The Dreamer and the Marked

Chapter One

This wasn't the first night Krystal found herself wandering through the tenebrous halls of the manor that so frequently plagued her dreams. At least, she assumed she was dreaming as she could never remember how she got there.

The first time she woke up in the manor, she had been terrified. The only thing that kept her from completely panicking was the idea of alerting someone to her presence. Something about the manor felt very wrong to her, a heaviness in the air that seeped into her core. Anyone who lived in such a foreboding place could only mean bad news. Krystal had decided it would be best to try to find her way out on her own, rather than attempt to explain to the owner how she got inside. Besides, who would have believed the absurd story that she just woke up in the middle of his home?

It took her an hour to find the entrance that first night, but when she tried to open the grand doors, she fell right through their hard wood and into a night so dark that the sky blazed with a galaxy of stars. She rose back to her feet, her breath caught in her throat. The land stretched out into the darkness, flat and seemingly infinite. A breeze brushed past Krystal's cheeks, carrying with it the smell of salt and humidity, but it didn't affect her ginger hair, as though she wasn't there at all. As she gazed upon her surroundings, her fear melted into wonder. She could just make out the faint outline of a cobbled road that led from the manor to a single glistening light far in the distance. But when she stepped to follow it, she awoke, back in her bedroom in her small apartment.

She was never one to keep a dream journal, but the vividness of the dream had compelled her to rush its details onto a scrap of notebook paper before they could fade away. She certainly didn't expect to find herself in the same dream a second night, and then a third. Unlike in her first dream, she'd retained her lucidity, but they weren't like any lucid dreams she'd ever heard of before. She was aware she was dreaming, yes, only she couldn't control what happened as she expected from lucid dreams. With every step she took across the dark granite floors of the manor, she anticipated an echoing tap, tap, tap. Instead, her footsteps were ghostly silent no matter how she moved.

Despite the eeriness of her own silence, she quickly discovered she wasn't alone in these recurring dreams. Humanoid but alien people roamed the manor's halls. Her first encounter had come as a shock when a short, bearded man with bat-like ears wearing a wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head appeared from the shadows at the entrance to greet an equally odd guest—a dragonfly-winged man covered from head to toe in mottled gray feathers. Krystal had ducked to hide around the corner, but the bat-eared man paid her no mind and escorted his strange visitor away. The feathery man wasn't the only arrival, either. Over the following nights, others would occasionally come and go, each as fantastical as the last. A woman whose torso grew from the lower body of a horse. A man with webbed fingers and fleshy tendrils in place of hair. Another feathered man.

Krystal didn't dare to approach any, instead opting to trail behind them out of sight, still nervous to be caught in a place she didn't belong. That is until one night when she followed the bat-eared man—whom she decided must have been a butler—to the kitchens. He joined in hushed conversation with a young woman with curled horns and the lower half of a deer, or maybe a goat, while she kneaded some dough. Their words were always foreign-sounding, but somehow Krystal could still understand their meanings; she attributed this as a quality of the dream and nothing more. The bat-eared man and the deer woman spoke of a man who must have been the lord of the manor, and who sounded to be upset. Why, Krystal couldn't tell, but when she peeked her head from the hall to the kitchen to hear better, the door creaked open. The pair in the kitchen turned her way and she froze, her heart picking up wildly in her chest. The bat-eared man grumbled as he approached the door. Krystal scrambled back. The man stared directly at her. And then he simply shut the door and returned to his conversation with the deer woman.