The Dreamworld

    There's a saying in Estellia; in sleep, all of us are equal. It's a shame, then, that I'm the only person in Estellia who sleeps on a daily basis. 

     Not that I'm complaining. Much. If I didn't sleep, then how would I be able to enter the Infinite, home of all dreams and dreamlands. The place where anyone, even a human like me, has the power to change reality. 

   True, humans aren't supposed to be able to alter reality. Going lucid isn't forbidden, exactly, but it's deeply discouraged by the High Nightmares. Not only are you putting the world in danger by changing it in ways the gods haven't sanctioned, but you're putting yourself in danger as well. Go too lucid, it's said, and you'll undo your existence. 

   I don't believe them.

   Ever since I was about five, I've gone lucid every night when I sleep. It's the only weapon a human has against nightmares, and I intend to use it for the good of human kind. I have to, since so few people are willing to defend us. 

   I don't just use it for combat purposes of course. The real use of lucidity is in creating dreamlands. Only those who've been sanctioned by the gods are supposed to make them, but anyone can, if they're willing to risk death of course. I don't have much of a life, so I don't see how that's supposed to hold me back. 

   So I built the temple. I don't remember how old I was when I first made it. It was shortly after my mother told me the story of the strongest shadow. She told that once, a very long time ago, humans were just as powerful as the other races, because we could use the temple of humanity to grant us the power needed to keep other races at bay. Then Dalton, a Shadow of unfathomable power, destroyed the temple, leaving us powerless. Not long afterwards, the other races enslaved us. Now we only exist to provide power to nightmares and slaves to the wealthy. 

    As I was sleeping later that day, I tried to picture what the temple humanity, the source of human power, would have been like. I imagined it as a simple stone arch, on a stone platform in the middle of a large field. Anything, I felt, would have been destroyed on sight for being too dangerous. When a human walked through the arch, they would find themselves in a large hallway full of mirrors. Not normal mirrors of course, these are magic mirrors. Looking into them, a person sees alternate versions of themselves, both the successes and the failures. At the end of the hallway is a door to the center of the temple, where the realm of all souls is. 

   The realm of all souls is the most powerful scrying device in all of Estellia. Using it, one can see the actions the holder of a particular soul, human or nightmare, will take if certain conditions are met. It's murky, but then so was reality to me at the time that I made it. 

   From the center of the temple one will find five doors. There's the hallway of mirrors, of course, but going right one will find the door to the library, where every book ever written is located. To the right of that door one finds the hall of artifacts, where all of the most important artifacts in Estellia are stored. I didn't have any artifacts when I made it, so I mostly used it to store my old toys and journals. To the right of that is the study, where one can record dreams and turn them into reality. The final door leads to my house, with however many rooms I need and all the stuff I could ever want.

  Hey, I made the temple, so I did what I wanted with it. 

  I built up the temple over time. I'd grab books from library shelves and book stores, copy them using lucidity, and stick them in the library. I'd come up with powers for the artifacts in the artifact room. I'd used the realm of souls to find out when I needed to be wary of a boss showing up or a watcher trying to arrest me. 

    I always hoped that, someday, I'd be able to take my parents to the temple and show them the one thing I'd done that I was truly proud of. But I couldn't. While I had to sleep constantly, my parents never slept at all. They weren't nightmares, so they didn't see any point. "We enter the Infinite, the nightmares will be on us instantly. Then where would you be." They'd often say. I don't think they remembered that I entered the Infinite every night, and I always woke up the next morning. 

   I didn't spend all my time in the temple of course. I went all over the infinite, looking for the Dreamworld. The Dreamworld in the oldest legend in Estellia. It's said to be the place where the dreamer, the maker of Estellia lives. Find them, and they'll give you anything you want so long as you never reveal where the Dreamworld is or who they are. Most people said it was just a story, but find the right person and they'd tell you about the ones who'd found the dreamer and gained power beyond their wildest dreams. Dalton, the most powerful Shadow in history. Celeste, Sorceress supreme. Alexander, the monster who every monster lived in fear of. Lindsey, the only fairy queen in existence. Those are the ones they tell humans about. They say there were many, many others they don't let humans know about, for fear they would break down in fear. Or so they say. Personally I think they just don't want us getting ideas, but I'm all for getting ideas. 

    So I'd go from dream land to dream land, old family estates to small cottages kept by one person. I saw how both the high and low live when they think that nobody's looking. You would think that, having seen them up close, I'd be able to tell you that one is good and one is evil, but all I ended up learning is that all of us have something horrible we need to hide. 

   Maybe because I've seen so much of what most want kept away, both from others and from themselves, my favorite place in the Infinite is what's considered by most to be the evilest place in the Infinite. Sinister Valley, the heart of Monster country. The place where everyone is evil, and everybody inside and out knows that. It's also the home of the Heartland, a charming town of about five thousand people, where my best friend in the world, within and without Estellia, lives. 

