The Gateway swallowed him whole.
There was no warning and no ceremony. Anvil had walked Sunny through a series of underground corridors beneath a building that looked, from the outside, like an ordinary government facility. At the end of the last corridor, behind a door that required Anvil's palm print, retinal scan, and a spoken phrase in a language Sunny didn't recognize, there was a room.
In the center of the room, reality was torn open.
Sunny had seen Nightmare Gates on the news, broadcast from a safe distance through armored camera drones. They were violent things, ragged wounds in the fabric of the world that spilled darkness and horror into the streets. This was different. The rift was stable and contained, framed by massive pylons of humming metal, its edges precise and clean. It looked less like a wound and more like a door that someone had cut into the air with surgical care.
Through it, Sunny could see light. Not the weak, filtered light of the city, but something warmer and stranger, the color of late afternoon falling on white stone.
"Once you cross," Anvil said, "you cannot return to the waking world until you have completed your First Nightmare. Leaving the Dream Realm triggers the Spell."
He said it the same way he said everything: without inflection, without emphasis, as though he were describing the chemical composition of water.
Sunny looked at the Gateway, then back at Anvil.
"How long will that be?"
"When you're ready."
"And who decides when I'm ready?"
Anvil's grey eyes settled on him with that same appraising stillness.
"I do."
Sunny thought about this. He was eight years old, and he had just been told that he was about to leave the only world he had ever known, with no guarantee of when or whether he would return. The rational response was fear. The survival-oriented response was refusal.
But the outskirts had taught Sunny a different kind of arithmetic. On one side of the equation was the life he was leaving behind: starvation, cold, the slow grinding certainty of an early death in a place where no one would notice. On the other side was the unknown, which was vast and dark and full of things he couldn't predict.
The unknown was terrifying. But at least it contained the possibility of something other than what he already had.
He stepped through the Gateway.
The first thing he noticed was the air.
It was clean. Not filtered-clean, not sterile-clean, but genuinely, fundamentally pure in a way that made every breath he'd ever drawn in the outskirts feel like inhaling through a dirty rag by comparison. It filled his lungs and kept going, reaching into parts of his chest that had never been properly oxygenated, and for a disorienting moment Sunny felt lightheaded, almost drunk, as though his body didn't know what to do with this much of a good thing.
The second thing he noticed was the lake.
It stretched in every direction, vast and tranquil, its surface so still that it reflected the sky like polished glass. And rising from the center of that impossible mirror, as though growing directly from the water itself, was a castle.
Sunny had seen castles before, in the dramas and webtoons about the Awakened that flickered across communal screens in the outskirts. Those castles were impressive in the way that special effects were impressive: you knew they were fake even while you were admiring them. This castle was not impressive. It was absolute. It was so large that Sunny's eyes couldn't hold all of it at once, so tall that its highest towers seemed to pierce the clouds, so old that the grey stone of its walls had been scarred by what must have been a thousand sieges without breaking. It sat upon the lake like a mountain sits upon the earth, with the quiet authority of something that had always been there and always would be.
It was Bastion. The seat of Clan Valor. The greatest human citadel in the Dream Realm.
And it was, Sunny realized with a slowness that embarrassed him, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Anvil stepped through the Gateway behind him. The shimmer that had surrounded his body in the waking world was gone. Here, in the Dream Realm, the air didn't buckle under his presence. The ground didn't crack beneath his boots. He stood straighter, breathed deeper, and something in his posture loosened by a fraction of a degree, as though a tension he'd been carrying for years had finally been allowed to ease.
He looked, for just a moment, like he belonged.
"Welcome to the Dream Realm," Anvil said.
It was not a greeting. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the same flat precision he applied to everything, and Sunny understood even then that the words contained no warmth because the man who spoke them had decided, long ago, that warmth was something he could not afford.
They crossed the lake by ferry. The boat was pulled by something beneath the water, something large enough that its wake sent gentle waves lapping against the hull but quiet enough that Sunny couldn't hear it. He gripped the railing and watched the castle grow, its details resolving as they approached like a painting being assembled stroke by stroke.
