Shana and her friends passed through the archway and emerged in the beginning of the Nightmare Trial. A dark road wound its way up a dark hill, slick with long, wet grass. A stormy sky crackled overhead, bolts of scarlet lightning lancing from one black cloud to the next.
At the top of the hill, a small lamppost shone with magenta light, dim and small in the darkness.
The first beacon. The first guide to our destination.
Shana took a deep breath, let it out. She felt light and warm, the fire to light the Dream Beacon flickering in her heart.
We can do this.
She gave Rae and Annabelle’s hands gentle squeezes, looked aside at each of her dear friends who were here with her. Annabelle smiled reassuringly. Rae had a determined, resolute gaze, nodding once. Kathryn had her familiar smirk, confidence gleaming in her eyes.
We can do this.
“Let’s go,” Shana said, starting forward. Up the hill the girls climbed, silence all around them save for the occasional distant rumblings of thunder.
They reached the first small beacon in just a few minutes, and stood at the top of the hill, catching their breath and basking in its faint magenta glow.
“We don’t have to do anything at these, right?” Rae asked.
“They’re just guides to show us the way,” Shana said, shaking her head. “It’s only the final beacon that we light with the Dream Flame.”
“A warm-up to get us started, huh?” Kathryn asked. “That’s awfully considerate.”
Ahead of them, the hill sloped steeply down into a wide, open landscape of razor-sharp rocks, fragmented ruins, and lakes filthy with ash. On the horizon loomed a great mountain, flat-topped and spewing smoke, fire, and ash into the sky.
“I don’t see the next beacon,” Rae said.
“Neither do IIIIIIIIIIIIIII!” Shana’s simple response turned into a sudden scream as the ground fell out from beneath her feet, and she fell with the others, tumbling end over end. A harsh, frigid wind picked up, its icy gusts lashing at them, tossing them this way and that. The dark, ash-choked landscape was replaced by something brighter but just as bleak, though Shana only caught glimpses as she tumbled over and over, struggling to right herself.
“Hold onto me!” Kathryn said, pulling everyone close. “Just stay calm and don’t flail about. Steady your breathing. Flatten yourselves out as best you can.” She demonstrated for them, staying steady in the free-fall even as harsh winds blasted her to the right and left. “Let’s all calm down so Shana can fly properly.” Despite their situation, she grinned at Shana. “Right?”
Shana managed a nod, helping the others pull close to Kathryn, fighting to still her flipping and control her body. Calm down, breathe steadily, flatten herself out… she could do these things, at least enough to get her bearings.
At least enough to gain command of the situation and…
There we go!
Shana felt the weightless sensation of flight, felt how light her friends suddenly became. She was tossed by the wind, dragging the others with her, but Kathryn’s voice and actions kept her steady. Carefully climbing over Rae to Shana, Kathryn held her waist and spoke from behind her, gently guiding her motions.
“Straighten your legs out… there,” she said. “Hold Rae and Annabelle equally… raise Annabelle a little higher, there you go.” She laughed. “Nice. Let’s find a good landing spot, huh?”
“Yeah,” Shana said, nodding. She carefully tilted downward, angling towards a flat plateau. The winds fought her, but she fought back with a relaxed, gentle control, sometimes giving to the harsh winds so as not to lose her steady pose. Kathryn played the navigator, she the pilot, and in a steady spiral they made their way down to land. With all of their feet on solid ground, the girls huddled together against the cold, and Shana gazed out around them.
And I usually love snow.
Somehow the land here was bleak — a bitter, forbidding snowscape made of steep climbs and sudden drops. Spiky, arcing formations of ice swept up in grand fashion, like an ice giant’s claws reaching out to ensnare prey and drag them down into the snow.
“There!” Annabelle said, pointing. “The next beacon.”
It was two plateaus over, past a pair of precipitous drops and outrageous climbs.
“Just great,” Kathryn said, huddling even closer to Shana. She laughed. “You’re so warm.”
“She’s always warm,” Rae said, hugging Shana tight.
“Yeah, but now she’s extra warm,” Kathryn said. “Must be that Dream Fire, huh?”
Shana laughed. “I think so.” She wriggled free of her friends. “Come on, we need to move. If we just —”
She cut off as she took a step forward.
When her foot came down, it wasn’t in the deep snow. It was on a hardwood floor.
“What the…?” Kathryn started.
The bleak snowscape was gone, replaced by a warmly-lit, pleasantly cozy library. A fireplace crackled in the wall to the left, a man in a tuxedo played a calming tune on the grand piano to the right, and bookshelves stretched on ahead of them.
Despite the atmosphere, Shana found herself instantly on edge.
In the Dream Forge, one of the first nightmares we faced was a library. And…
But she tried to cast that out. Expecting what would come probably wouldn’t work, aside from facing the Three. Everything else was fair game, an impossible-to-predict smorgasbord of subconscious fears and anxieties made manifest.
Nothing was as it seemed in Nightmares. With how quickly they’d gone from snowy wasteland to cozy library, their next step could very well take them somewhere else. Anything to unsettle them. Anything to surprise them.
