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World 8-2: It's Not Easy Being Dream
"I feel insulted, more than anything else."
Bowser dimly sensed someone dragging him over flagstones and up steps, heedless of how they further dented his lolling skull. Contrary to popular myths about cranial trauma, taking a hard blow to the head didn't send the victim into a peaceful nap. Sensation still seeped in, blurred and distant, and it was hard to care much about any of it. Pain did all it could to further distract from the proceedings.
"As a king, you well know gossip pierces deeper than spears."
Her spite drilled through gauzy layers of concussion. Peach's voice brought Bowser back, like a conjurer summoning their favorite monster from the Underworld to the gritty plane of the Real. Now he cared. Now he'd brave the agony beating a furious drum solo against the interior of his cranium. Another head wound, and more bleeding to go with it. If these assaults to his scalp kept up he'd go bald one day soon.
The room slowed its spinning, taking its sweet time applying the breaks. The shroom scum had flipped Bowser over on his shell. Insult slathered onto injury.
"You defeated me once. If the world catches word that my 'great' nemesis is really a clown playing with fireworks... What, in turn, will they think of me then?"
Blood in his eyes made seeing fine detail a chore. What little resolved out of the blur hinted at tasteful decor. Expensive stuff. The kommandos lay in a row beside their king, likewise upturned on their shells, wrists bound to ankles. Still no glimpse of the target. But he could still hear her.
"The illusion of Koopa anarchists scurrying through the streets. The..." and her lip audibly curled in disgust, "little love note scribbled by your backwoods stick rider, begging for favors in the sky for all to see. Then this unseemly rush into such an obvious trap. Amateur embarrassments so pathetic the world would accuse me of making it all up out of spite!"
There she was. Perched on a mezzanine to better shower all with disdain. Details began filtering in. The pink pastel queen of darkness herself leaned on a handrail of some rich, dark wood polished to shining luster, supported by baroque balusters carved with designs of flourishing piranha plants. As always she wore an evening gown with voluminous overskirts, the same variety of dress in which she posed for portraits. The royal brooch glittered on her breast. Upon her hay yellow tresses rested easy the four-peaked gold coronet, inlaid with gems larger than her eyes.
Peach's hands were empty. This time others held the weapons for her.
"Not that I will allow description of your sorry pranks to survive into record. Oh no. I will burn everything you have ever touched in fondness. Bury every generation of your line. Raze every monument. Tear down every holding and have the foundations hammered into gravel. I will spur my scientists to toil unto death to discover a method by which I might retroactively atomize your presence from history. Erase you so thoroughly that future generations will not even have a speck of ash or shard of shell to remember you by."
A Toad stood on his chest and glowered, a stocky runt almost as wide as it was tall, trying its best to tower with menace. Tiny hands held a studded club, a spatter of blood on the business end. The cudgel hovered, heavy with promised threat.
"Your failure is so complete that I rue the bribes I squandered on your betrayers."
A familiar face swaggered onto the mezzanine to join Peach.
Wario hugged a platter of layer cake, the pastry half-gone already and rapidly vanishing by the heaping forkful as the thief shoveled it away. Glutenous chortling escaped in loud, crumb-laden gusts through his nose while the maw was occupied.
He waved. "You were right. Best cake in the world! By far. Mmmmff."
Peach's voice, impossibly, grew even more self-satisfied. "Of course, I was first to approach Wario with an offer. I instructed him to accept your commission. When he waddled back and submitted a report detailing your plans for this ruinous rescue attempt, I nearly had him killed. I thought he was abusing my good humor by handing me a piss take instead of what I'd paid him to learn. Inconceivable that even you would resort to such an asinine scheme."
For one delirious moment, Bowser fancied Peach stood within range of a hasty lunge. On second glance, she was too far away to reach. Eyes be damned. Feeling game for an insane last gasp play, he swept the club Toad aside and kippered off his shell. Brain swirling, vision flipping somersaults, Bowser had a hard time gaining his knees, much less planting two solid feet beneath his bulk. The swoleshroom stepped up and buried a curly-toed shoe into his side. For such a small foot it delivered a load of pain. Bowser whuffed and sank back onto his belly.
