Luke had been inside my dreamscape before, so he admired the scenery but didn’t nerd out too much. Morgan, meanwhile, made a noise at a pitch I was pretty sure humans couldn’t even hear, and ran over to the pond to dip a hand in it. Then she turned around to face me, beaming like a little kid.

“It’s wet!”

I had to smile too. “Breaking news: water is in fact wet.”

“No, but I mean, when you said it would be a dream, I thought it would feel dreamy. Everything feels real! And it looks real, too! This is the coolest thing ever.”

“It’s not bad. Not very practical, but fun to mess around with.” I twirled my fingers for dramatic effect, and in the distance a t-rex roared as it started running across the clouds that spread out below our mountaintop.

“No! It’s so cool! You can do anything you want, anywhere you want, any time you want! I wanna have magic like yours. Um, no offence Luke, yours is pretty cool too.”

“None taken. They’re all different kinds of cool, and I’m sure yours will be really cool too once you awaken.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Just like that, Morgan was sitting on the ground, knees pulled up against her chest with her arms wrapped around them. You didn’t actually need to move in the dreamscape, just decide to be somewhere different and there you were. I got the impression Morgan didn’t actually realise what she’d done, though.

“Something wrong?”, Luke asked her.

“Just… is it normal to be scared?”

“About what?”

“Awakening. A month ago I was like, hey, I’m trying to get my degree, and now I have to get magic powers so that I don’t get eaten by monsters. What if something goes wrong, and I can’t do it? Or what happens if I get something really lame, like the power to levitate cheese? Or like, mind control, or shooting lightning out of my eyes, so all I’m good for is hurting people?”

“That’s totally normal,” Luke said. “I was scared about that sort of thing too, and I’d been preparing for it my whole life. This is a big important change in your life, anybody would be nervous.”

“Besides,” I added, “does it matter if it’s normal? I’ve met normal people, and they are incredibly boring.”

“Heh. Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“But yeah, you probably aren’t going to get exactly what you hoped for. I don’t think anybody does, magic has a funny sense of humour. I sure as hell didn’t expect to end up being an insomniac with dream magic, trust me. But you’re right, it is cool, even if it’s not the thing that I wanted, and I’ll tell you what: if you do end up with cheese magic, you would make a kickass dairy witch. Your enemies will tremble at the thought of your Fondue of Terror.”

That got an actual laugh out of her.

“And it’s not like your magic is totally one hundred percent locked in,” Luke said. “Even if you don’t like what you get, you might be able to change it a little.”

“Wait, seriously?”, I asked.

“You didn’t know?” He looked at me like a goat who’d decided to lick a fence, only to discover too late that it was electrified.

“Hey, we don’t all come from famous families with giant arcane libraries in our basements.”

“Oh crap, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I was just surprised because you’re normally so knowledgable, but everyone has gaps in their knowledge, there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m sure there’s heaps of things you know that I don’t.”

I could have poked him further, but he was already on the edge of having a heart attack, so I decided to show mercy.

“It’s fine, I’m screwing with you. But you’ve got me curious now. What do you mean?”

“Well, your magic comes from who you are and your bond, so if either of those things changes in a big way then it can shift how your magic works. Plus you can learn how to do things that you couldn’t before, just like learning to play the piano or something. It’s not something where you can totally change what you’re capable of, you couldn’t switch from fire magic to ice magic or something, but if you did have cheese powers, you might be able to learn how to do yoghurt too, or… something else that makes sense with that metaphor.”

“Huh. Good to know. Anyway, Morgan, if you want to talk more about that stuff, we can. We’ve got all night.”

“Maybe during? It’d be good to have a distraction.”

“Good idea. And speaking of which, how much of this was you actually being stressed over awakening, and how much was stalling?”

She winced. “Can’t it be both?”

“Eh, that’s fair. But we should get around to doing this thing.”

Morgan took a deep breath and nodded, making her thick curls bounce in a way that completely undermined her serious expression, and Luke came closer to stand by her and give moral support.

There were two ways people reacted when they found out you were a werewolf. Most freaked. The more enlightened ones might try to hide it and say that oh, it’s not your fault, I know you aren’t going to try to eat me, but even if you couldn’t smell the fear it was pretty easy to tell they weren’t comfortable around you. All the nervous looks, the widened eyes, the classic “oops we forgot to tell you we were moving to the other side of the country”, it was a lot less subtle than people thought.

