The Dream Realm greeted him with saltwater in his lungs and darkness in every direction.
There was no preamble, no aerial view or Spell narration easing him into the landscape the way the First Nightmare had. One moment Sunny was lying in a pod in the Academy's medical center, and the next he was submerged in freezing black water, blind and choking, his body convulsing as it tried to breathe and swallowed the sea instead.
He'd grown up in the Dream Realm. He'd spent eight years breathing its air, walking its soil, fighting its creatures in the controlled perimeter around Bastion's outer walls. The Dream Realm was not supposed to be unfamiliar.
This was unfamiliar.
His shadow sense activated before his conscious mind caught up, the spatial awareness that let him feel the shape of the darkness around him providing the orientation that his eyes couldn't. Down was heavy and vast, an abyss of pressure that extended further than his sense could reach. Up was lighter, thinner, and somewhere above him was a boundary where the water ended and air began.
He swam.
Teacher Julius had included swimming in his curriculum, and Sunny had treated those sessions with the same diligence he applied to everything, but the gap between a training pool in Bastion and a lightless ocean trying to kill him was the gap between reading about fire and being burned. His muscles screamed from the cold. His lungs burned from the water he'd inhaled. His clothes were gone, stripped away by the crossing, leaving him naked and exposed in water so dark that even his shadow-enhanced vision found nothing to work with.
Something moved below him.
He felt it through the shadow sense before he heard it: a displacement of darkness, massive and slow, rising from the deep with the unhurried patience of something that had never needed to rush because nothing in its territory could escape it. The pressure of its presence pushed against his awareness like a hand pressing down on his chest.
Sunny swam harder.
His head broke the surface and he gasped, sucking air in desperate, ragged pulls that hurt almost as much as the drowning had. The water was black and featureless in every direction, with nothing to distinguish the sea from the sky above it. Just an empty void that extended endlessly, broken only by the slow undulation of waves.
He treaded water and forced himself to think.
The shadow sense was painting a partial picture. Somewhere below and to his left, the massive presence continued its slow patrol, and the scale of it was large enough that Sunny's mind kept trying to reclassify it as terrain rather than creature. Ahead and slightly to the right, at the very edge of his range, something solid broke the waterline: a flat surface, elevated, made of stone.
He swam toward it.
Something surged behind him. A displacement of water so massive that it created a current, pulling him backward even as he kicked forward. The creature from the deep had risen, and whether it was hunting him specifically or simply moving through territory he happened to occupy, the result was the same: he needed to be faster.
The hunger surged, and for the first time since the Nightmare, Sunny didn't fight it. He reached for the water around him and tried to consume.
The ocean pushed back.
The resistance was instant and absolute, a wall of force so far beyond his ability to overcome that his pull didn't register against it at all. It was like pressing his palm against a mountain and trying to take its weight. The shadow he'd reached for wasn't empty or formless. It was dense and alive and immeasurably deep, and the thing it belonged to was so vast that Sunny's awareness couldn't find its edges.
He stopped pulling immediately. Whatever lived in this water, whatever this water was, it operated at a scale that made his Aspect irrelevant. The hunger snarled at being denied, but the survival instinct that Anvil had drilled into him overrode it. He did not try again.
Instead he swam harder, driving his body forward with everything his enhanced physique could produce. His muscles burned and his lungs screamed but the platform was close now, close enough that the shadow sense could map its edges, and Sunny poured everything he had into closing the distance.
Behind him, something else erupted from the water. He felt it through the shadow sense rather than seeing it: a second presence, even larger than the first, colliding with the creature that had been rising toward him. A colossal tentacle broke the surface somewhere to his left, and the impact sent a shockwave through the water that tumbled him sideways. The two presences tangled together and dragged each other down, and Sunny didn't stop to wonder whether the second creature had saved him deliberately or simply chosen that moment to attack its rival.
He reached the stone surface and pulled himself up with arms that shook badly enough to make the simple act of climbing feel like scaling a cliff face. The platform was flat, roughly circular, maybe a dozen meters across, with grooves cut into its surface that suggested it had been shaped by hands rather than weather. He crawled to the center, as far from the water as he could get, and collapsed onto his back. The hunger sat in his chest, unsatisfied and persistent, still raw from the failed attempt to consume.
He was alive. Cold and naked and alone in complete darkness on a stone platform in the middle of a hostile ocean, but alive.
His shadow lay flat against the stone beneath him. He could feel it through the connection, steady and present, and when he spread his shadow sense outward from the platform's edge the darkness resolved into spatial information: the shape of the stone, the depth of the water surrounding it, the slow movement of things far below. He anchored his awareness to the platform and let the sense hold there, a perimeter drawn in darkness.
He was alone. Completely, thoroughly alone, in a way that Bastion had never permitted.
His voice was hoarse from the saltwater when he spoke, and he spoke only because the silence was worse.
"Alright."
He needed to address the immediate problems in order of lethality. Exposure would kill him fastest. He was naked, wet, and the air temperature was warm enough that his breath didn't fog, which meant it was above freezing by a comfortable margin, but the wind and the wet were doing the work that cold air would have done on its own.
