Prologue

S now blows across the mountaintop in razor-sharp swirls and shuddering, billowing blasts. The sky is black, choked with snow-heavy clouds. The wind is vicious and relentless, scraping the rocky, jagged Alpine peak bare even as the white curtain of frigid flakes piles up where the wind just swept.

No living being could survive on this mountaintop, nor for long, not in this storm. Even an immortal would find it unpleasant.

Had there been anyone with eyes to see, they might, if they were sharp-eyed and knew what to look for, see a weird, shivery patch of deeper, darker shadows wriggling and writhing against the black backdrop of night.

Look closer.

Just shadows, perhaps? A trick of the wind and the blowing snow.

No?

Closer yet. Shift through the shadows and peer hard at the sliver of animate black.

Do you see it?

It's a line. Not so scary, right? The shortest distance between two points, that's all it is.

A line in the darkness, as if someone had taken a razor blade and sliced downward through the fabric of reality.

Watch it, now. Watch carefully.

There—do you see it?

Something is moving within that short, narrow gap in reality. You won't be able to make out its shape, no matter how acute your vision—it has no shape.

Not any kind of outline or form that you'd understand, at any rate. Or perhaps if it does have a shape, it shifts and distorts so constantly you might be reminded of the ocean as it rushes toward shore, rising and falling and rippling and writhing into waves, lifting into peaks and dipping into valleys.

The thing, if it can even be thought of as a thing at all, seems to be hesitating on the other side of the gap in reality.

You see, that line is a hole. A narrow slice in the veil between realities.

Picture it this way: pick up a coin and hold it between your thumb and forefinger; it has two sides—the front and the back, right? It also has the edge, the rim, which you only see when you hold the coin just so, edge-on. That rim, that thin, narrow edge is the veil between the front and the back of the coin.

The line of darker shadows here in the air above the blizzard-occluded mountaintop, then, can be thought of as a hole drilled through the coin of our little metaphor.

We, all of us, exist on this side of the coin. Occasionally, you might get a brief, vague, half-remembered peek at the reality that exists on the other side when you're asleep and dreaming.

But…just as we reside here, on the waking side of the coin, there are things that reside on the other side, in a version of reality where dreams are real, where fantasies can come true…and so can nightmares. It's a place where imagination and creativity are the stuff of magic.

These things, up until this precise moment, have only existed on the other side. The veil keeps them there. When you dream, you are not there on the other side. Not you , your body, your physical self—just your…ka. Your soul. Your mind. That part of you that thinks, dreams, wishes, imagines.

When you visit this other side in your dreams, you emit mana—the energy of dreams and creation, the stuff that powers your soul, the engine of fantasy. You, being mortal, lack the requisite sensitivity to see or feel the mana that exists within you. So, when you dream, that unused mana radiates from you.

And these things, the hungry denizens of The Dreaming, they crave mana. They are mana. And you aren't using it, so why not? They stalk you as you tiptoe across the surface of The Dreaming in your flimsy, weak, thin little mortal dream. They nibble and nip, taste and lick. You feel nothing. Perhaps your dream takes a turn for the bizarre—suddenly, the dream you're having of giving that speech tomorrow shifts, and suddenly, the audience is a school of fish; that shift in the substance of your dream is the moment when one of these things, these creatures of The Dreaming, takes a little bite out of your mana. You may have a nightmare—your teeth falling out or being chased by Freddy Krueger, who is, somehow, also your mother-in-law wielding that horrible meatloaf recipe on a yellowing, dog-eared 3x5 card. Or, you may have a lush, sexy fantasy about that fine as fuck blonde from 3C across the way who keeps giving you shy looks as you both bring in your groceries.

If you're physically here, in The Waking, and only visiting, then they can't harm you. You'll wake up and the dream will be firm for a moment or two, but then it fades until all that's left is a vague impression at best.

There are, of course, those who can visit The Dreaming in a more physical sense. And they do have reason to fear the creatures who live there—for if you're there in a more physical sense, the creatures can harm you if they think to take a bite of your mana—for mana is what you need to get back on the other side of the veil where you belong.

They can wrap you up in endless coils and drag you down, down, down…and what lies beneath? What's there, down in the deepest depths of The Dreaming?

The place called Death.

