Edwin slowly opens his eyes and attempts to look around the room. His immediate thought is a mixture of surprise and terror. The objects in the room are out of focus but his other senses inform him that what he is experiencing is real.

"Was that all a dream? Where am I?" he thinks. He attempts to sit up but is stopped by severe pain as he moves, prompting him to lie back down. He tries to make out the manner of surface he is resting on and the best he can manage to figure out is a crudely made bed. His hands reach around for any hints that might help him determine where he is. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and then slowly reopens them.

“This can’t be real,” he whispers. As his eyes refocus the world around him, he sees the familiar walls and metal bars from the cells where his torture took place.

"How long have I been here?” he thinks. He tries to move his hand to wipe the hair from his brow, but the progress is stopped by a sharp clanging sound. A quick look at his arms reveals that both of his hands are shackled to metal bars. He turns his head the opposite way and looks down towards his feet. His bed is revealed to be nothing more than some blankets thrown on top of a few bales of hay.

Edwin quickly darts his gaze at his chest and sees that he is not wearing a shirt and that his chest is covered in scars. He glances at each of his hands and sees scars covering them as well. A final look to the cell door reveals the little bits of skin still stuck to the metal from where his hands rested as the bars began to burn his skin.

“How can they be scarred already? Already healed? That’s impossible,” he says.

“Not impossible,” says a female voice from the darkened corner of the room.

Shocked by the realization that he is not alone, Edwin attempts to sit upright but is again stopped by the pain coursing through his body.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You endured so much last night,” says the woman. The words sting Edwin and a sinking feeling immediately courses through his veins.

“Last night, but that can’t be…” his voice trails off as the woman walks into the light by his bed.

“As I said before, it is not impossible. You simply do not grasp the gravity of your current condition,” the woman says.

As Edwin looks at the woman he is confronted with the truth that she is indeed the same one that appeared out of the block of ice. He stares into her eyes and is surprised by the complete lack of emotion they do not betray. The woman walks closer to him until she is standing right next to his bed. The long, hooded cloak she wears reveals only part of her shadowed face. She reaches out and places a hand on one of the bars that he is chained to. He notices her skin has an odd complexion that slowly changes between a light blue and warm reddish hue.

“Why should I believe you?” he asks. The woman smiles and moves her hand closer to one of his.

“Still defiant. I can respect that, but do not test me,” she says. She removes her hand from the bar and takes a few steps back. “Perhaps I can prove it to you, then?”

Edwin again attempts to sit up but this time only slightly raises his head. The pain is still severe but he forces himself to endure.

“And how do you propose you can do that? How do I know that this isn’t all in my head, too?” he asks. The woman’s smile grows larger as she rolls up each sleeve of her black cloak, revealing that the alternating skin color from her hand spreads over her arms as well.

“Oh Edwin, why of course it is all in your head.”

Edwin’s eyes grow large as he looks at his captor.

“How do you know my name?” He attempts to break free of the chains on his hands, but the irons do not budge.

“I know all about you, Sir Edwin the Brave. Brave? Ha! Not from where I am standing.” She notices that Edwin is again trying to break free of his shackles and giggles with amusement.

“The mighty Edwin cannot even get out of a simple charm. And my master thinks you are the one he needs for his journey?”

Edwin looks at the shackles more closely and does not see what about them could be a charm. He has seen tricks before and these are definitely the real things. He then looks at the bars they are attached to and likewise they look and feel real. He jostles the chains; the sounds of the metal hitting against metal rings true.

“Stop saying my name! You are crazy, I don’t believe in tricks or charms!” The woman folds her arms in disappointment and frowns.

“Now, now. You know what happens when you upset me. And I think we established that you don’t believe in tricks last night.” She unfolds her arms and takes a step closer to Edwin. He raises his head and their eyes meet. The woman is surprised that she sees no fear in him and tilts her head.

“That is interesting,” she whispers.

“What did you say?” Edwin retorts.

“Nothing, nothing. Now, you say you don’t believe in tricks. This is something I have to amend before I take you to my master. I thought I could make you believe with my little show last night, but clearly that did not work–”

“You mean when you cooked me alive?” Edwin interrupts. The woman raises her hand, a pang of anger flashes across her face. She takes a deep breath and slowly rests her arms back to her side.

