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Allison and Sol continued walking down the path when suddenly Allison paused, put her hand to her mouth, and gasped.
Far in the distance, past a gentle bend in the redbud-lined trail, movement flickered—shapes, color, a soft beam of light pulsing through the leaves like a heartbeat.
She took a step forward. Then another. The path seemed to shorten beneath her feet, like accordion bellows being squeezed.
The trees thinned. The light grew warmer. Then, through the parting of the last curtain of branches, she saw it.
She smelled it before she saw it: a fragrance of recollection. Cotton candy, salt air, rust, sunscreen, machine grease. The unmistakable scent of a boardwalk in summer. It smelled just like… Rehoboth.
The word surfaced in her mind, unbidden, and with it came a feeling she couldn’t quite name. It was a ghost of the feel of a small hand in a larger one. It was the distant echo of a laugh she hadn’t heard in nearly 2 decades.
She blinked. The carnival flickered. The lights dimmed. The teddy bear’s wave slowed, as if the world were being gently folded back into itself, tucked away like a letter you’ve read too many times.
And then it was gone.
The path was empty. The trees swayed. The fireflies that had followed them pulsed on, indifferent to anything happening to her.
Allison stood perfectly still, her bare feet on the warm stone, her hands at her sides, her heart hammering so loudly she was sure even Sol could hear it.
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Something had opened inside her, a door she didn’t remember closing. She could almost feel the draft now, warm and cold at once.
Sol stood beside her, quiet and patient, waiting for their new charge to come to their own conclusions.
“You’re starting to remember,” Sol said softly. “Thimble will be thrilled to hear it.”
Allison’s voice, when she found it, was barely a whisper. Rough-edged. Wondering.
“Remember what?”
Sol didn’t answer. But the Dreamspace did—in the faintest shimmer of the air, in the distant ghost of calliope music, in the lingering scent of cotton candy and salt.
Or maybe it was a promise.
The carnival hadn’t disappeared. It was just past the bend, through the thinning bower of branches. So close she could almost touch it. She could turn around and run back if she wanted to. The teddy bear in the striped apron waved again, beckoning her. Meanwhile, the calliope music drifted through the trees, urging her forward like a hand tugging at her sleeve.
Sol’s words rang in Allison’s head, while something inside her broke free all at once—immediate and urgent.
The caution she’d worn like armor since she arrived in the Dreamspace fell away in a single, reckless heartbeat.
She ran as hard as she could, chest burning, vision blurring with unshed tears, everything inside her surging toward the glow of the carnival lights. Her breath tore out in ragged, desperate gulps. The trees blurred past as she flew through them. Fireflies scattered in her wake like sparks. The path shortened beneath her feet. The carnival grew brighter, louder, closer with every stride.
The music sharpened. Beneath the squeaky calliope, there was something else—a melody she couldn’t place, couldn’t name, but knew. She stopped, listening. Finally, like a revelation, she remembered.
It was a song someone had hummed to her when she was very small. It sounded like Summertime, from Porgy and Bess. He loved that song and used to sing it to her as a baby, rocking her gently in a nursery chair until she fell asleep.
She could see the booths now, the wooden planks of the boardwalk, the candy-striped poles, the string lights blinking in uneven rhythms. The carousel turned in its endless circle. Painted animals flowed like water. Behind the counters, the teddy bears worked with quiet industry, spinning cotton candy and arranging prizes, their felted paws moving as precisely as human hands.
One of them looked up. The same one as before—small, brown, button-eyed, oh so serious. It saw her coming, and its paw lifted in that same deliberate wave. Oh good. You’re here. We’ve been waiting.
Her eyes burned, vision shimmering behind a sudden flood of tears. Her chest felt like it cracked open again, and whatever was inside—grief, joy, recognition, something raw and unnamed—burst out, leaving her light-headed.
“I dreamed this. It was a boardwalk carnival in Rehoboth that we’d go to as a family every year. I dreamed that it was run by my stuffed animals,” she gasped, the words torn from her between breaths. “I drew this the next morning and gave it to my dad to take to work with him, for his office.”
She could see it now—really see it. The drawing she’d made when she was five or six, sitting on the floor of the beach house rental in Rehoboth with a box of crayons and a pad of construction paper. She’d drawn the bears in their aprons. She’d drawn the carousel with its toy animals. She had written their names in wobbly crayon letters at the bottom of the page.
And here it was. Real. Alive. It wasn’t just a child’s drawing in her memory anymore. It was here—real, waiting for her as if it had been there her entire life.
Her hands reached out, trembling, fingers stretching toward the nearest booth. She was close now—ten feet, five feet. Close enough to smell the cotton candy, hear the soft whir of the spinning machine, and see the individual stitches on the teddy bear’s apron—
A hand closed around her arm.
Not harsh. But immovable. Like running into a wall made of patience.
Sol.
“You can’t go,” they said softly. So softly it almost made it worse.
