Page 16 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)

Preston barely breathed while the student spoke, beginning to wish that he could melt into the wall and vanish. The students’ eyes kept darting toward him, especially at the words Argantian invaders .

And perhaps, despite all his skepticism, he had been truly naive up until this moment—because he had never thought of himself as one of those intruders.

He had believed that he was an equal inheritor to Llyr’s history, its myths and legends.

He had a passport that proved his citizenship and grandparents who he had to travel only twelve miles to visit, just a quick trip across an arbitrary border.

He had a mother who had sung Llyrian songs over his crib; his blood was as Llyrian as it was Argantian.

But what he had not understood until now was this: he could not make the world see him as he wished.

Instead the world pressed in upon him, molding, crushing, until he was the shape they made him.

Until he fit the image of the enemy. He could protest, but it would be no more effective than beating his fists against stone walls as they flowered up around him, encasing him in his own living tomb.

Preston stood, in total silence and stillness, as this revelation filled him with a sickish, shackled rage.

Mercifully, he was not asked to perform any tasks or answer any more questions.

His hands were shaking in white-knuckled fists, and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps.

Even his brow started to dew with a cold sweat.

He was alarmed, for a moment, that the other students would notice, that they would use it as another excuse to smirk and jeer.

But none of the students’ gazes lingered.

Whatever metamorphosis was happening, it was for Preston to experience alone.

When the bell rang, the students collected their things and bolted to the door. The moment that the classroom was empty, Master Gosse grasped him by the elbow. His adviser did not appear to notice anything amiss, either.

“Come on, young unbeliever!” he said in an urgent, fevered whisper. “We have great depths to plumb!”

Back in his office, Master Gosse fanned out the papers of Angharad’s diary, while Preston knelt and still did not speak.

Gosse mumbled unintelligibly to himself.

He arranged the pages in a semicircle around them, just as he had done in the Sleeper Museum.

But his office was a great deal messier, and when he reached up to grasp more pages off his desk, he knocked over a stack of books with his elbow.

The copy of Lawes’s translation of the Neiriad fell onto the floor.

“Close your eyes, Héloury,” Gosse ordered.

His adviser’s words drifted over him like a chill wind, and Preston’s skin prickled with anger.

He wanted to refuse. He wanted to scatter the carefully arranged papers; he wanted to storm out of his office.

Worse, he realized. He wanted to do worse.

He wanted to tear apart this cruel and treacherous world itself.

Or perhaps you want to build a new one.

The voice in his head both was and was not his own.

Preston slid his eyes shut. Within a moment, he smelled salt and smoke. And he heard the deep, familiar, resonant ringing of the bells.

Preston opened his eyes, his vision sharpening and clarifying immediately, even though, once again, his glasses had vanished.

He got to his feet and looked around, gaze running over the now-familiar surroundings: the statues and their enigmatic marble faces, the stone columns climbing to the vaulted ceiling, the archway that led to the second room, where Effy stood preeminent.

The bells rang, the sound echoing within him like a second heartbeat.

It was only after a few moments that he realized Master Gosse was gone.

He felt a small flutter of panic. But perhaps his adviser had simply arrived—sunk?—in another chamber. Preston cast his eyes about the room one last time, through the large glass window that held the sea at a slender distance. And then he froze in shock.

Master Gosse floated in the water, his still body gently suspended, eyes closed. Preston approached the window and placed his palms flat on the glass. He opened his mouth, to speak his adviser’s name, but before he could, he heard his own name, drifting over his shoulder in an unfamiliar voice.

He whirled around. Standing before him was a man in long golden robes, a gray-black beard winding down from his chin, held with braided filets.

The sleeves of his robe obscured his hands, and he wore an iron circlet set with a single green jewel.

Preston had seen his face before, or at least a plaster reproduction of it, fixed to the sleeping body of Aneurin the Bard.

But he was broad-shouldered, of a height to Preston, and with the iron circlet girding his brow, he looked less like a court musician and more like a king.

Certainly not who he had expected—who he had hoped to see.

Not his father. Disappointment shivered through him, alongside a faint tremor of fear.

Real or not, he was staring down one of Llyr’s Seven Sleepers, the man best-known for his hawkish, nationalist polemics.

Whose words, over the centuries, had drawn thousands of weapons against the Argantian people.

“You,” Preston whispered. “How are you— what are you doing here?”

But the man smiled pleasantly. “Turn your question inward,” he said. “You are the one who summoned me.”

“No.” Preston shook his head. “No, I... that’s impossible. All of this is impossible.”

The man smiled that same resplendent smile. “ Young unbeliever, your mind as sharp as steel; it is for you and only you that the great bells peal. ”

It had the cadence of a song. A poem. Preston shook his head, more furiously this time.

“Tell me how to make them stop,” he said. “Tell me—what happened to Master Gosse?”

The man glanced dispassionately through the window. “You did not want him here,” he said. “And so he has been kept away. But do not fear for him. He will wake unharmed—unless you do not wish it so.”

“I don’t wish him harm,” Preston replied quickly. But he felt a thrill in his stomach, as if he had told a lie.

“What do you wish, son of Argant, son of Llyr?” the man asked, a gleam in his deep blue eyes. “This world has been built for you. Now you may mold it to your desires.”

“I...” It was inconceivable, all of it. Only a dream. Only a dream. Yet the more Preston repeated that in his mind, the less real it felt. They were just words, nothing more than breath and the twinging of vocal cords. Words could not shape the world— any world.

And yet, words tumbled from his mouth anyway. Spontaneous, childish words, in a tremulous but resolute tone.

“I want my father,” he said.

At that precise moment, the air rippled.

The man dipped his head in assent, as if—absurdly—he were bending to Preston’s demands, as if he were not the one wearing a crown.

As if Preston were some sort of king. He walked away, golden robes trailing through the sparkling puddles on the stone floor, through the archway where the bells tolled their ceaseless melody.

From the same archway where the crowned man vanished, another figure emerged.

Preston knew him at once, for his deliberate gait, the way he slouched as if apologizing for his great height—two inches taller than Preston.

They had measured themselves back-to-back once, his mother shaking her head and sighing good-naturedly as she looked on, his brother clamoring for his turn.

“Tadig,” Preston whispered as he drew closer. He reached out his hand.

This time, his father did not vanish; Preston was not swept rudely back into reality before they could even exchange words. His father smiled, that same slight, familiar smile that dimpled his cheeks and crinkled the corners of his eyes.

He took Preston’s hand. His grip was tender and his skin was warm; his fingers were callused but gentle.

He was solid and real; he breathed and he ran with blood.

And there was no distant, inscrutable glaze in his eyes, as there had been in his final weeks, the bleariness that held the real world back, as if he were trying to glimpse it through fractured glass.

He was precisely as he had been, before the accident that withered his mind and ate away at his memories, like the ruinous eroding of stone.

“Preston,” he said. “ Da garout a ran. ”

I love you.

Argantian—the Northern tongue, the language of his grandparents and their snowy mountain village. Preston had not heard it spoken in so long. Even his mother, during their infrequent phone calls, used only Llyrian. The words washed over him and soaked him to the bone.

“I missed you.” Preston’s voice cracked. “ Da garout a ran. I missed you. I—”

He took one stumbling step forward, and his father caught him in his arms. He pressed his face into his father’s shoulder, a sob rising in his chest and wrenching from his throat.

But no tears sprang to the corners of his eyes.

He could not cry here. Preston had built a world for himself that contained no fear, no grief, no weeping.

A perfect world, entombed in stone, suspended in shimmering stillness.

A world that, he realized with a start, he never wanted to leave.