I was sitting on my bedroom floor, thoroughly absorbed in an anime marathon and
aggressively eating rice crackers, when my brother's voice carried up the stairs with unusual
urgency.
"Sister! Did you see today's newspaper?"
"I am busy," I called back, without looking away from the screen. "And if it's about the
football results, I genuinely do not care."
His footsteps retreated. I returned to my anime. The matter, I decided, was closed.
It was not closed.
When I eventually descended in search of something more substantial to eat, I found the
newspaper spread open on the kitchen table. The headline occupied the full width of the front
page in bold, unambiguous letters: MONSTERS ATTACKING HUMAN SETTLEMENTS —
GLOBAL GOVERNMENTS IN EMERGENCY SESSION.
I stood and stared at it for a good ten seconds.
Then I laughed. It was a short, slightly hysterical laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. Clearly
someone in the editorial department had experienced a very strange week.
The next morning at school, however, no one was laughing. The corridors hummed with
agitated conversation—clusters of students trading fragments of news stories, phone screens
being passed around, voices dropping to urgent whispers whenever a teacher walked past. The
newspaper had not been alone. There were reports from multiple countries. There was footage,
though its authenticity was being vigorously disputed. There were official statements that
carefully avoided saying the words that everyone was already thinking.
Monsters. They were calling them monsters.
I was still trying to process this when I found the envelope on my desk.
It was an unusual envelope—heavy cream paper, sealed with dark wax bearing an emblem I
did not recognise: a crescent moon cradling a sword, surrounded by a ring of small stars. My name was written on the front in a handwriting that somehow managed to look both ancient and
precise.
Inside was a single card. It read: The Guardians of Dreams request the honour of your
presence. Address enclosed. Tonight, if you are willing. If you are not willing, tonight
regardless.
Well. That was direct.
The address led me to a large mansion on the outskirts of the city—the kind of building that
had clearly been standing for several generations and had accumulated, over those generations,
an architectural vocabulary that went well beyond "imposing." It was the sort of building that
seemed to watch you approach.
I squared my shoulders and rang the bell.
The interior of the mansion was simultaneously one of the most beautiful and most
bewildering spaces I had ever entered. Every surface seemed to carry the quiet weight of
history, and the air itself had a texture to it—something between electricity and incense—that
made the hairs on my arms stand at attention. Mystical artefacts filled alcoves and shelves:
sealed jars of softly glowing substances, instruments I had no vocabulary to name, tapestries
depicting histories I had never studied.
In the grand main hall, perhaps two dozen people stood or sat in quiet conversation. They
looked ordinary at first glance. At second glance, less so—there was something in their eyes, a
particular quality of attention, that suggested they were accustomed to seeing things that most
people could not.
A woman at the centre of the room turned as I entered. She was perhaps forty, with
silver-streaked hair and the posture of someone who had never once in her life slouched. She
crossed the room toward me with the unhurried confidence of a person who had never needed to
rush.
"Sakura Chiba," she said, and her voice carried that same quality of old, resonant certainty
that I had come to associate with the wishing tree. "Welcome. I am Lady Scarlett. We have been
expecting you for some time."
"How long is 'some time'?" I asked, because apparently when I am nervous I ask clarifying
questions about vague temporal statements.
The corner of her mouth moved. It might have been a smile. "Since you made your wish,"
she said. "Come. There is a great deal to explain, and—" her gaze swept briefly and meaningfully over me "—not a great deal of time to waste."
She explained the Guardians of Dreams: an organisation that had existed for centuries,
dedicated to maintaining the equilibrium between the human world and the realms of magic that
ran parallel to it, invisible to most. They monitored disruptions. They intervened when
necessary. They had, for generations, operated quietly in the background of history, ensuring
that the two worlds rubbed along without catastrophic friction.
"Your wish," Lady Scarlett said, settling into a high-backed chair and folding her hands
with the precision of someone who has had a great deal of practice choosing their words, "did
not simply change your life. It created a point of intersection—a moment where the walls
between realms became permeable. The disturbances being reported in the news are a direct
consequence. The balance has been disrupted, and it requires someone who exists at the point of
intersection to help restore it."
"Someone," I repeated. "You mean me."
"I mean you."
I looked around the room at the assembled Guardians—this collection of calm, capable,
clearly-more-experienced-than-me individuals—and felt the very reasonable urge to point out
that there were surely better candidates available. Candidates who had not, for example, ranked
last in their mid-term examinations three weeks ago and spent most of their school career
sleeping through lessons.
Instead, I said: "What would the training involve?"
Lady Scarlett's almost-smile returned, more definitive this time. "Everything you do not yet
know how to do," she said. "Which, I suspect, is quite a lot. But you have something the others
here do not."
"Excellent comic timing?"
"A direct connection to the wishing tree," she said, with the patient tone of someone who
had been ignoring jokes for decades. "And that, Sakura, changes everything."
I sat with that information for a long moment, feeling the weight of it settle around me like a
cloak—unfamiliar, slightly too large, but mine.
"All right," I said finally. "When do we start?"