I just didn't think it was possible.

I mean, who wouldn't want to escape this dreary world, right? Who wouldn't want to be free of Earth and all their worldly responsibilities? Who wouldn't want to trade their life in exchange for another, even if that meant surrendering yourself to a universe you never even knew existed? Hell, I'd sure want that. No doubt about it. In fact, I used to pray for that very thing to happen, folded hands and all.

I just… never thought I'd actually get my wish.

Unfortunately, dimension hopping, or whatever you want to call it, hadn't been as much fun as I used to imagine it would be. The traveling part had been especially disorienting, to say the least. One minute I shut my eyes in the real world to go to sleep and the next, I'm surrounded by a maelstrom of sounds and colors, except these sounds and colors were loud and too bright and completely out of this world. And when I say sounds and colors, I literally mean sounds and colors. All at once, a high-pitched keening sound fired off near my head. Loudly, too. I wanted to scream, but there was no air for my lungs. Inhaling felt empty, and yet, still satisfying somehow. I guess I could feel something trickle down my windpipe to fill my insides, but it sure as shit wasn't oxygen. Although, by the time I'd figured that out, the keening sound was gone and instead, I saw a gaseous cloud of purple wander into my field of vision. It looked like a bunch of colored gas particles, each one clustering together to form a medium sized blob of not-air just several inches away from me. I stretched forward, not really feeling my limbs, and saw my pale hand waft through the cloud like smoke. Tendrils of purple enveloped my fingers, and I almost laughed when I realized that it was warm. The sweet, low music of wind chimes seeped into my ears then, and I made a fist inside of the not-air and watched the gaseous cloud fade to the color of cotton-candy… or maybe it had always been this shade of pink and I was just experiencing an uncontrollable sort of mind trip. After all, this couldn't be anything but a dream and dreams were not logical by any standards.

I decided right there and then that this might have been the coolest dream-trance that I had ever had in my life. I was suspended and floating in a sea of impenetrable nothingness, both arms and legs trailing out in front of my body as if I had been sitting down in a giant bean-bag chair that been smushed too much in the middle. Clouds of color and sound continued to ooze and float along this deep chamber of blackness, and all I knew for certain is that I was nowhere and I was everywhere at once. But, if I was nowhere and everywhere at once, then I shouldn't have had this eerie feeling on my skin - the kind that feels like each of your pores were charged with static electricity. The feeling of a cold, wet finger trailing down the back of your neck and spine. The feeling of your heart growing little hummingbird wings, beating so fast that you thought you could fly.

The feeling of being watched.

I tried to wrench free of the invisible ropes binding my arms and legs to the invisible beanbag chair I was sunk in, but I couldn't. Each jerky movement of mine weighed me down as if I were wading through sand, so I soon gave up. Then I shut my eyes, because maybe if I pretended I wasn't really there, I would wake up in my bed at home with a few hours to spare before class and wonder what in the world had provoked this sort of unexplainable dream before drifting off to sleep again. Or maybe I was just full of it and really sort of terrified at this point - so terrified in fact that the soundlessness of my subsequent scream only made me scream harder, because what was the point in a gesture so loud and violent if no one was around to actually hear it? The thought was chilling even to myself. My eyes started to sting with moisture, though in this place I wouldn't be surprised if my tears came out red or black or blue. Panicking, I quickly shut them again. I opened my mouth to scream once more, when suddenly, a steady vibration rocked my core, as if my heart had become a cell phone and it was alerting me to a text message. The sensation was so startling and so different that my jaw immediately snapped shut with an audible sound, teeth against teeth. If the strange vibration in my chest hadn't shocked me out of my fit, then the human sound of my breath catching surely would have, for it was the very first noise I had heard since this dream started. Well, the first normal sound. I pressed my teeth tightly together again and heard the soft grinding sound I was searching for.

This was good then! This was… well, this was familiar, if nothing else. I ground my teeth in a slow and steady pattern while my mind raced to catch up with this new information. Maybe I was finally waking up? Maybe this dreadful and otherworldly place would finally dissolve into a dark crevice of my memory, and I'd wake up from this nightmare and finally be grateful to go to school for once. Ugh. My heart was vibrating again and the pulse of its rhythm was so frantic that if I unclenched my teeth now, they would surely break.

