Aaron dithered on the spot, but only for a second. Then he moved up the stairs as quickly and quietly as he could.
It was tempting to stay put since the crypt provided cover from three directions. The strange, giant wooden shirt button could open behind him at any moment, though, and he also didn’t know what was coming toward him through the forest. That helped him make up his mind quickly enough.
At the top of the stairs, he crept around the side of the crypt, away from whatever was moving through the gloom of the woods. With a light jump, Aaron pulled himself up onto the small building. He lay, pressed flat against the sloped roof, and positioned himself until he could just barely see over its peak. He was trusting in the angle to let him watch the woods without being easily spotted.
A few moments later, he caught sight of movement in the trees. It was barely more than a hint of the thing, hidden as it was in the shadows of the dense wood, but it was enough to tell that it was big. Really big. Roughly the size of a car big. It was almost too big to fit between some of the more tightly packed trees in this part of the park. It brushed against trunks and scraped across exposed roots as it prowled closer to the crypt.
Even with little more than a shaded glimpse, Aaron thought he recognized it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to accept what his instincts were telling him. Moreover, revealing himself was a big risk to take if he turned out to be wrong. Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long to find out.
After half a minute of bumbling around in the shadows, the creature found its way onto the cobblestone path. Heavy paws slapped against the lane as it drew near, long claws clicking on the smooth rocks with each step, until finally, it emerged fully into view near the fence around the crypt.
Aaron almost slid off the roof when the huge brown bear galumphed the last steps to the wrought iron gate. It looked mostly like a regular grizzly bear, with several distinctly odd differences. The ears were too wide, for one, and the fur was far too close-cropped to the body, for another. The dead giveaway, however, were the eyes, which had lids and could blink but were still the brown ringed plastic Aaron had been looking at most of his life.
The dream form of Baby Bear — or this dream form, at least — stood up on its hind legs, reaching a height somewhere between nine and ten feet. He looked right at Aaron, haphazardly hidden on the roof of the crypt, and waved one massive paw at him. Then, he dropped back to all fours and ambled through the gate and down the path to the crypt.
Baby Bear stood back up on his hind legs when he was beside the small stone building, resting his forepaws on the edge of the roof, and stuck his nose up over the edge, sniffing at Aaron.
“Hello,” Bear said, his voice still the small, soft, lisping version Aaron knew so well. “I got a little lost on account of all the trees.”
“Uh, hi, Bear,” Aaron replied. “I didn’t know you could turn into a mostly-normal bear.”
Bear snickered softly. “Me neither, but it’s a dream and that’s basically doing a imagination. I rule at imaginations!”
Aaron clambered down from the roof, still feeling a bit on edge from the shock of Bear’s approach. “What are you doing here, Bear? Did you want to play or something?”
“Um… oh yeah! I came ‘cause I felt like something bad was happening,” Bear said. “Is something bad happening?”
Baby Bear swung his long head around to examine the small clearing around the crypt and Aaron couldn’t help but join him. It was still a creepy tomb in the spooky forest part of the park, but nothing else stood out as being immediately wrong. Only one thing really occurred to Aaron that could be dangerous.
“I don’t know. I was looking at this weird door down in the crypt right before I heard you coming, so maybe that’s it. I’d show you, but I don’t think you’ll fit.”
Baby Bear dropped back onto all fours and turned until he could look down the narrow stairway cutting into the ground below the small building. The passage might have been wide enough for the huge grizzly to fit, but just barely.
“No problem,” Bear said.
With a poof! and a cloud of dust practically straight out of a cartoon, the bear was suddenly much smaller, about the size of a corgi. Aaron barely had time to register the transformation before the new, minified bear started plodding down the stairs, one hop at a time.
Aaron followed behind and found Baby Bear with his nose pressed against the wooden button at the bottom of the stairs.
“I think this is something that scares you, but I don’t think it’s the bad thing that had my fuzz standing up. Let’s see if I need thumbs to work one of these things.”
Bear reared up onto his hind legs and pressed his paws against the humongous shirt button, his claws clicking on the wood. With a funny little grunt, he leaned in and pushed. The button didn’t open like a door, but split down the middle and swung inwards. A clunk and rattle accompanied the motion, sounding more like old, rusted metal than smooth, polished wood.
A small, dark space waited beyond the opening, not more than ten or fifteen feet across. A sickly fog clung to the uneven dirt floor, swirling around a cylinder of well-worn stones standing in the middle of the room.
“I don’t think that’s the bad thing either,” Baby Bear said. “Although it certainly is spooky enough, whatever it is.”
“It’s a well,” Aaron said, gesturing to the rickety bucket perched on the stone rim.
“Well, well, well,” Bear said, hopping up to lean on the stone wall with his front paws and sniffing at the well. He was only there a couple seconds before dropping back to the floor and turned towards the entrance. “Someone else is here.”
Aaron turned, his heart beating more rapidly again. He wanted to get back outside where he could move if it was a threat, but stopped himself before he went up the stairs. He knelt down beside the micro-bear and whispered, “Stay out of sight unless you have absolutely no choice. Okay?”
