Who am I kidding…

  I know my name is Alice, but unlike my namesake, I keep jumping headfirst into Wonderland. No polite peeking through the looking glass for me, thank you very much. I’m way too eager to see what’s on the other side.

  The massive, golden-etched door loomed before me, humming with a kind of patient hunger. Nina’s reverent smile hadn’t faded, as if she’d been waiting her whole life to show me this.

  I touched the wood. It was warm, like a living thing. The carved eyes seemed to blink in the corner of my vision. Locks shifted and turned on their own, tumblers rolling like lazy dice. The air smelled faintly of ozone.

  “Don’t fight it,” Nina whispered. “The Great Dream doesn’t open to you. It opens through you.”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I understood. And then, light rushed out and enveloped me. It wasn’t blinding. It poured like mist, painting the air with shifting colors. One moment, I stood before the door; the next, I was swimming in a sea of pastel hues. The ground beneath my feet wasn’t ground at all; it rippled like water, firm enough to walk on, yet transparent, a glass river flowing nowhere. Shapes swam underneath: fish made of words, whales stitched from memory.

  The world flickered again. A city square alive with torchlight and voices. A forest of silver trees, their leaves whispering secrets in a dozen tongues. An endless sky. Then, non-Euclidean spaces bent sideways, whole worlds painted in Van Gogh's strokes.

  Nina stepped in casually, as if this place were just another street she knew. “Don’t panic,” she said. “It listens to you.”

  I swallowed. “Well, that is creepy,” I muttered.

  “This is the hub,” Nina said, gesturing grandly. “The crossroad of everyone’s minds. If you’re not careful, your own thoughts decide where you go. Amusement, longing, hunger, lust… they all pull you in their direction.”

  “Navigation must be tricky,” I said, watching the scenery stretch and fold in on itself.

  “Yeah, you need a clear idea of where you want to go.”

  “Can you find me if I get lost?” I asked, eyes still on the shifting dreamscape.

  “Yes. I can always find you, especially if you want to be found. But don’t worry; if you hold my hand, I’ll handle the navigation.”

  “No. Let me try on my own first.” I smiled.

  And I stepped forward. If I understood things correctly, the Great Dream was a web of connected dreams, each dreamer with their own sanctuary, each able to host a fragment of the whole, like a server. Dreamer internet. Which meant, maybe, just maybe, I should be able to navigate it like the internet.

  With a flicker of concentration, I found myself watching a man and a woman running toward each other, weapons in hand. Behind the man lay ruin and decay; behind the woman stretched pristine golden sand. They met in the middle and swung. At the impact, the map shifted, and the desert overtook the dead land. On the next swing, the dead land swallowed the desert. Back and forth they fought, each strike reshaping the world. Slowly, with every clash, green plants began to sprout, as though their struggle itself restored the land.

  I knew the title at once, as if it had been placed directly into my brain:

  The Third and Last Holy War, when the Holy and Unholy made peace.

  The vision lingered until I saw the lady and the forgotten knight cast down their weapons and kiss.

  I couldn’t help myself. I wondered if I could find more information…

  The screen of the dream shifted. Suddenly, I was surrounded by towering books and scrolls, statues and paintings. A dark-haired, handsome man stood depicted with a distinctive flame sword. A massive scroll unrolled itself in front of me:

  Kurt Seaborne

  Born in the Pantheon. His father was a worshiper of Damada. His grandfather was a sea god priest. Converted to the Holy at the age of fifteen, after meeting the Lady and developing a crush on her that would later dictate the trajectory of his life…

  I found the wiki, I thought, smiling.

  As I drifted through the archive, I noticed graffiti sprayed boldly across one wall. Huge block letters shouted:

  THE FORGOTTEN KNIGHT IS ION THE PHOENIX.

  Nina appeared beside me, her eyes following mine. She rolled her eyes at the graffiti. I shifted the scene toward the Lady’s entry.

  Laurel of Peachgrove

  The Holy of Holies. Last survivor of Peachgrove. Survived a ritual sacrifice by killing the cultists, becoming the accidental beneficiary of immortality…

  Artworks filled the space, depictions of a blonde woman in silver armor. To the side, another graffiti in the same font screamed:

  THE LADY OF THE HOLY IS ION THE PHOENIX.

  I blinked and jumped to another famous figure.

  The Sleepless Father, the art showed a dark, brooding man, an anti-hero type, more emo than goth.

  And on the wall, once again, the same graffiti:

  THE SLEEPLESS FATHER IS ION THE PHOENIX.

  “What does that even mean?” I frowned.

  Nina sighed softly beside me.

