Airess’ hum faded off as she turned to lay on her back. She breathed in and out slowly, willing her raging thoughts away as she calmed her mind. She concentrated.
And left her reality.
Airess was falling through space.
Streaks of starlight rushed past her as she shifted into the astral, nothing but infinite starry blackness encasing her like a blanket as she traveled through the Dreamworld. The feeling was jarring, uncomfortable even, but she had grown accustomed to the sudden shift in planes. For she had been Dreamwalking aimlessly in her sleep for years now.
The starry space around her melted away like spilled paint, revealing the setting of her old childhood bedroom. Airess instantly knew she was in one of her past memories as she watched the younger version of herself nestle under the covers of her childhood bed. She must have only been six or seven in this memory, her mother still coming in to read her bedtime stories nightly.
Aesira, her mother, tucked her younger self in and smiled, “That will be all for tonight, my little one. It’s time for bed.”
“But wait, mama! I have a question.”
“What is it, dear?” Aesira asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion, knowing her daughter well enough to know she was stalling.
“Is Tevye real?”
Aesira sighed, lowering herself on the foot of the bed gently as she looked at her daughter. “Tevye isn’t real, Airy. It’s just a fairytale.”
“Is time really frozen in Tevye? Do other beings and Magick really exist there?”
“Tevye is made up, Airess. It’s only a bedtime story. Something to get little children likeyouto fall asleep!”
Her mother smiled a mischievous grin and began to tickle Airess. Childish giggles flooded the room, the last thing Airess heard as the dreamscape changed, just as quickly as it materialized. She was falling through space again until she landed somewhere solid.
Airess looked down at her astral body. She was barefoot here, her body resembling a ghost of translucent, golden light. She wore a simple maroon gown, the phantom material stopping just above her ankles, clothing she always appeared in while dreamwalking.
This was her dreamform.
She gathered her bearings and took in the foreign setting, a town she had never been to in the waking world, or the dreamworld, for that matter. It was daylight, and the oceanside town she stood before was bustling with life. Sunlight shimmered on the waves like scattered starlight.
She took in the architecture of her surroundings. It was vastly different from Luciena: square-shaped cream structures lined the shoreline, roofs made of orange clay tiling. Elven people walked-– no,notElven people—Airess squinted her eyes and walked closer to the bustling street.
“Fae,” she said to herself in awe. “A whole town of Fae.”
Pure Fae males and females crowded the streets. Airess could tell by their short, sharply pointed ears and elongated canines. They were wielding the elements all around her, some pouring water from the ocean nearby into buckets. Others moved rocks, guiding the earth with their hands, into wagons. Airess smiled at the rare sight. What a gift it was to dreamwalk, to see such a rarity of Magick.
After the war, it wasn’t as common to meet any of the Fae on her continent. Luciena created their new world, eradicating elemental Magick from their country entirely and socially dividing the only two continents on the earth. The Fae whodidexist in Luciena were Nobornes, powerless individuals who succumbed to working and living in the lower class.
The town and its people entranced her. Wasthisthe great country Rune? She certainly had never dreamwalked here before. Not that she had any control of where she dreamwalked to in the first place. Unfortunately, there still wasn’t a lot she knew about her dreamwalking abilities, and controlling where she ends up wasn’t one of them. Airess had long since deduced this was the nature of the dreamworld.
She would go where it took her.
“Hey!” an older male yelled in Runean. The man hobbled by, walking right through her astral body. “Get back here!”
Airess turned to the group of kids running down the street, laughing as they held baskets of stolen goods in their arms.
“Follow me and run!” A Fae boy bellowed. He continued to speak, but he was yelling too fast for Airess to comprehend. Even though Airess had taken some lessons on the language in her schooling, she couldn’t make out every word.
She felt her spirit being tugged onward, like a string pulling her forward from her chest. She knew the dreamworld was urging her to follow the group of juveniles. Airess obliged the sentient push to follow, knowing this to be the common nature of the dreamworld.
Airess chased them, like a ghost streaking through the night, running behind the group until they veered right onto another street, skidding to a stop once they gained enough distance from the old male. They were quite young, barely breaking their teenage years. Young females and males made up the group.
A boy with disheveled brown hair held up an engraved dagger, a sly grin on his face as he began to speak in Runean to the group, no doubt showing off his stolen goods.
“Sothisis Rune,” Airess said to herself, putting the pieces together as she looked around.
The boy with the dagger stopped mid-sentence, dropping his attention from the blade and looking in her direction. His gaze pierced through her, like he was seeing something he shouldn’t. Airess stilled, her eyes going wide.
