Splintered Dreams (Dreamwood Tales)

In your heart of hearts, you know that labeling something a ‘fairy tale’ is not the same as calling it untrue. There are things glimpsed in the half-light, that you may try to swear aren’t possible, and yet, they are happening nonetheless. There is a dream you have upon waking, when you are neither awake nor unconscious, where fanciful creatures and men of questionable truth intrude upon and twist your reality. You’re more than a little afraid that accepting them as real will forever cement them into your world, and give substance to that which does not deserve it. The stories in this volume are a little like that. In ‘A Winter Crossing’, you’ll read: "In those times, when the sun would drop behind the ancient and broken mountains, the bridge became unfamiliar and cast a stifling pall on those who dared cross. Even to this day, it is said traversing the bridge alone at the end of a winter’s day is to invite frost demons.” And in ‘PRISM’ you encounter this telling of a tragedy: “He was staring straight up at the sky, with his eyes wide open. But his eyes had become just whitened balls. The color, you know that circle around the little black hole? It were drained, gone. And his hair turned fully grey. When we went to sleep, Blevins had a healthy head of dark hair. “Then my horse keeled over, likewise dead. It were a chestnut-colored mare the night before. Only now it was mottled grey. It had the same whitened eyes.” “Good Gods,” Liam whispered. So it all depends on you. Are you adventurous enough to read these tales, pretend for the moment that they could happen, they could be real?