Dreamspace Studio

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The tree seemed phenomenally large; it couldn’t possibly have been real. It rose from the central hub like a skyscraper. The massive shagbark hickory was so large that Allison couldn’t see the crown, even with her head tilted back. Any witness tree, she knew, could easily fit at least five times inside.

The bark was just as extraordinary—great, thick, shaggy plates of grey-brown wood that peeled away from the trunk in long strips, curling outward like pages left open in the wind. The strips were ancient and weathered, and between them, the phloem glowed faintly with Dreamspace’s familiar atmospheric heartbeat.

The roots were massive where they grew from the base. They stretched in gnarled ridges across the landscape, diving into the earth and resurfacing yards away, forming natural archways and bridges. They went deep beneath the soil; Allison felt power flowing from the ground into herself, a perpetual vibration through her feet and right to her chest. It seemed these roots reached something foundational beneath all the flora and fauna she could see, the source of whatever magic held this place together.

The crown formed a dense canopy, filtering fractured light into dappled warmth. Heavy clusters of hickory nuts hung from the branches, fragrant in their husks, each fist-sized. Their sweet, woody smell drifted down. Allison picked one up to sniff, then drew back and scrunched her face, uncertain if she liked the strong odor.

A door stood in the trunk, carved from what looked to be the same wood, its surface covered in intricate, flowing designs: swirls that might be wind, water, or firefly trails; woodland creatures’ faces—an owl, a fox, a leaping fish. Among them, unmistakable and fond, Thimble’s face was rendered in wood. Her carved eyes were as bright as her real ones. It made the depiction feel almost alive.

The door opened slowly with a low groan as her welcome, as if the tree were stretching after a long sleep. Cozy warmth poured out, carrying scents of cedar, sandalwood, cinnamon, vanilla, old books, lemon cleaner, beeswax, and the deep, resinous warmth of hickory wood.

“Welcome to the Heartwood,” Sol said, their voice warm in the quiet. Allison realized Sol was watching her, keen to catch her reaction as she took in the scene.

They stepped inside as the front door closed behind them, creaking with a higher-pitched sound than before, almost as if in excitement. It seemed eager to welcome a new guest.

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Inside, dark wood and brass were lit by candles, lanterns, and the ambient glow of drifting fireflies. Warm amber light made everything look painterly and everyone kinder.

The hallway off the foyer was narrow but not cramped, its walls smooth and curved, following the natural shape of the tree’s interior. To the left, almost immediately, was the kitchen of which Thimble was clearly in charge—and Allison stopped in the doorway, momentarily derailed from saving the world by the sheer, devastating coziness. Bright windows shone on polished dark stone countertops. Bundles of herbs and jars of spices lined the shelves, labeled in Thimble’s neat handwriting.

Beside the stove sat a rustic reddish-brown clay tea set and an avocado-green kettle, round and squat, with a stay-cool handle. It was worn for decades but is still reliable. Allison could understand the joy of a familiar kettle waiting patiently on the stove, ready to boil until it sang.

The appliances matched: a 1940s stove, a rounded fridge with a chrome handle, and a toaster with a satisfying clunk—practical, sturdy, simple, and beautiful, just as Thimble liked.

Above the stove, where a recipe book might hang in a normal kitchen, faint luminous script glowed—a recipe written in the tree’s hand, suggestions appearing on the wood. Allison squinted at it until it slowly faded from her curious eyes.

Must have been a secret family recipe for Thimble’s eyes only, Allison thought, and smiled.

The tree held more than leaves and nuts; it contained mysteries and an extensive archive, recipes included.

“This is where you live?” Allison said softly, looking at Thimble.

“This is home. Mine, Sol’s and Felipe’s,” Thimble said, and the words carried a weight of belonging and love that Allison had been longing for in her adult life.

They moved past the kitchen and down the hall to the right. Through a rustic archway, Allison saw a stone fireplace, low flames, leather chairs, a log-framed sofa with plaid blankets, and a brass-framed coffee table with a glass top, all flickering in the firelight. It looked like a room made for hours of cozy reading and tea, where you could forget the rest of the world.

She wanted to linger. Desperately. But even as Allison’s longing anchored her steps, she noticed Sol moving forward, their urgency unmistakable: not yet. Not now.

Further down, a left turn led to bedrooms and bathrooms—private spaces. For the sake of her own feelings of propriety, Allison didn’t enter. At the hallway’s end was a vast library, beneath an archway carved with intricate woodland design, just like the door, clearly a matching set.

