Her awareness floated down a surreal tunnel of swirling mist, being pulled by an outside force. Char wasn’t sure if she should be terrified or pissed. When the sensation of movement faded, she was standing in a round room with great, arching windows looking out onto an impossible view of stars and planets. She wasn’t a physicist, but she was pretty sure planets couldn’t cluster together like that without gravity having something to say about it.

  There was a floaty, disconnected feeling to the whole experience that made her pretty sure this was some sort of dream, but it was like no other dream she’d ever had. The whole room was vivid in the way sound echoed around the room, the bright colors, even the feel of cool air against her skin, but every time she tried to focus in on the fine details, they seemed to shift and blur.

  She turned in a slow circle, taking it all in, and froze when she realized she wasn’t alone. About a dozen feet from her stood a tall, thin, blue-skinned alien with enormous silver-green eyes. Subtle stripes of a darker blue wavered around its skull, like the patterns ocean currents made in the sand of the sea floor. It wore a long, ornate robe that covered everything but its head and hands. It held its long-fingered hands folded before it.

  Was this one of the Aldevari? Rage boiled up at the thought, and her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. As her anger rose, the air around her seemed to crackle, and tiny cracks spread through the floor from her feet, as though the weight of her emotion was too much for the floor to bear. Suddenly, she didn’t care if this was a dream. She just wanted to get her hands around its skinny neck and squeeze.

  The being raised its hands in a show of peace. “Be at ease. I am called Zell, and I am not your foe. My people were subjugated by the Aldevari just as yours have been. This is a Dreamscape. I had an agent slip a Dreamstone onto your person to facilitate this communication. It is one of the few ways that we can speak without being spied upon.”

  “Dreamscape? So I am dreaming?” Char looked out one of the windows at the impossible starscape, then back to the alien. Despite her fury, curiosity started to seep in, beating back her more volatile reaction. She needed answers, and this was a chance to get some. Her hands unclenched, and the cracks at her feet began to fade, leaving the floor as pristine as it had been when she first appeared. “What do you want from me? What do the Aldevari want? How can I know that this isn’t some sort of trick?”

  “This spell connects the parts of our minds that dream. It allows us to share thoughts and impressions. Lies cannot pass unnoticed here.” The alien waved a long-fingered hand. “Allow me to demonstrate. I am the Emperor of the Varthii’ak Empire.”

  The last sentence he spoke rang with a synesthetic dissonance that grated against her senses like cracked, peeling paint and the feeling of her breath against the inside of a cheap plastic Halloween mask. She could feel the falseness of them. The strangeness sent a shudder down her spine.

  Zell nodded. “You see? In this shared space, emotion and intent are shared along with the words. This is what allows us to understand one another, even though we are speaking different languages.”

  She hadn’t realized it, but when she paid attention to the sounds alone, he was speaking a different language. It was full of rounded sounds and drawn out, breathy vowels.

  He turned slightly to the side and gestured with one long-fingered hand. The fingers were partially connected by membranes, like vestigial webbing. In the empty space he gestured to, a chair appeared. At least, she thought it was a chair. It was tall and skinny, the seat tilted slightly forward. A padded, curved extension swept out from the front. It looked like it would be very uncomfortable for a human. “You have some measure of control over the space, and may summon a seat for yourself by simply willing it in much the same way you would apply your intent to a spell.”

  Char focused, picturing the recliner from the house she grew up in. When she had the picture clear in her mind, she pushed her will into it, and the chair appeared, the worn and cracked faux-leather along the arms exactly as she remembered. She stepped around it and had a seat, sinking into it as she had when she was younger. The worn coziness of it was jarring against the sterile room and cosmic backdrop.

  “As for what I want with you, I am here to warn you about what the Aldevari intend. I hope that we can build some trust and work together as allies, but even if that does not come to pass, at least I will know that you have been given a better chance to survive what will come.” Zell lowered himself onto the chair he had summoned, leaning his knees against the padded extension as if to hold himself in the seat. His robes hid the shape of his body, and Char couldn’t help but wonder what oddity of his anatomy required such an arrangement.

  “Why me? Out of all the people on the planet?” She shifted in the recliner, pushing herself to the edge of the seat and leaning forward, half expecting the chair to vanish again and drop her on her ass.

