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The clock in the hallway ticked with a slow, heavy rhythm, each sound echoing through the quiet house like a judge’s gavel. It was ten minutes past midnight, and eight-year-old Julian was fighting a fierce battle against his own tired eyes. He was barricaded inside a fortress made of heavy winter quilts and perfectly positioned pillows. In his hand, he clutched a yellow plastic flashlight, its beam illuminating the worn pages of a comic book.
Julian’s eyes burned, and his head felt like it was stuffed with heavy cotton, but he refused to turn off the flashlight. If he turned off the light, he would fall asleep. And if he fell asleep, the bad dreams would come. Lately, Julian’s dreams had been a tangled mess of dark shadows, endless mazes, and a feeling of being lost. He had decided that the only way to avoid the scary dreams was to simply never, ever go to sleep again.
He rubbed his eyes and turned the page of his comic, but the words were beginning to blur together like marching ants. As he shifted his weight, trying to find a more comfortable position that wouldn’t make him drowsy, a strange glow caught the corner of his eye.
Julian lowered his flashlight. The glow wasn’t coming from outside the window, and it wasn’t the hallway nightlight. It was coming from the bottom shelf of his wooden bookcase.
He carefully pushed aside a wall of his blanket fort and peeked out. Sitting perfectly wedged between a dictionary and a book about dinosaurs was a thick, leather-bound book he didn’t recognize. The leather was a deep, twilight blue, but the edges of the pages were radiating a soft, pulsing, golden light. It hummed quietly, a sound like a distant choir holding a single, beautiful note.
Curiosity gently overriding his fear of the dark, Julian clicked off his flashlight. The golden glow from the book illuminated his entire room, casting warm, friendly shadows on the walls. He crept across the soft carpet and reached out. The moment his fingertips brushed the leather spine, the book slowly slid out of the shelf all on its own. It fell open on the floor, but there were no words on the pages. Instead, the pages looked like a swirling pool of liquid gold and starlight.
“Hello?” Julian whispered, looking around his room.
Suddenly, the golden pool on the pages began to spiral, growing wider and wider until the book itself seemed to expand, covering his bedroom floor. The light didn’t blind him; it felt like stepping into a warm, sunlit room. Julian felt his feet lift off the carpet. He wasn’t falling; he was floating down, slowly and gently, as if sinking into a giant, fluffy feather bed.
He closed his eyes as he drifted through the warm, vanilla-scented air. When his feet finally touched solid ground, he opened them and gasped.
He was no longer in his bedroom. He was standing in the most magnificent room he had ever seen. It was a library, but the shelves did not hold ordinary books, and the ceiling did not have ordinary lights. The wooden bookcases towered hundreds of feet into the air, curving gracefully like the ribs of a giant ship, stretching up into a ceiling made entirely of a swirling, starry night sky. The air smelled of old paper, warm honey, and lavender.
“Ah, welcome, welcome! Mind the floating scrolls, please!” a deep, jovial voice called out.
Julian turned to see a massive mahogany desk. Sitting behind it was not a human librarian, but an enormous Red Panda. He was the size of a grizzly bear, with thick, plush, rust-colored fur, a long, striped tail, and a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles perched on his fuzzy white nose. He was using a feather quill to write in a large ledger.
“I… I’m Julian,” the boy stammered, stepping forward.
“I know exactly who you are, Julian,” the giant red panda smiled, his eyes crinkling kindly. “I am Arthur, the Head Librarian of the Archive of Dreams. Every dream ever dreamt by every child in the world is written, bound, and stored on these shelves. And lately, my dear boy, your volume has been causing quite a commotion.”
Arthur reached under his desk and pulled out a book with a midnight-blue cover—the exact same book that had been on Julian’s shelf. But looking closely, Julian saw that the spine was cracked, and several pages were torn and hanging loose. Dark, wispy shadows seemed to leak from the tears.
“Your anxieties and waking worries have seeped into the binding,” Arthur explained gently, resting a large, soft paw on the book. “When the pages of a Dream Volume tear, the stories become tangled. That is why your dreams have been so frightening. You’ve been trying to run away from the book, Julian, but the only way to fix the dreams is to repair the pages.”
Julian looked at the torn book, feeling a pang of sadness. “Can we fix it? I really, really want to sleep nicely.”
“We can,” Arthur nodded warmly, stepping out from behind the desk. “But we must gather the materials to bind a new dream. We need the Thread of Tranquility, the Vellum of Visions, and the Ink of the Indigo Sky. It is a peaceful journey, Julian, but you must be brave enough to walk it. Will you let me guide you?”
Julian looked at the giant, comforting red panda, and the endless, beautiful library around them. He took a deep, calming breath. “Yes, Arthur. I’m ready.”
