As my eyes close to the real world, they open up to a dream.

I am standing upon a mossy patch of stones in a deeply shadowed oak forest. I walk between the trees, smelling the damp, fresh air. It rained recently. The chirps of the birds are few and faint, as if they are slowly waking up from a deep sleep.

As I continue to walk through the forest, the spacing of the rocks, shrubs, and trees becomes increasingly familiar. Something about this place makes me feel uneasy, as if something bad is about to happen.

I walk further and find myself in a meadow, the ground dented and the grass brown and dead from a great force which compressed upon it. The trees on the other side of the meadow are bent and broken, and among the trees still standing, there are giant claw marks scratched deep into the bark.

I remember this meadow. This is the place where my dragon fell from the sky, where it desperately fought for its life as a coward trapped and killed it.

This crater should not be here. My dragon should not be dead! This place is just a shadow of an idea created by Kenneth, not a part of my dream as I see it to be! I demand it not exist!

I clench my fists, concentrating on my dragon, imagining its gleaming spectral feathers and fearsome teeth... but the dragon does not appear.

On the other side of the meadow, four shadowed figures appear between the distant trees. As they walk closer, their faces and bodies become illuminated. They are four armored soldiers.

Before I can take a step, I hear the sound of a stretching bowstring. I try to coalesce magic into my hand, but I feel nothing. I stand frozen as the four soldiers surround me.

A soldier unravels a rope. A hand pushes against my back. The ground and trees collapse beneath me, and the world corrupts and degrades into a pile of chaotic and putrid color. Worlds and creatures not of my own creation materialize spontaneously and quickly vanish. In brief moments, my dream world as I know it returns, and I find myself struggling desperately against restraining ropes and chains. Some of the beings pulling on the chains are human, but some are something else: vague, form-shifting monsters, whose colors change rapidly like the chaos which seems eager to consume me.

I sink into the abyss of chaos, and then I am shoved into a wall. I turn my body around, and see iron bars slam shut, their tarnished vertical surfaces glowing faintly from a dimly lit hall carved into stone.

A tall human in golden armor stands in front of the bars, slides their hands down the bars, and tilts their helmet down toward me.

"So, you're the famous 'Grand-Mage Matterhelm.' The Council will have a lot of questions for you."

"What council?" I ask.

"The newly-elected government, of course."

"I never authorized an election!"

"Of course you didn't," the golden-clad says. "You've been overthrown. Replaced. Your reign of tyranny is over, and your evil magic destroyed."

"You are lying!"

"Oh no, I'm not lying to you. You're just in denial," the golden-clad says. "This fate you've fallen into is your own fault. And it was exactly what we've been waiting for. It began with your decision to run away from your master. Ever since that moment, your magic has drained rapidly, in fact it did so far faster than we anticipated. It's almost as if you were never Kenneth's apprentice to begin with. It's quite fitting, really, given you acted with such cowardice."

"I am not a coward," I tell them, "and my weakness is not a product of cowardice! I used every last spark of my magic because my master told me to! And then I was nearly turned undead! I will recover soon. When I do, I will destroy you and everything else in this world and create a new one, just as I have countless times before. My new world will be bigger and even more beautiful than the last one. And you will be no more than a forgotten memory."

"I'm not convinced by your threat. You've grown too attached to your dream worlds and imaginary characters. You haven't destroyed anything since before your apprenticeship began."

"I refuse to let you deceive me," I tell them. "I am still just as capable of destroying anything I want to in my world, including you. And I will not let you make a mockery of me!"

I reach deep into myself, further than ever before. I push my mind past the pain deep in my chest, disregarding the echoes of years of careful instruction telling me how dangerous this is, ignoring the voices of survival instincts I never knew I had telling me to stop.

I reach that deep within myself and and seize the precious power I desire so dearly, and watch as my hands swarm with arcs of lightning and glowing clouds. I look up at the golden figure with hatred and focus my mind on their body, preparing to commit to their death.

But then the arcs of lightning and glowing clouds on my hands vanish, and wisps of silver fire materialize in the air and rush into my hands, enveloping my hands with incredible, piercing, burning pain.

I scream myself awake. My hands are shaking. The room is barely lit from starlight and the remaining reflected light of the moon. I look at my hands, and I see they are covered in a dense web of glowing silver cuts, each sliver in the web cutting into my flesh with the lingering pain of voidfire. Even though the burns only touch my hands, the pain is so great that it seems to hurt every part of my body, as if the sensation in my hands is not enough to contain it.

All this pain... all these lacerations of voidfire on my hands... how could they come from merely a dream? Did Kenneth do this to me?

I hear two pairs of boots stepping rapidly against the creaking wooden floor. My bedroom door rushes open, and I see my mother and father with their swords at the ready.

"Iris? Are you alright?" my mother asks urgently. "What happened to your hands? Why are they glowing?"

"I... had a nightmare," I tell her. "I used this magic in self-defense, and misfired."

My mother makes a best attempt to clean and dress my voidfire wounds, but the magic is far beyond her. I thank her, trying to be polite, and walk with her to my bedroom door.

Then, my father asks to speak with me, apologizing that his work at the bakery makes it difficult to spend time at home during the day. He tells me about his passion for reading adventure stories when he was a child, and how he had to come to terms with the fact that he couldn't learn magic. He is suspicious of the fact that I have been away from home for so long. He asks me if I am truly happy. I tell him that I am. I am not sure there is any other answer I can give.

My father then slides his fingers gently over the top of my shoulder, and rests his palm there. I feel my shoulder warm from the heat of his hand. I cannot help but recall all the times Kenneth has placed his hand there. It always made me feel so anxious. How strange it is, feeling the kind hand of my father on my shoulder, knowing he expects nothing of me in return. No spell exercises, no theory writings, no demonstrations of improvements of my power. His hand is so light that I feel like I could be floating in the clouds.

The skin beneath my father's eyes crinkles as he smiles. "Then that's all I need to hear. I love you, Iris. I will always love you. Nothing you do will ever change that."

My father then lifts his hand from my shoulder, and walks with me into my room. He walks over to Rose's side of the bed and lifts Rose from the bed, just as he used to lift me from my bed when I was little, when I was afraid of the monsters outside. He walks with Rose in his arms out my bedroom door, and closes the door behind him.

There is something bittersweet about it. On one hand, I am happy to have my bedroom to myself again. But I know that the real reason my father carried Rose out of my bedroom is because he is afraid of me.

I wonder if Rose really is my sister, but my parents do not want me to know? She is even named after a flower, just like my mother and I.

I have seen the way my mother looked at Rose, a look of honest and unrestrained love. Even in my father's eyes, just before he lifted his hand from my shoulder, I could still see a hint of nervousness, a sign that the emotions of love he felt for me were somewhat forced.

Perhaps my parents used to look at me the way they look at Rose, at some point, when I was very little: before I met Kenneth, before I became disenchanted with school, before I decided I didn't want to be the obedient, complacent child everyone in the village expected me to be.

I feel the voidfire wounds beneath the bandages of my hands continue to burn. My perfectly soft bed sits invitingly, but I refuse to sleep. I refuse to give the rebellious specters of my dreams the pleasure of tormenting me again.

I walk to the window next to my bed and stare blankly out into the night. The occasional monster walks by, unaware I am watching them from my deceptively safe cavern of wood and fabric. In the distance, just as the clearing at the edge of town gives way to a thick forest, I find it easy to imagine one of the tall, still shadows between the trees is Kenneth, waiting for me to return.