“Please don’t do that. I am trying to be nice. Now, as I was saying, I thought that would work, but it was to no avail. So, I thought showing you that your nasty, horrible wounds healed overnight would do the trick. But still, it seems you do not want to believe in my tricks. So, perhaps a simple mind such as yours requires a simple solution to remedy your stubborn ignorance.”

Edwin closes his eyes and sighs.

“Fine, I will play your little game. Just how do you propose to prove to me that this is all some silly trick taking place in my head?” he asks. The woman lowers the hood of her cloak, revealing her long black hair. It shines even in the dim light of the cell.

Edwin now confirms that her entire body must be covered in a mixture of red and blue colors as her face also dances between them. Her eyes, now visible, are emerald green. Razor-thin black eyebrows seem to almost hover over them. Edwin follows her nose down to her lips. They are thin and pursed together as she stares back at him. Her jawline and cheekbones are soft, and overall, her exotic beauty surprises him. However, he is quick to realize that her presence is commanding, not just because of his current condition, but also because of the confidence she exudes. She seems to notice Edwin studying her and smiles.

“Fine, I’ll get to the point. Like I said, there is a simple solution for your simple mind. You continue to attempt to break free of your chains. Take a close look at the bars they are attached to,” she says. Edwin begrudgingly heeds her command and looks at the bars on either side of the bed.

“They look like normal bars to me,” he replies. The woman lowers her head and puts her face in her palm.

“For all the planes of existence, look closer, you imbecile!” Edwin again looks at the bars, this time scanning the length of them. He starts at one end and gazes to the other. He then looks back at his hands and where the chains are attached. He lowers his head and turns it to the side, as the pain from raising it to look down toward his feet becomes too much to bear. As he lies there, he realizes that the bars are not attached to the bed.

“Obviously they must be attached to the ground, then,” he thinks. He looks for any signs of support beams leading to the ground beside his bed. He finds none. He quickly raises his head again, pushing through the pain that attempts to force him back into unconsciousness. He scans the full length of the bars one more time and notices that, quite to his astonishment, they appear to be floating in midair. The woman notices Edwin’s realization and the smile returns to her face.

“See, that wasn’t so hard, now was it?” she says sarcastically. Before Edwin has a chance to respond she moves next to the bars and motions her hands underneath them. Waving them the full length of the bars, Edwin admits to himself that the support beams he is looking for are not somehow being obscured.

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“But, how can that be? Why don’t they move when I pull my hands away?” he asks. The woman walks backward a few steps.

“A trick, you dolt. Brave, but not bright, are we?” she remarks. Edwin tires of having his intelligence questioned, so he tries to sit upright once more. As he writhes and struggles to continue his ascent, the woman waves a hand through the air.

“Faerdig,” she says. As the word leaves her mouth Edwin jolts upright into a fully seated position. He notices the pain disappearing from his body. He looks at his hand and down at his chest and the scars shrink before his eyes until they are no more. He looks again at his chained hands and then up towards the ceiling. He looks for anything that the bars may be hanging from and sees nothing.

“How…what did you just do to me?” he asks. The woman folds her arms and glowers.

“I removed all of your pain. I removed all of your scars. I removed any remnant of evidence that anything ever happened to you last night. And still you don’t believe in tricks?”

Edwin takes a moment to contemplate what the woman is telling him.

“Could she actually be telling the truth? Is she capable of some sort of magic?” he wonders.

“NOT magic!” she angrily replies. A dumbfounded look shoots across Edwin’s face.

“How do you… how do you know what I am thinking?” The woman walks toward the bed. She momentarily stops at the bars and then proceeds to walk through them. She sits down next to Edwin and places her hand on top of one of his. Before Edwin has time to contemplate the idea of this woman being able to read his thoughts or that she can walk through solid objects, a new sensation of intense heat and cold shoots through his hand.

“Because, Edwin, all of this is taking place inside your head. You don’t feel anything, unless I want you to,” she replies. She looks down at the pair of their hands and continues, “This feeling you cannot understand; this simultaneous burning heat and frigid cold, you only feel it because I want you to feel it.”

