There was no answer, but a second later a blur of violet streaked with red and blue appeared beside me. The energy flowing from it told me it was a spirit-form, but I could not see it clearly for I was still within the realm of merging colour. I felt it reach out to grasp my hand, and then it dived, dragging me with it towards the dreamtrails. I felt the darkness striving furiously after us. Terror broke my paralysis and I threw myself downwards, dragging the spirit-form with me. Even so, the darkness would have had us if I had kept diving towards distant consciousness, but the violet spirit-form suddenly wrenched me sideways into a dream of a black road running across a moonlit, bone-white desert.

I was floating above the desert and could now see that the other spirit-form was a fiercely beautiful violet-coloured man with a black wolf’s head and wings of red fire. The beastman’s eyes shone like burning embers and he spoke to me in a harsh misshapen whisper. ‘Wake you fool! Wake now, before you draw it to you!’

Then he vanished and the darkness formed claws and tore open the dream of moonlit desert and black road as easily as if it were parchment, exposing me. Instead of fleeing, I closed my eyes and used every bit of strength and will I possessed to coerce myself awake.

I opened my eyes to the distant sound of thunder and a shattering headache.

Later, as I made my way through the greenthorn maze that separated the main buildings of Obernewtyn from the farms, the headache was only just beginning to fade. I dismissed the long, fragmented dream as yet another nightmare in a period when my sleep had been more unsettled than usual. Yet I could not forget the terrible helpless passivity that prevented me from waking.

‘I was not trying to wake,’ I muttered to the fragrant greenthorn hedges. ‘I was dreaming of trying to wake.’

Coming to the end of the maze, I glanced up at the dark clouds brooding on the mountains visible above the wall surrounding Obernewtyn. I hoped the storm they harboured would hold off until evening, but there was no predicting weather patterns. Over the years since I had come to Obernewtyn, the weather seemed to have become ever more chaotic, though the incidence of firestorms had lessened.