Bear’s face scrunched up — as much as a bear’s could, at any rate — but he gave Aaron a small nod and prowled to the foot of the stairs, hidden by the corner where it turned to the wood button.
Knowing that Bear was as well-concealed as Aaron could make him on such short notice, he made his way back up the stairs of the crypt.
Secret and safe is good, Aaron thought. Having a giant grizzly lurking out of sight, ready to back me up if there’s some kind of dream fight, is pretty nice, too.
When he reached the top of the stairs, Aaron’s eyes were drawn upwards. He couldn’t have said why, exactly, but the impulse was strong. The small plot of land around the crypt was clear of trees, so there was a break in the canopy of foliage above, allowing a mostly unobstructed view of the sky.
There were two immediately obvious changes in that strange, alien expanse.
First, a beam of light crossed the visible area of that dark space like a hazy gray aurora. Second, one of the stars was rapidly descending towards the ground. The core of that light was a soft green and its rim was a reddish-orange that looked more like liquid or plasma than the rays of an illuminated nimbus.
The star drew closer, growing larger until it was about the size of a basketball. As the object floated towards him, the light emanating from it dimmed, revealing greater detail.
The silhouette of a figure began to resolve in the heart of the light. The green core was actually two smaller points of light — the eyes of the figure in the glowing orb — and the red a flowing corona of hair. Once it had drawn close enough, Aaron recognized the star-person as Alice.
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She was clad in a gown of material so light it was little more than tissue paper, hugging her curves and exposing much of her legs as the skirts billowed around her. Her hair reached past her waist, flowing from her head like she was floating in a pool of water instead of the air. She glided to a halt, stopping when she was just ten feet above the ground.
“Aaron,” she said, breathlessly. “I tried to pull you into my dream or force you to wake, but couldn’t. Your defenses have certainly improved since your Emergence.”
“Thanks?”
“Some kind of magic is targeting you,” Alice continued. “I’m not sure what it does, but it started a few minutes ago. Do you know when that beam of light appeared?”
“I haven’t looked up at the sky for a little while, not since I left the plaza at the heart of the park. It wasn’t there a half hour ago, or however long that works out to in the waking world. I’ve been snooping around this creepy-ass tomb place for the last fifteen minutes or so.”
Alice glanced critically at the crypt behind him. “It seems like that’s a natural part of your dream, not whatever’s targeting you from the outside. The important thing right now is that you wake up. Getting you out of the Dream is our best bet of cutting off the magic directed at you here.”
“Okay, so I need to fall. Can you haul me into the air and drop me?”
“Probably not, but I could try,” Alice said, biting her lower lip. “Actions in dreams are laden with symbolism and flying with someone is usually a sign of a deep level of trust.”
“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”
Alice directed her gaze to the ground. “I think– I think, because of my glamour. You have an abnormally strong reaction to it. If I had to guess, I’d say that some part of you resents or mistrusts the idea of being influenced. That’s… that’s not a good foundation for trust.”
Aaron was taken aback for a moment. Her observation wasn’t without merit and he had struggled with thoughts along those very same lines, but it was the remnant of a childish mistake not some nefarious ploy to manipulate his feelings. Aaron knew that, even if he didn’t always feel it.
Unfortunately, it was hardly the time for a bunch of introspection and self-talk to try to sort through all of that, so Aaron forced himself to focus on the problem at hand. It also gave him an excuse not to confirm or deny Alice’s concerns aloud. He could say that might help soothe her worries on that front, though.
“It’s not so bad right now, actually,” he offered. “I think I’m getting better at resisting it.”
“It’s a dream,” Alice replied. “The glamour’s magic is tied to my body.”
“Well shit, sounds like we’ll need couples therapy to sort through that,” he said, then winced. “Not that we’re a couple or anything. Anyways, we don’t have a fancy private jet on hand, but I bet we can make do without it.”
An idea had occurred to Aaron looking around the crypt’s yard. Before there was any time to dwell on that stupid couples therapy joke, he put his plan into motion. Aaron pulled himself back up onto the roof of the crypt and stood, his heels at the very edge of the stone. With a deep breath, he forced himself to lean back. And back. And back.
He swayed in place briefly as his instincts tried to add their two cents into the conversation about what he did with his body. Aaron didn’t know if he could overpower basic instinctual impulses, but that didn’t mean he was without options. He looked up at the sky, thrusting his chin upwards as hard as he could and forcing his head backwards.
One of the many seemingly inane lessons he’d learned over the course of his life was that where the head went, the body would follow. Once his head tilted far enough, he started to fall in earnest.
Aaron tried to swallow the monkey brained — or ape brained, anyway — panic that said falling was bad. Falling meant leaving the safety of the trees for the ground, where there were snakes and tigers and shit. He had nothing to fear from snakes or tigers and even less from a meager eight or ten foot tumble.