The veil has protected us, here in The Waking.

But now?

There's a hole. The veil is torn. And the creatures that lurk in The Dreaming have a window into our reality.

The Dreaming is a vast place—infinite, really, and even though the mysterious creatures that live there are numberless and beyond counting, this window is quite small. A sliver, at best.

Unfortunately, The Waking is ripe with mana. We're glutted with it. It flows like a river, rushes like currents. Every time you lie, you use mana. Every time you tell a story to your friends about that sexy hookup or fumbling boss or clueless parent, you dip into the well of mana within, scoop a little out, and put it into the world. The more energy used to create, the more mana that creation puts into the world. A feature film, then, is a geyser. A novel is a wellspring. A dreaming mortal, though? That's more like a lake.

To a thing that feeds on mana, The Waking is an all-you-can-eat buffet.

And with so much mana to eat, a creature might sniff out that minuscule hole in the veil, scenting a cornucopia of dreams to snack upon, fantasies to devour, stories to slurp up.

And these things, as has been stated, are mana. And where there's mana, there's maya—a kind of byproduct, you might say.

Maya is magic.

When a story pulls you in and captures your imagination and transports you to that world, you are experiencing magic—sort of. A small, weak version, but magic nonetheless.

This is where things get interesting.

Keep all this in mind as the following sequence of events unfolds. Remember what you've been told about mana, maya, and the creatures that live in The Dreaming.

Return your attention to this narrow gap in the veil between The Waking and The Dreaming.

Watch it closely once more.

See that thing wriggling on the other side? It's sniffing. Scenting. Nosing the hole like a fox investigating the space under a fallen tree, looking for a rodent to munch on.

Now it sends a tendril through, a bather dipping a toe in the water to test the temperature.

Seems safe—so far, so good.

The tendril is a thin tentacle of distortion, perhaps the size of your forearm; you can't see it directly, but if you sort of squint without looking directly at it, you'll see a shimmering outline. Think of the Predator when it's invisible, stalking Arnie through the jungle.

Keep watching.

First a tendril, then another. They touch the ground, prod the air. A third joins the first two, and then the tendrils merge to become a single thick arm reaching through the gap.

It's not an arm, really, that's just another metaphor to help you visualize this amorphous being.

More of the thing squeezes through the gap, very much like an octopus shoving itself through a gap in the rocks smaller than a quarter.

More, and more, and more.

The air above the peak shimmers wildly, now. If you can make out its shape through the curtain of swirling snow, you'd see it shifting and twisting and coiling, curling in on itself into a tight little ball, and then unfolding through at least a dozen dimensions beyond the most common three.

It's out, now. The thing has brought its entire shapeless, weightless, formless bulk through the gap. The wind does not affect it, nor does the snow. Or gravity, for that matter.

Speaking of matter, even that has no real effect on this thing. It's not of our reality, remember.

It floats in place, there above the mountain's peak, a mile or so above sea level, somewhere in the Swiss Alps.

It twists in on itself endlessly, swirling and coruscating in translucent distortion. And then…it moves. If you can picture a jellyfish, or perhaps more accurately, a Portuguese man o'war, you might have a rough approximation of the thing's manner of locomotion.

It shivers and wriggles its way down the mountain. It passes through trees and leaves no trace, not even a shimmy off pine needles as it passes. Further, and further.

It pauses briefly—sniffs a corpse. Female, naked, and headless. It's dead and so has no mana, which means the thing continues onward, downward.

It investigates the overturned wreckage of a snowmobile without any real interest. Another few corpses, these mangled and mauled—again, dead, and so without sustenance for the creature.

Further on, then. An outcropping of bare rock rises in its path—it goes through it.

After a few more minutes of travel, it comes to a ragged, gaping hole in the side of the mountain itself. Snow howls in the opening, catching in drifts against the hulks of machines and equipment. Into the darkness, into another hole. It is incurious, this thing. It has a singular focus: find mana. Here, it can scent the traces and old vestiges of mana as it lurks in corners and prowls through offices and labs and sleeping quarters. But there's nothing left—not anything it can eat, at least.

Down into the bowels of the earth it goes, following the scent of what was, at some point in the recent past, powerful mana. If it had a mouth, it would be watering—like walking into a kitchen where someone made chocolate chip cookies an hour or so ago—the scent isn't exactly fresh, but it's still pungent and delicious.

