Dreamwalker's Bride - Chapter 402

Chapter 402: Waking up slowly
Anaisa was the last into the room, and she imagined, the most anxious. She needed Trace with her. Her soul ached from his absence, and her body was exhausted from the trek up endless stairs and through corridors of black stone.

Who lived in a black stone castle anyway? What kind of interior design was it to have such ominous surroundings? It was positively ridiculous!

She preferred the little farmhouse Trace had built before they were married to this depressing, frightening place.

Though she wasn’t frightened!

No one could scare her enough to keep her from her husband!

Anaisa straightened her shoulders as she held onto Ford’s hand and looked with surprise into the vast room.

This room alone might be as tall and as large as the palace in her home country. She wasn’t even sure she could actually see the ceiling! The black stone made it rather difficult to tell whether there was simply shadow or an actual roof to this awful place.

And yet…

It was furnished in unparalleled luxury. The dark wood of the bed, a deep and rich brown, wound upward in intricately carved bedposts to a vast canopy of beautiful silks.

The quilt, which was larger than the expansive courtyard of her home in the Capital, was faintly glittering as if woven from gemstones. Of course, it could be.

It reminded her of Deborah, and a ballgown made for Anaisa long ago that shimmered like a starry sky.

Shaking off the memory, Anaisa concentrated on the task ahead… and the silence in the room.

The snoring, which had nearly shaken the walls apart, had stopped rather suddenly.

Anaisa’s eyes widened when she heard a voice.

“Keep him asleep, will you!”

“It’s your blasted dreamwalking that wakes him up! Can’t you make it calmer!”

“I’m doing my best–just, do your part.”

Trace’s voice, she recognized immediately, and her heart flew. The second voice took a beat longer, but even after over ten years, it still shook her.

Denholm.

Her husband and her hated distant cousin, working together? Both were kidnapped by the wights, but she couldn’t have predicted they would be conversing at all, let alone in pursuit of a common goal.

“He wakes,” A voice from behind made Anaisa nearly jump out of her skin.

One of the ghostly figures she’d seen in the castle fluttered forward, and past the trio of humans on the wide floor.

Ford’s hand tugged her forward, and she followed wherever Mia must be leading. It was a fair trek just to get across the room. The wight ascended the bedpost, apparently finding it not at all difficult to scale the thing, but Mia led them underneath the bed.

It was an eerie thing, to feel as small as an ant. They didn’t need to crouch, but could easily walk upright underneath the furniture. Anaisa imagined there would be dust up to her ankles in any other situation, but apparently whoever cleaned this room did a very thorough job.

She was grateful for that.

The sleek floor was like glass, and though there was not much light under here, Anaisa thought she would be able to see her reflection, if she had one.

But of course, she didn’t, while she was invisible.

“We know he wakes,” Dehnholm’s irritated voice was a harsh, but loud, whisper. “There’s nothing much we can do about it!”

“Make sleepy,” The ethereal being responded, earning a guffaw from the human.

“What do you think I’ve been doing for—what, have we been here weeks, months, years? We’re your blasted prisoners working night and day–is there even day any more? I’ve made him feel as sleepy as I can for as long as I can, and may I say, respectfully, I’m quite done with the whole ordeal.”

“No,” The wight responded calmly, as Anaisa and the others drew near to the far end of the bed.

“What do you mean, no? You can’t very well control what I do. You’ve told us the world will be destroyed if we don’t listen to you, but I can’t very well serve like this to the end of my days. Let the world burn! See if I care!”

A human-sized staircase made of dark wood was just beyond the hanging edge of the coverlet. Anaisa had to duck under the blanket as Ford pulled her forward.

A thunderous, restless groan made the conversation fall quiet for a moment, and Anaisa’s heart was in her throat. The world would end if the monster awoke?

“Gah!” Trace’s voice made her panic a little as she began slowly making her way up the stairs, continuing to be led by Ford, and Mia before him.

There was no railing, and they went quite high. A misstep would be costly. She would have to wait until they could see over the edge of the bed before she let her imagination run away from her about what was happening up above.

“There!” Trace declared after a moment.

“What was that??” Denholm demanded. “You can just make a sleeping powder?”

“In the presence of the trees, I can make dreams reality,” Trace sounded aggravated. “You know that, but you also know how taxing it is to use so much magic! Pick up the slack!”

“Why should I, if you can do this all yourself? Maybe I’ll take a vacation and rest a bit!”

The snoring restarted, unevenly, but clearly. Anaisa wanted to run past the others up the last few stairs, where a chair was perched.

It was empty.

She looked over to a sort of bridge from the platform of the nightstand over to the enormous bed. There, the two men stood uneasily on the surface of the coverlet, facing each other down with the wight hovering between them.

“I can’t do this all by myself, and it’s not a long-term solution. You know that. You’re just stuck on your own self-centeredness too much to care about anything but your own stupid hide! Which, I might point out, would not survive the fallout of this going poorly!”

Anaisa couldn’t stand anymore. Quickly, she squeezed Ford’s hand four times, and then ripped away from his hold to run towards her husband.