The heavyweight short stack stuck close, observing the suffering in detail with dead, black poker chip eyes so much like Luigi's. For all that it maintained the stoic mien of the unfeeling professional, the Toad's bland features sweated the squalid glee of a sadist bully doing what it loved and getting paid in the bargain. Yeah, enjoy the show, shit-born. You've just earned the number three spot on my list.
Recognition struck through the brain fog with the searing brilliance of lightning. This capped cadaver consumer wasn't just any Toad. He was The Toad. His red-spotted white toadstool cap had been formally adopted as the official color scheme of the First Echelon's head gear. The Toad was probably the least Toad-like of his entire race. He should've been born a Koopa.
Whatever birth name his cultivators selected upon his sprouting was long forgotten. The Toad had earned his pretentious moniker through long years serving as the queen's left hand and her chief bodyguard, comfortable dealing out violence with efficiency and discretion, or with flashy excess as the situation demanded.
There were legends whispered far from the capital that long ago, while escorting Peach on a sojourn through the Negative World, The Toad's soul was stolen from his body and replaced by an alien presence, one of those incomprehensible entities of inscrutable motives which sometimes slipped through a crack in the walls of brick and stone and sky that closed off the Worlds from the infinite gulfs of the Outer Bounds.
To Bowser, The Toad smelled like a pizza topping begging for a fierce broiling, to be dished out as soon as was convenient. Right now would work. Bowser swiped at The Toad, who nimbly danced out of reach. "Fast little crotch crop, ain't ya?"
Bowser kept after him, scrapping across the stones on his stomach, sweeping his claws and snapping at The Toad like a riled crocodile, still too dizzy to attempt standing.
The Toad made a begrudging retreat, evading each claw and bite by a mocking inch. His fellow guard elite tittered. Bowser didn't care. Dignity was overrated. Closing jaws on the enemy, snapping their soft bones, organs bursting on the point of a tooth—that was worth enduring any indignity.
In a sudden rush, The Toad stopped retreating and came on, club whirling in a gray blur. The blows rained down. Bowser shut tight his maw to avoid losing teeth. A spike snapped off his carapace. The left horn cracked. Blood welled in his nostrils and poured hot down his neck. The beating stopped when The Toad swung up by the cracked horn and mounted the back of Bowser's neck. He spurred the jugular veins with his heels and slapped the shell, pantomiming a ranch hand breaking in a rowdy Yoshi.
The chirping mirth of the peanut gallery graduated into a stinging hail of belly laughs. Wario's coarse guffaw overrode the whole chorus.
Blood soaked carpet squelched beneath Bowser with each shifting of weight. Darkening blood spread over the checkerboard marble tiles beyond the carpet's tasseled edge. Too much blood to lose and remain alive. It then dawned on Bowser why the five captured kommandos of Team Marinara were so silent. Kranston and his squad mates lay pale and still, with heads hauled back, each throat slit.
Some survived. Luigi knelt under the weight of great chains. They'd locked a black iron, studded collar around his neck, steered by four lead chains clinking in the white knuckled grip of several Echelon 2 guards. Of all the Toads present, only Luigi's handlers remained solemn, faces glistening with flop sweat. Murder smoldered in the depths of the flakes of wet obsidian Luigi used for eyes. Iggy was, alas, also alive, gasping and bloody, the crown of his head swollen from a steel bat love tap.
Peach leaned over the railing, as if to carefully examine some newly noticed detail. "I've won, today. Yet, a tinge of disappointment haunts me. A sense of opportunity wasted. Of all the rivals I've cleansed from history... you. I always believed you'd be one worth remembering. I expected more out of you, my vanquished, than this pitiful gambit." She let out a girlish sigh. "Now we must make an end, just when the middle game was heating up. So... premature."
The guards dragged Luigi away, faces red as they hauled on the chains for leverage. Their prisoner thrashed and growled, spattering his handlers with spittle froth. When a pair of the fungi stooped down for Iggy, Peach called a halt. A cruel smile dimpled her heart-shaped face. "No. That one isn't bound for a cell. I'll see to him, personally."
"Fuck you want with him?" Bowser croaked.
"Dead Koopas aren't privileged to ask questions," snapped Peach. Despite the carapace covering Bowser's back and sides, The Toad still found a sweet spot to plant his sharp heel.
Wrath warmed Bowser, stirring up a cyclone of red sparks inside his guts. Bowser surged up, roaring, jaws gnashing, and felt the club bounce off his skull. Cold black stars rained down, extinguishing the inner firestorm. His roar guttered out on a warbling, confused note. For the second time that morning, he disappeared.