It passes discarded weapons, piles of bloody clothing, and patches of dried blood. Cells where living beings once resided, beings rife with delicious mana.

The thing is getting impatient, if such a sentient emotion can be applied to a brute, thoughtless thing. It is alive, yes, but is it sentient? Not really. Just hungry.

Keep thinking of that Portuguese man o' war. It's a fairly accurate way of picturing this thing—just…make it bigger in your mind. Much, much bigger. A man o' war the size of an orca, with similar predatory instincts. And without the cute, playful personality—cute and playful as long as you're not a harbor seal or Macaroni penguin, that is.

After exploring the vast space under-mountain, it decides in its rudimentary way that there's nothing to eat here, and so it passes through the side of the mountain and out into the open air.

It billows and haunts across wide, rolling fields and over and sometimes through the foothills. It's not interested in the two-lane road over which it passes—but remember, it is a predator, after all. So the road itself isn't of any interest—the faint hints of mana it scents near the road—just above the road…now those it is interested in. The strains of mana aren't static—they move. This way, that way. Back and forth, linear, following the vector of the road.

So, when the thing follows the road further down-mountain, it's just following the old, faint hits of faded mana from the cars that passed—cars containing people who dream, and lie, and daydream, and fantasize.

The road twists and turns and switches back and forth and carves down the mountain, and with it hunts the thing.

The road passes through a town. It's not much—a few bars, a few restaurants, a few shops, a library, a little school, a playground, and a few clusters of houses tucked in among the trees and foothills.

The road carries onward in its journey, but the thing pauses. It coruscates into a shop—cameras, film, tripods, bags, framed photographs—it munches on the faint trace of mana coming from the photographs, and perhaps its outline becomes a little more distinct as it twists into itself, but the photographs only contain enough mana that it can barely taste it. Kind of like running your finger inside the bowl after all the frosting has been used.

Onward, then.

A restaurant—more old traces but nothing it can really sink its teeth into. The library holds promise: so many books, so many stories—but it's a million little pieces, and this thing is ravenous. It wants a meal , and the library is a bag full of sunflower seeds—good for snacking, but nothing that'll really fill it up.

And then…ohhh yes. There. A mile away, as the crow flies, nestled against the flank of a hill, surrounded by towering pines swaying precariously in the wind…a house.

Small. Cozy. Steeply pitched roof—not quite an A-frame, but close. A wide front porch on stilts, a garage below, and sliding glass doors looking into a den.

Smoke curls up out of a chimney and is snatched away by the eager wind.

The thing slants and heaves and billows over the landscape, rushing through trees and over roads and past a narrow, twisting, two-track through the trees. It pauses in front of the little house. If it were an animal, it would be sniffing, scenting. Nose twitching, ears swiveling, crouched low on its belly—assessing.

It inches forward to the base of the wooden steps leading up to the balcony. Pauses. It scents prey. After a moment or two, the thing dances upward, following the angle of the steps but not the form—it actually phases through the steps and pauses at the glass. Watching. Waiting.

On the other side, prey. And a choice.

On one side of the room is a large rectangular box that flashes blue and white—the thing shimmies to the side to get a better view. Pictures. Images. A story. Much mana. So, so much mana—the box of moving images fairly drips with pungent, powerful, delicious mana.

But…opposite the box is a figure. A being. Alive, like itself, but more dense. A native denizen of this strange place in which the thing has found itself.

The thing watches the being for a while. It seems to be almost but not quite sleeping—watching the images on the box. In one hand, the being holds a cylinder full of liquid, from which the being sips occasionally. On the other hand, it, or he—the thing has an innate, passive ability to comprehend the form and nature of things and to understand them in a non-sentient sort of way—holds a piece of paper rolled into a tube, inside of which is a substance made of plant matter, which this strange being has set on fire, the smoke of which it inhales occasionally. The thing notices that the more of the smoke the being inhales and the more of the liquid it ingests, the more powerfully the being reeks of mana.

A funny, odd, and delicious combination.

The choice, then: the box, or the being?

It writhes through the glass, neither noticing nor caring about the abrupt, drastic change in temperature. The thing drifts to a stop equidistant between the box and the being.

