The City of the First Dream

The city from Elias's dreams was real.

Every street matched. Every tower. Every river. Every broken statue lay where he had always seen it, with the same chipped nose, the same missing hand. He walked down the avenue of cracked fountains, with Mara at his shoulder and Noah muttering behind, and felt something rise in him that was not fear. It was homesickness, so sharp and sweet that he had to stop.

There were no people.

It was the first thing he noticed, and the thing that frightened him most. Every window was dark. Every doorway stood open. A loaf of bread sat on a bakery sill, perfectly fresh. A child's shoe lay in a gutter. It was a city in which everyone had just stepped out.

At the center stood a house.

He knew it. It was a small house, narrow, with a blue door and a rain-stained roof, nestled between two much grander buildings. In his dreams, it had been the bakery. Now it was something else.

Elias entered.

Inside, the walls were covered with photographs.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. They hung in long ragged rows, from floor to ceiling, each in a plain black frame. They showed his life. His childhood. A small boy on a tricycle. A birthday cake with five candles. His mother, young, laughing, holding him up to the camera.

But some of the photographs showed events that had never happened.

In one, Elias stood beside a girl he had never met. She had red hair, and a gap in her teeth, and her arm slung around his shoulder as though she had done it a hundred times. In another, Noah was wearing a crown, grinning, enormous and absurd. In a third, Mara was old.

Very old. Her face a map of lines, her hair white, her eyes the same bright impossible dark. She sat in a wicker chair, looking at something beyond the frame, and she was smiling.

A final photograph hung at the far end of the room, in a frame of dark wood.

It showed Elias standing before seven doors. He was older, taller, his face grave. Behind him stood eight shadows, long and dark, cast by no one.

He took it from the wall.

He turned it over.

A date was written on the back, in his own handwriting.

Tomorrow.

Elias looked at his friends.

"We need to leave."

The house doors slammed shut.

All of them. The front. The back. The cellar. The windows. Every opening in the little house sealed itself with a sound like a closing book. The photographs trembled on the walls. A wind rose from nowhere, and it carried the smell of ash.

A voice spoke from the ceiling.

"Too late."

In the photograph in Elias's hands, the eighth shadow moved.