Page 5 of Hex and the Dragon (Mistwhispher Falls Romances #4)

FOUR

DORIAN

T he evening air carried more than autumn's chill as Ivy and Dorian returned to the library.

Reports had been filtering in throughout the day—residents sleeping later, moving slower, their eyes carrying the distant look of people who preferred their dreams to waking reality.

Mrs. Patterson at Moondrip Market had barely managed to keep her stall open, repeatedly nodding off mid-conversation with customers.

The Morrison twins hadn't left their house at all.

"It's spreading," Ivy said as she unlocked the library's front door, her keys jangling in hands that weren't quite steady. The wards they'd reinforced were holding, but she could feel the Chronicle's influence like a current beneath the surface of the town's daily life.

"Faster than I expected," Dorian agreed, following her into the darkened building. "This afternoon, I saw three people fall asleep standing up in the grocery store. Just... stopped mid-step and started dreaming."

Ivy flicked on the lights, casting warm illumination through the main library while shadows gathered in the corners like living things. The Chronicle waited on her desk exactly where she'd left it, but somehow it seemed more present now, as if its influence had grown stronger during their absence.

She approached her desk cautiously, noting how the presence in her mind hummed with satisfaction. The fragment was satisfied with the day's progress, pleased with how easily the townspeople were succumbing to its whispered promises of perfect lives.

"Before we open it again," Dorian said, settling into the chair beside her desk, "tell me about your dreams last night. The ones that kept you awake."

Ivy hesitated, her fingers hovering over the Chronicle's scaled cover. The dreams had been more vivid than any she'd ever experienced, so real that waking had felt like a loss rather than a return to reality.

"I was in a library," she said slowly. "But not just any library.

This one contained every book that had ever been written, every piece of knowledge that had ever existed.

Ancient texts that held the secrets of immortality, theoretical treatises that could solve any scientific problem, philosophical works that answered every question about existence itself. "

"And you could read all of it," Dorian said with understanding. "Understand it perfectly."

"More than that. I could use it. I was helping people, solving their problems, preventing disasters before they happened.

A child was sick with something the doctors couldn't identify, and I found the exact cure in a medical text from a civilization that vanished three thousand years ago.

A young couple was struggling with a magical curse, and I discovered the perfect counter-ritual in a book of fairy tales. "

"It felt real," Dorian observed. "More real than this conversation."

Ivy nodded, finally opening the Chronicle to reveal pages that now contained detailed maps of human consciousness, showing the pathways the fragment used to access and influence sleeping minds. "What about you? What did it show you?"

Dorian's amber eyes grew distant. "The entity crisis.

But this time, I was there from the beginning.

I helped evacuate everyone before the worst of it hit, used my dragon fire to strengthen the town's defenses instead of hiding in my house like a coward.

When the entity made its final push, I was strong enough to contain it without anyone getting hurt. "

"No one died," Ivy said softly, understanding the appeal of such a dream.

"No one even got injured. Sarah was still alive, Tilly still had both her parents, and the town came through the crisis stronger than before." His hands clenched into fists on his knees. "I was a protector instead of a potential threat. People looked at me with gratitude instead of fear."

The Chronicle's pages turned of their own accord, revealing text that seemed to pulse with gentle understanding:

Why should such dreams remain mere fantasies? Power exists to serve purpose, knowledge exists to heal ignorance, strength exists to shield the vulnerable. In the reality I offer, neither of you need waste your gifts on lesser pursuits. You could become everything you were always meant to be.

"It's seductive," Ivy admitted, her scholarly mind noting how the Chronicle tailored its approach to their specific desires. "It doesn't offer us power for its own sake. It offers us the chance to help people, to be useful."

"To matter," Dorian added quietly. "Instead of being dangerous or irrelevant."

Before the Chronicle could respond to their growing vulnerability, the library's front door opened with a soft chime. Griff Cooper's voice carried through the building, warm and careful in the way of someone trying not to wake a sleeping child.

"Ivy? Are you here? We could use some help."

"Back here," Ivy called, quickly closing the Chronicle before their visitors could be exposed to its influence.