Edwin slowly turns his head and once again locks eyes with his captor. He is met with the sincerity and truth of hers, as waves of doubt, despair, and hysteria flow through his body. His mind begins to reel at the thought of any of what she is saying being true.

“But it is true, Edwin,” says the woman. She removes her hand from his, and the painful sensation disappears. Edwin’s mind begins to crack as the structure of his reality is bombarded with these new truths.

“Just let me out of these chains!” he desperately screams. The woman stands up from the bed and once again walks through the bars as she steps away. She turns around to face Edwin. A devilish smile stretches across her face.

“Finally. All you ever had to do was ask. Enden.” The woman barely whispers the word, but as she does, the chains on Edwin’s hands vanish into the air. The bars they were attached to follows suit and dissolves into nothingness. Now free from his shackles, Edwin stands up. He is surprised that his legs so easily support him.

“If this is all in my head, if this is all made up, then how are you here? I don’t know you and I would never have made you up. You are evil!” he exclaims. The woman noticeably blushes.

“Edwin, you flatter me,” Edwin stomps his foot in anger. He turns to where the bed was, only to find it replaced by a cozy lounge chair. The woman gestures towards it and says, “Please, have a seat.”

Edwin, baffled by the appearance of the chair, slowly sits down and is instantly relieved of worry. He rests his head against the back and closes his eyes. His hands gently move along the upholstery, his core filling with warmth and a sense of happiness. His thoughts return to his house and his family. He sees his wife and daughter in the distance, playing in their front yard. He calls out to them but they do not reply. He tries again, this time louder than before. Still, there is no response. He tries to walk towards them, but his feet do not follow the commands he is giving them.

He looks around for any indication of his whereabouts. The house and his family are quickly surrounded by darkness and vanish. Dread washes over him. He tries to open his eyes but they remain shut. The darkness gives way to two blurry images in the distance. They approach, each figure on either side of him. As they get closer, the haziness enveloping them begins to wane. He begins to make out the shape of two people sitting in chairs. Chairs eerily similar to the one he is sitting in. This realization prompts him once again to open his eyes. They do not budge. The encroaching chairs are now rapidly approaching his own.

“Hey! Can you hear me? You have to slow down somehow!” he cries out. The shout dies in the darkness. The chairs are now mere feet from colliding with him when they suddenly stop. He is stricken with fear. The people in each chair are woven into the chair itself. The fabric is stitched through their skin, revealing random parts of their bodies throughout. He takes a closer look at the person to his left. He can barely make out the shape of her face, but her pointed ears give away that she is an elf. Edwin scans for other signs of identification and stops at the middle of the chair back. His eyes fixate on a silver pendant of two entwined birch leaves.

“Olara!” Edwin screams. He looks over the rest of the chair and admits that the person within it is indeed his longtime confidant. Edwin darts his gaze towards the chair to his right and his stomach lurches. Not much of this body can be seen through the fabric, but the part of the head that is exposed reveals a scar running from its scalp line down through its right eye.

“Dascar, not you too!” cries Edwin. He struggles to get out of the chair, but seems powerless to move any part of his body. However, without thought or effort, his eyes finally do open. Edwin is shocked back to his senses when his vision reveals the dark cell and the woman standing before him. He tries to say something but his mouth does not move. The woman walks toward him.

“Yes, your friends. You remember them, don’t you Edwin? Don’t worry, we are taking good care of them, too.”

Again, he tries to say something, anything, but his mouth does not open. He attempts to reach toward his mouth but cannot move his arms either. He looks down at them and is horrified by what he sees. Just like in his dream state, the chair is now consuming him. His arms are riddled with strands of fabric poking through his skin. His legs have been sewn into the bottom of the chair, and a quick glance at his chest reveals a mixture of feathers, cotton, and cloth spilling forth from an open wound. One last terrified effort to scream proves meaningless.

“Here, perhaps this will help,” says the woman. She conjures a mirror from the air and extends it toward Edwin. He looks into it and sees the nature of his plight. His lips have been sewn shut. But, there is no pain. He neither sees nor feels any blood. The woman retracts the mirror.

