“I’ve never seen anything like this except in books,” Ellen murmured.

  “Me either,” I said. Our voices echoed and reverberated off the walls and ceiling around us. “Only I haven’t seen them in books, either.”

  “That’s because they’re the rarest non-unique portal type.”

  The gateway out wasn’t a typical, vertical portal. Instead, it took the form of a ‘pool’ in the center of a wide, octagonal room a hundred and fifty feet to a wall. Dark, Greek-looking pillars lined each wall, and off-white arches opened to a sky that was both too black and too filled with white stars that looked to be the size of my head.

  Our footsteps joined our hushed voices, echoing around the massive room like drumbeats and mixing with an almost ethereal humming that came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  “Okay, team, this one shows up at B-Rank only,” Ellen kept murmuring. Somehow, that helped with the echoing. “We’re looking at a Ghostdream archetype portal. They’re extremely rare. I only know about them because I’ve been digging into B-Rank portals for a while. Be ready for strong, individual foes, natural hazards, and a long slog. Oh, and they’re not typical portals. They’re a manifestation of a powerful monster’s psyche, not a part of a world cut away or copied.”

  Then she pointed at the doors, one after another. “That one’s not real. That’s a fake, too. We’re looking for the real path forward, but there’s going to be a clue in here somewhere… until we find it, I think we should just keep pushing forward. The two encounters with Ghostdream portals in the archives both say that they’re labyrinths, but that it’s impossible to get lost. They say the portal wants you out, not trapped.”

  I relaxed at the news that it wouldn’t be a trap. Granted, we saw the portal. It’d be easy to jump into it. But confirmation from previous delvers felt good. “Right. So, first door, then?”

  “Sure, first door,” Jeff agreed. He hefted his sword and shield, then headed for the closest path forward.

  As he pushed the door open, stars flooded the room, burning orbs within glass orbs that gave them an almost white color and gave the uncomfortable sensation of eyes watching us. Every star avoided us, but for a moment, the pillars’ shadows faded to nothing as they spread throughout the entry hall.

  Jeff didn’t stop, and the rest of us followed him. Stormsang sat in my hand, ready for action, lightning crackling around the long, thin blade, and my aura pushed outward in search of an enemy.

  Gholan the Dreamtipped: B-Rank

  The enemy appeared on the far side of the fountain-filled hallway. He was…tall. Eight feet—not a giant, but bigger than even Jeff. He carried a spear made from the same starlight as the orbs that had just pushed past us, and his body…

  His body was familiar, in a bizarre, different sort of way. Those same orbs hung at his joints, connected by bands of perfectly straight light. It took me only half a moment to understand what I was seeing; the God of Thunder was built the same way, but with lightning. We’d seen another Paragon with a similar construction, too, but this felt more…natural?

  Before I could contemplate it for too long, Gholan struck. His spear extended thirty feet in a lancing beam of starlight, and it slammed into Jeff’s shield just as he activated Split-Second Shield. The spear exploded outward as it hit, splashing like water against his blue hex-barrier.

  Then I rushed in from the left as Raul’s spear flashed toward Gholan from the right. Stormsong flared. I lunged. Both weapons headed for the monster’s head.

  Somehow, the star-spear intercepted both blows. It whirled, and the monster moved his head through the spinning spear. Then he danced backward, shockingly graceful for such a massive opponent, and lunged again.

  My chest burned as the star-spear punched through the Stormsteel breastplate like it wasn’t even there. Agony. He’d pierced a lung. I collapsed, and Sophia sprinted toward me, face covered in horror. The spear ripped out, and the pain…stopped.

  She slid on the marble walkway next to me, knees hitting my side, and stared at the wound. “I…I can’t do anything,” she stammered.

  “What? You can’t…” I gasped. The speed of the agony and the equally fast end of it had been breathtaking.

  “There’s no wound, Kade.”

  I pulled up my resources.

  Stamina: 379/460, Mana: 473/580

  I hadn’t used over one hundred Mana. The Stamina drop I could almost believe, because my body had deployed a huge amount of it into my chest as a painkiller. But the Mana? That was shockingly low considering I hadn’t cast a single spell.

  Ellen was casting, though. She threw Shadow Shapes at Gholan, but the agile spearman pranced away from her ripping, rending spell before it could get a hold of him even as Raul and Jeff kept up the pressure.