As the fathomless darkness of the starry heavens expanded in his sight, that same cloying feeling that he might be drawn into that boundless void teamed up with his primal terror of falling until they were practically clogging his throat.
The ground was rushing up to meet him. The sky was threatening to drag him into its cold, endless clutches. He had no control over his own body without something to touch, to grab, to push off of. There were barely any coherent thoughts in that long, interminable moment that surely lasted no more than a fraction of a second.
Just before Aaron could slam into the hard-packed dirt around the crypt, his eyes — his real eyes — flew open and his legs flailed, helping him shoot up to a sitting position in bed. The lingering intensity of the dream was so strong, Aaron would have almost sworn he heard the sound of his own impact with the ground, a muffled thump in the dark room.
“Fuck me running — that sucked,” he swore.
“You’re telling me?” Baby Bear asked from somewhere across the room.
Aaron looked around and saw that Bear was dangling from a large dreamcatcher hanging over the window to the fire escape, the heavy drapes still fluttering from his impact.
Maybe that thump was less in the dream that I thought, Aaron realized.
“Oops,” Aaron said. “Sorry, Bear. Looks like I might’ve launched you a little.”
“You think???”
Aaron’s phone buzzed from where it sat atop the dream oubliette beside his bed. It was a message from Alice telling him to shower and grab his things as quickly as he could, then come up to the roof.
“Sorry again, Bear, but it looks like I’ve got to get moving.”
He weathered the bear’s muttered imprecations as he made his way into the bathroom to get ready for what was already shaping up to be an unfortunately exciting day.
Half an hour later, Aaron was on the roof with Alice, Tia, and all four of the teams assigned to his security personnel. A phone sat on the table connecting Barrett to the meeting and a floating crystal… thing was doing the same for Mallory.
Alice had told everyone what she’d witnessed from the roof — some kind of probe through the Dream directed right at Aaron’s sleeping mind — and explained that she couldn’t be sure of its origin or purpose. Although some of the security people were less than thrilled with the lack of information, the discussion quickly turned to what to do in response to this new, unknown threat.
“We could bunker up at HQ or get seriously remote,” Barrett said. “That would give us a wider net to spot and intercept hostiles while minimizing risk.”
Mallory hummed thoughtfully, the crystal vibrating slightly as he did. “Your proposal is not without merit, Cordus Freeman. Removing the candidate to a vessel and remaining in transit by sea or air could impede any attempts to further target him. However, it provides no actionable path to resolving the threat of whatever magic was used.”
Aaron had spent his own time thinking over what to do while he’d showered and dressed. His first impulse would have been to agree with Barrett and Mallory — isolate and defend — but after some consideration, it felt less and less like the right move.
“I’d like to suggest an alternative,” he said. “As much as cruising around in international waters on a mega-yacht sounds like major fun, I think it’s the wrong choice. First of all, we can’t stay on the backfoot forever if we expect to accomplish anything. More importantly, I think there’s a way to take advantage of this situation.”
“How, precisely, would you propose to do that?” Mallory’s voice droned through the crystal.
“The most likely result of whatever magic was thrown at my dreams was to locate me, right? That information is basically useless if they don’t act on it, so we have an opportunity to test its limits and turn the tables on our mystery wizard.”
Barrett cut in. “Sure, sure. We know they’ll either go to the apartment — which they might not be able to find thanks to its enchantments — or make their move wherever Aaron goes. If we control both locations, we have an opportunity to identify and possibly neutralize any hostiles. It might even lead to the recovery of the book.”
“So we hunker in the bunker?” Griffin asked.
“Too risky,” Barrett replied. “We can lose that apartment building with no real loss, but we can’t risk revealing any major holdings, like the Monolith. No, I think we move the schedule up a few hours — you take Aaron into the Buttonwood Gate, as planned, and we’ll make sure we have people sitting on the apartment and the entrance to the Gate.”
Kiara cleared her throat. “This is Kiara Lavigné, with the security detail. I just want to make sure we all understand that none of the dungeons through the Buttonwood Gate are coterie-locked. Any pursuers who get through the Gate have a chance to make contact with us.”
“Could we send more forces into these dungeons?” Mallory asked.
“We could, but I don’t think it would be especially helpful,” Barrett answered. “If it requires a small army for our candidate just to exist in the world, we’re so deep in the shit there’s no way we don’t get flushed. Besides, where they’re going, adaptability and maneuverability are going to be key if there’s enemy contact. Lavigné’s unit is a crack team and this is their element; best to leave it to them.”
“Besides, we’ll have people outside who can come in on the flank if anyone does track us down inside,” Albert said.
There was a long pause, then Mallory grumbled through the crystal. “Very well. I acquiesce to your stratagem, Cordus Freeman. I will dispatch a runner with some additional equipment to rendezvous with the candidate’s protectors at the Gate.”
“Then we’re settled,” Barrett said, the sound of his hands clapping a single time coming through the phone. “Let’s get the convoy on the road. I’ll be in touch with individual unit leads with further instructions.”