Griff appeared in the doorway carrying his six-year-old daughter Tilly, who was wrapped in a colorful quilt and looked like she'd been crying. Behind them, Mara Voss carried a steaming travel mug that smelled of chamomile and protective herbs.

"Sorry to bother you so late," Mara said, her usually cheerful demeanor shadowed with concern. "But Tilly's been having some unusual dreams, and given everything that's been happening..."

"Not dreams," Tilly said firmly, lifting her head from her father's shoulder to fix Ivy and Dorian with eyes that seemed far too old for her young face. "Visions. The pretty lady is rewriting the town's story, making it all wrong."

Ivy’s blood turned to ice. "Rewriting the story?"

"She's changing what happened," Tilly explained with the matter-of-fact tone that children used to describe impossible things.

"Making it so all the sad parts didn't happen, all the scary parts were just pretend.

But when you change a story like that, it stops being true.

And when stories stop being true, they turn into lies that eat everything real. "

Griff and Mara exchanged worried glances, clearly having heard this explanation before. "She's been talking about it all day," Griff said. "Drawing pictures of shadows that move on their own, writing in languages she shouldn't know."

"May I see the pictures?" Ivy asked gently.

Mara pulled a folder from her bag, spreading several drawings across Ivy's desk.

Tilly's artwork showed disturbing accuracy for a six-year-old—shadowy figures with too many eyes, landscapes that shifted between beautiful and nightmarish, and people with blank, content expressions who looked more like dolls than human beings.

But the most unsettling drawing showed the library itself, with dark tendrils reaching out from the building to touch every house in town. At the center of it all was a figure that might have been human if not for the way shadows writhed around it like living smoke.

"That's her," Tilly said, pointing to the shadow-wreathed figure. "The pretty lady who makes the dreams. She lives in a book now, but she wants to live in the world again. She thinks if she makes everything perfect, people won't mind that it's not real anymore."

Dorian leaned forward, studying the drawings with intense focus. "Tilly, when you see these visions, do you see the lady talking to anyone? Working with anyone?"

"She talks to the book," Tilly said promptly. "But the book talks back now. It's not just words anymore, it's... awake. And it's hungry for more stories to rewrite."

The Chronicle on Ivy's desk pulsed with heat, as if responding to Tilly's description. The child's gaze immediately fixed on the scaled cover, her expression growing troubled.

"That's it," she whispered. "That's where the pretty lady lives. Why did you wake her up?"

"We're trying to understand what she wants," Ivy said carefully. "So we can figure out how to stop her."

"You can't stop her by talking to her," Tilly said with the absolute certainty of childhood. "She's too good at making people want what she's offering. She's already got most of the grown-ups dreaming her dreams instead of their own."

"Most of the grown-ups?" Mara repeated with alarm. "How many people are affected?"

Before Tilly could answer, Griff's phone buzzed with an incoming call. He answered it with one hand while keeping the other securely around his daughter.

"Leo," he said by way of greeting. "What's the situation?"

Even from across the room, Ivy could hear the exhaustion in Sheriff Leo Maddox's voice as it carried through the phone's speaker.

"Bad and getting worse. I've got forty-seven people who didn't wake up this morning.

Not comatose, not unconscious—just sleeping so deeply that nothing can rouse them.

Dr. Hayes says their vitals are stable, but they're showing the kind of brain activity associated with vivid dreaming. "

"Forty-seven," Griff repeated grimly. "Out of how many residents?"

"We've got maybe three hundred people in the greater Mistwhisper Falls area," Leo said. "Which means about fifteen percent of our population has chosen the Chronicle's dreams over reality."

Ivy felt the Chronicle pulse with satisfaction beneath her hands, its scaled cover growing warm as it fed on the town's growing surrender to its influence.

"It's accelerating," she said. "The more people who choose the perfect dreams, the stronger it becomes."

"And the stronger it becomes, the more appealing the dreams get," Dorian added with growing understanding. "It's a feedback loop."

Leo's voice came through the phone again, strained with the kind of stress that came from watching a crisis spiral beyond control.

"I need you all at the sheriff's station first thing tomorrow morning.

We're setting up an emergency command center, and I want everyone who's still thinking clearly involved in the response. "