The being blinks his eyes and then rubs them with the back of a wrist. When his vision doesn't clear, he rubs them again and blinks harder. Still blurry, as if a film over his eyes. Maybe he should get his vision checked—his grandfather and father both had vision issues and had floaters that got progressively worse.

The thing watches the being—he seems to be consuming the mana coming from the box. Not directly, not as the thing would consume it, but still. Now, the thing watches the box.

On it, many beings like the one here. They are clothed differently. After a few minutes of observation, the thing understands that the box is a source of stories. The images on the box—or in the box—tell a story, and the being consumes the story for entertainment.

It watches more—the story is fascinating.

Ah!

There!

In the box, within the story, is a creature. Huge, violent, and powerful. The beings in the story fear it, and love it, and hate it—but mostly fear it. The being, watching, experiences a pulse of powerful mana when the creature soars and roars inside the box.

Yes.

The thing has chosen—it will consume the mana within the box.

It glides and tangles toward the box and the images that form a story—the mana that it so ravenously craves.

The thing goes through the glass—but not into the mechanics of the machine; it isn't interested in the wires and circuits. No, the thing goes into the story.

Consider the story, then, as the thing would view it:

A boy, perhaps one could consider him a man. His hair is blonde, almost white. Curly, almost ringlets. Perhaps not handsome, he is more…striking. He wears armor, fine, expensive stuff fit for a king—for the man-boy is, in fact, a king.

He sits astride the creature which has so raptly captured the thing's attention. The creature is massive and magnificent. It has a long, serpentine neck, thick hind legs, a long, wicked tail, huge wings which, when folded, it uses as forelegs, and sharp snapping jaws—and best of all, it breathes fire.

Within the story, the creature—the beast—soars through a blue sky and swoops down upon more of the smaller beings, catching them up and crunching them down, breathing fire upon them and crushing them with its tail and ripping them and tossing them with the sword-like talons on its feet.

Yes, yes, yes—the thing is going to feast, indeed.

The being, watching the box, sits up. He places his bottle on the table in front of him, stabs out the small red-orange coal of the tube in its other hand, and sets that down as well.

He rubs his eyes. Blinks. "What the fuck?"

The TV is...blurry. Not out of focus, but…he can't find the words.

He just knows it's freaky. Weird. Maybe the pot was laced? Maybe he's more exhausted than he thought. Don't sleep-deprived people sometimes hallucinate?

Or maybe he's dreaming. That's it. He's just dreaming.

He pinches his arm so hard he leaves a bruise—but on screen, Vaghar is still oddly blurred and shimmery, as if outlined with Vaseline or something.

The scene continues—the assault on the castle, the men at arms, the arrogant young prince, and the battle-worn older Queen That Never Was…

And the other prince, the one-eyed one whose name he can never remember because this damn show and the weird fuckin' names, man.

The shimmering outline of the dragon goes funny—or funnier.

And then…the mightiest dragon of them all turns to face the screen. It seems to be looking at him . Its huge face fills the screen. Burning yellow eyes regard him with cold, calculating hunger.

He scrambles up onto the couch and huddles against the back, arms around his knees. "What? I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming. Fuck—I have to be dreaming. Wake up, Johannes. Wake up!" He smacks his face hard, leaving a red mark on his cheek.

Yet, on the TV—or in the TV—Vaghar is still staring at him, rumbling in its chest like boulders rattling down a mountainside.

The man spies the remote on the coffee table—he lurches forward, topples off the couch, and hits the floor with a painful thump, scrabbling at the smooth surface of the table. Knocks over his beer. Finally, his hand finds the remote—he stabs the power button with his thumb frantically, twice, six times, a dozen times. The dragon remains on the TV, huge head weaving side to side, tilting, great eyes blinking, occasionally snarling or chirping curiously, hungrily.

Moving with ragged, clumsy haste, the man crawls on all fours across his living room and yanks the power cord out of the wall.

Vaghar opens his jaws and roars—showing the fiery orange volcano glow at the back of its throat.

"The fuck? The fuck! It's fucking off !" The man is panicking now.

He kicks the TV—the expensive, seventy-five-inch LED screen cracks and splinters but does not change the fact of Vaghar—now all nose and eyes and teeth.