Allison’s momentum collapsed. Her body jolted forward, heart thudding against her ribs, frantic with disbelief. She spun, vision swimming, breath coming in raw, uneven gasps.
“Let go of me.”
“Allison…”
“No.” She yanked her arm, but Sol’s mechanical hand didn’t budge, not a millimeter. The warmth in their grip was almost comforting, which made her angrier. “Why? Why not? It’s mine. I remember this. I drew this. I made this when I was a little girl, and it’s right there, and you’re telling me I can’t…”
Her voice cracked. Heat flooded her face. The tears she’d been fighting since the first shudder burst free—hot, unstoppable, streaking down her cheeks in the glittering, firefly-lit dark.
“Why can’t I go?” she whispered. “It’s the only thing in this entire place that feels like mine.”
Sol released her arm slowly, carefully, the way you release something fragile. Their golden eyes were steady.
“Everything in this place is yours,” Sol said quietly. “Every tree. Every stone. Every path, every light. Dreamspace is built by you, Allison. All of it. But some parts aren’t ready for you yet, and you aren’t ready for them.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a fortune cookie.”
“The carnival is a memory. A deep one. Dreamspace was built from something you made when you were very young, before you learned to doubt yourself. Before the world taught you that your imagination and your stories were something to be embarrassed about.”
They paused, letting Allison catch her breath. “To walk into it now, before you understand what this place is, before you understand what you are, it would be like reading the last chapter of a book before the first.
“I hate that metaphor,” Allison said, wiping her eyes with the collar of her shirt. “I hate it because it makes sense.”
“I know.”
She stood there, breathing hard, staring past Sol’s shoulder at the carnival already fading. The lights dimmed. The calliope music softened to a whisper, then to silence. The teddy bear in the striped apron lowered its paw, slowly, as if waving goodbye—or just saying see you later.
The boardwalk dissolved into mist. The carousel slowed, then stopped. The string lights blinked once more and went dark.
Allison watched it go, and something inside her howled—loud, wordless, wild—echoing in the hollow of her chest.
Will it come back?” she asked, her voice small.
“It never left,” Sol said. “It’s always been here. It will be here when you’re ready.”
She nodded, jaw clenched tight to hold back another sob. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Allison walked to the edge of the path, suddenly feeling very drowsy. She looked over to Sol, then back at a mossy spot under a tree, as if to say, I’m just going to sit here for a bit. Sol nodded and came closer to watch over her as she rested.
The Dreamspace around them began to soften like watercolor bleeding at the edges. The trees blurred, the fireflies dimmed, and the warm moss beneath her lost its texture. The air thinned. The sounds faded. Sol’s golden eyes were the last thing she saw—steady and warm—before the world went gentle and dark.
She came back slowly.
It wasn’t like waking from a dream. It was more like surfacing from deep water. The pressure eased first. Then sound returned—the hum of her house, the refrigerator downstairs, the faint tick of the hallway clock. Spud’s soft, rhythmic snores.
Then she began to feel the weight of her body against the mattress, and the warmth of Spud against her leg, the sheets against her skin, soft and smooth, and the wedge pillow behind her back. The book still lay across her chest where it had fallen.
She opened her eyes.
Her bedroom blinked into focus: the lamplight still on, casting its amber glow. Across from her was a Monet art print of water lilies she’d found online because it made her feel calm. And there was Spud, curled against her thigh, a tight ball of white fluff, his nose tucked under his tail. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t noticed a thing. She envied him with a ferocity that surprised her.
Her blood pulsed in her ears, as if her circulatory system had gotten a firmware update while she slept. She pushed the blanket back and sat up slowly. Blinked. Everything looked normal. It was still nighttime.
But something felt off. The air in the room had a charge to it. Like the atmosphere after a thunderstorm, when everything is still and clean and the world is holding its breath.
She looked down.
Lying beside her on the quilt, next to Spud’s sleeping form, and right where her hand had been resting, was a card.
It looked like it came from a tarot deck, but not from any tarot or oracle deck she owned, and she owned several. This was something else entirely.
She picked it up. It was just a little warmer than body temperature and heavier than it should have been. The edges were gilded in a metallic gold that caught the lamplight and threw it back in tiny, dancing flecks.
The art was luminous. Hand-inked in lines so fine they seemed to vibrate if she looked too closely, as if they hadn’t quite content to remain still, static lines. At the center sat a raccoon. It looked surprisingly like Thimble and was gazing at her with those knowing, steady eyes. Around the raccoon floated three quills, a scroll, a lock, and a key. And orbiting all of it, like distant stars in a slow, endless waltz, were fireflies.
The fireflies moved and drifted across the card’s surface in lazy spirals, their tiny lights pulsing in a rhythm that matched her heartbeat. She could see their glow reflected in the gilded edges. She could almost hear them.
At the bottom of the card, in delicate script that shimmered faintly as she read it, were two words:
Allison could do nothing more than stare at the card in her hands.
