"What is that?" Christabel's voice rose to a terrified pitch as she pointed toward the devouring horizon.
Erik watched, paralyzed, as the swirling rot began to coalesce into a shape. It was gargantuan, a silhouette that blocked out the golden dream-sky. It didn't walk; it seemed to unfold from the darkness itself.
The entity stood nearly five meters tall, its body a void of oily blackness. It wore a mask carved from something that looked like weathered bone—a jagged, oversized skull that stared with empty, hollow sockets. The mask was fractured at the jaw, revealing a jarringly human detail: a pale, bloodless mouth and a sharp chin that twitched with hungry intent. A massive, pointed cowl rose from its shoulders like a funereal shroud, and its arms were grotesque—bulbous and heavy at the shoulders, tapering into unnaturally long, spindly forearms ending in pale, twitching human hands.
"Erik, that thing is wrong. It's wrong," Christabel cried, her fingers digging into his arm until it bruised. "Wake us up! Erik, get us out of here!"
"Okay, okay! Just give me a second to find the thread," Erik said, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Usually, exiting a dream was as simple as exhaling. He would focus on the sensation of his pulse, find the "exit point" where the dream met his physical body, and pull.
But as he reached out for the waking world, he slammed into something cold and unyielding. It wasn't a fade-to-black but a wall of iron.
"Hell... I can't," he whispered, his eyes snapping open.
"What do you mean you can't? Stop playing, Erik! This isn't funny!" The rot was screaming toward them now, the beautiful meadow turning into a graveyard of black sludge just yards away.
"Erik, it's moving! It's coming for us!"
The skull-faced giant surged forward. It glided through the air, shadows coiling around its slender limbs like serpents. It moved with a terrifying, silent velocity—faster than the Queen's royal airships, faster than the spread of the rot itself.
"Erik, please!" Christabel began to sob, the sound raw and desperate.
What kind of nightmare is this? Erik's mind raced. Why is the door locked?
He closed his eyes again, straining until his vision swam with white sparks. He searched for the coordinates of the dormitory, for the smell of the orphanage, for anything real. But every path was blocked by that same static, freezing wall.
He felt a familiar, sickening throb behind his eyes. His gift came with a price: the Twenty-Minute Rule. He had never dared to stay longer. Exceeding the limit meant his physical body would begin to fail—capillaries in his brain would burst, his lungs would seize, and he would wake up paralyzed and bleeding. He had been in Christabel's mind for over ten minutes already. If they didn't break out soon, they wouldn't just be trapped in a nightmare; they would die in it.
"I can't find the way back," he gasped, a single drop of blood beginning to leak from his right nostril. "The door is gone, Chris. Something has locked us in."
"There is only one thing left!" Erik shouted, his voice cracking against the roar of the encroaching storm. He seized Christabel's hand, his grip bruising. "We run!"
They bolted across the emerald expanse, but the physics of the dream had shifted. The ground felt like heavy silt, dragging at their heels, while the rot behind them surged with the speed of a flash flood. The vibrant green turned to a charred, oily blackness just inches from their boots.
Suddenly, Christabel's hand slipped from his. She hit the ground with a sickening thud.
"Chris! Get up!" Erik screamed, skidding to a halt and doubling back. He hauled her upward, his eyes darting toward the towering silhouette of the skull-faced giant.
"Are you hurt? Can you move?"
Christabel tried to lunge forward, but her leg buckled instantly. A sharp cry of agony escaped her lips. "I can't—my ankle. It's twisted."
"Shit. Get on my back. Now!"
"No!" she gasped, pushing him away as the shadow of the giant stretched over them, cold as a tomb. "I'll only slow you down. Erik, the exit is blocked because of me. Leave me! Save yourself while you still have time!"
Erik didn't hesitate. He could have abandoned anyone else in the Kingdom—the Nuns, the Moredins, Father Bioka—without a second thought. But Christabel was his only anchor in a world of ghosts. He would sooner burn in this nightmare than wake up without her.
"Shut up," he growled, hoisting her onto his shoulder in one fluid, desperate motion. He ignored her protests and the way she winced as her injured limb jostled. In the dream realms, pain wasn't a phantom sensation; it was a jagged, visceral reality.
He ran. His lungs burned as if he were inhaling ash, and his legs felt like lead. But the effort was futile. Behind them, the giant reached the Great Oak—the heart of Christabel's sanctuary. As its spindly, human-like hand touched the bark, the massive tree didn't just die; it dissolved into a fountain of black bile.
The giant was the epicenter. It wasn't just following the rot—it was the rot.
Every stride Erik took felt shorter, the distance between them and the creature shrinking as the giant glided forward. The air grew so cold that Erik's breath began to mist, and the single drop of blood from his nose was now a steady, warm trickle down his lip.
The twenty-minute clock was screaming in his blood, and the monster was close enough now that he could hear the wet, clicking sound of its pale, human jaw behind the bone mask.
Just as the oily edge of the rot was about to swallow their heels, the air fractured. A violent, concussive wave of pressure rippled through the dreamscape, warping the horizon like heated glass.
The force of it sent Erik sprawling. He lost his grip on Christabel, and they both went skidding across the grass, tumbling several yards away into a small, untouched pocket of emerald green.
Dazed, with his vision swimming in fractured light, Erik scrambled to his hands and knees. His brain was a siren of panic. Get up. Get Christabel. Keep moving.
"Chris!" he gasped, spitting blood from his lip.
But as he spun around to heave her back onto his shoulders, he froze. The world had gone deathly silent.
The rot, which had been surging forward like a tidal wave, had hit an invisible wall. It stood frozen in mid-air, a jagged cliff of black sludge that refused to advance another inch. Even more impossible was the creature. The five-meter-tall giant was suspended in a state of stasis, its spindly limbs lashing frantically at the sky as if it had been snared in a web of hardened air. It let out a sound like grinding stones, but it could not move.
Standing between the children and the monster were two figures who hadn't been there a heartbeat ago.
They were a man and a woman, their backs turned toward Erik and Christabel. They stood with a calm, predatory stillness that made the bone-giant look like a mere toy.
"What the bloody hell..." Erik whispered, his heart hammered against his ribs for an entirely new reason.