The second group was the folks who got really, really horny.

Morgan was in the first group, thank god, and unlike most she even had a good excuse for being uncomfortable. Turned out, when you’d had a phobia of anything dog-like for half your life, finding out that phobia was irrational didn’t actually make it go away overnight. And also unlike most, she’d admitted that she had an issue, she’d apologised to us for feeling that way even though it wasn’t her fault, and she was actively trying to move past it. I couldn’t hold any resentment towards her after all that, and I was an exceptionally good resentment holder.

I started things out with the gentlest touch I’d been able to think of. First rule of exposure therapy, according to an hour of internet research: start out safe and distant, then gradually increase the intensity when they were comfortable, just like dipping your toes into the pool rather than diving straight in. I plonked a big leather couch in front of the pond and placed the three of us on it with Morgan in the middle, then put a painfully adorable golden retriever puppy right on the edge of the water, splashing around and getting her paws and big floppy ears wet. Luke made a sound that told me either that he thought she was cute or that something had just hit him in the balls.

“Aww, puppy,” Morgan said quietly.

“You okay with little dogs?”

“More okay.”

“Should I bring her in closer?”

“I could handle closer. No touching, though.”

The puppy started to trot in towards us. I let her move naturally, shaking the water off her fur, meandering a bit and stopping to sniff at some interesting scents I placed in the grass for her, which had the added benefit of giving Morgan more time to adjust to the approaching dog. She stopped once she reached Luke’s feet.

“You want to pet her?”, I asked him. He didn’t need to answer, I could see the cartoon stars in his eyes. He leaned down right away, yoinked her up onto his lap, and started scratching her belly. I had her enjoy the pats for a while before flipping over and falling asleep, sprawled across Luke’s knees. Morgan tensed up some, but I couldn’t smell any real fear coming off her, and my nose actually worked here. My dream-self didn’t have to wear any bracelets.

“So, magic stuff,” she said. “Um. Can’t think of any questions. Brain no braining.”

Luke said, “You were talking about what you’re worried about with your awakening. What about the opposite? What are you hoping for?”

“I dunno. I mean, I like food, so maybe I get cooking magic and I can make that Fondue of Terror after all, but that’s too obvious isn’t it? None of you got magic that’s just your hobby. But I do want a familiar.”

“Good choice,” I said. “Can’t wait to meet your kitty.”

“I didn’t say it would be a cat!”

“You didn’t need to.”

She smiled, a little sheepishly. I used the lull in the conversation as a chance to make the puppy shift a little, yawn and then settle back down to sleep. Morgan flinched when her mouth opened, but otherwise kept her cool.

The silence stretched a little longer, then she said to me, “I never met your familiar.”

“He’s a free spirit, even I don’t see him that often. I’ll see if he wants to introduce himself.”

I could’ve made a dream version of him and had him do whatever I wanted, but I’d always maintained that it’s a breach of etiquette to create soulless automaton duplicates of people you know, and in this one case I didn’t need to. Normally I couldn’t share a dream with someone unless they were asleep near me, but some part of him being my familiar meant the rules didn’t apply.

We didn’t communicate with words. He understood them, but it wasn’t necessary. I reached out to him with my mind, and as fast as thoughts could form he knew exactly what the situation was and what I wanted. He let me feel that he was considering it, then suddenly I had a parrot on my shoulder.

“Yarrr,” I said. “Morgan, meet Edmund. Edmund, Morgan.”

She reached out a hand, and he jumped onto it. Before she could react, he’d hopped further along her arm and grabbed one of the buttons on her blouse with his beak, trying to yank it off. She squeaked and tried to get out from under him without actually tossing him off, but he was bigger than the average bird and very determined.

“Ed, play nice,” I warned him.

He squawked and informed me that he was playing nice, and if Morgan didn’t appreciate good clean fun then that was her fault, not his. He did relent though, jumping off her and all the way back onto my shoulder. That jump was big enough to involve a bit of flapping, so he was able to show off the very handsome orange feathers on the underside of his wings, a sharp contrast to the dull brownish green on the rest of him. Then he changed my shirt into a violently red monstrosity covered in sequins, buttons and zippers, and started attacking everything that now hung off it. He could edit my dreams just as easily as I could, the little scamp.