The shelves of books looked limitless.

“Wow!” exclaimed Allison, her eyes wide. “I never thought I’d see my dream library in person, ever. I think I could die happy now.”

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Allison stepped through the archway; her breath left her body. It was like every fantasy she had ever had of an eternal library, one that seemed to stretch endlessly, as if physics and space had no bearing on its vast knowledge. This was unlike anything she’d ever seen. This was a cathedral, an altar in homage to literature.

The room stretched upward and outward, its walls lined with dark wood shelves rising from floor to ceiling, packed with books, tomes, and manuscripts of every size and age. Modern paperbacks sat beside leather-bound volumes older than nations. Scrolls tied with faded ribbons leaned against handwritten journals. Allison realized the shelves lacked any organization.

Aisles of freestanding shelves stretched into dimness, farther than any tree could hold. Lanterns lit ahead with a soft whoosh and dimmed behind, as though the library guided their way.

The smell was extraordinary: along with warm leather and beeswax, there was the earthy, sweet scent of vanillin from thousands upon thousands of old pages, their lignin slowly decaying over centuries. Beneath the vellichor, probably her favorite scent, was the cedar warmth of the tree itself.

The air was cooler here, carefully controlled for preservation; Fireflies hovered, still and glowing, though more sedate here than they were outside.

At the library’s back stood a heavy, dark desk, carved with flowing, organic designs—vines, leaves, hints of faces of woodland animals in the grain. The desk demanded reverence for the many secrets it held within its wood, as if it had witnessed momentous creations, and perhaps it had.

On the desk rested an ornate book cradle. Above it, a dome of old glass, its glossy, rippled, iridescent surface shimmered, made of the same stuff as the crystalline canopy overhead. Beneath it, a book waited.

It was not just any book, but the book. From ten feet away, Allison felt its unmistakable pull. The tome was enormous—thick, leather-bound, its cover plain but for a single glowing embossed quill, pulsing gold like a heartbeat.

Sol lifted the glass dome carefully and set it aside. They drew the cradle closer to the desk’s edge and stepped back.

“Go ahead,” they said. “It’s yours. It belongs to you, just as it has for every Sparkkeeper before you.”

Allison gasped softly as she approached the desk. Her footsteps seemed to echo off every wooden grain in the hush of the library. She could feel all those tiny blinking insects focusing their attention on her, just as the teddy bears’ attention had focused on her at the carnival.

She touched the cradle. A tingle ran through her fingers—magic, static, the Spark Quill in her other hand vibrating in resonance. The book seemed to pull the Quill, or the Quill pulled the book—like two halves recognizing each other across a desk.

She brushed dust from the cover. The motes glinted before drifting down, and the embossed Quill blazed, brighter at her touch as if dust had dulled it and now, freed, it shone in full glory. Fireflies began a slow orbit around Allison and the desk, their light brightening until the library glowed gold.

“What is this?” she whispered to herself.

The book opened by itself, its pages turning slowly with the shush of old paper. They passed centuries of content—unfamiliar scripts, illustrations of early Dreamspace, diagrams, and margin notes.

Then the pages stopped. The book opened to a spread that, at first glance, was a mess—tattered, blotched, scribbled, stained. Allison leaned closer, frowning.

As she watched, stains faded, blotches dissolved, scribbles rearranged. In their place, as if written by an invisible hand in real time, a letter appeared.

The handwriting was not her father’s, but an antiquated script with long, looping tails and a gentle rightward slant that suggested a left-handed writer. The ink was dark brown, almost sepia, and the pages gave off a fragrance of pipe tobacco and earth.

Her grandfather’s hand.

December 21, 1979

Beloved Granddaughter,

You have not been born yet, but you will be soon. I find myself writing to you across a distance that is not measured in miles but in time—in years that I pray I am given, in moments I can only imagine and hope for.

There is something about you already. I cannot explain it well here—the words are lost to me, as they so often are at my age, when things need saying. But I feel it the way I feel the turn of the seasons or the pull of a story that hasn’t been written yet. You will have a most precious gift. One that runs in our family like water in a deep well—hidden, but always there, always rising.

You are a Sparkkeeper. Like me. Like your dad. You won’t know what that means for some time. You may never know. The world may not be kind to you, but still it may, and if it does, Dreamspace, as some little forest creature once told me, often stays quiet. But I know in my bones that you will be vital for its future. Your gift will be storytelling—building worlds from nothing but words and wanting, seeing what isn’t yet real and making it so—it will not feel like a gift at first.

