Only A Dream

'What if none of this is real?'

Fletcher looked at her like she was insane - a perfectly rational way to respond to such a weird, out-of-the-blue question.

'What do you mean?'

'What if it's just a dream and I'll wake up tomorrow as a normal, boring teenage girl? No magic, no skeletons, no evil gods...' No Darquesse.

'I don't know.' Pause. 'Is that what you want?'

'No.' Yes. 'I was just thinking. It's possible, right?'

'Um, everything feels pretty real to me.'

'Maybe for you. Maybe you're just a person in my dream.'

'Since when did you turn all philosophical, Val? It's getting kind of weird.'

She didn't answer.

'Are you OK?'

'Yeah...' No.

But if it was a dream, and if she did wake up tomorrow as ordinary, boring Stephanie Edgley, living her ordinary, boring, magic-less life, without the pressure of Darquesse hanging over her every second of the day, filling her with cold worry and dread, what would she think of this dream she had just had, before it faded away like smoke and she got on with things?

Just a cool, exciting dream, or a terrifying nightmare?

She turned to Fletcher. 'I don't know. Sorry. I know I've been acting weird lately...'

'Yeah, you definitely have. Is everything really OK? Is your mum all right?'

'Yes.' But if Cassandra's vision comes true she won't be.

She banished this sudden, terrifying thought out of her mind and attempted a casual shrug. 'I think it's the Necromancy. It's kind of depressing.'

He smiled and pecked her on the cheek. 'But when you're around me it's hard to stay depressed for long, right?'

She rolled her eyes and tried to smile back, but she wasn't sure how convincing it was.

That night, she tossed and turned in bed before eventually falling asleep... and the dream she dreamed was the strangest she'd ever had.

She was no longer Valkyrie Cain - she was a stranger, a girl named Stephanie Edgley. Stephanie Edgley's life consisted of school, where she had a slight crush on a boy named Gary Price and no friends to speak of - home, where she got on well with both her parents but spent a lot of time in her room - and swimming and walking on the beach. Her only real enemies were Hannah Foley from her class, and possibly her cousins, Carol and Crystal the toxic twins. Her only real fear was that her whole life would carry on like this - boring, meaningless, completely lacking in adventure.

She missed her uncle, the writer Gordon Edgley, whose books allowed her to escape from the real world, if only for a little while. He was the only person who seemed to have understood her need for adventure and excitement in life. But now he was dead. She'd been to his funeral. She thought he'd have been disappointed by the people who attended it - mainly their family and some people from his publishers.

That had been three years ago, when she was twelve. She was fifteen now, and the three years that had passed since then had been boring to say the least. She really, really hoped that in the future, it would be different.

What a strange dream, Valkyrie thought, and tried to wake up.

It didn't work.

She was lying in bed on Monday morning, with five minutes to go before her alarm went off. Wake up, she thought. You're dreaming, wake up.

But she was awake, it seemed. How could she be dreaming if she was awake?

Now very confused, Valkyrie Cain - Stephanie Edgley? - sat up in bed and looked around. Her room looked the same, apart from one very subtle difference - her black clothes, which always hung over the back of her chair, were gone. Now there was a school uniform hanging there instead.

She picked up her phone and looked through her contacts. Skulduggery, Tanith and Fletcher weren't there anymore. Instead she had a load of names she didn't even recognize - Anna Healy, Kate Butler, Sarah Rourke. Such ordinary names compared to the types of names she'd gotten used to hearing.

Thinking of names sent a chill down her spine as she thought of her own. Not Valkyrie, or Stephanie, but Darquesse. The same chill that she'd felt several times a day since that fateful night the dream whisperer had spoken to her. The same chill that was brought on when she thought of how bleak, cold and horrible her future now looked.

Or did it?

After all, if she'd never heard of magic...

... if she couldn't even do magic...

...then she couldn't be Darquesse.

She thought of what Skulduggery had said. 'Sometimes people never realise they can do magic, and die without ever knowing how great they could have been.'

At the time, she'd thought it was sad. Now, the thought filled her with hope. Somehow, in this dream that had to be real because she wasn't waking up, she had never heard of magic.

Maybe there was no magic. Maybe it had all been just a dream.

Of course. If this was real, then what she'd previously thought was real had to be a dream.

A tentative smile spread across her face.

Her alarm went off.

Time for school.

A/N: Confusing? XD

She has been trapped in a paralell universe in which Skulduggery got stuck in traffic and missed Gordon's funeral. :)No, not really.

I'm not sure whether to update, or leave it as a oneshot, because my plotline has some serious holes in it. Review?