  “Ion the Phoenix is one of the oldest immortals. He predates even the opening of the rift gates. Some historians started cross-examining history and noticed Ion appearing in event after event under different names, always blond, always tied to the Phoenix, always immortal. The most concrete record is that Ion was present at the founding of the Holy, personally advising Henrietta the Virgin, the first saint. But now people joke that every notable figure in history was just Ion in disguise. Which is absurd. He can’t be both the forgotten knight and the Lady at the same time.” She scowled.

  “Oh. It’s a meme,” I said, grinning widely. “You guys have memes.”

  The scenery shifted again, and suddenly I was sitting in an audience, watching a cute fox girl with a thick accent sing a holy hymn. She clearly didn’t know all the lyrics, so she filled in the gaps with nonsense syllables, her little face scrunched in determination.

  “Sky high lalala, fly-bly, paraprarapra,”

  “Dream with me, lialaiali,”

  It was adorable.

  The ocean of dreams rippled, and now I was watching a cat skidding helplessly across a frozen lake, paws flailing with zero traction. The scene shifted again: a baby Valkyran in his crib, seriously flapping his wings while mimicking the wing beats of a nearby jaybird.

  And then, chaos. I was suddenly in a crowded room full of people all talking over each other. One man was blasting out the fox girl’s mangled hymn, another was painting Ion graffiti across the wall, while a gaggle of kids screamed pure gibberish into the void.

  Nina face-palmed beside me. “How did you even end up here?”

  I burst out laughing, so hard my ribs hurt.

  “I knew it! This is just the dream internet.”

  With a burst of reckless inspiration, I warped my body into a small red echidna and darted under the crowd, clacking my tongue obnoxiously.

  “Do you know the way? Do you know the way? I will show you the way!” I shrieked, zigzagging across the floor.

  I sprinted toward Nina, who just stood there, mouth open in horrified disbelief, and circled her three times before bellowing:

  “Are you my queen?”

  Then I kept running in loops, cackling like a lunatic.

  It didn’t even take thirty seconds before the first kid shifted into the same red abomination, waddling after me and repeating my every move. Five minutes later, I had an army of thirty.

  I spun dramatically, faced my horde, and declared in a solemn voice:

  “Spread, my people, and conquer this world for me!”

  They scattered instantly, each red monstrosity galloping off into a different dream.

  I shifted back into my regular self, laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.

  “What… what was that?” Nina asked, staring at me.

  “Just testing the virality of the Great Dream,” I said with a shrug.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nina muttered, narrowing her eyes. “But I guess I know the kind of place to take you now.”

  Before I could reply, she seized my hand and dragged me away from the chaotic dream-chat room.

  “Just focus on following me. I’ll handle the navigation.”

  And just like that, the noise was gone. I stood in a beautiful garden, a dirt path winding gently through it. Flowers in every shade, violet bells, crimson bursts, silver-petaled blooms that caught the light like moonfire, lined the way. A pond rested at the center, its water glassy and still, koi drifting lazily beneath the surface. Dragonflies traced shimmering arcs overhead.

  I was so absorbed in the scene, I didn’t notice Nina’s wicked little grin.

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  When I turned around, I froze. For half a second, the serene garden was gone. Flowers became writhing eyeballs on stalks, and the pond bubbled with dark blood instead of water. Then everything was normal again.

  I frowned, shifting uneasily. The trick repeated itself as I moved; the scenery warped. The evil version flashed into view at random, just for a heartbeat.

  No… not random.

  “Each time my face is angled sixty degrees from the path, I see the evil version,” I muttered, tilting my head until the horror lingered. This time, I managed to hold it for more than ten seconds. All the eyeballs had shifted to look directly at me. I turned my head, dispelling the creepy vision.

  Nina sighed in mock disappointment.

  “You already figured it out? You’re no fun. I was hoping you’d keep walking slowly, questioning your sanity.”

  I smirked.

  “That would’ve worked… if I wasn’t fully aware that I’m dreaming.”

  “I notice we’re alone in this garden,” I said thoughtfully. “Does that mean we’re the only ones visiting it?”

  “No,” Nina replied. “This dream isn’t a shared space. It’s more like an experience crafted by a dreamer and then hosted in my sanctuary, rather than a developed part of someone else’s soul where people can visit.”

  “Ah, I see. So we’re here together only because I was already in your sanctuary.”

  In my head, I translated: this garden is basically a downloadable app.

  “I must say, for a non-dreamer, you’re handling complex concepts rather well,” Nina said with a smile.

  I couldn’t tell her we had similar technology back home, not without revealing I was from outside the Seven Realms. So I just smiled back.

  “So what’s next?” I asked.

  “What do you want me to show you?” she responded with a question.

  “Can we go see the gathering spaces?” I suggested. “See how people interact in the Great Dream.”

  “Sure,” Nina said. “As long as you don’t drag me back to the madhouse like earlier.”

