Rem lay on his bed, awake, the morning sunlight started making its way into his room, the glaring white lamp overhead buzzed, its light illuminating the room. He couldn't sleep, The pills his father gave him prevented him from doing that, but soon he would have no choice but to sleep and very soon at that, he could already feel its effect wearing off.
Rem got up from bed and walked over the crumpled sheets, and crossing to his desk. He had been doing nothing but reading through the books that were now all over his desk, next to the unfinished coffee cup. He picked them up one by one and returned them to their place, spines aligned, titles facing outward. He read the covers before he shelved them, though he had already read each a dozen times. Survival Guide: The First Nightmare. What the Ages Left behaind: A Formal Study. Surviving the Dream Realm and lastly Where Dreams End. He stood in front of the shelf unable to put it back.
Rem opened the book to the page he had marked specifically and his eyes stopped at one marked sentence. "No Sleeper, not a single one has ever returned from inside the drawn circles." He turned the page and saw a map of the dream realm. Inside one of the circles lay a huge skeleton to the north that separated Ravenheart from Bastion, and further north was the chain of mountains that no Awakened has made it past. He took a deep breath, closed the book and returned it to its place.
Rem continued cleaning his room. He made his bed, put on his tracksuit and left the room without looking back at it.
The hallway outside was dark. He moved through it the way he'd practiced for years — third floorboard from the left creaked, so did the one outside his younger brother's door. He stepped around both without needing to think about it.
In the bathroom he stood in front of the mirror for a long time before he turned the cold water on. He splashed his face, let it drip from his jaw, and opened his eyes again.
Behind him, in the reflection, lay a humanoid monster in a pool of its own blood on the cold floor of the bathroom.
He didn't turn around. He'd learned that much, at least — being awake for this long, it's only natural to see one or two things. He washed his face again instead, slower this time, and when he lifted his head the mirror only showed the bathroom, empty, white and ordinary.
He dried his face and went downstairs.
By the front door his hand betrayed him — steady all the way down the stairs, shaking the moment it touched the handle. He stood there for a moment, staring at his own hand holding the handle, unsure of what to do.
"You don't need to go on your run today."
His father's voice came from the kitchen, low and even, the kind of voice that never rose or fell no matter what it was saying. Age had crept into it somewhere in the last year without Rem quite noticing. The grey spreading through his sideburns was just more proof of it—a quiet betrayal of the unchanging man Rem thought he knew.
"I was going to head to the police station," Rem said, turning. "It's getting harder to stay awake. Might as well go early."
"No need." His father set down the mug he'd been holding, precisely, the way he did everything. "I'll drive you there myself."
Rem didn't answer right away. There wasn't really a choice being offered. He nodded once and let his hand fall from the handle.
The private gym downstairs still smelled like chalk and sweat, familiar in a way that almost hurt. Rem ran his fingers along the rack of training weapons — the worn grip of the longsword, the balanced weight of the spear, the pair of daggers at the end that he hadn't touched in months.
He picked the daggers up anyway.
"Not sure which one to pick yet?"
His father stood in the doorway, arms loose at his sides, face doing nothing at all. Not disapproval, not curiosity — nothing. It was the one thing about him people always noticed and never said out loud, the flatness that sat behind his eyes no matter what happened around him. Rem had stopped wondering, years ago, whether his father even could look different. He suspected, sometimes, that he simply couldn't — that whatever let other people's faces move with what they felt had stopped working at one point, the same way some are unable to taste, or see.
"Not yet," he said, his eyes not moving away from the daggers.
"You're decent with most of them." His father crossed the room, footsteps unhurried. "Stay away from the daggers. Not your style."
"..." The daggers didn't suit him, Rem thought. He didn't even like how they felt in his hands. He just wanted to hold them at least one more time.
His father stood in front of him silently, also looking at the daggers. He reached over and slipped them gently from Rem's hands, replacing them with a spear before Rem had really registered the exchange.
"You will beat your first nightmare. That, I'm sure of."
He said it the way he said everything — flat, certain, without a trace of emotion. Then he stepped back across the mat, reached for a second spear, and settled into a stance.
Rem took his stance as well, weight low, spear angled to guard rather than strike.
His father attacked first without warning.
Rem fell into his father's rhythm immediately: parry, step back and stab, parry again. The spear shaft hummed in his grip, vibrating with the shock of every blow.
He found openings twice and pushed forward into them, and both times He found himself driven back within seconds, boxed into retreat before he understood how it had happened. He caught a few mistakes in his father's form — a dropped guard here, a wide swing there — and even as he saw them, an instinct, the same one his father had drilled into him, told him those weren't mistakes at all. Bait, left open on purpose, waiting to see if he'd bite.
He didn't. Not those anyway.
He ended up on his back anyway, breath torn out of him, the tip of the spear resting lightly against his throat, just another loss, Rem thought.
"Good job today too."
His father offered a hand and pulled him upright without effort. Rem stood there a moment, chest heaving, and found himself asking a question that had nothing to do with the spar at all.
"Where's Mom?"
A long silence before his father answered him.
"Asleep. Your brother too."
Rem didn't say anything to that. This is probably for the better.
"Let's go," his father said after a long pause, turning towards the stairs. "The pill I gave you will wear off soon. You might fall asleep before we get there."
"...Yeah."
The PTV was quiet except for the tick of the turn signal at empty intersections. Rem sat with his head against the window, watching the streetlights slide past too slowly, each one dimmer than the last. He could feel his father's eyes on him, or maybe that was just the sleep getting to him. He might as well ask. This could be his very last day, after all.
"Anything you want me to remember in there?"
"You already know." His father's hands were steady at ten and two. "You've been preparing for this for the last eight years."
Rem's eyes were heavier now than they had been minutes ago, the pill finally losing its grip, the edges of the world started going soft and distant. He thought, in the fog of it, that there wasn't much point in holding anything back anymore.
"You and I both know I've been preparing for far longer than that."
It wasn't an accusation. It didn't need to be. It was simply true, the way it was true for every child in every house on every street.
His father didn't answer right away. The only sound Rem could hear, was the sound of the tires and his own breathing, slower now, fighting to stay even.
"I know."
Another pause, shorter this time, but somehow heavier.
"Return safely."
Rem meant to say something back — I will, or I'm scared dad, or nothing at all, just to have his father hear him say something honest for once instead of something practiced — but the words never quite made it out. His eyes were already closing, the city lights smearing into long golden trails behind his lashes, and the last thing he was aware of was the low, even hum of his father's voice, steady even now, even here, the one thing in his life that had never once changed shape no matter what was breaking around it.
Before his eyes closed, he felt his fathers hand on his shoulder, then everything turned dark and he heard the faint whisper of the nightmare spell.
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial...]