Flecks of bone dust floated down from the flat roof of the dockside warehouse, landing on the cobbles below like a thin scattering of unmelting snow.

Hunched, partly deformed figures dressed in early modern working men’s clothes hauled cargo from the warehouse onto waiting wagons, entirely oblivious to the boy sat perched about ten metres above their heads.

Dorian ignored the constructs going about their work below him, concentrating instead on the unnaturally jagged whalebone that he’d liberated from the same warehouse less than an hour before. The tip of his knife dragged precise grooves across the surface of the bone, pausing occasionally as his off-hand brushed away the excess down onto the busy street below.

Materials liberated from the City were unique in that – no matter into whose dream they were taken – they retained a consistent form and shape. Although his own dreams were safer and kept him better hidden from the City’s nightmare denizens, something about the permanence of the place kept him coming back, even on his downtime.

Impermanence could be a terrible thing when one was trying to collate information about one’s situation, after all. The boy’s journal, as a prime example, could only serve him if he could be sure that its contents were not subject to change and misremembering. As such, the one he currently used was not of his own making, but stolen from behind the counter of one of the City’s many shops.

His clothes and many of his other limited possessions hailed from similar origins, although he was equally well aware that not everything benefited from a consistent, unmalleable form. The knife in his hand was a construct: a simple figment of his imagination that only existed when he needed it. No storage or upkeep required.

Similarly, the sword he kept in case of emergencies belonged solely to the confines of his mind. It was there when he needed it, it couldn’t be stolen, and – as he had discovered – his mental image of it could slowly change over time, gradually moulding the weapon into a more effective form with each and every use.

He scraped away another long groove in the whalebone and wiped away the dust, glancing between the dark spires of the looming cityscape ahead and his rendering thereof as he decided which part to carve next. He could have created a construct of whalebone. He could even have created one pre-etched with any image he liked. But if he wanted the image to remain true and unchanging, then he had to find the materials and etch it for himself the old-fashioned way.

The familiar glow of the ethereal butterfly fluttered into his peripheral vision. He did his best to ignore it and focus on his work, but found himself having to stop as the creature came to rest atop the whalebone in his lap, just as he was done brushing it clear.

‘And what do you want me to do about it?’ he asked the glimmering insect. ‘I said I’d help her, didn’t I?’

The butterfly remained where it had landed, gently flexing its wings, and sending slow, rolling waves through the gossamer strands that trailed in its wake. Dorian huffed and gave the creature an exasperated look.

‘It’s a big city, you know!’ he exclaimed, casting his hand out across the vast skyline to underline his point. ‘If anyone’s going to be able to work out where her brother went, it’s her, not me. Best I can do is try and keep her safe, but I can’t exactly do that when it’s the middle of the day and she’s not even asleep yet, can I?’

He waited for the butterfly to move, slowly losing patience as it fanned its wings out and settled down more fully onto the whalebone, practically blending in as it did so like a moth against tree bark.

‘No,’ he told the insect. ‘I’m not going searching for the one empty dream in all of Holmstowe just to prove he’s somewhere in the City. Have you any idea how long that would take? How many dreams I’d have to sift through just to—’

He lifted his gaze and frowned out to the distant spires, before lowering it again and frowning more intently at the slender white butterfly obscuring his carving.

‘It’s daytime…’ he realised, the butterfly flexing all three pairs of its wings in sequence as if to encourage his line of thinking. ‘Barely anyone’s going to be asleep right now except night workers and…’ The butterfly took flight, drawing the boy’s eye as it circled triumphantly overhead. ‘…coma patients…’

***

There were three ways to deal with other dreamers’ constructs, in Dorian’s experience. The first – which was his go-to method – was to be easygoing and flexible when interacting. Invariably, they would treat him as an extension of the dreamer from whom they had originated and, generally, this was the best way to navigate other people’s dreamscapes without drawing any attention.

The second was to be firm and direct. This would usually mark him out as a foreign entity, causing most constructs to become confused and pliable. It could be a useful technique, but it could also – on rare occasions – instigate a kind of psychic immune response, which wasn’t something Dorian wanted to be on the receiving end of again, if he could help it.

Here, though, as he trudged through the vividly swampy muck encircling the ruined fortress and spied the sorry band of armoured men that had set up camp within, the young man couldn’t help but get a little excited at the rare opportunity to utilise the third method. It wasn’t something he’d found himself needing to do very often outside of the City, but he’d discovered some time back that, if he made himself fit in – if he played the role of a constituent part of the dream – then the constructs would accept him as just another one amongst their number.

He was generally more of a non-fiction reader, but stories of knights and chivalry had always held a special place in his heart. After hours spent sifting through the grey, foggy dreams of tired and unimaginative night workers, the prospect of engaging with whatever was going on here had his interest firmly piqued.