“Don’t be so daft, I can hear your thoughts, remember?” she says. Edwin struggles to collect his thoughts. He manages to keep any notion of what he saw in his dream out of them completely.

“I don’t feel any pain because you don’t want me to,” he thinks.

“Good, good. You are finally beginning to accept and understand,” the woman replies.

“I do. I accept that there are things that I cannot understand. I accept that you have some strange powers, some mag…tricks that you can perform,” says Edwin. The woman crosses her legs and begins to float in a seated position in midair.

“Yes, I have many tricks. My master has even more. I will take you to him soon, now that you are beginning to understand,” she says.

“Why do I have to understand these tricks before I can see your master?” replies Edwin. The woman lowers her legs and walks over to the chair. With another wave of her arm, the chair releases Edwin from its grasp, causing him to fall to the floor. He reaches up to his mouth and is relieved that the stitching has been removed. He stands up and dusts off his clothes, somehow the same he was wearing the night before. A touch of his chest reveals that the wound has closed, and so far as he can tell, he is completely back to normal.

“It’s not for me to say, entirely. But, my master has a special plan for you, the nature of which requires you to understand that the world you live in isn’t the only world, per se.” Edwin walks over to the gate of the cell and leans against them, looking at the pieces of skin left behind from his hands. He picks up a piece and shows it to the woman.

“All of this is only in my head, but I can feel it because you allow me to? My friends in the chairs in my dream, my flesh burning, the block of ice and you being a talking dog are all somehow tricks? Do you even have my friends?” he asks. The woman walks next to Edwin and rests her hand on the cell door.

“Like I said, all you ever had to do was ask,” she replies. She opens the door and swings it open. The resulting crash of it hitting against the barred walls of the cell echoes through the rest of the dungeon. She takes a step outside and turns back toward Edwin.

“We do have your friends. They were in those chairs just as you were. Your flesh did burn. I was in a block of ice and I am a talking dog.”

Edwin laughs and tries to walk out, but his head smacks into an invisible wall. He rubs his nose with his hand, his eyes slightly watering.

“Another trick?”

“Perhaps you’re getting brighter.”

“If all of this is inside my head then why should I believe that any of this is even real?”

“Then again, perhaps not,” she says quietly.

The woman winks at Edwin and pulls the hood of her cloak back over her head. She then rolls down her sleeves and closes her eyes. She turns away from him and lowers her head. She utters a string of words that Edwin cannot make out and then vanishes, her cloak falling to a heap on the ground below. Edwin stares at the cloak and notices it moving. It forms into a hump and is violently shaken off, revealing the stark, black dog it was hiding moments before.

“You will have to come to learn, Edwin, that just because these things are taking place inside your head, doesn’t mean that they aren’t real,” the dog says with the same voice of the woman.

Edwin chuckles at the sight of the dog. He knows that it is the same one from the night before.

“Even so, how can I be sure that this isn’t some sort of dream state like I had when I was seeing my friends in the chairs?” She sits down on her hind legs and looks up at him.

“Well that’s the game, now isn’t it? But who said anything about seeing your friends in their chairs being a dream?” She stands up and walks a few steps toward the large wooden door at the end of the room and then stops to face Edwin once again.

“Now, don’t you want to go see them?” Edwin reaches at the opening of the cell door and feels the invisible wall still impeding his exit.

“How am I supposed to get through this door?”

“Tsk, tsk, Edwin, I told you, all you have—“

“May I go through the door and follow you to my friends?” he interrupts.

“Why of course,” she replies.

Edwin reaches for the wall and does not find it. He cautiously takes a step through the opening and steps out of the cell. He takes a few steps toward the dog and is startled by the crashing of the cell door behind him. He looks at the dog and then back at the inside of the cell. He reels when he sees himself lying in a heap in the corner, skin melted off and charred bones poking through the remainder of his burnt clothes. He quickly looks back at the dog and then down at his chest and hands. They are perfectly normal. His thoughts are again interrupted by a soft grunt. He looks back at the dog and sees the same devilish grin from before happily strewn across her mouth.

“Come along now, right this way,” she says.