Anything to terrify them.
“There’s the next beacon,” Annabelle said softly, pointing. Down the main aisle through the bookshelves, at the very back, was a slender lamppost shining with magenta light.
“Stay close,” Shana said. “Stay alert.”
Together they started forward, gazing down each aisle to the left and right as they stuck to the narrow center aisle. Aside from the man playing piano, they didn’t see anyone else. Hundreds, thousands, of books — the size of the library was staggering — but no customers.
Something’s going to happen. Soon.
Shana could feel it in the air. A disquieting tension hung over the library. The music of the piano, growing more distant, turned from cozy and calm to slow, careful, foreboding.
A loud, heavy thud made all four girls jump, whirling about to search out the source of the noise. They finally saw it — the aisle to the right. A heavy book had fallen from a high shelf. It lay on the floor, unmoving, but the girls didn’t move on.
Why had the book fallen? Had it been pushed? By who?
Another thud. The girls wheeled around, to see a book from the opposite aisle had fallen.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Three more books fell, and then three more soon after. Not just from these aisle nearest them, but from aisles ahead and behind. A chorus of heavy falls, books tumbling to the floor, went on for five, six, seven seconds.
And then all was quiet. In the distance, the piano played a soft, eerie chord, letting it hang in the air for a long, long time.
Shana stared at the books scattered all over the floor. Silent. Unmoving. And yet she couldn’t look away. Something was about to happen, she was sure of it.
Suddenly, the piano started up again. A swift, staccato melody bounced through the halls, lively yet somehow sinister. And after a few notes…
The books started to move.
“We should, um, run,” Kathryn said softly, gripping Shana’s hand tightly.
Yet Shana was transfixed. The books were moving all on their own, as if they were living beings. It was… kind of exciting. And yet…
This is a nightmare. Don’t forget that. The books moving is bad.
So move!
Curiosity was a powerful force. Shana stood staring for a moment longer. The nearest book popped up, hovering in the air, bouncing along to the melody. Its pages fluttered gently. And then…
The pages turned into fangs. Fiery eyes blazed on the book’s spine, and it came lunging for the girls, snapping open and closed in a frightful fury, paper fangs as solid and sharp as that of any wild beast.
The girls bolted into a desperate, clumsy run. They ran into bookshelves, bounced off of each other, and took numerous steps to get their bearings and run straight for the distant beacon. Each jostle, each bump, each collision with a bookshelf forced more books to fall, and they swiftly turned into carnivorous book monsters of their own, bouncing and flying and snapping their paperback jaws. Shana led the escape, holding tight to her friends, constantly looking back to check that they were all still with her.
And every time she looked back, she saw the vicious book monsters. First there were a handful. Then there were a dozen. Then several dozen. More and more joined the horde, until hundreds of books were tumbling over each other in a vicious, hungry assault on the girls. They even tore into each other sometimes to make room, and just a glimpse of how swiftly those paper jaws tore through even the sturdiest hardcover made Shana’s eyes grow wide.
None of this was helped by the frantic and jaunty yet sinister piano melody, which somehow never grew quieter despite how fast and far the girls ran. And similarly…
“Why isn’t the beacon getting any closer?” Kathryn cried, her voice coming out panicked and desperate. The confidence she’d displayed earlier had evaporated.
“It’s like Heart said,” Annabelle said. “They’re always either closer or farther than they appear.”
“Well why can’t it be closer?” Kathryn cried.
“It sounds like they’re coming from farther ahead!” Rae said. She pushed ahead of the group and held up her Talisman…
But nothing happened. Her keychain didn’t even gleam with magical light.
“Why isn’t —” she started.
“Nightmares can’t be fought!” Shana said, pulling her along. “Not here. That’s not the point of this trial.”
“But that makes it a million times scarier!” Kathryn said. She was sobbing, starting to lag behind despite how Shana pulled at her.
“You have to keep running!” Shana said. “No matter what!”
This must be her nightmare. Her subconscious… her worst fear, lurking in her subconscious, is a horde of carnivorous books?
Just hearing that sounds hilarious. But facing it directly…
She’s got the right idea. This is way too scary!
“You’re the Dreamer, right?” Kathryn asked. “Can’t you do something about it?”
“This is my trial,” Shana said. “That’s exactly why I can’t.”
“But you could fly earlier!”
“It’s like… my powers are available, sometimes, depending on where we are. Back there, we weren’t in someone’s nightmare. It was more general, like Nightmares were sizing us up, measuring us, figuring us out. Once we’re inside a specific nightmare, belonging to someone here… I’m just me.”
“Just you is enough,” Rae said. “Come on, Kathryn! We’re getting out of this together!”
“Up ahead,” Annabelle said. A moment later, books started swarming out from the aisles farther ahead, effectively cutting the girls off.