Star Hill, paramount among the Eight Wonders of the world.
Like no other mountain it embraced the sky, peerless in its majesty. Its slope tumbled down to misty lowlands which receded into purple hazy distances. The whole mountainside glowed in burning blues and turquoises and violets—the very stones beneath their feet shimmered with indwelling power. Dull gleaming shards of fallen wishing Stars littered the ground.
In times past, pilgrims from all nations and races quested to Star Hill to beseech the Stars for guidance or healing miracles or salvation from war. They came here so a Star might reckon their desire a worthy one and grant their wish. But one could only enter into the Hill's holy precincts if the fortunate supplicant knew the secret paths, could navigate the sprawling labyrinth of the Pipe Maze, or if they possessed a Key that would open the right sort of door.
Bowser had used such a Key to bring what was left of the Koopa Kingdom army here to rest in safety and bandage their wounds. The Toadstool Queen had cut off the last path home. There was no place left to run.
Bowser flopped down on the blessed mountainside, panting, woozy with thirst. He grunted, dismayed to discover some of his wounds had began to bleed again. The muscles of his legs and back felt as if they'd forgotten how to unclench. Brought to the limits of his strength, there he rested amid the grounded stellar splendor, brooding on the empty sky. In every direction, the remnants of the Koopa host did the same, though few bothered following their king's example by looking up.
None dared to hope a Star remained in the ransacked firmament to grant them any one of a long, long list of desperate wishes. And they had been right to keep expectations low, for the queen had struck the Wishing Stars from the sky when she shattered the Star Road with her blasphemies. The Paths and Ways grew steadily more poisonous to travelers, and evil things stalked passages that had once been sacred. Bowser had lost troopas in the retreat to Star Hill. Yet, for all the queen's depredations, some faint trace of numinous presence inhabited this place. A faint and fading sparkle that eased spirits and lifted heavy hearts. Star Hill would make a better place to die than most.
Bowser gazed deep into the empty heavens and said, "I wish someone would come along and save our collective asses."
"Have a care what you say in this place, sire." Kamek groaned as he eased his old bones down onto a nearby rock. The desert had claimed his broomstick, leaving him grounded with the rest of the mere mortals. Too much teleporting gave him a headache, which looked to be the case at present as he pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "That was a good wish, though."
Bowser snorted with disgust. Waving an arm at the dark blue void, he said, "Doesn't matter if I beg proper or sloppy, nothing's left to hear it. I've led us all into a dead end."
"This is the last place left to us, my liege. Whatever time we buy for the defenders back home to brace for the storm is precious. And perhaps our visit will not be in vain." Kamek's voice lowered to a husky whisper. "Long ago, in my all-but-forgotten youth, I had a dream about this place. A vision, perhaps."
Bowser lifted an eyebrow. "Do they come true, these visions?" He refused to take the full share of bait and ask after the content of the mage's dreams. Any more false hope and his mind would crack.
Kamek shook his head, frowning. "Only the unpleasant ones. But this one felt different. It was a vision of hope, I think." Back bowed with exhaustion, he lifted his wand. With a waggle of the wrist, a spell like a comet cloud of glitter zipped from the wand's jeweled tip to burst against the king and soak into his scales. The pain of Bower's wounds grew less severe, the bleeding trickled to a stop, which made dashing to catch Kamek before he toppled over a lot easier.
"You've pushed yourself too far, you soft little bookworm," grumbled Bowser. "Get some sleep already." He laid Kamek on a gently canted angle of smooth star stone, cool and gray after granting its wish and plummeting to the earth in some happier past.
Shouts and screams drew his attention down slope. Out from thin air a pair of star doors gaped wide to disgorge columns of soldiers. Irregulars, by their motley armor and arms and lack of banners. They were assorted sellswords and rogues conscripted from the queen's conquered territories. Pianta outcasts, Whomp mercenaries, even some regiments of Boos, all the peoples Peach considered expendable. The queen thought so little of Koopas that she had sent in the cannon fodder to finish them off. Or so Bowser thought.
Further downhill, on a flat shelf of rock, another star gate yawned to admit a company of Toad infantry. Behind their ranks marched the First Echelon Royal Guard in box formation, and in their center hovered the gold and pink silk palanquin of the queen Herself. Peach had come in person to make sure the job was done right.