He summoned the Puppeteer's Shroud.
Dark grey fabric materialized over his body, and the relief was immediate. The Memory came with a full set of garments including soft-soled leather boots, and the material was dense enough to trap body heat and block the wind that was pushing low across the water's surface.
He lay still for several minutes, letting the Shroud do its work, feeling warmth return to his extremities in slow increments. His breathing steadied. His mind cleared.
He sat up and took inventory.
The platform was the only solid ground he could detect. His shadow sense extended outward in every direction and found nothing but water and the things that moved through it. The massive presence he'd felt during the swim had settled deeper, no longer actively circling but still there, a permanent feature of the underwater landscape that Sunny filed under threats he could not address and therefore had to accept.
Something else was down there too. Smaller presences, dozens of them, moving in patterns that suggested territorial behavior rather than hunting. They stayed near the bottom, or near structures that Sunny's sense registered as vertical formations, tall and dense, submerged deep beneath the waterline. He couldn't determine what the formations were made of, but they were extensive, stretching in every direction like a forest buried under the sea.
Above the water, he had the platform and nothing else.
He checked his Memories. Silver Bell, Puppeteer's Shroud, Last Lesson, Solemn Oath. All present and functional. The Solemn Oath's iron band sat warm against his wrist beneath the Shroud's sleeve.
The mission. Sunny allowed himself to think about it for the first time since the water had hit.
He was in the Dream Realm. The Spell deposited Dreamers across the realm's vast geography with no regard for proximity, which meant that Nephis could be on the other side of the world. Caster could be anywhere. Cassia could be drowning in this same ocean or standing on solid ground a thousand kilometers away. The only thing resembling hope was that Rock had mentioned Sleepers from the same cohort sometimes appeared in the same region, but "sometimes" was not a guarantee, and "same region" could mean a territory the size of a continent.
Rough proximity, in a featureless ocean, could mean anything.
Sunny's operational priorities reorganized themselves with the efficiency of long practice. Immediate survival was handled: he had shelter, clothing, and his Memories. Short-term survival required water and food, neither of which the platform provided. Medium-term survival required information: where was he, what was the geography of this region, where were the other Sleepers, and where was the nearest Gateway.
Long-term survival required finding Nephis, because the mission required proximity, and because the Dream Realm killed people who were alone, and Sunny had spent enough years in Bastion to know that solitary operatives in hostile territory had a shelf life measured in days rather than weeks.
He also needed to find her because Caster needed to find her, and Caster's ability to complete the mission depended on Sunny's ability to maintain access to the target.
And underneath all of that, in the part of his mind that he didn't examine too closely, he needed to find her because the last time he'd seen her she'd been sitting alone in the Academy cafeteria with headphones on, looking like a lonely girl who was about to be thrown into a world that wanted to kill her, and the image had lodged itself in his memory in a place that the mission briefings didn't occupy.
He put that thought in the file. The file didn't object. It was getting used to the company.
There was nothing to do until dawn, assuming dawn existed in this place. The Dream Realm's day cycle varied by region, and some areas existed in permanent darkness, which would make his situation significantly worse. He couldn't navigate, couldn't forage, couldn't scout beyond the range of his shadow sense, and he couldn't sleep because the platform offered no protection from whatever might climb up from the water while he wasn't watching.
He sat in the center, wrapped in the Puppeteer's Shroud, and waited.
The ocean moved around him. The presences below continued their slow patrols. The wind pushed across the water and over the platform and into the darkness beyond, carrying nothing.
Hours passed. Sunny measured them by his heartbeat and the slow rotation of his shadow. The monotony of it was worse than the danger had been because monotony gave his mind room to wander, and his mind, when it wandered, went to places that weren't useful.
He thought about Anvil. About the grey stone of Bastion and the enchanted lanterns and the training yards where he'd learned to kill things before he'd learned to cook for himself. About the anatomy primer and the way the page on cervical vertebrae had creased from being opened too many times. About Lira, who had been kind to him without being warm, and who had looked at him sometimes with an expression he now suspected was grief.
He thought about the fact that he was alone for the first time in his life in a way that Bastion had never permitted, because Bastion had always had walls and schedules and the knowledge that Anvil was somewhere in the fortress, planning and watching and maintaining the architecture of Sunny's purpose. Here there were no walls. No schedules. No architecture.
Just water, and darkness, and the sound of his own breathing, and the iron band warm on his wrist.
Something changed.
It was subtle enough that Sunny almost missed it: a shift in the quality of the darkness at one edge of the sky, the black softening to something that wasn't quite grey but wasn't quite black either. The shift expanded slowly, a gradient spreading across the horizon like ink diluting in water.
Dawn. There was a dawn.
Sunny stood and faced the lightening sky and felt something he hadn't expected. Relief, certainly, because light meant information and information meant options. But underneath the relief, something older and less rational: the simple, animal comfort of knowing that the darkness wasn't permanent, that the world still had a cycle, that time still moved forward and carried him with it.
The pale sun crested the horizon, and the dark sea began to change.