  I pushed myself to my elbows, sword in hand, and started moving to rejoin the fight. Then I stopped. “We’re missing something,” I muttered. My voice echoed, but not as much as it had.

  Then I unsummoned Stormsong and let Cheddar out.

  He flapped his wings and, in less than a second, was in the air, all but invisible except for his single cloud-wing. That cast a shadow on the ground, and as it passed over Gholan, it seemed to pin him in place for an instant before he broke free. Then Cheddar opened his mouth, and a sunbeam ripped across the room. Marble cracked and melted from the heat. Gholan kept dancing backward as the ray of light pushed toward him. Cheddar screamed, and a mental image forced its way into my head—frustration and annoyance, in equal measure.

  The B-Rank monster was just too fast, even for me. Windwalk and Thunderblade might’ve helped, but I couldn’t land a blow, and Gholan’s spear had punched clean through my armor. I wasn’t sure if I could parry or dodge his attacks well enough to survive in close.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Cheddar was buying time, though. Gholan kept backpedaling and backpedaling. The long, fountain-lined hallway kept giving him space. And when I glanced behind me, the door was just as close as it had been the moment we’d stepped inside.

  We couldn’t out-speed him. The only play was to slow him down. I fired a Thunder Crash, then a second one. The lightning made contact for less than an instant, but it made contact, and a pair of Wind Charges started circling Stormsong’s tip.

  I grinned ferally, then used Windfall.

  I didn’t use Windfall often. Speeding myself up was more effective than slowing down an enemy. But in this case, it was the best option. The third Thunder Crash carried the snare effect with it. Six bolts of lightning erupted from the ceiling next to Cheddar, lighting up the room and sending shadows dancing every which way.

  Gholan dodged every single bolt.

  It was almost beautiful how he bent his body to avoid my spell. Perfect control of his body, perfect understanding of the danger all around him. If this had been a friendly spar, I’d have congratulated him. Maybe even yielded. But no. A split-second after he dodged, his spear caught Raul in the chest in an eerily similar place to the blow he’d landed on me, and the fighter went down screaming.

  How could we beat him? We had no options. I couldn’t land an offensive spell, and if I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t…

  Ellen and I had the revelation at the exact same moment. As Jeff and I charged the monster, she dropped a Darkness to his left, and I dropped one to his right, overlapping behind him. Gholan hit the twin fields of black fog and stopped dead. He didn’t even get inside of them. One moment, he was the most agile thing I’d seen outside of the God of Thunder. The next, he was completely rooted.

  Cheddar’s sunbeam crossed over him a moment later, and he exploded into a thousand more stars. They rushed down the hall and past Yasmin, then through the door we’d come out of.

  Then they were gone, and I blinked. “That was…easy.”

  Sophia looked up from Raul. “He’s…fine? His armor’s even intact. I don’t understand.”

  “I think I do,” Ellen said.

  The portal wasn’t real.

  That was Ellen’s conclusion, anyway. Like she’d said, it was the manifestation of a monster’s psyche.

  The monsters inside were little more than figments of something’s imagination—hence the Ghostdream name—and we were intruding into the monster in question’s dreamscape. It made some semblance of sense; our armor hadn’t stopped Gholan’s attacks because they weren’t real, and they hadn’t caused actual injury for the same reason. They’d been attacking our Mana instead, and that was almost as dangerous.

  “I think you’re right,” Yasmin said. Then she cleared her throat. “I think the stars are also the solution for getting to the portal’s boss, whatever it is.”

  “Yep. It’ll almost certainly be the dreamer,” Ellen said.

  I stretched my shoulders out, then thought about unsummoning my armor. “Think the rest of this portal’s got the same gimmick?”

  “Absolutely not. There’s no way a B-Rank portal just gets straight-up defeated by a spell like Darkness. If I had to guess, every one of the rooms around the central one will have a different trick to them, and we’ll have to figure each of them out.” Ellen opened her hip pouch, pulled a sticky note, and started writing. “But…this is an opportunity to learn something that’s not in any of the GC’s records. Let’s pay careful attention to the rest of this Ghostdream portal.”

