Episode 57: Gray Skies and Gossamer Webs
- Crystal Crawford
- May 7
- 7 min read
Updated: May 8
The dream dropped me in the wet sand of an all-too-familiar beach, beneath a gray and stormy sky.
Emery stood a few yards down the shore from me, the waves still crashing against her feet. She gave me an anguished look, then turned and walked away from me, along the surfline.
“Emery?” I ran toward her. “Emery, wait!”
She spun back, eyes wide. “Aubrey?” She took a shaky step back as I neared. “No. No, go away.”
I stumbled to a halt. “What?”
“You’re not real, nothing is real, go away!” She yelled, taking more steps backward.
The despair in her eyes broke my heart.
“Em,” I said, taking one careful step toward her. “It’s me. I’m here.”
She looked hopeful for a brief moment, then her face fell. “No. It’s always like this, every time I think I see something new, something different—there’s a way out, or someone comes, or there’s a new mind nearby I can reach—I always just end up back here.” She looked away. “It’s always just a dream. All a dream, within a dream, within a dream…”
“Not this time,” I said firmly. “I came to you. This is your dream, Emery, but I’m here with you… or my mind is, at least. I’m really here.”
Her brow furrowed. She stared at me. “You’re really here?”
I nodded.
“But here is—”
“Your dream, yes, but it’s really me, I promise.” I stepped closer. “Em, I’m here.”
She studied me for a long moment, then her skeptical expression collapsed into a sob.
“Aubrey!” She ran toward me.
We crashed into each other, hugging tight.
“You can visit me in dreams?” she asked, squeezing my shoulders. “You figured out your gift?”
I nodded.
“I knew you’d figure it out and come for me,” she said, still hugging me tightly. “I left you the notebook, just in case something went wrong when I came here, but I never thought I’d actually—” She stopped. “You’re bigger.” She pulled back to look at me.
“You’re taller. How long have I been gone?”
I swallowed. “Two years.”
She stared at me. “What?”
“I’m here, now, Em,” I said. “We found you. I’m so sorry it took me this long to understand your messages.”
“I don’t understand how I could’ve been here that long,” she muttered, starting to pace.
“I came to this beach to follow up on a suspicion, and I was right.” She turned to me with an urgent expression. “Someone was taking elementals, just like I’d seen in my visions. I’d left you the notebook because I’d seen something would happen here, something bad—but it had to be puzzles, Aub, because they were watching.” Her eyes went dazed, distant. “I saw that. They couldn’t know too much. So I left the notes, then came here. But when I got here…” She shuddered. “I went into a dream to try to warn you what I’d seen here, to warn you they might be coming for you, too, but then I—I couldn’t wake up, and—” She looked at me with concern. “The elementals, the ones they captured. I could feel them nearby. I tried to send them a warning, but then a few minutes ago, they all just vanished, and…”
“We got them out,” I told her. “They’re safe.”
Her eyes fell closed. She exhaled. “Safe. Thank goodness.” When she opened her eyes, they were clearer—less dazed. “I’m lost, Aubs,” she said. “I came into a dream, so long ago, but—” Her expression morphed into terror. “I can’t get out. And now you’re stuck in here, too!”
“We’re not stuck,” I said. “I can get you out of here, Em. I just have to figure out how to leave…” I glanced around. This place looked just like the beach in the real world, with one important exception: the air was wrong. There was a shimmer to it, like a gauzy material had been laid over the whole area—all except for the section behind me, in the direction I’d walked from. “There,” I said, pointing. “See? That’s where I came in. I can still see the opening. We just need to follow it back out.”
Emery turned toward where I pointed. “The opening?” She looked confused. “Aubrey, there’s no opening. It’s just the beach.”
I looked at her. “You don’t see a rift in the air? Like a break in the shimmering?” To me, it was plain.
She stared at me. “No.” Her brows rose. “Wait. You can see the gossamer web?”
I stared back. “You mean that weird shimmery layer over everything here? Yeah, I can see it.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re a dreamwalker. I can project dreams, but you—” She laughed, a sudden joy taking over her face. “Aubrey, you’re a dreamwalker!”
