“Don’t take that one,” he said, his voice cracking.
You will remember the facts, the Yumeost said gently. But not the feeling. That is the cost of dreaming. To dream deeply is to wake hollow. I am not cruel, Kael. I am kind. I spare you the weight of a thousand lost worlds.
It existed in the hollow space between sleep and waking, a sprawling metropolis of impossible architecture: staircases that spiraled into starless skies, libraries where the books whispered your name, and a great, silent clock tower whose hands spun backward or forward depending on who was dreaming it. yumeost
For three hundred nights, Kael had come here. He knew the cobbled streets of the Dream Quarter, the taste of the silver milk from the Fountain of Regret, the way the sky turned lavender and bled into rose when a dreamer was about to wake. Yumeost was his refuge, his second life—a place where his legs worked (in the waking world, they did not), where he could run until his lungs burned, where the scars on his face from the accident faded like old paint.
Kael stepped forward. His legs—strong here, perfect here—planted themselves in front of the broom. “No. I want the weight. I want the ache. That’s mine. That’s hers. You can’t have it.” “Don’t take that one,” he said, his voice cracking
He wrote her name. And then he began to build something that even the Yumeost could never sweep away.
In its hands, a broom. At its feet, a pile of things that looked like crumpled film reels, each one flickering with tiny, stolen scenes: a wedding kiss, a child’s first step, a man laughing with friends at a bar. The figure swept them into a black sack. That is the cost of dreaming
“Because if you sweep it away, I’ll forget the way she laughed. I’ll forget the smell of her pancakes. I’ll forget…”