Stepping back onto Canalave City’s docks felt refreshing. Ethan, a young man who’d taken up work as a sailor, had missed his home port. No place beckoned to him quite like Canalave with its metal bridges and old libraries, though Ethan had seen a number of fantastical locales in his journeys. The most recent had been Newmoon Island, a place thought lost in the annals of history until its recent rediscovery. Nautical folklore held the spot was cursed, and that wayward sailors who trod on it should beware.

Ethan had never been one to put stock in folklore, but when he’d set foot on Newmoon to accompany the scientists, there had been a strange, eerie feeling, as if he was being watched, that hadn’t gone away. It had persisted even when they’d shipped off.

But now that he was back home, everything would go back to normal, he was sure of it. Though that quiet sense of unease still persisted, it was easy to ignore under the lovely Canalave sky; nearly skipping home, he was more than ready to enjoy his weeks off before the next voyage.

---

That night, resting comfortably in his bed, Ethan found himself in the midst of a highly unusual dream.

It was one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming. He had those only rarely; strangely, though, the rule that you could manipulate the dreamscape when aware of it didn’t seem to apply. He found himself on a landscape that looked oddly like Newmoon Island, but darker, greyer, under a shadowed sky. Strange black shadows fringed the edge of the island, and that same sense of being watched was still there—it emanated from the shadows.

Ethan walked on the island’s surface, traversing huge swathes of land with a single step, the way you could in dreams. He couldn’t help but feel unease—yet a wordless, impossible sense of anticipation threaded through him as well.

“Hello?” he called out, his voice echoing over the emptiness.

It was returned:

Hello.

Ethan spun to see where the new voice came from, only to realize that it had come from all around him, almost pressing itself into his skull. There was a new glob of shadow close to him, and a serpentine tendril of it snaked out to wend around his leg—