  “Madhouse?” I tilted my head.

  “That room full of pranksters and jokesters you took us to.”

  “Oh. Okay, no, I was looking for something more serious this time.”

  The scenery rippled. Suddenly, we were standing in the heart of a city. Around us rose buildings of the strangest design, structures that broke every rule of urbanism I knew. By all logic, it should have clashed, but it didn’t. Somehow, each absurdity belonged, as though chaos itself was the binding aesthetic.

  There was a tower made entirely of stacked weapons, melted and fused together into jagged angles. A harp-shaped building painted in a riot of rainbow colors. And, yes, an actual skyscraper styled like a pile of manure, if you can believe it. I guess Dreamer forums look like surrealist art.

  People bustled around us, most slipping in and out of the buildings. A few lingered outside like we did, though they seemed less real, flickering at the edges as if half-present.

  Nina gestured toward a gleaming tower of gears, each one turning with hypnotic rhythm. “I can easily get us into the Crafters’ Paradise.”

  Then she pointed toward a crystalline dome pulsing faintly with music. “Or, I can ask a bard friend to invite us to the Melody of Gossip.”

  “Let’s visit the House of Crafters first. I want to see how knowledge spreads here.”

  We stepped inside the tower of gears. A spiral staircase wound upward, lined with countless doors. Some were solid and opaque, others were shaped from different materials, wood, glass, bronze, even living vines.

  “The opaque ones are open to the public,” Nina explained. “The others, you need an invitation.”

  She led me to a door with a plaque that read: Lenses and Glass. Just before opening it, she hesitated.

  “Do you mind if I share some of the knowledge you gave me? Or… is it a secret?”

  “Hey, I’ve got nothing against spreading knowledge. Go right ahead, just don’t tell anyone I’m the source, that’s all.”

  “Thank you.” She bumped her shoulder against mine, wings fluttering with excitement, and pushed the door open.

  “Hey, guys!” she called, stepping into a workshop full of young lens makers. They were crafting eyeglasses, monocles, even a few rudimentary spyglasses, but nothing close to what Nina had made using my Earth knowledge.

  “I have new knowledge to share,” she said proudly.

  Summoning a perfect prism of glass, she caught a shaft of sunlight and split it into a rainbow.

  “Light is made of components,” she explained. “You can separate them with this shape of glass.”

  She pulled a curtain over the window and lit a candle. The prism caught the flame’s glow, but instead of a rainbow, it only bent into dull, yellow light.

  “The sun has more ingredients than candlelight,” she said, grinning.

  The apprentices stared, wide-eyed and dumbfounded.

  A side door opened. Older craftsmen trickled in, curiosity pulling them closer. Soon, Nina was deep in discussion, talking about her experiments with light and the spectrum. Questions flew back and forth.

  I drifted toward a naga man standing nearby and asked quietly, “Sorry, new to the Great Dream. Do people really share knowledge this easily here?”

  He nodded. “All knowledge up to journeyman level is freely shared. For more advanced work, you need access to the master rooms.” He tilted his chin toward the older artisans, the few asking pointed questions about Nina’s demonstration.

  “Was what she just shared considered journeyman-level?”

  He shook his head. “No, that was new knowledge. My guess is, she wanted to impress the masters, so she’ll be allowed into their private rooms.”

  “I see,” I murmured, smiling. “That’s clever.”

  I guess that’s how knowledge about spectacles made it out of the soulit’s hands so fast. The dreamers don’t really care about competition when it comes to developing new technology, especially when the person you’re sharing with lives in another city. And inventors like Nina? They’d rather chase the thrill of making something new than hoard an old idea.

  The anthropologist in me was buzzing. On Earth, ideas spread through trade routes, through books, through merchants looking to make coins off novelty. Here, the Great Dream served as a kind of intellectual common library and workshop woven into one. The journeyman threshold acted like a peer review system, filtering out junk and play experiments, while the masters curated the higher levels, as guilds had once done back home.

  It was open-source before open-source. A medieval guild system merged with a digital forum. Only here, instead of pamphlets or patents, knowledge moved at the speed of imagination. No wonder technology seemed to leap forward in unexpected bursts; every inspired dreamer could plant seeds in a dozen cities at once.

  And I realized something else: this meant that if I wanted to leave my mark on this world, I didn’t have to guard my secrets. I just had to share them in the right place, and they’d spread like sunlight through glass.

  I decided to leave Nina with the glassworkers and wandered off into the wider dream halls. The glass room faded behind me, replaced by corridors of shifting doors. Each one opened into its own little world.

  People of all ages and crafts gathered inside, showing off their work, arguing theory, debating the usefulness of each tool and material. Peaceful conversations slipped easily into heated debates, and now and then someone settled a point with fists. I saw rooms devoted to sprawling arts like carpentry, niche filed like bellfounding, and even the mystical craft of alchemy.

