younger I had been confused, why me and not anyone else? Everything had felt so very fleeting, people drifted away from me, even if they knew me, and the people I’d even temporarily meet would then hear my name, and slowly drift like everything else.

There was a definite, why try era of my life.

But this thing, I had with Arthur? I’d had that for a long time, and while I wasn’t sure how I felt about him, the length of time I’d spent with him felt like I should’ve at least given our friendship more effort, which is why I said I felt contradictory. On one hand, emotion and just people flitted through my life faster than I could actually sit down to enjoy them. On the other hand, Arthur was a good guy. I didn’t find conversation with him to be a drag, and we’d been alongside one another long enough to pick up on each other’s little ticks enough to push each other.

Though, at the same time, I never wanted to push him. I never wanted to say anything that’d upset the careful balance we’d come to. I wanted more, but at the same time I wanted less.

I wasn’t sure if my friendship with Arthur was strange, and I didn’t have any other friends to compare with.

“… Thinking about my Wake last night… among other things,” I instead muttered, because I refused talk about the nature of our friendship in a bath, nor talk about my spitefully trapped Shade.

It’s not like I didn’t know what he’d say anyway. “What do you mean, Elle? Of course we’re friends…” or, “That’s awful! Why haven’t you freed her?”

I watched his silhouette set the newspaper down and turn his chair to face the partition that he knew I was sitting on the other side of.

I hesitatingly continued, “The guy I was building the dream for, he was weird.” I let my eyes fall shut. “Well, not really weird. He just…” I paused, trying to find the words and failing.

“Just wasn’t what you expected?”

I realized, part way, that I couldn’t find the words to describe mortality and obligation to Arthur. He wouldn’t understand. “Yeah. Thank you. I don’t know how else to phrase it. Sorry.”

Does he know? You’re running out of time. I kept my mouth shut, piled more unspoken problems onto the ever-growing pile between myself and him, and filed away the worry for later.

“So, uh…”

“Yeah?” he said softly.

I snorted. “Give any thought to entertaining my wish for soggy sandwiches?”

Arthur chuckled, picking back up his newspaper. “It wasn’t really sandwiches in that box, y’know.”

“What? What was it then?”

“Lemon rolls, and a new tea mom wanted you to try.”

“Soggy lemon rolls then?”

“Not happening,” he replied, chuckling.

“By the way,” I asked, thought coming to be unbidden, “can I ask why Maple decided to kick you out of the house?”

Arthur made a choking sound, and I gave a short laugh, letting a small smile come to my face.