He could see streets now, and buildings, and the tiny shapes of people moving along the walls. The lowest ring of the citadel was built directly into the lakeshore, its white stone foundations disappearing beneath the waterline. Above it, ring after ring of walls and towers rose in concentric layers, each one higher than the last, until the whole structure tapered toward a central keep that caught the late afternoon light and blazed like a beacon.
There were Awakened on the walls. Sunny could tell because they moved differently from normal people, with a fluidity and precision that marked them as something more than human. Some wore armor. Some carried weapons that shimmered faintly, catching light that wasn't there. A few simply stood and watched the approaching ferry with the calm, predatory alertness of people who were not accustomed to being afraid.
Sunny had never seen an Awakened in person. He'd seen them on screens, in the dramas and news broadcasts that filtered into the outskirts through communal terminals, but those images had always felt distant and abstract, the same way footage of natural disasters felt abstract until the water was at your door. The people on these walls were not abstract. They radiated a quiet lethality that Sunny could feel even from a distance, like standing near a high-voltage fence and sensing the current humming through the wire.
And yet none of them radiated anything close to what Anvil did. When the patriarch of Clan Valor stepped off the ferry and onto the dock, every Awakened within sight straightened. Some bowed. A few dropped to one knee, their heads lowered, their right fists pressed against their hearts. The response was automatic and absolute, the way a compass needle swings toward north: not because it chooses to, but because there is no other direction that exists.
Anvil acknowledged none of them. He walked, and Sunny followed, and the crowds parted before them like water around the prow of a ship.
They ascended through the rings of the city. Each ring was its own district, Sunny realized, with its own character and population. The lowest ring was loud and busy, full of markets and workshops and the smell of cooking meat. The second ring was quieter, more orderly, populated by people in uniform who moved with purpose. The third and fourth rings were progressively emptier, the architecture more severe, the people fewer and more formidable.
By the fifth ring, they were alone.
Anvil led him through a heavy gate into a section of the castle that felt different from the rest. The stone here was darker, the corridors narrower, the silence thicker. There were no windows. The only light came from enchanted lanterns that burned without flame, casting a cool white glow that made everything look precise and clinical.
"This is the east wing of the inner keep," Anvil said. "You will live here."
The room he brought Sunny to was small and sparse. A bed with a real mattress. A desk. A chair. Clean walls, clean floor, a bathroom with running water.
Sunny stood in the doorway and waited for someone to tell him it was a mistake.
No one did.
"Eat," Anvil said, gesturing to a tray that had already been placed on the desk. "Sleep. Tomorrow we begin."
He turned to leave, then stopped. For the first time since the alley, something in his expression shifted, though Sunny couldn't identify what it was.
"The body is a machine, Sunless. Every machine has components, tolerances, failure points. A competent engineer knows where they are."
He reached into his coat and produced a small book, bound in dark leather, and set it on the desk beside the food.
"An exceptional one knows how to exploit them. Memorize this. I will test you in one week."
The door closed behind him. Sunny listened to his footsteps recede down the corridor, each one precise and measured, until the silence of the east wing settled over him like a second skin.
He ate first, because eating came before everything else when you'd grown up hungry. The food was simple: rice, vegetables, strips of some kind of meat he couldn't identify. Monster meat, he realized. Everything eaten in the Dream Realm came from Nightmare Creatures. It was the best thing he had ever tasted, not because the flavor was exceptional, but because there was enough of it. The portion was sized for a normal child. For Sunny, it was a feast.
Afterward, he picked up the book and opened it to a random page.
A detailed cross-section of a human throat stared back at him, with the major blood vessels labeled in neat, clinical text. The carotid artery. The jugular vein. The trachea. Precise measurements accompanied each diagram: the depth beneath the surface, the width of each vessel, the angle at which a blade would need to enter to sever both simultaneously.
He didn't think about why Anvil wanted him to memorize the inside of a human body. The question existed somewhere in the back of his mind, but it was quiet, and the room was warm, and he had eaten enough food to feel full for the first time in months. Questions could wait. Questions had always been a luxury he couldn't afford, and the habit of not asking them had kept him alive longer than any answer ever had.
Besides, he understood maps. This book was just a map of a different territory.
He sat down on the smooth stone floor, opened the book to the first page, and began to learn.