Mr. Elias Bell could see dreams.

Not just his own. Everyone's.

When people slept, Elias could step quietly into their dreams. He had wandered through castles made of clouds, sailed oceans of lemonade, and once attended a birthday party where the guests were all talking cats.

He had always thought it was a rather splendid gift.

Until one night, he met the Nightmare King.

Elias had entered the dream of a little boy who was having trouble sleeping. Instead of the usual dragons and flying machines, Elias found a grey kingdom where everything was silent.

At the top of a hill stood a small man wearing a crooked crown.

"I am the Nightmare King," he announced.

"You don't look very frightening," said Elias.

The King frowned.

"I am working on it."

He raised his arms, and suddenly hundreds of gloomy clouds filled the sky.

Elias smiled.

"That's your problem."

"My problem?"

"You've forgotten what dreams are for."

Elias snapped his fingers.

The clouds turned into enormous balloons.

The grey ground became green grass.

The Nightmare King's crown turned bright yellow.

"Stop that!" cried the King.

But Elias was already running.

The King chased him across the dream, changing everything he touched into something dull and dreary.

Elias changed it back.

A castle became a playground.

A dragon became a puppy.

A storm became a shower of marshmallows.

At last, the Nightmare King tripped over his own crown and landed in a puddle of chocolate pudding.

Elias offered him a hand.

"Come on," he said. "You can do better than nightmares."

The King looked at him suspiciously.

"Can I?"

"Of course."

The King stood up.

Then he smiled. And the whole dream changed.

Elias laughed.

Hed never seen anything quite so wonderful.

But as he turned to leave, the Nightmare King quietly whispered:

"Elias?"

"Yes?"

"There are other dream kingdoms."

Elias stopped.

"And some of them," said the King, "have kings who don't like being defeated."

Elias looked toward the horizon.

For the first time, he wondered just how many dreams were waiting for him.

And somewhere, far beyond the stars of the dream world, a distant bell began to ring.

The War had begun

For the next few weeks, Elias didn't think anything of the King's warning. He continued to visit peoples' dreams, quietly observing the strange and wonderful things that appeared within, sometimes adding little touches of his own when he found it appropriate. One night, when he visited a dream that looked like a tropical ocean full of fish, he transformed himself into a stingray to explore it. He had tried first to become a dolphin, but that hadn't worked. He wasn't sure why a stingray felt like the most natural form--maybe something to do with how they were stealthy, lurking in the background near the ocean floor, just like he lived in the background of peoples' dreams.

He was enjoying all the different types of coral in the sea, millions of times more vibrant than the waking world, when he first saw the shark.

At first, he only saw its shadow above him in the water. His stingray form darted underneath a many-pronged red coral, peering up at the dark shape between the branches. The shark circled lazily through the sea, causing all the small fish to flee as well. Elias thought it was another part of the dream until he noticed the water changing color from bright blue to dull grayish-blue wherever it swam. It reminded him of the Nightmare King's world.

He tried to transform it into something else, but it resisted his efforts. Finally he swam out to confront it head-on, swishing his venomous tail back and forth. "What are you?" he asked, speaking just fine even though he had no human mouth.

The shark answered in kind, surprising him. "A shadow, an emissary of my Nightmare King."

"Impossible," Elias said. "I defeated the Nightmare King. He's no longer turning everything drab and dull; he's become the king of a much more beautiful kingdom."

The shark's body shifted, turning from flesh and blood into an inky blot of darkness with blurred edges and pointed teeth. Ink leached off of its body into the surrounding water, staining it dark. The shadow grinned. "There are many Nightmare Kings, each ruling over a different kind of nightmare. In the past, they have not intruded on each others' domains, enjoying an unsteady peace. Now that the Nightmare King of Drab Silence has been defeated, each of the other kings sees an opportunity to gain power over the others. Whichever king emerges on top of this Dreaming War will become the most powerful being in the universe, shaping every dream to his design."