“Left!” Shana said, making a snap decision and racing down the next aisle. No books had fallen here, but it was narrower than the central aisle, so they had to be more careful. Running single-file, Shana kept Kathryn ahead of her so she could push her, and Annabelle and Rae behind push the both of them, so they wouldn’t slow down. All the while she did her best to speak encouraging words to Kathryn, to try and awaken her courage. She had a feeling that…
If I don’t, if she doesn’t find her courage again, if she isn’t able to take on this fear and win…
It doesn’t matter what the rest of us do. This is her nightmare. It’s her fear. As long as she’s still a frantic mess, we’re trapped here, no matter how close the beacon looks.
It can be a lot more dangerous taking people with me into the Trial. If I’d come alone… I wouldn’t have their support. But I also wouldn’t have their nightmares on top of my own.
“I swear I’ll never read a book again!” Kathryn screamed, fighting against Shana’s attempts to push her onward. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just don’t eat me!”
“You’ve got way too much reading to do to be saying that,” Shana said. “And they’re not mad at you for reading books. They’re just mad because they’re mean. Don’t try to placate them, just keep running. Think about the beacon. Think about what lies beyond this place. Think about all the things you love about books, all your favorite series and characters.”
“I don’t want —”
“You do want to!” Shana cut off Kathryn’s complaint. “You love Merchant Princess, right? We’re on Volume Twenty-Six, and the story’s still not over. You can’t just leave all that behind without a proper ending, can you?” They emerged from this aisle and had monstrous biting books on all sides, but far enough away that they could duck into a different aisle and continue charging ahead. “And what about The Misadventures of Gadrick Gorensell? You’re not honestly going to tell me you don’t love how much of a fool he is, all the trouble and nonsense he gets into and barely gets himself out of. Books are wonderful!”
Kathryn didn’t say anything. But she seemed to be just the slightest bit less resistant to Shana’s pushing, her steps the slightest bit faster.
“And we just started reading Greylight Chronicles,” Rae said. “I’m not going to go ahead and finish it without you! It’s been so much more fun having you to read it together with.”
“If you abandon books forever,” Annabelle said, “then you’ll be very upset when we wake up back in the Library of Solitude. All those books, and you won’t allow yourself to read a single one? I have so many I want to recommend to you.”
“Oh…” Kathryn said softly, shaking her head and running a little faster. “You guys! Of course I can’t give up books! Out of our way, bitey book beasts! We’re getting out of here!”
They turned a corner, and there was the beacon, just a few aisles down. And when they raced towards it, they got there even faster, tumbling over themselves as the library — and the bitey book beasts — vanished.
“Oh thank goodness,” Kathryn said, gasping for breath. “I seriously thought I was gonna die. Giant books that want to eat you! That’s terrifying!”
“You said it,” Shana said, surveying the new area as she caught her breath.
And her breath caught in her throat. Because she’d escaped the library…
Only to end up in her first true challenge. The first of the Three.
She was in Grimoire Academy.
“Hold up, we’re at school?” Kathryn asked, looking around. “Third basement, too — all the way at the bottom. Dead center, even?” She walked to the door of the classroom and slid it open. “Yep. Dead center.”
“It’s so dark,” Rae said, reaching for Shana and breathing a sigh of relief when she took hold of her shoulder.
Click-click. “Light switch isn’t working,” Kathryn said with a sigh. “At least we’ve got the emergency lights. Never realized how dim they are.”
In the ceiling there were three lights — the same layout in every classroom — that had a reddish casing. They gleamed a dull, dim glow now, just barely enough to see by, and were an essential feature in a classroom with no windows, on a floor that had no windows anywhere.
“Shana?” Annabelle asked. Shana looked down at her, and only then realized that her hand was trembling. Annabelle gave that trembling hand a firm squeeze. “You know this place. What do we do about it?”
“I… don’t know,” Shana said. Her voice was taut, her mouth dry, it was hard to make much noise. “I… this is…”
“Hey, now,” Kathryn said, hands on her hips. “You can’t go all pale and shivering after helping me get out of my nightmare. We’re all in this together. Share your troubles. Tell us what’s going on.”
“One of… ‘the Three,’ right?” Rae asked. “You have three worst nightmares?”
Shana nodded. “They… they’re ones that I wake up from, and I still remember them vividly. And I have them over and over again, they never leave me. And they’re… they’re all… just terrible. And this one, it’s…”
“Oh,” Kathryn said, the look in her eyes one of recognition… and dread. “Oh, I know that tone of voice. I know that look. You’re… you mean this place is filled with…”
Shana nodded.
“Filled with what?” Annabelle asked. “Don’t leave us in suspense, it won’t help anyone. What are we up against?”
In the faint, dark distance, Shana could hear them. A skittering of tiny clawed feet. Normally so silent, but when they were such a size, their footsteps were just barely audible.
“We…” Shana started, swallowing. “We need to get out of this classroom. Right now. Right now!”
She raced for the door, the others stumbling after her. As soon as she got outside, she looked left and right.
Sticky, moist strands, layered over and over and over again. As far as she could see, down both corridors.
And moving through the webs…
“Spiders,” Shana said in a hollow, tiny voice.