DREAM QUEST

Chapter 1 : An Average Life

The smell of broth and scallions clung to everything in the Hu household — the curtains, the stairwell carpet, even the pages of Daren's textbooks, no matter how many times he washed his hands after closing up the shop. He used to hate it. By nineteen, he'd stopped noticing it at all, which was its own kind of loss.

Daren Hu was an unremarkable-looking young man, and he knew it, and mostly he didn't mind. He stood a shade under six feet, lean in the way of someone who worked on his feet most evenings rather than someone who lifted weights for fun. His hair was black and always a little too long, because haircuts cost money and money went into the shop. He had his mother's narrow eyes and his father's jaw — or so his mother said, on the rare occasions she mentioned his father at all. A thin scar crossed his left eyebrow from a childhood bicycle accident, the only feature on his face that anyone ever commented on.

He wasn't an athlete. He wasn't a genius. He was the kind of student teachers described as "quietly capable" on report cards, the kind of son who showed up, did the work, and didn't ask for much. If you'd passed him on the street that Thursday afternoon — backpack slung over one shoulder, earbuds in, hands in his pockets against the early autumn chill — you would have forgotten his face by the next corner.

That suited Daren fine. He had enough to think about without being memorable.

The shop was called Golden Bowl, though the gold paint on the sign had faded to a tired mustard color years before Daren was old enough to read it. His mother, Mei, had run it alone for as long as he could remember — alone in the sense that mattered, anyway. His father had left when Daren was seven, and the explanations had changed over the years depending on Daren's age and how much truth his mother judged he could carry. He had to go. Then, later: He wasn't able to stay. Then, when Daren was old enough to stop asking: silence, and a tightening around his mother's eyes that told him the subject was closed.

Daren had stopped resenting it sometime around sixteen. There wasn't room for resentment in a life that ran on a schedule as tight as theirs — school until three, the shop until close, homework after that, sleep, repeat. His mother handled the woks and the broth; Daren handled the register, the deliveries, the dishes, and whatever small fires needed putting out on a given evening. It wasn't a hard life. It wasn't an exciting one either. It was, simply, his.

That Thursday had been ordinary in every measurable way. A math test he was fairly sure he'd passed. A walk home past the same cracked sidewalks and the same dog that barked at him from behind the same fence. He'd stopped by the shop first, like always, dropped his bag in the back room, and spent two hours wiping down tables and restocking napkin dispensers while his mother hummed old songs under her breath over a pot of simmering pork bone broth.

"You look tired," she'd said to him, not looking up from the cutting board.

"I'm always tired."

"Tired is not always. Tired is sometimes." She'd pushed a bowl of noodles across the counter to him — broth, scallions, a soft-boiled egg cut in half, the way he'd liked it since he was small enough to need a booster seat. "Eat. Then go rest. I can close tonight."

He hadn't argued. That, too, was ordinary.

By ten o'clock he was home, showered, and lying in bed with his phone's blue light the only thing illuminating the ceiling. He scrolled without really seeing anything — a habit more than an activity — until his eyes grew heavy and the phone slipped from his hand onto the mattress. He didn't remember turning it off. He didn't remember closing his eyes, exactly. Sleep simply arrived, the way it always had, unremarkable and complete.

What was not ordinary — what Daren would spend a long time afterward trying to explain to himself, and failing — was the light.

It came sometime past midnight, though Daren had no way of knowing that at the time, because by the time it came, he was no longer aware of time at all. It did not wake him so much as arrive inside the place where waking and sleeping met, a single point of brightness blooming behind his closed eyes like a star being born too close to his face. It didn't hurt. That was the strange part, the part he'd turn over and over later. It should have hurt — light that bright, that close, ought to have seared through eyelids and bone alike — but instead it simply poured, warm and total, into the center of his skull, the way water finds the lowest point of a room.

He had the dim, distant sense of his own thought trying to form a question — what is this, what is happening — and then the thought, like everything else, dissolved into brightness.

And then there was grass beneath him.

Daren opened his eyes to a sky the wrong color.

Not wrong in the way a cloudy day is wrong, or a sunset is unusually vivid. Wrong in a way that made his stomach lurch before his mind had even finished processing what he was looking at — a sky the deep violet of a bruise just before dawn, streaked with two moons instead of one, one full and pale and one a slender crescent the color of rust. The air smelled of crushed grass and something mineral underneath it, like rain on hot stone. Towering trees ringed the clearing where he lay, trees with bark the color of charcoal and leaves that shimmered faintly silver, as though dusted with frost that never melted.