Trumpeters sounded the call to form and close ranks. Reedy wailing blew from gaping Koopa skulls forming the mouths of their Koopa shell horns, while drums fashioned from the femurs and cured skins of vanquished kings boomed a battle march to quicken the pulse and remind all of the ultimate price for failure. Judging by the flurry of activity below, Peach intended that the slaughter should commence immediately. While the queen's forces had the advantage of numbers, stamina, morale, supplies, and time, perhaps the Koopas' position on the high ground unsettled her.
The Koopa soldiers looked to each other, too tired to withdraw into their shells. Faces dirty and dull, eyes bright only with fear, reduced to frightened hatchlings casting about for a mother who would never come to reclaim them. A few reached for their weapons. Others eyed the heights, seeking a possible escape route. Wounds encumbered everyone, some so cut up they were unable to walk unaided. Many had carapaces held together with soiled bandages and dried mud—beaks shattered with no plaster and wire to brace them. Gore caked one and all, and whether it was the enemy's or their own viscera was impossible to tell. Most painful for Bowser was the sad resignation in the stares of his son and daughter.
The marching song of the queen doubled in volume, as did the tempo of the beating drums. Some began twitching in rhythm to the pounding skins. Others covered their ears and began to weep.
"It's been an honor, Dad," said Larry, his constant smile turned sad. He smoothed down a cockscomb of azure hair to don his helmet. Wendy, face twisted in a pained grimace, turned away and spat.
No, this would not stand. Bowser could understand and accept a moment of weakness in his troopas as they stared down their oncoming deaths, but he would not abide his own brood surrendering meekly to the inevitable. Up he leapt onto the canted arms of a crashed star stone. Over the bedlam of unhallowed noise Bowser roared back in challenge. Jaws wide, tongue flapping, blowing slaver, he bellowed until Star Hill shivered, until the pebbles danced loose and began to rattle down the mountain in sparkling streams of stone. The hideous racket of the queen's legions faltered, the drummers missed beats, the trumpeters ran short of breath mid-blow.
His son and daughter looked up, blinking. Awake. The Koopa Troopas focused on their king. All stood to attention, if not yet encouraged, at least careful to conceal their desire to flee.
Bowser pumped his fist into the air. "Hey, don't go marching off to the beat of toadstool drums. You all forgetting who the real boss is around here? Here's a hint, dipshits—It's me! And as your boss I say it's time to kick some ass, Koopas. They think we're licked. Down to our last gasp. But we haven't run away. We've lured the Bitch right where we want her. And now we're gonna cut right through those punks in the vanguard like wet toilet paper. Then we'll waste her body guards and rip Her Royal Lowness right out of her fancy chair and eat her alive and kicking. One more banquet aboard the Bruise Cruise Express, and then we go home and sleep for a thousand years. Who's with me?"
Koopas and Goombas stiffly tottered to their feet and gave back a ragged cheer.
"This is more like it," said Wendy. She grinned, teeth still smeared with blood. "Dibs on that skank's face."
Larry pounded his breast plate with clenched claws. "Better to die trying than just give up."
Tired yet strong, the Koopa Troopas formed into two loose lines. Too few able bodied soldiers remained to manage a third. Many limped into place. The worst injured had to be left in back, propped up against boulders with weapons resting in their laps so they might get a last lick in before the fungal tide washed over them.
Toad sergeants goaded the hodgepodge irregulars into a charge before they had finished organizing into proper ranks. In massed confusion, the queen's fodder surged up the hill. Peach wanted this ended, now.
Bowser aimed to disappoint her.
As one, the Koopas flowed down the hill, constricting into a wedge with their king on point as they neared the hated foe. Forgetting his wounds, Bowser threw himself forward full tilt, Larry and Wendy two steps behind.
"Sire, look up!" Bowser heard Kamek's voice in his ear, despite having left the magikoopa far behind to work whatever cantrips he could. He obliged, turning his gaze to the velvet blank above.
A Star was falling. A wish had been granted.
The star stone impacted with a meteor's fury and heat into the screaming host of the Mushroom Empire, hurling bodies and pieces of bodies into high soaring arcs. The shockwave knocked both armies onto their backs.
A fun sight, to be sure, but the results were mixed. Bowser's charge was spoiled and Peach still commanded the superior numbers. What happened next changed everything.