  It made me wonder, was there a room for science? No, not exactly science… maybe something more abstract. Mathematics.

  The scenery shifted again, and I found myself standing before a door. Inside, 4 men and one woman sat in a circle, their heads bent over a pile of papers. I stepped closer and realized they weren’t sketching tools or designs; they were scribbling equations.

  At first, the symbols confused me, bent just enough away from my Earth expectations to throw me off. But once I adjusted, I saw what they were doing. They were working on first-degree problems with ease, manipulating numbers and simple unknowns.

  I began paging through their scattered sheets. No one stopped me; I was just another dreamer wandering through. Their work was clever, elegant even. They could spot and solve problems that had clear, obvious patterns:

  x2 – b2 = 0

  (x + b)(x – b) = 0

  x = –b, x = b

  Or:

  x2 + 2bx + b2 = 0

  (x + b)2 = 0

  x = –b

  But when the patterns weren’t obvious, they faltered. They hadn’t yet discovered the general quadratic formula. To them, equations without neat symmetry were like locked doors without keys.

  Should I solve it for them? No. These people were already brilliant; they were handling second-degree equations in a world where most folk hadn’t even discovered negative numbers. Solving it for them would only rob them of their own discoveries.

  Instead, I could give them a paradigm shift. Not an answer, but a new lens. Something to stretch their thinking.

  ??Rather than working through equations line by line, what if I introduced the idea of functions and graphs?

  I studied the way they wrote their equations, then began writing my own on a blank sheet:

  f(x) = x – 1

  if x = 0 → f(0) = 0 – 1 → f(0) = –1

  if x = 1 → f(1) = 1 – 1 → f(1) = 0

  if x = 2 → f(2) = 2 – 1 → f(2) = 1

  Then I flipped it around:

  if f(x) = 0 → 0 = x – 1 → x = 1

  if f(x) = 1 → 1 = x – 1 → x = 2

  if f(x) = –1 → –1 = x – 1 → x = 0

  Next, I sketched a simple graph of the linear function, with each point connecting to a straight line. Beneath it, I wrote a second one:

  f(x) = x2

  A simple parabola graph bloomed across the page.

  When I was finished, I set the new paper in the middle of the group.

  At first, the scholars just stared at the paper. Then one of them traced a finger along the line, lips moving as he checked the numbers for himself.

  “This… this lets you see the answer,” he said slowly.

  Another leaned in, eyes wide. “If we can draw curves, we can estimate where the roots lie, even if we don’t know the exact number!”

  They began firing questions at me, eager and half-shouting over one another. Could every equation be drawn? Could unknowns be visualized before being solved? Was it possible to predict results that no one could yet calculate?

  I smiled and decided to push their minds a little further. Taking another sheet, I wrote:

  x2 + 1 = 0

  I drew the same parabola for f(x) = x2, but shifted it upward, then gestured. “See? The curve never touches the axis. That means, no solution.”

  Gasps circled the group. One of the older scholars clutched the edge of the table as if the floor had tilted.

  Then I wrote a second one:

  x2 – 1 = 0

  I sketched the parabola, crossing the axis at –1 and +1. “Two solutions,” I said, tapping the intersections.

  They were amazed. It wasn’t just that I had given them answers; I had seen them solve something similar.

  No, it was that the answers could be seen. A whole new way of thinking had opened before them.

  They pressed closer, eyes bright with awe.

  “Scholar,” one said reverently, “grant us your name, that we may honor the one who brought such wisdom.”

  All of them nodded, eager, expectant.

  I froze. My throat worked, but no sound came. Names have weight, and I wasn’t ready to start another “new saint” situation, remembering how Cleric Jaime introduced me to sergeant Edmund.

  Then, like a gift from my own past self, the distraction arrived.

  A mob of red, squat, echidna-shaped abominations waddled through the doorway, clicking their tongues and shrieking, “DO YOU KNOW THE WAY?”

  The scholars groaned in unison.

  “What are those pests!” called one scholar.

  “Damned youth have no respect for scholars!” shouted another.

  They immediately set about driving the creatures out with scrolls and inkpots, more annoyed than afraid.

  I didn’t waste the chance.

  With a thought, I shrank, my form compressing until my own hands became stubby, my face flat and round, my skin the same garish red. My voice rose to join the chorus:

  “Do you know de wey?”

  One of the scholars’ mouths gaped at how a knowledgeable person like myself dared to join in the mess of troublemakers. I didn’t care. I waddled with the rest, half-laughing at my own audacity, and vanished into the swarm, escaping without ever introducing myself.

  Here is an illustration of Nina.