'Are you seeing what I'm seeing?!' Noble asked as Flint came up beside her.
The man froze.
'That…that cannot be!'
But it was. The tear in reality was unmistakable.
Sure, there were similar gashes in the Dream Realm when seeds bloomed. But Noble had never heard or read of one happening inside a Nightmare. And there was something else strange.
"You are saying that the monsters come out of there?" Noble felt her feet lift from the bark floor as she waited for the answer.
"They do. The lesser abominations usually come first before the truly frightening creatures. We were lucky that their leader wasn't too powerful this time." Syrce's grey eyes were tinged with sadness.
'What she just described is a Category Two Gate.' Flint furrowed his brow.
'That means the thing we killed was the Gate Guardian. But how? Monsters should be going into those gates, not coming out of them.' Noble took a deep breath. Her mind was racing with a thousand questions.
Had the dark spots she spotted on her expeditions to the sea been gates? What about the strange void she sensed in the woods? It hadn't occurred to her before, but now she was almost sure they were.
If that were the case, why hadn't she felt the call when being close to them? Even now, Noble felt uneasy, but not the unrelenting pull that she had resisted when fighting at the Gate in the NQSC.
Were the two sensations different simply because she was already in a Nightmare?
Could she enter another Nightmare while in this one? How horrible would that be?!
She could not sleep here. None of them could!
"We cannot stay here with that so close. The Spell may have already claimed some of your men who fell unconscious in battle."
"Spell?" The Saint's expression darkened. "You aren't a heretic, are you?"
"What? No!" Noble blinked, confused. First, there were Remnants, and now Heretics? What was next?
The Saint nodded.
"Good. Those worshippers were chased out years ago. I would hate to think you were bringing it back. If not that spell, then what spell do you mean?" Syrce tilted her head. "And why is it claiming my soldiers?"
Noble tried to think of a way to explain.
"Have none of your people fallen asleep close to the darkness and turned into hideous creatures?"
The mossy-haired woman looked even more confused. "What? No, of course not! Is that what has happened in your Realm? And here I thought our moon breaking was bad!"
"You…you mean the moon broke…recently?" Even Noble's Quick Study attribute was having trouble keeping up with all the revelations.
The Saint scrunched her nose. "Of course. We may be a mortal Realm, but we were made with a perfectly working moon."
'Mortal Realm?'
There was that word again.
A sinking suspicion formed in Noble's gut.
"Lady Syrce, I am afraid I am lost. Could you back up and explain exactly what is happening here?"
"Oh my. I forget you are addlepated. Please come away from the ledge, and I shall explain it in small words that even you can understand."
Syrce looped her arm around Noble's elbow and patted her gently.
With a surprisingly silent Flint, the two ladies descended the wall and found a knot of the tree large enough to use for a bench. Sitting, the Saint pulled Noble beside her.
"Where would you like me to begin?"
"The moon," Noble decided. "What happened to it?"
"The war. We are not a divine Realm, but we were home to Imagination, or as our people called her, Mirage. With her as our patroness, the gods could not leave our world unscathed. In coming after her, the moon was shattered. For that alone, I am glad they are dead."
Syrce was sincere in her hatred. The gods had maimed her world and ruined her sky. It was no wonder that she was bitter.
'That..she's describing the Doom War!' Flint's thoughts filtered into his companion's head.
Noble had heard of the Doom War before, but only in fragments. Unless the Legacy clans were holding out on them, no one had any real information on what had transpired. To be so close to those events was truly unheard of.
"You saw the moon break?" The professor tried and failed to picture the scene.
"Ha!" Syrce's laugh was sullen, "I was weaker then, having not reached Transcendence. We hid in the caves below our city to avoid the gods' wrath. The land shook and felt on the verge of coming apart entirely. When it finally settled, and we returned to the surface, our city was ruined and the moon was beyond repair."
"That…that's terrible!"
Noble knew the strange lore that surrounded the moon of the waking world. She had made her own theories about it when trying to solve the mystery of the failing satellites. But to have the moon destroyed? That was unthinkable!
"Indeed, it was. We had not even experienced the Imperial invasion in our land; we were peaceful people. But nothing lasts forever, and our world was forever changed. If only that were where it ended! We hoped to find peace again when the war was over, but Remnants still plagued us. Then the darkness appeared without warning."
That wasn't how it had happened in the Waking World. People had been infected by the Spell, grown tired, and fallen asleep. Some had Awakened while others had turned into terrible beasts.
Gates had come later.
Was the Spell omitting itself from the tale because they were in a Nightmare? Or was it not actually the originator of the harrowing rips in reality, like the people of Earth thought?
Before Noble could consider too deeply, Syrce continued.
"We have always had a few corrupted creatures here and there, but as more of the darkness appeared, many more abominations spilled into our land. They drove us from what was left of our homes. That is when my sisters and I set out on our mission to find a place to dwell in safety. If my plan works, we will carve out a home for ourselves and have a way to keep the darkness from consuming what is left of our Realm. I won't let ours end up devoured like others. Too much of it has disappeared already."
Noble thought about what she had seen at the base of the tree. Without the insidious call of the Spell, she had noticed that the Gate was like an open maw ready to eat everything around it.
Syrce wasn't talking about a metaphorical disappearance of land. She meant a literal one.
But the Dream Realm still existed in the present, so it hadn't been destroyed.
Unless her suspicion was right.
'Flint, I know this might sound crazy, but I don't think we are in the Dream Realm.'
'What do you mean?' The man furrowed his brow.
'I am not sure.'
The gates, the strange topography, the sweet ocean unlike anything either of them had experienced before…all of these pointed to a place outside the Dream Realm.
Syrce had mentioned mortal and divine Realms. Perhaps the Nightmares told of countless other existences across time and space.
That would explain why, after so many years and thousands of Nightmares, earthly historians still could not piece it all together meaningfully.
They were not the story of one Realm, but the histories of a myriad of them.
Had they all been devoured as well?
If the Gates all originated from the Dream Realm, did that mean it was absorbing them one by one to feed itself?
The realization was mind-blowing.
And terrifying.
Because if this world were being eaten by the Gates dotting the landscape.
Then her world was too.