  We moved back into the central room, then into the next spur. This time, it was a winding passage filled with trees that someone had grown over hundreds of years, carefully twisting their massive forms into knots and bends that choked the room while looking perfectly orderly. Bonsai, but on an absolutely massive scale. The monster hiding in that room was the trees themselves; as we pushed in, they attacked us from every side, and Sophia would almost certainly have died if they hadn’t hit her Mana instead of her.

  Then it was on to the third room—a throne room with a trio of knights that constantly swapped locations and left behind starlight versions of themselves that went supernova and filled the room with agonizing white light. Darkness helped, but in the end, it wasn’t the solution.

  The solution was violence. Massive, targeted violence.

  One after another, we cleared the eight side-rooms. A hulking wall of darkness that ignored us in favor of consuming the stars in the room. A wall of light that crossed the room, leaving behind echoes of monsters as it did. And then, eventually, there was only one left, to the north.

  “Status check?” Ellen asked.

  I looked at my Mana and Stamina. Plenty of both. If the enemy on the far side was the boss, I’d have enough resources to beat it. And if not, we’d handle it just like we’d handled Gholan and the others. “I’m good.”

  “Same,” Yasmin said. “Enough for one more round of buffs after these run out.”

  “I…haven’t used anything,” Sophia sighed. She looked conflicted, and I felt for her. Healing was her job, and her magic had been useless for this entire portal—but at least no one had died in her arms this time. No one had even been in danger of dying. It had been, by far, the safest portal I’d ever cleared.

  I stepped through the door, and on the far side was…

  A throne room? That didn’t describe it correctly, but it was the closest I could get. The same dark pillars and off-white, arched walls that stared out into the star-lit void. The same echoing hum. But where the walls in the central room had been bare, these were covered in what looked like woven vines…or maybe willows. They seemed to almost flow from the wall into the air and then back into the pillars, an ethereal, living tapestry that hung from the ceiling all the way to the floor.

  And, sitting on a chair near the center of the round room, in between the two tips of a stylized crescent moon, was a puppet.

  She was dressed in blue so dark it was nearly black. Arms extended from her shoulders and ribs, just below her breasts. They folded and sat in her lap; she looked like her strings had been cut, and every limb had fallen still in whatever position she’d landed in—a toy doll, abandoned by a child.

  Then her eyes opened.

  They reminded me of the night sky outside. I stared into them, almost lost in their black depths. They were mesmerizing. The longer I looked, the more I understood what this place was—a reflection of her inner thoughts. This wasn’t the eighth room. This was the boss—it had to be.

  She spoke, her voice young and melancholy. “Why dost thou disturb Mother’s sleep?” Her body didn’t move. Her eyes stayed locked on me.

  I didn’t say anything. Stormsong sparked and popped in my hand, and behind me, Ellen readied a spell. We were ready for the fight that was coming.

  “You shant need those, visitors,” the puppet said. One of her four hands raised, and Ellen’s spell dissipated. Another pointed at me, and the lightning surrounding my weapon cut off with a final crackle. “Mother Mine hath sent me to pose this one question: why dost thou disturb her rest-world? If thou will but answer, I shall allow you passage from this dream, and grant you a boon.”

  I tried to resummon my sword. Nothing happened. My fist balled. How dare this monster deny me the chance to fight? But even as I did, the puppet sat up, and for the first time, her name and rank appeared over her head. I froze. So did the rest of the team. This wasn’t supposed to be a trap portal, and yet…

  Mind Maiden Enolda: ?-Rank

  My head spun as I stared at the monster in front of us. It was at least S-Rank. What was it doing here, in a B-Rank portal? Behind me, Jeff’s shield clattered to the ground. Ellen tried to cast another spell, but the Mind Maiden’s hand waved, and the spell sputtered out.

  I raised my own hand. “I don’t think we can beat her,” I murmured.

  All around me, the stars brightened, and Mind Maiden Enolda laughed. The sound didn’t carry an ounce of malice, but instead, it carried all the weight of Eugene’s voice. And then she spoke, not in the choppy, halting voice of the Paragons that had talked to us before, or in Eugene’s familiar cadence, but in understandable, if ancient, English.

  “I beg thee, Paragon Kade Noelstra, explain to Mother Mine why the God of Thunder dost send thee into her world, and why he insists on interfering with her Works.”

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