Page 225 of Towers of Midnight (The Wheel of Time 13)

Deep red lightning crashed in the sky, throwing waves of bloody light across the sea. Each burst revealed shadowed creatures lurking beneath the waves. Massive things, evil and sinuous in the spasming red lightning.

People clung to the wreckage of what had once been a ship, screaming in terror and crying out for loved ones. Men on broken boards, women trying to hold their babies above the water as towering waves broke over them, dead bodies bobbing like sacks of grain.

The things beneath the waves struck, snatching people from the surface and dragging them into the depths with splashes of fins and sparking, razor-sharp teeth. The water was soon bubbling red that didn't come from the lightning.

Whoever had dreamed this particular nightmare had a singularly twisted imagination.

Perrin refused to let himself be drawn in. He squelched his fear, and did not swim for one of those planks. It isn't real. It isn't real. It isn't real. Despite his understanding, part of him knew that he was going to die

in these waters. These terrible, bloody waters. The moans of the others assaulted him, and he yearned to try to help them. They weren't real, he knew. Just figments. But it was hard.

Perrin began to rise from the water, the waves turning back into ground. But then he cried out as something brushed his leg. Lightning crashed, breaking the air. A woman beside him slipped beneath the waves, tugged by unseen jaws. Panicked, Perrin was suddenly back in the water, there in a heartbeat, floating in a completely different place, one arm slung over a piece of wreckage.

This happened sometimes. If he wavered for a moment if he let himself see

the nightmare as real it would pull him in and actually move him, fitting him into its terrible mosaic. Something moved in the water nearby, and he splashed away with a start. One of the surging waves raised him into the air.

It isn't real. It isn't real. It isn't real.

The waters were so cold. Something touched his leg again, and he screamed, then choked off as he gulped in a mouthful of salty water. IT ISN'T REAL!

He was in Cairhien, leagues from the ocean. This was a street. Hard stones beneath. The smell of baked bread coming from a nearby bakery. The street lined with small, thin-trunked ash trees.

With a bellowing scream, he clung to this knowledge as the people around him held to their flotsam. Perrin knotted his hands into fists, focusing on reality.

There were cobblestones under his feet. Not waves. Not water. Not teeth and fins. Slowly, he rose from the ocean again. He stepped out of it and set his foot on the surface, feeling solid stone beneath his boot. The other foot followed. He found himself on a small, floating circle of stones.

Something enormous surged from the waters to his left, a massive beast part fish and part monster, with a maw so wide that a man could walk into it standing upright. The teeth were as large as Perrin's hand, and they glittered, dripping blood.

It was not real.

The creature exploded into mist. The spray hit Perrin, then dried immediately. Around him, the nightmare bent, a bubble of reality pressing out from him. Dark air, cold waves, screaming people ran together like wet paint.

There was no lightning he did not see it light his eyelids. There was no thunder. He could not hear it crashing. There were no waves, not in the middle of landlocked Cairhien.

Perrin snapped his eyes open, and the entire nightmare broke apart, vanishing like a film of frost exposed to the spring sunlight. The buildings reappeared, the street returned, the waves retreated. The sky returned to the boiling black tempest. Lightning that was bright and white flashed in its depths, but there was no thunder.

Hopper sat on the street a short distance away. Perrin walked over to the wolf. He could have jumped there immediately, of course, but he didn't like the idea of doing everything easily. That would bite at him when he returned to the real world.

You grow strong, Young Bull, Hopper sent approvingly.

"I still take too long," Perrin said, glancing over his shoulder. "Every time I enter, it takes me a few minutes to regain control. I need to be faster. In a battle with Slayer, a few minutes might as well be an eternity."

He will not be so strong as these.

"He'll still be strong enough," Perrin said. "He's had years to learn to control the wolf dream. I only just started."

Hopper laughed. Young Bull, you started the first time you came here.

"Yes, but I just started training a few weeks back."

Hopper continued laughing. He was right, in a way. Perrin had spent two years preparing, visiting the wolf dream at night. But he still needed to learn as much as he could. In a way, he was glad for the delay before the trial.

But he could not delay too long. The Last Hunt was upon them. Many of the wolves were running to the north; Perrin could feel them passing. Running for the Blight, for the Borderlands. They were moving both in the real world and in the wolf dream, but those here did not shift there directly. They ran, as packs.

He could tell that Hopper longed to join them. However, he remained behind, as did some others.

"Come on," Perrin said. "Let's find another nightmare."