From its bowl of steaming earth the star stone began to unfold itself. Angles spiraled out into higher dimensions, edges bloomed yet more edges, shapes growing larger and smaller in ways that made no perspective sense. Toad and Koopa and sundry creature alike watched the metamorphosis in rapt stillness, nearly silent except for the occasional involuntary grunt of fear.
At last, a doorway appeared in the heart of the stone, first appearing as a speck, then drawing closer until it was large enough to fit three Bowsers. As the door arrived, irising open, it released a cold wind which smelled of strange dust. Through the portal, in blazing golden splendor, rushed the banished Stars. At first they came in constellations, then in great bee swarming clusters. Around the blinded soldiers they zipped. Up the lost Stars flew in a great legion of jewel fire to once more populate the sky. The procession of Stars sang as they returned home, with melodies painfully beautiful to hear yet impossible to remember afterwards. Nearly lost beneath the great swelling stellar hymn, a woman's high voice rose in a wail of dismay.
When the last Star had swooped through, the door between worlds remained open, its work not yet finished.
On the portal's other side another world wavered in summer heat, a city of glass and brown brick and steel. The architecture was like nothing the diverse gathering of warriors had seen before—grubby and functional, yet not without a squalid charm. Painted chariots of metal and fine crystal rolled along streets of poured stone, while the grim towers and woven steel thread span of an unthinkably immense bridge loomed over the heads of tall brick hovels.
Two beings—later Bowser would learn to call them men—walked out from a crowd of wide-eyed onlookers and, with only a second's hesitation, stepped over the threshold from their world onto the luminous soil of Star Hill. The Seven Elder Stars floated in on their wake.
The pair's clothing looked strange, smelled stranger. The city noises and speech leaking in from the other world clashed against Bowser's ears. Pollutants borne on the alien wind burned his nostrils with exotic intensity. What would such strange visitors possibly want from humble Koopas? What could they possibly say to one another?
The Seven soared into the sky to rejoin their kin, leaving the strangers to their introductions.
"Uh, hello everyone," said the shorter creature, its mustache waggling. Probably it was the blessing of the Elder Stars that allowed them to understand one another's alien tongues. "The name's Mario. This is my brother, Luigi. We found your star friends while out repairing a boiler and agreed to help them find a way to get back home. They asked us to come along, told us you needed help. And, well..." Mario paused to rub the back of... his neck. "Seeing that we're flat broke and the landlord kicked us out of our home and business, we figured we could crash with you for a couple a' weeks. Just until we get our feet under us again. If it's not too much trouble, that is."
Bowser stepped up to the hairy little critters. Mario and his brother looked like they wanted to run. Fear stink rolled off them like a bad cologne. He realized then how he must look to them, gusting steaming breath from flared nostrils, streaked with gore, looming over them all scale and spike and twitching muscle. Yet they stood their ground. As King of the Koopas, he held no fondness for weak and cringing things. To walk into a world not your own, interfere in a strange war between alien peoples, and make such terrible enemies before one can reckon the odds—there was no word in the tongue of Goomba or Koopa or Toad for the immensity of courage required. Strength must recognize strength, or it is no strength at all.
Down slope, the queen and her scum ran back through the doors they'd opened to reach Star Hill, the portals already closing on the panicked rout. The Koopa Kingdom, and its people, would survive to fight another day.
The waiting humans shuffled their feet and looked back to their own door, vanished and likely never to open again, the star stone which had powered the portal now glowing cool and dim. Mario wrung his hands. Bowser reached out and clawed the back of one open. Before the man had time to yelp in pain, he crushed Mario's bleeding hand in his own lacerated paw and they shook the firm handshake of blood brothers.
"Greetings, brother," he growled. "You can crash in my castle and eat my food and sleep with anyone there who will take you. For as long as you live. You're family now, whether you like it or not."
"Oh—uh, thank you. Uh, mister...?"
"Koopa. Just call me Bowser." He drew up in a regal pose, claws on hips. "I'm the king around here and don't you forget it."
"We won't," said Luigi, who had stopped shaking enough to force his lips to part.
"The Star Spirits." Bowser gestured to the shimmering heavens, resplendent with a million flaming gems where moments ago there had been only void. "They listen to you? Talk to you?"
