In her senior year of high school, Natalie Hope reunites with her friends, Adam and Barbara, at the funeral of the fourth member of their once-close gang, Jake. They remember the made-up superhero game they played as kids called "the Astronites," wh...
An aroma of star cookies, honeymilk, and chocolate lifted Natalie out of her slumber. She opened her eyes and sat up in bed with the pennar in her right hand. She wasn't in the Heltest Eye, but rather in a very familiar bedroom on someone's home moon.
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"Aleph!" Natalie joyfully exclaimed.
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Aleph sat next to her just as Natalie remembered him the first time they met — white-haired and clothed in his golden-starred navy robe. She threw her arms around him.
"Care for some?" Aleph chuckled as he held out his roasted softstone.
Natalie happily accepted the softstone and inhaled. Waves of chocolatey essence dribbled into her heart. She turned aside and euphorically devoured a plate of star cookies and glass of honeymilk on the bedside table.
Natalie froze. "Aleph, am I . . . dead?" she asked.
"No, you're not," he answered, twiddling with his beard. "This is a shared dream, one that you and I inhabit together. It's like a lucid dream, only much more realistic."
Natalie looked down at the pennar in her hand. "I must still be using the pennar in the real world," she realized. "And because you and I are thinking of each other, we can talk to one another. Does this mean I'm using . . . Insistium?" Natalie guessed.
Aleph smirked. "Alas, no. You are using Imagnium Indeliberatium Engagium — Engagium for short. Unconscious, voluntary imagination. You participate and interact with the dream, but your subconscious builds the environment and the people in it."
Natalie looked at the spiraling supernova above her. "Are my friends here?" she asked.
"I'm afraid not," Aleph regretfully replied. "I am only dreaming of you, and you are only dreaming of me. We are the sole wanderers of this dream world we constructed for ourselves."
Natalie's eyes dropped to the bedside table. Behind the plate of star cookies was a faded photograph of a little girl playing on her mother's lap. The mother sat on a bench in front a bush overgrown with pink, springtime roses.
"Is that . . . Magda?" Natalie asked, saying the name for the first time in many years. "Back on Earth, Mister Eleph had a wife named Magda."
"Yes, it is," Aleph bitterly smiled. "And that's my daughter, Sasha."