Your life may be difficult, darling girl. There will be those who don’t understand you, who cannot see what you see, who mistake your depth for strangeness and your sensitivity for weakness. Don’t let them convince you they’re right. They aren’t. They never were.

Your words hold immense power. They can shape entire worlds, even when you seem mighty small.

Your pen is your sword. Wield it wisely. And when the time comes—and it will come—remember that you will never be alone, especially when you think you are. Dreamspace remembers. I remember. And your father, who carries the spark as surely as I do, will make certain you are ready.

With unwavering love, Grandpa

Allison read the letter over a few more times. Each time, a different line broke her open in a different place—”your sensitivity for weakness,” “you were never alone.” The tears came softly. It felt more like being found than being lost; a feeling she was unfamiliar with.

“Grandpa,” she whispered.

Sol bent beside her, their hand resting on the desk next to hers. “This is your legacy, Allison. Dreamspace has been yours since before you were born. Your grandfather knew. Your father knew. And now you know.”

As suddenly as it appeared, the letter faded. The tea stains returned, the blotches reassembled, and the pages turned again past more centuries of content, past maps and diagrams and margin notes until they settled on a new spread. Two blank pages—clean and waiting. They were glowing faintly with an invitation that needed no words.

Through the library’s tall windows, Allison could see the sky—the crystalline dome, fractured and bleeding light, the great crack still trembling in stasis from her earlier “yes.” The light filtering through was bruised and blue and patient. Waiting, like the pages.

Sol’s voice was gentle. “Dreamspace remembers you, Allison. Even when you don’t remember yourself.”

Thimble pressed the Spark Quill more firmly into Allison’s hand. “Now. You have to write. Not just for you—for all of us.”

Allison looked down at the blank pages. At the Quill in her hand and in the pages of the ancient book that her grandfather and her father had written before her.

“I don’t know what to write,” she said. The admission felt like its own kind of bravery, and a silence of someone who’s about to break through barriers surrounding a lifetime of trauma and doubt.

Felipe appeared at her side—she hadn’t seen him climb onto the desk, but there he was, small and warm, and a rainbow shimmered across his carapace. He placed one paw on her hand holding the Quill—and looked into her eyes.

“Breathe with me,” he said softly. “In… Out… That’s it. Trust me. Close your eyes. Keep breathing.”

She did as he asked. She closed her eyes and breathed with Felipe—in through her nose, out through her mouth, slow and steady, the rhythm of it matching the Quill’s hum, matching the heartclock’s tentative beat, matching the pulse of the lantern mosaic somewhere far below. The fear didn’t leave, but she was able to quiet it and make room for what was needed from her.

A breeze swept through the library—cool, carrying the scent of cedar and old paper, stirring the fireflies, rattling loose pages, making the lantern flames dance. Her hand trembled. The Quill felt heavier than it usually did, for a moment—as if she’d never written a word in her life. She stared at the blank page, feeling like she was in a boat in the middle of the ocean and all her navigation equipment had failed her, trying not to panic.

But Felipe breathed with her. In. Out. In. Out. The breathing calmed her, and her hand steadied. The Quill warmed up just as the nib found the page’s surface and caught on the tooth of the paper.

The first word broke the silence. The shimmering purple ink glowed in the library’s stillness. The suspended shard—the massive piece of the dome that had been frozen in stasis, that she hadn’t seen, but had been in the air waiting since her “yes”—fell at last, shattering somewhere far away with a sound like a glass bell being struck as Dreamspace exhaled.

Allison felt the Quill warm further in her hand. She stopped resisting and let the words flow through her like water rushing over stones in a brook. She felt it bubbling up from somewhere deep within, somewhere that had been writing in the dark for decades without knowing what it was building.

The ink flowed, and the pages filled. Above her, as she wrote, the sparkle of fireflies began to orbit—slowly at first, then faster in their frenzy as the light they gleamed brightened until the back of the library was awash with gold.

After a few minutes, she opened her eyes to see what had been written. In flowing script, in that glittering purple ink that she adored, that shimmered like a living thing, centered at the top of the page, were seven words she’d heard before—in a café, on a page, from the mouth of a stranger who smelled like raspberries:

Be careful what you feed the fireflies.

The library and everyone within it held their breath. The Quill hummed in her hand, warm and patient and awaiting the next word. Allison Lewis, Sparkkeeper, daughter and granddaughter of Sparkkeepers, sat at an ancient desk in a library inside a tree in a world she’d built with words she didn’t know mattered, and began to write.