Daren sat up so fast his head spun.

"Okay," he said out loud, to no one, because saying it out loud felt important somehow, felt like an anchor. "Okay. This is a dream."

He said it again, because the first time hadn't worked. The grass under his palms was cool and slightly damp, exactly the way grass should feel, and that fact alone was deeply unhelpful to his theory.

He pinched the inside of his wrist hard enough to leave a mark. It hurt exactly the way a pinch was supposed to hurt. He stood, legs unsteady, and turned in a slow circle, taking in the strange trees, the wrong sky, the absolute and ringing silence that pressed against his ears like cotton.

"Dream," he said a third time, quieter now, less like a declaration and more like a plea.

There was no shop here. No mother humming over the broth pot. No cracked sidewalks, no barking dog, no blue glow of a phone screen. Just Daren, alone, in a clearing under a violet sky, with his heart hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat.

He didn't know how long he stood there before he noticed the smoke.

It rose in a thin gray thread above the treeline to his left, the unmistakable shape of a chimney's exhale. Where there was smoke, there were people. Where there were people, surely, there were answers — or at the very least, someone who could tell him how to wake up.

Daren picked a direction and walked.

The village — though Daren wouldn't learn its name until later, would only ever come to know it as Thornhollow, a cluster of timber-and-stone houses pressed low against a hillside as though hiding from the sky itself — announced itself first as a smell of woodsmoke and livestock, then as a sound of distant voices, and finally, as Daren pushed through the last line of silver-leafed trees, as a sight that made him stop dead in his tracks.

It looked, in the dim violet half-light, almost like something out of a postcard — narrow lanes between sloped roofs, a well at the center of a small square, lanterns hung on iron hooks casting pools of warm orange light. For one absurd, hopeful moment, Daren felt something like relief. People. Just people. I can ask someone where I am. I can wake up.

The relief lasted exactly as long as it took for the first villager to see him.

She was an older woman, a basket of something root-vegetable-shaped balanced on her hip, and the moment her eyes found Daren standing at the treeline — clearly out of place in his school uniform, clearly a stranger, clearly wrong in some way Daren couldn't name — her face went rigid with something between fear and fury.

"Outsider!" The word cracked across the square like a whip.

Heads turned. Doors that had been cracked open for the evening air slammed shut. A man near the well rose from his seat so fast he knocked over a stool, his hand already closing around something at his belt — a knife, Daren realized, with a fresh wave of nausea. Voices rose, overlapping, none of them in a language Daren recognized and yet all of them perfectly, viscerally clear in their meaning.

Get away. Get out. You are not welcome here.

"Wait —" Daren raised both hands, palms out, the universal gesture for I mean no harm, the only thing he could think to do. "I don't — I'm not trying to —"

A stone struck the ground inches from his foot. Then another, closer.

"I just need help!" His voice cracked on the last word, too loud, too desperate. "Please, I don't know where I am, I just need —"

The man with the knife was moving toward him now, flanked by two others, their faces set with the particular grim purpose of people who had decided, collectively and instantly, what Daren was and what was to be done about it. More stones fell. Somewhere a child was crying, pulled inside by a mother who didn't take her eyes off Daren even as she slammed the shutters.

This is not a dream, some cold and very awake part of Daren's mind informed him. Dreams don't have this much detail. Dreams don't hurt this much when a rock hits your shoulder.

That last thought decided things for him.

Daren ran.

He didn't know the terrain, didn't know which direction led to safety or deeper danger, and in the end it didn't matter — he simply ran away, back into the trees, branches tearing at his arms, lungs burning, the shouts of the villagers fading behind him into the rustle of silver leaves and his own ragged breathing. He didn't stop until his legs gave out beneath him, until he collapsed against the charcoal-black trunk of some ancient tree and pressed both hands over his face and tried, with everything he had left, to simply wake up.

It was there, gasping, half-sobbing with confusion and adrenaline, that the light found him again.

It came the same way it had before — not from any single direction, but from everywhere and nowhere, blooming behind his closed eyes even though they were already squeezed shut. Daren felt his stomach drop the way it does at the top of a roller coaster, felt the ground simply cease to be beneath him, and when he opened his eyes —

He was no longer on the ground at all.