"And how would a Nightmare King obtain this power?" asked Elias warily.

The shadow shifted into a leaner, meaner shark with a narrow nose and sharp scales. A predator.

"Why," it said, "by killing the one who defeated the King of Drab Silence, of course."

Elias went flat and pressed his expansive body close to the seafloor as the emissary lunged, slicing through the water like a missile. Elias glided as quietly as he could until he found himself an underwater cavern which he could fit in and the emissary absolutely could not. The Nightmare Kings would have to defeat him, would have to--

Did the emissary say whoever defeated him would end up on top?

Then that would mean, if he defeated them, then he would be King. The revelation shook him, and almost as instantly as the thought came to him, the cave came undone, crumbling as if someone had pulled a thread on reality itself, water became liquid yarn around him. Elias tried to flee, but the dream was unweaving around him too rapidly. His stingray body felt like it was coming apart at the seams, his form dissolving into separate strands.

He woke up gasping in an entirely different dream, standing in a vast library, with each and every book falling apart. Pages drifted through the air like autumn leaves, their words fading before they could be read. The shelves collapsed in slow motion, each plank gently unraveling into splinters. The floor beneath him was a patchwork of half-finished tapestries, their threads pulling loose.

"Interesting," came a voice from above.

Elias looked up to see a woman sitting on what remained of a chandelier, a mess of copper wire and crystals hanging by threads of light. She was tall and elegant, dressed in a gown that seemed to be entirely made of unraveling lace. With each movement, bits of her dress came undone, only to be rewoven by threads that floated around her like invisible hands.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said, descending on a spiral of string. "You're supposed to be dead."

"I take it you're another Nightmare King," said Elias, carefully brushing some falling pages away.

"Queen," she corrected, her smile sharp as broken glass. "The Nightmare Queen of Unraveling. I am the ruler of dissolution, of things coming apart, of endings without meaning." She gestured around the falling library. "This is the dream of a tailor, you see. Every night, she dreams of her seams failing, her patterns going wrong, her entire life's work coming undone. It is delicious anxiety."

"It sounds miserable," said Elias.

The Queen laughed, a sound like tearing silk. "Of course it is. That's the point." She circled him slowly, and wherever her feet touched, the floor came apart faster. "But you've complicated matters."

A book fell at Elias's feet. He picked it up and watched as the pages crumbled to nothing in his hands.

"Tell me," said the Queen, "do you know what happens if I unravel you?"

Elias felt a chill run through him.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Neither do I," she said. "Isn't that thrilling?" She snapped her fingers, and the entire library began to come apart at an accelerated rate, all of it dissolving into an infinite storm of threads and paper and wood. "Let's find out together."

Elias stood firm as the unraveling rushed toward him. He closed his eyes and thought about what he knew: This was a dream. And dreams were his domain.

"No," he said simply.

And he began to weave.

Thread by thread, Elias pulled the falling remnants of the library toward him, weaving them into something new, stars and planets coming from the Queen's loose threads and being reworked by Elias' hands. Slowly, impossibly, a new library took shape around them, full of interesting asymmetries and deliberate flaws from Elias' unskiled hands. Words rejoined with other books' words to create new stories, endings making for brilliant new beginnings. The Queen found herself standing in the center of it, her gown patchworked in dozens of fabrics, sewn together with visible stitches that showed the work and care of their making.

For a moment, she looked almost beautiful.

"This changes nothing," she hissed. "There are still five more Nightmare Kings, and they are far less reasonable than I. Some have ruled their domains for centuries without interference. They will not be reformed so easily."

"Why tell me?" asked Elias.

The Queen's laugh was bitter. "I want to see the look on your face when the King of Endless Pursuit finally corners you, or when you meet the King of Mirrors and cannot tell which reflection is real, or when-"

She stopped abruptly. In the far corner of the dream, a door had begun to appear, seething with dark energy.

"It seems," the Queen said quietly, "that one of them has found you already."