Dreamwalker's Bride - Chapter 129

Chapter 129: Afraid of heights
Anaisa froze, petrified as she looked down again. The ground was so very far away. She couldn’t make out any details at all, neither mountains nor trees or anything!

“How am I supposed to keep from falling?” She held tightly to Trace’s hand. Surely if she clung to him, he wouldn’t plummet to the earth below.

“Balance and coordination? Velocity? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Are you ready to find out?” He quirked an eyebrow.

“And if I fall?” She peered down.

“I’ll catch you,” He promised.

“Are you sure?” Anaisa swallowed.

“How much do you trust me?” His answering smile was half-amused, half-serious, but after a moment he let it fade. “If you truly don’t want to do this, I can take you to a nice courtyard and throw soup at you instead.”

The woman threw him a sharp look. “Is soup going to fly out at me from the clouds?”

“I promise, these clouds contain no soup whatsoever,” He held up one hand and vowed solemnly. Her lips twisted as she recalled the various mean things she’d done to him in her dream creations.

“Snowballs? Water?” She asked.

“Both of those things come naturally from clouds, and of course I wanted this experience to be somewhat realistic for you…” A hint of mischief tugged at the corners of his mouth. “I would simply advise you to be as fast as you can manage.”

“Fine,” She said with a heavy sigh. “I’m sure I deserve every bit of this.”

“Absolutely,” He agreed easily.

Anaisa eyed the path through the clouds warily. It extended forward and twisted out of sight around the side of the large puffy white monolith to her right. She couldn’t estimate how long it was or how dangerous once it left her sight. Maybe the little cloud stepping-stones would be further apart? Climb or fall? Run straight into a cloud where she couldn’t see?

“I would suggest you begin soon,” He glanced behind them, and a sinking feeling bloomed in the pit of Anaisa’s stomach.

Over her shoulder, she saw a looming cumulonimbus cloud moving steadily towards them.

“REALLY?” She cried, ripping her hands away from his and lurching forward. He chuckled, floating alongside her as she hopped from one cloudy ‘stepping stone’ to the next.

“You’re doing great!” He encouraged enthusiastically, but she couldn’t shoot him a playful glare or she would risk losing her concentration. Up ahead, a solid tendril of cloud was snaking out from the side, about as thick as her arm and at the height of her knees.

She leapt over it and kept going. Trace’s laughter died down as he watched her jump and duck under cloudy obstacles, while the subtly thundering wall crept ever closer behind her.

If breathing were necessary in dreams, she would be out of breath now. The next foothold, with a strangely greyish tinge, gave out as she stepped on it, causing her to trip forward and scramble up the next. She glanced ahead. About every third or fourth little cloud held the same color.

“Are they all like that?” She demanded, and Trace held back a snicker.

A chill wind blew first from one side and then another, and the stepping stone-clouds began to shift left and right before her. Her race forward became a game of zig zagging across them, trying to avoid the greyish ones that would dissolve beneath her.

“What next, up and down?” She huffed.

She heard a subtle murmur from beside her, and then they began doing just that.

“Not fair! That was my idea, not yours!” Anaisa complained, but Trace laughed.

“It’s been your turn so much that I had to put everything in all at once,” He explained, floating backwards ahead of her. “Isn’t it fun?”

She glared, concentrating on staying aloft as she leapt from cloud to cloud. Was it her imagination, or were they getting further apart?

It was fun, though she wouldn’t say so out loud. A lot of fun. The perfect mix of challenging and achievable. Just when she got the hang of the course, Trace would change one small variable to increase the difficulty for her. The steps were smaller, moved faster, grew further apart, and then the obstacles became larger, appeared more suddenly, and were odd shapes.

Thankfully, her dream body did not have to grow tired or run out of breath, but even so, it would all become completely impossible to keep up with sooner rather than later… not that Anaisa hadn’t given Trace impossible challenges.

The cloud-steps spiraled upward around a large, conical cloud, and Anaisa launched herself to close each gap. Higher and higher she climbed, reaching the summit of the cloud’s peak.

The stairs stopped suddenly. She was on the last one, looking around with no end in sight. Trace’s world was nowhere what it had been before, but it was still hugely impressive. Far larger and more detailed than anything she had ever created in her dreams, even once she became able to have more influence over them.

“What now?” She called to Trace, who was hovering off to one side, looking down into the cloud itself. She followed his gaze past her toes and downward. “Do… Am I supposed to jump into this thing??”

He glanced behind her dubiously, and looked down again. “If you want to.”

“What do you mean, ‘if I want to’?” The dark wall of cloud that had been chasing her the entire race was moving closer. She crouched and took a deep, unnecessary breath. She definitely didn’t want to get trapped in the oncoming storm, so she steeled her nerves and launched herself into the air.

“I meant that I hadn’t anticipated you getting this far, and had no plan for what should happen next,” Trace’s words followed her down as she was consumed by the white tufts of the giant cloud and plunged into the darkness below.

“Wha—!” Anaisa’s words were cut off as the humid air forced itself into her lungs.