Vibratevibratevibratevibrate. Pause. Vibratevibratevibratevibrate.

How long had I been here anyway? An hour? Two? More? It felt likes years had passed by the time the incessant vibrating had stopped. Did I dare open my eyes and discover what lay before me now, though I still hung suspended in the air like a puppet? I debated on this for several minutes, and then the vibrating started up again. Except… faster. The vibrations pummeled my insides, beginning from my chest until tremors rocked my lifeless extremities in a rag doll fashion. My body was warming up from each harsh movement, and I kept my jaw locked for fear that I would bite my tongue off. My dark hair stuck to the clammy sweat on my neck as this continued, and I waited patiently, if fearfully, as the vibrations got faster and faster and increasingly violent.

After one more minute of this, I had reached my end. I wanted to go home! I wanted all of this to stop! I wanted to sleep in my bed and rise to the sound of my mother crashing around in the kitchen! I wanted to see the faces of my best friends, each one solid and beautiful and wholly real! I'd had enough of this dream or trance or state or whatever this was! I was TIRED! I was SCARED! I was —

"Solana?"

NOT Solana! I was —

"Solana, wake up. Solana! Come on!"

Whose voice was this all around me? Make it stop. Make it STOP!

"Solana!"

"NO!"

Something solid and steady gripped my shoulders and I flinched, twisting away from the unwanted contact.

"Solana, it's me, dammit! Open your eyes!"

So, I did. They flew open at once and hovering before me was a tan blob, each side of its surface decorated with dark ornaments. It wasn't until fresh tears spilled over my cheeks that I realized I was looking at a face, the dark eyebrows knitting together to form a dent just above his nose.

"Who are you?"

I asked this question without thinking, without even knowing where I was. It was dark, that I could tell. If I squinted, I thought I could make out the rest of this figure's face. His features were average and handsome, and black bangs tumbled down his temples in a disarray. This man looked as tired as I felt, and the pressure gripping my shoulders then released me. I realized that he had been the one restraining me, and if I had not been so disoriented, I think I might have tried to move away from him.

"Are you all right?"

A pang of familiarity snapped me out of my convoluted thoughts, and I peered up at him again. I knew this man and his voice, though I didn't know what he was doing in my house so late at night…

"Jowan?" Was that his name? "What's happening?" The pitiful whisper of my voice sounded fragile even to me.

The man called Jowan sighed deeply and extended a hand. It occurred to me that he was perched close to where I lay on my bed's mattress. I took it, knowing that I was safe, and allowed him to pull me up beside him.

"You were having another nightmare, I think. A big one this time. You were yelling."

Of course. The nightmares had been visiting me frequently this week, it seemed. "Sorry. Did any templars come?" I asked in a sleepy voice. At once, the words confused me. What was I saying? Nightmares? Templars? I stiffened, and Jowan slowly shook his head.

"You're lucky. I got to you before your screams could wake up the entire tower," he mumbled lazily. "This one sounded worse than the others — " But I couldn't hear him anymore. What was going on? Where was I?

"Jowan," I urgently pressed, completely cutting him off from his lecture about who I should and should not talk to whilst in the Fade or whatever that meant, "I need to ask you some things and I need you to answer me as concise and as straight forward as you can. Are you able to do that?" Jowan hesitated for just a second and then swallowed in determination. He nodded.

"Thank you." Inhaling shakily, I pushed away all the damp hair still matted to my face and forehead. My curls were long and tangled, and I didn't want to bother with them too much so I impatiently shoved them all behind my shoulders. "Firstly, where are we?"

Jowan frowned. "The Circle Tower."

I tried to hide my alarm at the notion of waking up anywhere else besides my home in Massachusetts. "What city are we currently in?"

"We're… not. The Tower is settled on Lake Calenhad."

My heart thumped painfully at his words. Not in Massachusetts, then. Somewhere in the United States, perhaps?

"What country is this and what is the date, Jowan?"