"Yeah. Guess you could say we got to be good friends while we worked out a way they could return home. It wasn't easy. Not a lot of magic in Brooklyn to work with, and government goons chased us all the time. Nothin' bonds people together like an overlong series of shared misadventures. They told us—"
Color suddenly flickered out of the world. Everything stuttered, movements slowing. Mario's voice and the wind's song blurred as they degraded into a basso drone, dissipating into the crackle of an old recording. The world around Bowser flattened, as if all reality was and had always been a mere projection on a screen. A screen which began to bulge, then rip open.
Out from the backstage realm of dreams, through the fluttering tear emerged Wart, King of Sub-Con. All the royal raiment of his kingship bedecked his rotund personage: the nightmare fur trimmed robe of white cloudsilk, the Crown of Possibilities set with gemstones the like of which did not exist in the waking world, and the scepter of the Dream King clutched tight in one webbed fist, the Morpheus Ruby set in its tip. The ruby blazed as Wart tapped into its power.
"Hail, friend. I'm glad to find you alive," he said.
"Until you broke through, I didn't realize I was dreamin'. Funny, ain't it?" Bowser mused. "How we can dream every night of our lives, and yet inside a dream we always struggle to tell it apart from what's real."
The King of Sub-Con favored him with a sad smile.
"I have heard your calls requesting aid, but until this moment I have been unable to respond in kind," said Wart. "Unless conditions change for the better, I will not be able to provide the reinforcements and supplies for which you've rightfully asked. The roads between my world and yours are not what they were. Many doors stand closed to my hand. A dark mist has risen between our dominions, like the kind that sometimes boils up from Vanda, and our connection is fleeting when we can manage it at all. Only now, that you are closer to death, can our minds meet.
"As for your other request, my best agents are hard at it. However, they will need more time. It shames me that I cannot offer you direct help in your hour of need." Wart bowed low, graceful for all his bulk.
"Yeah, that's the times we're living in. Everything's getting harder."
Filled with the detached peace of dreaming, Bowser held no desire to complain or rage, though his waking self would react otherwise. Baseline, workaday Bowser, were he present, might comment that for someone so powerfully weighed down with an inability to help, Wart was going all out delivering an I.O.U. in style. The frog king meant what he said, though. And he was brave to do it.
Bowser was a prisoner of the Mushroom Empire. Intruding into his subconscious, even if only to provide a word of comfort, was to commit a grave trespass. No matter how slight the succor supplied, Peach did not forgive those who helped her enemies. If caught, Wart might as well formally declare war against the queen right now. Sub-Con would find itself promoted to high priority on Peach's list of Problems To Be Dealt With.
"I'm touched by your concern," said Wart, making a short bow.
"I didn't say anything."
"But you were thinking it. Fear not on my behalf. I've made my way already onto the queen's black rolls by walking through her nightmares." Jiggling like a frightened water balloon, Wart quaked with horror. "In them I have espied Peach's vision for this world, and all others. Death, however painful, would be better than surviving into those grisly futures."
"So tell me some good news already."
"The queen inhibits my contact with you. She has neglected to take into account your retainer, Koops. I've done what I can for him. May he do the same for you."
Shadows, like those cast by dancing fires, fell over every surface of the dream. They reduced Wart to a writhing blob of black ink lit dimly by a guttering candle.
Wart spoke from somewhere behind Bowser's head. "Our time is being cut short. Be strong, friend." The frog king's floating voice held a sadness deep enough to shake Bowser even while coddled in sleep's cushioning. Among the flickering tongues of shadow, figures contorted and swelled and reached out for Bower's eyes. "It's not much of a chance. And there are so very few left who care to try. Protect him, old friend. Time is..."
Around them, the dream wore thin. A light, not of any spectrum visible to the waking world, but of the hideous color of true Nothing, began to shine through. Bowser's link to Sub-Con was about to collapse.
What was left of the King of Dreams turned to leave. Bowser struggled to lift his arm.
"Wart. There are Sub-Con artifacts leaking into our world. My traitor son had one, and Peach tossed a bane turnip at my head. She has designs on your realm too. Her dirty fingers are digging into all our pies!"
The puddle of sagging shadows nodded. "Nothing lasts forever, dreams least of all. Thank you for the warning."
The dream snapped apart like a strip of film held over a match flame. The recoiling ends carried Bowser away, reeling him up into reality.