Now that she was free, Morgan was able to take a minute to admire him. “He’s very pretty. Much nicer than Charity’s creepy spider.”

I had to maneuver my head around a faceful of parrot before I could respond. “Eh, Chloe’s a sweetie. She might have a few too many legs, but she’s much better behaved than this fellow.” Ed responded by gently pecking me on the nose.

We kept admiring him for a while, me doing my best to teach Morgan how he liked his feathers stroked while he kept somehow sticking those feathers in my mouth, then he decided to go get food and vanished just as abruptly as he’d arrived. Things started to settle back down after that, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Morgan haltingly begin to inch a hand towards the puppy on Luke’s lap. Luke seemed to notice too, because he went back in to the ‘come up with distractions’ plan.

“So, Morgan. Has anyone told you what awakening is actually like?”

“Kind of? Charity explained it to me, but it was a bit confusing. Then she told me that if I wasn’t a bit confused then I wasn’t paying attention.”

“She’s not wrong, it’s very individualised, so there aren’t a lot of real rules about how it works. But I was thinking, if Alex is okay with it, I could hijack the dream to show you what it was like for me?”

“Sure. Just focus on your memories and I’ll bring them out here.” He could’ve brought the memories in by himself, but it was a lot easier for me. I didn’t even need to know which memories I was grabbing, I just told the dream to show us Luke’s awakening and he supplied all the details. It wasn’t a precise science though, which was why I needed him to focus on specific memories first. Otherwise we could end up seeing any number of strange and disturbing things as the train in his mind travelled down the twisted railway of thought.

The pond didn’t disappear exactly, but another scene was superimposed over it. A scrawny young boy with spiked-up blue hair was sitting on his bedroom floor in a meditative pose, eyes scrunched up in concentration. The room looked a lot messier than I’d expected, but I couldn’t see many details. Anything that Luke wasn’t focusing on got vague and blurred around the edges, and started blending back into the pond, so there were patches of water among the carpet and lilies floating on the bed.

“Oh my god, you never told us you were cute!”, Morgan said.

“I’m still cute!”, Luke said proudly.

He definitely looked different to how I’d expected. You could see the resemblance if you looked hard enough, but if I hadn’t known this was Young Luke I wouldn’t have guessed it. Puberty and years of exercise had bulked him out a lot.

“What was special about that day?”, I asked him. You didn’t just decide one day to awaken. There was a lot of buildup to it, you had to start by learning to wiggle your toes until one day you could walk up to the edge, but you couldn’t jump off by yourself. It didn’t have to be big, but there needed to be something else to push you.

“Nothing really. Just, that was the day the Dragon Knyght film came out.”

“Oh I loved those books!”, Morgan said. Then she cocked her head to the side. “But um, weird question, why did you like them? Isn’t fantasy just reality for you?”

“Not the parts that I care about. Not that I don’t care about the magic and fighting and dragons and stuff, dragons are really cool, but the important part is, how do I say it… Heroes. If you’re a good person, you fight for what you believe in, and you truly care about others, then you’ll overcome any odds, defeat any evil, save the world. Reality’s full of moral greyness and unavoidable tragedy, but in fantasy, people really can live happily ever after. Getting to see Dragon Knyght, it reminded me of all of that. I wanted to be a hero like Knyght, so I could make our world just a little bit more like his.”

Whether it was coincidental timing or brought on by that speech, the scene in front of us started to shift. Young Luke’s eyes opened, and I could feel the moment where he dropped off the ledge and found out he could fly.

Magic felt different in his memory than it did to me, which would have weirded me out if I hadn’t already experienced Grace’s memories of using magic in the same way. Luke had been utterly focused on the fire within, his drive to be the hero from his stories and help people. For him, in the moment he finally dove deep enough to touch that fire, he realised that it hadn’t just been inside him. Magic was a raging inferno spread across the world, and it was an ocean whose tide he couldn’t have resisted even if he’d tried. The humble scene of a kid’s bedroom burned away to ashes, revealing something deeper beneath: a picturesque countryside, with a small town off in the distance, all thatched rooftops and smoking chimneys.

Well that was disappointingly mundane.