"What happened in your dream, Solana?" he blurted out forcefully. "Did you engage with a spirit of some sort or —"

"Jowan, please!"

He scowled at me but otherwise swallowed the rest of his words in silent surrender. "This is Fereldan, where we've lived all our lives in glorious splendor… minus the glorious part. The date is 9:31 in the Dragon Age, and yesterday was the first day of spring time, thank the Maker for that." And then Jowan was suddenly leaning towards me with a fierce look in his onyx eyes. "What's wrong, Solana? Please… you can tell me. If it was a spirit, then I could help you! Whatever it was, we cannot let the templars find out, of course. There's no telling what they'd do if they found anything worth investigating."

"I…" But what could I even say? What help could I take from this man who I knew and didn't know at the same time? Even just looking at him was perplexing… I thought I'd recognized his unkempt hair, the slight curve of his thin lips. But upon further inspection, he only seemed more and more alien to me. I could feel myself growing colder with each passing moment.

And his words. They didn't make any sense at all! Or did they? I swore I could remember laying upon this stiff mattress before. I seemed to sink into its shape as if I already had…

No. The thought was too ridiculous and too terrible to even entertain.

Drawing my knees upwards, I sluggishly proceeded to kick off the blankets tucking me in as I crawled towards the opposite edge of the bed, away from Jowan. It was all I could to do get to my feet, for exhaustion still tore at my limbs and they almost felt too tired to lift. Once I was stable, I tried not to think about the long, dark robe I was dressed in or how it must have gotten there. As far as I knew, I didn't own anything of the sort, so I internally silenced those questions while my eyes readjusted to the dark room around me.

It was a bedroom, more or less, its walls composed of what appeared to be stone. The air was slightly stale but comfortable enough. A few yards ahead of me was what I assumed to be the doorway, its foreign interior arching high above the height of the average person. A generic dresser rested to the left of the doorway and was adjacent to a full length mirror, decorated with intricate patterns of silver and brass along the sides. To the right of the doorway was a wall that had been hollowed out and filled with stacks of books, each spine gleaming and proud and strong. Besides a water basin, that concluded the list of personal items, albeit few. Wait. Was this… my room?

"Jowan?" I called emotionlessly. To be honest, I still didn't know how I knew this man's name… just that I did. It was eerie, and I wrapped both arms around myself, pressing my fingertips into the crevices of each rib. I was vaguely aware of that resulting in a dull ache spread across my torso, meaning that this probably wasn't a dream at all. If I could feel pain, then…

Jowan interrupted me from my silent revelation. He'd somehow walked around the perimeter of the bed frame without me noticing and was now staring unabashedly into my face not a foot away from where I stood. I gazed back into his puzzled expression and swallowed, feeling a blank numbness seep into the corners of my bones. It felt heavy.

"I don't feel so well, Jowan. I… think I need to take a walk or something." Yeah, a long, long walk, far away from this place…

Jowan's wary eyes swept over me, and I could see him internally deliberating with himself if he should accompany me or not. I shook my head at him and ignored his resulting frown, all the while still hugging myself.

"I'll be okay," I lied, "I'm just disoriented from my nightmare is all. You were right… it was a bad one and… I'm just really tired, Jowan. I'll be back in a few minutes and then head straight to bed again. You should, too."

If I had any energy reserved, I might have flinched when Jowan reached out and softly clapped his hand upon my shoulder. Instead, I felt the jolt rack my hollow self and struggled to remain upright. Jowan opened his mouth to say something but bit his lip then, and I tried giving him a half-hearted smile despite not really feeling my face anyway.

"Please get some sleep," I mumbled while shuffling my feet closer to the room's doorway. "And thank you for checking up on me tonight. I'll see you in the morning." But why did I say that? What was in the morning and why did I have a feeling like I've said that before in a million different instances?

The doorknob was metal and cold to the touch, and I yanked it open with as much force as I could reckon from this extraordinarily horrific night. Stepping into the dimly lit hallway, I left a shell-shocked Jowan far behind and tried not to think about where I was headed because the thought of getting lost in this hard and stone tower was nothing in comparison to the realization that in this place, I might not be headed for anywhere at all.