    Her name is Alex Loreden, daughter of Aubrey and Marcus Loreden. She says she's just a daughter of one of the towns many gorgons, but I know better than that. She glows like a high nightmare, that's how I'd put it. For reasons that make absolutely no sense to me, she thinks she's the weakest of Estellia's nightmares. She's thought that ever since I first met her.

  I couldn't forget that day, not even if I wanted to. I was flying around the Infinite using the power of my necklace (I think it was just after I got it actually) and I spotted the valley. I remember thinking that a large meadow surrounded by lush forest sounded like the perfect place for a dreamer to hide. I entered it, and it became clear immediately that I was wrong, as the place was infested with darkness.

   A lot of people say that miasma doesn't exist, that what some humans call miasma is just what happens when you go lucid enough times to see where darkness and light separate. I don't know if I think that's true, I just think that miasma is a better term than darkness. Darkness has no consciousness, no desire to cling to anything. Miasma does. And most Dreamworlds run by nightmares are infested with it. I can handle nightmares without issue, all nightmares are humans deep down after all, but I can't handle miasma. So I ran, until I found a place that was free of it. 

   That's when I saw her. She was curled up in a ball and crying, looking like she'd just been attacked by someone. Part of me wanted to rush up to help her, but I knew better. Even if I can't see nightmare forms, I knew a nightmare when I saw one, and she was the strongest one I'd ever seen. Nightmare or not, you could see that she needed help, and unlike in the real world, in a dreamland I have power. So I walked up to her and asked, "What's wrong?"

   She didn't answer at first, so I repeated the question. That's when she looked at me and wailed, "I can't scare anyone."

   I didn't know what she meant. Judging by the way the miasma was circling her, I figured her nightmare form, when she got one, would be horrifying. Heck, without even seeing her nightmare form, I was a little nervous by how bright her soul was. "Sure you can. I should know, I'm a human and we're scared of absolutely everything that isn't us or our Mommies and Daddies." 

    She looked at me and muttered, "How come you aren't scared of me, then?"

    I was baffled. "Of course I'm scared of you. Who wouldn't be? But I can't show my fear. Humans can't fight back against nightmares, so the only thing we can do is try to bluff our way out of trouble." 

    What I didn't tell her was that I knew that wasn't even remotely true, and that I would fight her if she tried to fight me. I had a feeling that she didn't want to fight right now though, she just needed somebody to talk to. 

   "What do you mean by bluffing?" She asked.

   I thought for a bit. "I don't know what it means exactly, it's just something Mommy tells me I need to do when I go to sleep. My daddy says it means I should lie, but I don't know how that would help. Nightmares lie, humans always tell the truth. Right?"

   "If you're lying." She said, "Then you're much better at it than most humans I've met." 

    "You've met humans?" I asked.

    "Of course I have," She said "Humans live everywhere in Estellia."

     "I bet they aren't proud humans." I said.

    "What do you mean?" she asked.

    "I asked Mommy once why a human would live in a city if Nightmares were so awful to them. She said, 'Cassie, some humans are weak, so they beg for power and privilege from nightmares. Not us. We may be Humans, but we're proud, for we can live our own lives.' Those humans must not have a lot of pride if they're willing to live in a place like this." I said, gesturing at the clouds of Miasma.

   She looked at me and asked. "You're name's Cassie?"

   "Yeah," I said, "What's yours?"

    "Alex."

    We talked a bit more that day, though I don't remember what about. I saw her as often as I could, which wasn't as often as I wanted to, because she often spent time in the center of the dreamland, where a replica of the village was, or in one of the Miasma pools. 

    It didn't help that her mother was against our friendship from the start. She said that the only reason I was there was to try and gain power for myself. I thought she was being ridiculous, but Alex kept taking her words to heart. The only thing that kept our friend ship together was me praying to her dreamland that she'd see sense, and remember that if I wanted power, all I had to do was go to dream tower, at the center of the infinite, and display my worth. I wouldn't do that of course, because I was such a coward that it was obvious that I had no worth at all. No amount of praying could dispel Alex's doubts about me. I didn't feel that was such a bad thing. I'd heard that if a nightmare liked you enough, you would become a nightmare yourself, and I didn't want to be a nightmare, so I kept every nightmare I met at arm's length. 

    My goal in searching the infinite wasn't friendship or power. I wanted to find a way to be a human, the kind of human that doesn’t need to sleep all the time and can do most things easily. I figured that if I found the dreamer, I could become one and then all my problems would be over.

   One thought kept niggling at the back of my mind though. They say that, past a certain level of power, souls develop weaknesses so that no human or nightmare is truly stronger than any other. Weaknesses are pretty rare, only found in the Gods and midnight nightmares, or so I've been told. Of those with weaknesses, needing to eat and drink is by far the most common weakness. I'd never heard of anyone, even a midnight nightmare, needing to sleep, but other than that it sounded pretty similar to my sleep issue. If you go without you're weakness for a little bit you're alright, but the longer you go, the worse the effect is, until you succumb to your weakness or you die. 

   I was worried about that because the Gods said that not even the dreamer could eliminate a weakness. I tried not to think about it, but in the back of my mind I kept asking, "What if I find them, and it turns out that this was all for nothing?"