Stepping into the encampment within the rubble, he willed a steel cuirass into being around his chest and a set of Romanesque pteruges around his waist, recontextualising the lower half of his City-made Victorian frock coat into a more setting-appropriate war skirt. Pulling his familiar single-edged claymore into existence and balancing it on his now-armoured shoulder, he took a good look around the camp and inhaled deeply of the cool, mud-scented air.

The soldiers here looked like they’d just lost a particularly gruelling battle. Only about ten of what was probably originally many more men remained, and the vast majority huddled around a campfire looking like they’d rather be anywhere else in the world than here.

To the contrary, Dorian had to actively work to hide his glee. Everything about this place, from the period, to the mood, to the gritty realism of it all was more harmlessly stimulating than anything the boy had come across in quite a long while. If this turned out to indeed be whose subconscious he thought it was, then he could only imagine that the two of them would get along very well should they ever formally meet.

Picking out who he assumed to be the highest-ranking of the men, Dorian marched over to him, doing his best to retain a dour outward expression as he passed the soldiers at the campfire.

‘What ails you, Sir Knight?’ he asked the grizzled, crestfallen-looking man, revelling in his surroundings even as he tried to remember he was here to do a job himself.

‘That’d be the Demon of the Valley, lad,’ the man growled through his beard. ‘All but nine of us, torn asunder… And our champion’s yet to return.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry fool. Went back in to face the thing alone…’

‘Then you’ll be glad to hear I’m the vanguard for your relief,’ Dorian replied. ‘Reinforcements will be here shortly, Sir Knight, but in the meantime, point me to your champion that I might aid him in his fight?’

***

The pale butterfly descended from the rotting trees to perch on Dorian’s shoulder as the armoured boy merrily waded his way through the swamp.

‘I am looking for him,’ he assured the insect, ‘I promise. I’m allowed to enjoy myself along the way, aren’t I…?’

He continued onward, pulling himself up onto a patch of higher ground and out of the muck dragging at his boots. Once he was steady, he paused for a moment as he felt the luminous insect’s tiny gaze boring into the side of his skull.

‘Look,’ he told it, gesturing to the valley ahead, ‘this is the most vivid one we’ve found today by far. If it’s not Zoe’s brother’s dream, I’ll eat my cravat, okay?’

The butterfly didn’t respond, but Dorian felt judged all the same.

‘Just… let me slay the Demon of the Valley, please…? It sounds awesome, and it’ll only take a minute…’

Stony silence.

‘I’m not getting distracted, I promise,’ the boy insisted. ‘If there’s a dreamer in this valley fighting a demon, then we move on.’

His face slowly broke into a smile as the butterfly seemed to relax its wings.

‘C’mon,’ he told it, shrugging it back into the air and making a beeline for the valley entrance, ‘you can be my lookout!’

***

‘Goddamnit…’ Dorian sighed, watching from his hiding place behind a fallen log as a gnarled, many-legged monster noisily devoured what was left of the Demon of the Valley. The white butterfly perched curiously atop his head, gently adjusting its wings for balance as it seemed to watch along with him.

The monster was clearly from the City: the main giveaway being the fact that the face stretched gruesomely around its devouring, toothy mandibles looked distinctly like it had once belonged to a person. Additionally, the tatters of its stained, once-white garments were a much better fit for a modern doctor or scientist than anything out of a medieval fantasy.

‘Didn’t even know they went for constructs…’ Dorian muttered. ‘Guess it must’ve got really hungry.’

Not liking his chances in a fight against the interloper, the boy glanced skyward, hoping to spot the moon, but instead finding a canopy of twisted trees far above blotting out what little of the sky was visible beyond the valley walls. So much for a quick exit.

A cursory scan of the widened section of the valley where the demon had been lurking revealed little. The island betwixt the bifurcated stream that flowed through the rest of the valley in a single channel almost looked like an arena purpose-made for a fight. It was just a shame that the relatively harmless construct demon therein had been replaced with something far more threatening before Dorian had arrived.

‘Hey!’ he hissed, watching as the white butterfly flapped clear of his head and flew out into the open, ‘get back here!’ The fragile creature ignored him, instead skirting around the feasting monster to settle on a crooked tree on the other side of the valley.

Gritting his teeth, Dorian kept his eye firmly on the monster, waiting for it to bury its mandibles in the dead construct’s body before dashing across behind it in a hurried crouch. The moment he had cleared both channels of the stream, he pressed himself hard into the side of the crooked tree and back out of sight.

‘The hell’re you—’

He’d barely started to chastise the rogue butterfly for its carelessness when he saw the unnatural twist of geometry in the valley wall, largely obscured from where he'd been hiding before.

‘Ah…’ he muttered, setting his jaw as he spotted the moonlit glow of Drey Island’s lighthouse on the other side of the rift. ‘Think that’s a confirmation on Zoe’s brother, then…’ He inhaled deeply, turning his head back to check on the monster before he departed.

His heart lurched in his chest as his gaze fell upon stretched skin, sharp insectile legs, and an enormous set of mandibles mere inches from his face, their owner opening them wide to the sound of a hungry and predatory screech.