Then, glass splinters again—spitting outward . Shards sprinkle the carpet and pepper Johannes' face. He yelps in shock, touching his face with his fingers—they come away smeared with blood.

He scrambles backward on his ass, scrabbling on all fours, kicking at the carpet and chanting, "Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck."

The TV cracks—the plastic frame detonates at all four corners and the pieces of the frame rocket across the room with such force that they bury into the drywall like thrown knives.

Glass explodes, and then a giant, reptilian nose emerges, followed by a long, serpentine neck. One wing with a claw-like limb smashes into the floor, and then another.

The man screams. He's frozen in place, on his back halfway into the kitchen.

Behind him, the green numerals on the stove read 3:34.

Back in the living room, the dragon fully emerges from the wreckage of the TV, much as the thing emerged from the gap in reality less than an hour before.

Ceiling trusses shatter and shingles soar away into the blizzard, and drywall dissolves into dust and fragments.

Trees are swept aside like matchsticks by the vicious, careless sweep of the tail. Wings—450 feet from wingtip to wingtip—claw at the air, and the dragon lifts a few feet, talons seeking purchase on solid ground. Five hundred feet from nose to tail, the dragon—no longer exactly Vaghar from the story on the screen, now something else, something new, something real —crouches in the forest, and its neck curls and coils and cranes, lowering until it comes nose to nose with the being—the man, Johannes.

He's beyond weeping, beyond begging. His mind is broken. Even if he would somehow survive this encounter, the essential sanity of the man would be gone. He would live in this moment for the rest of his miserable life.

It's almost a mercy, then, when the dragon rears back, opens its mammoth jaws, and spews liquid fire.

Johannes is incinerated, but his muscles function momentarily—propelling him to his feet in an instinct to run, to stop being on fire.

Crunch.

The dragon tastes mana, juicy and potent.

Perhaps later it will find more of the tasty little mana-ripe beings to snack on. For now, though, it decides it wants to explore its new world.

It likes it here, it decides.

It's no longer the amorphous thing from The Dreaming.

See, once a creature from The Dreaming comes here and finds a suitable source of mana, it eats it. There are certain laws of the universe which are immutable, magic or not. One of them is that things which exist cannot simply vanish, no more than anything is created out of thin air.

When a human is conceived, it doesn't come from nothing—it's the combination and propagation of parental DNA. When a piece of paper is burned, the essential matter is not erased, it simply changes—becomes ash, smoke, and carbon, and returns to nature to become something else.

The same law applies—here in The Waking, at least. Whether those laws apply in The Dreaming is anyone's guess—immortal scientists haven't found a way to study The Dreaming yet.

But, when the Creature emerged into our world, into The Waking, it became subject to the laws of nature—to a degree. It is still, after all, a creature made of magic, so there is much which it can simply ignore. But when it ate the mana of the story within the TV, specifically the great, powerful, dense mana of the dragon, it became that thing. Its essential nature is the same—it is the same hungry beast perpetually on the hunt for mana, but now it has a new form, and that form, the dragon, is fully informed by the lore of the greater framework from which it came.

It is the dragon, but yet, at its core, for all the intelligence and vicious cunning of that beast, it is still the creature that emerged from The Dreaming. It cannot go back. It cannot revert.

It is now part of this world, for better or worse.

If you were to post a watch on the mountain peak, you might notice an occasional shimmer. Some are as big as the one that became the dragon—these will find powerful sources of mana and, in devouring them, become weird, wild, and powerful new things: orcs, dragons, griffins, phoenixes, goblins, quaint little forest huts whose inside is bigger than the outside…the scope of human imagination is the only limit to what these creatures can become once they find their way here. Others are smaller, a barracuda to the great white shark of the one we observed. These smaller ones will become smaller things: a talking dog, a semi-sentient tree, a water sprite, a dryad inhabiting an ancient oak, a wyvern, a wisp.

Our dragon will soar the vast mountain ranges, perching on jagged peaks and satisfying its dragon's belly with goats and horses and the occasional wayward hiker or skier. People will see it and even take videos. Its existence will be debated and argued over.

It was the first.

It will not be the last.

And they will change our world in big ways and small, in ways no one can predict.