DREAM QUEST

Chapter 2: The Goddess of the Sun

Daren was rising.

Not falling, not floating — rising, smooth and impossibly fast, the dark canopy of silver-leafed trees shrinking beneath him until it was a smudge, until the whole forest was a smudge, until Thornhollow's lantern-lights were nothing but a scattering of orange dust against a violet landscape that was itself shrinking, curving, becoming visibly round at the edges. Daren should have screamed. He found he couldn't. The light that carried him was not hostile — was, if anything, achingly gentle, wrapped around him like something carrying a sleeping child to bed — and somewhere in that gentleness, his terror simply had nowhere to take hold.

The violet sky gave way to true black, scattered with stars unlike any Daren had ever seen from his bedroom window, dense and close and burning in colors he had no names for. And then, ahead of him, the light gathered itself into a shape, and the shape became a place — a vast floor of what looked like beaten gold, suspended in nothing, ringed by pillars of pure white light that hummed faintly, like a sound felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears.

Daren's feet touched down without impact, as though gravity here had been asked, politely, to be gentle with him.

"You may open your eyes fully now," said a voice. "I know the ascent is disorienting, the first time."

He hadn't realized his eyes were only half-open. He opened them the rest of the way, and the breath went out of him entirely.

She was not what he expected, though Daren could not have said what he had expected — something more like a statue, perhaps, cold and distant and carved from marble. Instead, the woman before him looked almost achingly alive, golden-skinned and dark-haired, dressed in robes the color of sunrise that seemed to shift and breathe with their own slow weather. Her eyes, when they met his, were the warm amber-orange of a hearth fire, and they held no menace at all — only a patient, ancient kind of sorrow, the kind Daren recognized, distantly, from his own mother's face on the nights she thought he was already asleep.

"My name is Solenne," the woman said. "I am the Goddess of the Sun. And it is I, Daren Hu, who brought you here."

Daren opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He tried again.

"This is a dream," he managed, though even as he said it, the words felt thinner than they had in the forest, more habit than belief.

Solenne's expression didn't change, exactly, but something in it softened. "It is, in a manner of speaking. And it is not." She moved toward him — not walking so much as drifting, her robes trailing light like a comet's tail — and stopped an arm's length away. "When I called you here, I did not wish to tear you from your life entirely. Your mother does not know you are gone. Your bed is not empty. To everyone who loves you, Daren, you are simply asleep, and dreaming, and you will wake when you have finished what I have asked of you. Until then — yes. This is, in every way that matters to the world you came from, a dream. But I promise you, what happens to you here is real. The pain you felt when that stone struck you. The fear you felt, running. That was real, and I am sorry for it."

"You — " Daren's voice cracked. "You trapped me. In a dream."

"I did." She did not look away from him, did not soften the truth to make it more palatable. "And I will not pretend otherwise, or apologize for the necessity of it, though I am sorry for the fear it has caused you. I needed you here, Daren. The way was through your sleep, because the way is always through sleep — it is the only door between your world and mine thin enough for someone to pass." She paused. "You may leave the way you came. But only once your task is done."

Daren sat down — or rather, his legs simply stopped holding him up, and the golden floor was there to catch him, solid and strangely warm. "What task. What is any of this. Where even is this."

Solenne knelt, gracefully, so that her eyes were level with his. "Let me try to answer all three."

What followed, Daren would later struggle to repeat in order, because Solenne did not explain her world so much as unfold it, layer by layer, the way one might unfold a map too large for any table.

This world had no name that translated cleanly into anything Daren knew, though Solenne called it, simply, the Veil-Lands — a name, she explained, that came from its position: a realm stitched into the seam between the mortal world and the deeper dark beyond it, the place where demons made their home. It was a world soaked in magic the way Daren's world was soaked in sunlight — present everywhere, in the rivers and the soil and the marrow of every living thing, waiting only to be drawn out by those with the gift and the training to do it.

It was also a world of gods. Many gods.

"Above all things," Solenne said, "there is balance. That is the law older than any of us, older than the Veil-Lands themselves. Light requires dark to be seen. Growth requires decay to make room for it. And so the gods you are about to learn of were not born to rule this world, Daren — we were born to tend it. To keep its scales from tipping too far in either direction."

She named them as she walked him — figuratively, for they had not moved from the golden floor — through the heavens of her world.

