Calm days followed this uproar. We had our usual group training lessons with Captain Alea, and then there were theory classes with some of the top knights, and even survival training with Peot themself. I still had magecraft lessons with Mage Discordia, but it seemed more and more like she was studying me rather than trying to teach me. Arden started to join in on those lessons too, and she was very talented, which helped our burgeoning friendship for some reason. I thought it was just that she was less antagonistic towards me now that she had something that she was better at than me. I didn’t mind. It was nice getting along with her and Leo, and sometimes we even played outside of lessons in the gardens of the palace.

All of this was enough that I managed to contain the impulse to keep practicing on my own. Mostly. Sometimes I would practice combat moves in my room at night, especially after bad dreams, but I stopped trying to sneak into the training grounds.

The days turned to years, which turned to weeks and months and years. As I grew older, the dreams got even more detailed, until it finally happened. After one particularly long dream when I was nine, I woke up with a strange feeling. You know how sometimes it’s hard to remember a dream, as though it’s slipping away as you try to hold onto it? Well, it wasn’t that. I remembered the dream perfectly. In it, I and the woman – who seemed to be dream-me’s only friend, and, I was slowly realizing, maybe something more – were reading a book. A book they’d read before, but this time, it was like the dream was about the story in the book. I woke remembering every detail of it perfectly, as though I had just read the book myself.

The story was about a girl in the countryside who, through a number of trials and lots of stuff I won’t get into right now, learns she’s actually the lost first daughter of the formerly exiled and now-dead crown prince. By then, she’s an accomplished warrior mage, working as a wandering knight. She is welcomed into the royal family by her grandmother, the Empress of Pyllia. The rest of her new family welcomes her as well, even her uncle the current crown prince, who could very well have been jealous and nervous to have a new person right after her in the line of succession. Only one person doesn’t welcome her: Princess Gardenia, formerly the third in line to the throne, and now the fourth. She is an ambitious, ruthless monster of a woman, who tries to kill the new crown princess in all sorts of schemes and plots. Eventually, she is disowned by the Empress and sentenced to exile, where she summons a demon to help her get her revenge. In the process, she accidentally opens the gates to the demonic plane, nearly bringing about the end of the world. The heroic crown princess defeats the invading army of infernal creatures and kills the evil Gardenia.

Maybe you can see why this might have made me wonder about a few things. It was… unsettling to say the least.

I woke up from the dream in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, the light from a nearly-full moon illuminating my room. I jumped up and started pacing the room restlessly, nervous and being forced to confront something I’d avoided thinking about: the question of what exactly my dreams were. I had wondered about it before, a little bit, but really I hadn’t cared too much. I mostly thought they were just cool dreams, ones that reflected how awesome I was at fighting. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

I sat down and made a list of the things I knew:

-           One, in the dreams, I was a warrior in a very different kind of world

-           Two, in real life, I seemed to have been born with the skills and instincts of a warrior already built-in

-           Three, I had just dreamed of a book that was about my family

-           Four, in other dreams, I’d read books about people being born with memories of previous lives, or transported into the world of novels

-           And five, in the book about my family, I was a villain

All in all, not great.

If you added it all up, it seemed like my dreams and abilities were memories and skills from my previous life (which, by the way, looked like it had mostly sucked.) Not only that, but the world I was in now was somehow predicted in a novel I had read in my previous life, and I was currently the villainess of the story, destined to bring about calamity and die horribly. Why exactly I would bother to do all that was beyond me, but that’s what was written, and the rest of it all summed together – mostly the fact that I was already a genius warrior – hardly seemed like it could be a coincidence. If it weren’t for that, I might have assumed my dreams were just due to having a fantastic imagination.

I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night, and come morning, I was a distracted mess still trying to think through it all. I mean, imagine learning you were either a) possibly having delusions or b) the big bad guy in your world. It was scary to think I might lose everything I had started to value so much. And it was even scarier to think I might be capable of the terrible things from that book.

I wish I could say I sat down and made a plan immediately, but instead I just sort of freaked out for the whole day. I was worried and unwilling to confide in anyone, so I just stayed in my room, going over all my past dreams in my head and wondering what other books from those dreams were actually real worlds somewhere.