“I’m not sure what I am,” I said, “but I can get us out of here. Come on.” I grabbed her hand, and we ran toward the opening.
I could see the orb-room ahead of us down a corridor beyond the rift, like I was about to cross a hallway between worlds. My parents were on the floor in the orb room, leaning down over my unconscious body. “I see it!” I shouted, tugging Emery’s hand.
“We’re almost there!” I burst through the rift.
As soon as I crossed it, my arm yanked back.
Emery’s hand slipped from my grasp.
I stopped and spun around. “Emery, what—”
“I’m stuck!” she said, panicked. She was still on the other side of the rift. She pounded on the air with her fists, but it was solid. “I can’t go through!”
I stuck my arm out—it went back through the rift without resistance.
We stared at each other in fright.
“Why can I go through but you can’t?” I asked. “Is it because I’m a dreamwalker?” If that was the case—if only I could walk in and out, but she couldn’t—”What is the point of this gift?” I shouted. “What good is it to dreamwalk to you if I can’t even wake you up?”
Emery looked at me. “Dreamwalkers can do more than project a dream to someone, they can enter another person’s dream. They can’t impact that person’s physical body from within the dream, but they can interact with the person’s dream-form—their consciousness—which means they can wake them. If you can see the break in the web, you should be able to walk me out with you. We should both wake up, wherever our bodies each are. But honestly, Aubrey, I should’ve been able to wake myself this whole time. When I dream intentionally, I usually can. This time, I just couldn’t.”
“Why?” I asked, starting to feel hopeless. “Why isn’t any of this working?”
A sense of calm focus washed over Emery’s face. “This is just another puzzle, Aubs, like the ones I gave you. We can figure it out. Tell me what’s happening on the outside. There’s got to be a reason you can’t wake me. A reason I couldn’t wake myself.” Her eyes locked on mine. “Where is my body? Did you find me?”
“You’re in the orb,” I said.
Her nose wrinkled. “In the what?”
“The big, pulsing orb that’s beeping super fast and might explode at any moment.”
She stared at me. “Why am I in something like that?”
“I don’t know!” I said, flopping my hands in exasperation. “None of this makes sense!”
“Wait, wait,” she said. “Where is this orb? Is there anything else around it?”
I thought back to the room. “It’s in the center of a circular room, just kind of floating there. There were these holding cells around it, with barred doors. The elementals were in the cells, attached to the orb by tubes.”
“By tubes?” She looked horrified.
I nodded. “It’s like the whole orb was feeding on them somehow. Chloe—” I paused, suddenly realizing Emery and Chloe had never met. “She’s my friend. She was taken by them to lure me out, I think. She was in a cell, too, and she heard them say the orb was harvesting the elementals’ power or something—no, wait. She said it was supposed to gather the elementals’ energy, transfer it, then self-destruct.”
“Self-destruct?” Emery’s eyes widened again. “And I’m inside it?”
“Yes,” I said, my throat tightening. “Mom, Dad, Lockley, Collin, and a bunch of other people are all standing around it—by my unconscious body—waiting for me to get you out.”
Emery looked at me in horror for a long moment, then drew a breath. “Okay, it’s alright, we can figure this out.” She chewed her lip in thought, then looked at me. “Are you sure that thing was siphoning power from elementals? I saw that guy from Vorcos taking elementals in my visions, but why would he have been siphoning power from them? Where was the power going? It’s not like a regular supernatural can just infuse themselves with someone else’s gifts… at least, not that I know of.”
“The woman who took us said the Vorcos CEO was trying to open a gateway or something, like a barrier between worlds,” I said.
“He was what?” She stared at me in terror.
“Trying to open a gateway. They plan to load the orb with power, then use that to blow open a passage between worlds or something. I know it sounds crazy, but Trenchcoat Man—he’s this guy working with Dad—he said there really are worlds that touch ours, if you can believe that, and that the barriers between worlds are—” I stopped my rambling, because Emery had gone pale. “What is it?” I asked, my heart hammering.
“Emery, what’s wrong?”
“Aubrey,” she said, her voice trembling. “If what you said is true, then I think they’re siphoning the power into me.” Her eyes locked on mine. “I think I’m the gateway.”
***
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