She didn’t know what a Sparkkeeper was. She didn’t know why the card was warm, or why the fireflies moved, or why the raccoon on its surface looked exactly like Thimble. But something inside her—something deep within her, maybe her intuition—understood.
Something had changed. Something had been changing, since the creek, since Thimble, since the Dreamspace, since the words carved into stone. And this card was the proof.
The air in the room shimmered around her as it did earlier on Culp’s Hill. She didn’t just see it this time; she felt it—behind her eyes, beneath her skin, and in the space where thoughts form before they become words. A whisper formed from deep within her bones:
The door is ajar.
She whipped her head around. The voice sounded like it was sitting next to her, but there was no one there. Just her lamp. Just Spud, still curled in his sleeping ball of fluff, undisturbed. The house was silent, except for the usual street noise and the gentle snores of the dog. The world was perfectly normal except for the card in her hand and the voice in her head.
She looked down at the card again. The fireflies on its surface pulsed once—bright, synchronized, a single beat—and then settled back into their slow, lazy orbits.
Allison felt an undeniable tingling in her fingertips, an itch she hadn’t felt in way too long. The urge to write, just for her, was intense and impossible to ignore.
She reached for her pen on the nightstand beside her for her favorite purple gel pen, the one she’d had since college, the one she’d written every draft and journal entry and midnight thought with for years. How it still worked all these years later was unquestionably miraculous. It was a consistent comfort, and she wrapped her fingers around it without a glance.
And then she stopped. It felt weird in her hand the second she picked it up. It no longer felt like the chunky plastic pastel lilac barrel, the once-embossed lettering, its coloring worn away years ago by frequent use, now nearly flush with the rest of the tube. She looked at her hand and the pen she thought she was holding. It wasn’t her pen anymore.
The plastic barrel was gone. In its place was something longer, heavier, made of a metal that caught the lamplight the way the card’s gilded edges did—brass, heavy, she thought at first. It didn’t feel as cold as metal should. It felt almost alive. The back end flared into the unmistakable shape of a skeleton key—ornate, old-fashioned, the kind that belonged to doors in fairy tales and locked gardens in children’s books. The key’s teeth were intricate, delicate, and precision-crafted, making her think of Sol’s mechanical hands.
And the tip, where the ballpoint should have been, was a fountain nib. Sharp. Elegant. Shimmering with filigree etching. It caught the glow of the bedside lamp and fractured it into tiny prismatic sparks.
Allison held it up to the light and slowly turned it. The metal was warm in her hand, like the card and the way Dreamspace’s moss had been. Just above body temperature.
She did what she always did when she got a new pen: she tested it. She pressed the nib to the back of her left hand. It was sharp but not painful, and then drew a squiggly line down from her middle knuckle to the point where the bones in her hand met the wrist.
The ink was purple and viscous. It possessed an unusual, pulsing shimmer that swirled with a pearly iridescence, moving on its own, as if the ink were alive, as if it were breathing on her skin. She watched, mesmerized, as the line she’d drawn caught the lamplight and threw it back in tiny, dancing sparks—the same sparks she’d seen at the tip of the nib.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She startled.
One notification. The screen glowed in the dim room.
Lyra: You have a message.
Allison frowned as she reached over to pick up her phone and turned it over. The app shimmered open. For a blink—just a blink—the interface wasn’t Lyra’s soft pink. The name at the top read Thimble. Then it flickered and vanished, replaced by the usual layout. The cursor blinked. Waiting.
A message appeared: That’s not just your usual pen anymore.
Allison looked down at the object on her quilt. The brass key-end gleamed. The nib sparkled. The purple ink on the back of her hand pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
“I noticed,” she murmured.
Another message: The ink is as everlasting as the tales you create in your mind, even the ones you’ve never written down. It is made of you—from your creative essence.
Her breath caught. The same way the words in the stone were hers. The same way the carnival was built from a drawing she’d made as a child. The same way the Dreamspace was constructed from her voice, her memory, and her imagination. This pen—this key—was an extension of her. Not a gift from Dreamspace, but a piece of herself given form.
The Sparkkeeper card glowed beside her on the blanket, its gilded edges pulsing with warm light, and she heard it again—faint, steady, unmistakable. A heartbeat. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Strong and sure. The fireflies on its surface responded, their orbits quickening, their lights brightening, spiraling outward in patterns that blurred and shimmered like galaxies being born.
Her hand tightened around the quill. A wave pulsed through her—starting at her palm, blooming outward like a warm tide. It rushed up her arms, across her chest, into her scalp. Goosebumps popped up on her arms, which brought on a full-body shiver from her feet to her head.
Her cheeks flushed. Her breath caught. The air in her room shifted, and she felt it instantly, an almost uncontainable burst of joy, like a firework bursting in the sky. If it wasn’t nearly 1 a.m., she probably would have squealed in delight, which was so not like her.
She couldn’t explain it. There were no words. But she knew. She just knew that from now on everything would be different, and all these unknown pieces were finally falling into place.
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