There was Caelus, the Moon God, Solenne's own brother in spirit if not in blood, cool and watchful where she was warm, governing the tides and the things that moved safely only by night. There was Ignara, Goddess of Fire, fierce and quick-tempered, who had once burned an entire mountain range to stop a plague of shadow-wolves from spreading further, and had been mourning the act, quietly, for three hundred years. There was Undine, Lord of Water, ancient and slow-spoken, who shaped the great rivers that fed every kingdom in the Veil-Lands and who was said to remember the name of every soul ever drowned. There was Terron, the Earth Father, who slept more often than he woke, and whose waking was always accompanied by tremors that toppled towers. And there was Aveline, Goddess of Wind, swift and changeable, who carried messages between the others faster than any of them could travel themselves.

"Six of us, in the great circle," Solenne said. "Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Earth, Wind. There are lesser spirits beneath each of us — patrons of harvest, of healing, of the hunt — but it is the six who hold the deepest covenant. The covenant of non-interference."

"Non-interference," Daren repeated.

"We are forbidden — by a law none of us, even now, fully understand the origin of, only that it has held since before the first mortal kingdom rose — from acting directly upon the mortal world. We cannot strike down a monster ourselves, no matter how it suffers the innocent. We cannot raise an army, or smite a tyrant, or even walk among mortals in this form for longer than the span of a single conversation." Something flickered across her face — old frustration, worn smooth by repetition. "We may guide. We may grant gifts, bless weapons, send omens. We may take disciples, mortals who pledge themselves to our service, and through them act with our blessing, at one remove. But the demons who oppose us labor under no such law."

And there, finally, Solenne told him of the dark at the center of it all: the Demon Lord, Mordrach, who ruled the territories beyond the Veil's furthest edge, who sent his generals and his monsters across the border in slow, patient waves, testing the world's defenses the way water tests a dam for cracks. For a thousand years the gods had held the line through their disciples — warriors, mages, healers, blessed and trained and sent into the dark on the gods' behalf — while the gods themselves stood bound by law, watching, unable to lift a single divine finger to stop the bleeding.

"Villages like the one you stumbled into," Solenne said quietly, "have learned, through hard and bloody history, that strangers from beyond the treeline are sometimes scouts. Sometimes worse. Their fear of you was cruel, and frightening, and I do not excuse it — but it was not born from nothing."

Daren sat with that for a long moment, the golden floor warm beneath him, the strange stars wheeling slowly overhead.

"Okay," he said finally. "I get the world. I get the gods. I get the demons." He looked up at her. "I still don't get why me. I'm nobody. I sell noodles. I'm not — whatever it is you need. A warrior. A hero. I've never held a sword in my life."

For the first time, something like real vulnerability crossed Solenne's golden face.

"Because I could not bear a son," she said simply.

Daren blinked. "What?"

"It is not common knowledge, even among my own disciples, and I tell you now only because you deserve the truth before you agree to anything I ask of you." Solenne's voice had gone quieter, the warmth in it edged with something rawer. "Gods do not bear children the way mortals do, Daren — but we can, when the need is great enough and the cost paid willingly. I tried. I have tried, across centuries, to bring forth a child of my own essence who might stand where I cannot — who might fight where my hands are bound. Each time, the price demanded was too great, or the working failed, or what came was not enough to survive what it would need to face." She looked at him, and there was no theater in it, no performance of divine grief — only plain, exhausted honesty. "I am not asking you to be my son in blood. I am asking because the door that should have opened through birth would not open, and so I searched, instead, for a soul on the other side of the Veil whose threads matched what I needed — courage banked low but real, a heart unhardened by this world's cruelty, hands not yet trained to violence and so not yet limited by any one way of fighting. I found you, Daren Hu, sleeping in a room that smelled of broth and grief for a father who left. I am sorry to have taken you so suddenly. I am not sorry that I chose you."

The silence that followed was long.

"So what happens now," Daren said at last, voice rough.

Solenne rose, and as she did, the warmth in the golden chamber seemed to gather itself, brighten, settle into resolve.

"Now," she said, "you train. I cannot teach you myself — the same law that keeps my hands from the battlefield keeps them, mostly, from the training yard as well. But I have disciples, Daren. Women who have given their lives to my service, who have walked the path you are about to walk and lived to walk it further. I am placing you in their care."

She raised one hand, and the golden light of the chamber began, gently, to part like a curtain.

"They will not go easy on you," Solenne added, almost gently, almost like a warning kindly meant. "But they will not let you fall, either. Not while I have any say in it."