  “There are seven of you to whom I’ve sent Dreamstones. You are among the strongest of your people, and now that you’ve claimed a Sanctuary, you are in a position to become a leader and influence the direction of your people.” When he paused, Char started to open her mouth to ask another question, but he held up a hand to forestall her. “I don’t know how much time we have in this Dreamscape, the passage of time is odd and unpredictable in dreams, and I have much to tell you.”

  Char closed her mouth and nodded. She had a thousand questions, but she would learn more by hearing him out. At least then she’d have a better idea of which questions were the important ones.

  She examined Zell as he spoke, and she realized that she knew more about him than his appearance. This place, this joining of dreams, let her delve deeper than the surface. He held a well of tightly leashed rage that resonated with her own. There was a great depth of loss and determination to protect… someone. It was all emotions and vague impressions; she couldn’t get any details, but what she could feel made her more inclined to trust this strange being. The enemy of one's enemy wasn’t always one's friend, but in this case, she was pretty sure they were swimming in the same direction, at least.

  “The first thing you must know is that the Aldevari Dominion is only one small faction among many, and they are all at war.” His hands fluttered as he talked, their graceful motion adding emphasis to his words. “The Aldevari did not bring mana to your world; they are only capitalizing on a phenomenon that would have thrust your world into turmoil regardless. Mana is a natural force, as natural as light or gravity. It is one of the few forces that can escape a black hole’s grasp, and the black hole at the center of the galaxy, the one your people refer to as Sagittarius A*, is the greatest source of mana in this galaxy.”

  With a gesture and a flex of his will, he created an image; a model of the Milky Way Galaxy, hanging in the air between them. Char caught her breath in wonder as she watched the spiral of light form. Intricate details showed, not just pinpricks of light, but the colors and sizes of the stars, star nurseries, pulsars, and the voids of black holes. The sourceless illumination of room around them dimmed to allow Zell’s creation to stand out even more.

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  The image turned and zoomed in toward the bright and crowded center of the galaxy, “Millions of years ago, a civilization rose near the Galactic center. The mana there was thick and rich, and it condensed into Aetheris the way water vapor condenses into rain. They breathed mana the way you breathe air. They spread out from their home world to colonize most of the galaxy.”

  As Zell spoke, the floating image changed to show a diaspora of lines flowing outward from a single planet near the center, growing exponentially to cover nearly the entire galaxy in an interconnected web.

  “Who were they?” Char asked. Her leg twitched and she nearly stood to move closer to the floating galaxy, but she stopped herself. Zell could probably feel her awe and curiosity through the dream link. The light show was incredible, but she needed to focus.

  “The Varthii’ak Empire.” He created another image to the side of the galaxy. In it, a tall, thin humanoid with skin like marble and hair like spun silver stood before a wall carved with intricate geometric designs. “It is thought that they are the reason so many of the sapient species in the galaxy share similar traits. Their Empire lasted for millions of years. It hasn’t been proven that they influenced the evolution of the various peoples of the galaxy, but it hasn’t been disproven either.”

  Char examined the figure. It fell firmly in the uncanny valley: too large eyes, too sharp cheekbones, features with slightly wrong proportions; just close enough to human to make her uneasy, but definitely not human at all. She wondered if these beings were the basis for the legends of elves and angels.

  The image of the Varthii’ak faded away and Zell continued, “The Varthii’ak were powerful on a scale that would have us calling them gods if they still existed. They built a massive engine to capture the outflow of mana and control its flow through their colonies, and it was this that was their eventual downfall. The legends say that it was the size of a planet, or maybe it was several planets in a ring around the core, or that it was made of arrays of asteroids and comets on a galactic scale.”

  He shook his head and waved a hand. “No one knows. The only certain thing is that around…” He tilted his head to the side, and his eyes went distant as he did some math, then he went on, “Around 30,200 of your years ago, the machine became active. It began sucking up all of the free-floating mana emanating from the black hole at the center of the galaxy and channeling it to the colony worlds of the Empire. The result of this is that any world that wasn’t part of the Varthii’ak Empire was cut off from that source of mana.”

  Char leaned forward. “Wait… you’re saying that they stole all of the galaxy’s mana?”

  Zell nodded, “Essentially.” He waved his hand, and the floating image changed again. This time, it showed the galaxy lit with a diffuse blue glow, cut through by the rich, neon blue lines connecting the Empire’s worlds. A sphere of runes flickered into life, a magical Dyson sphere of sorts around the galactic core, and it started to absorb the blue glow that came from the center, pumping it into the Empire’s web, making the lines glow brighter. The space beyond the sphere of runes grew dark in an ever-expanding ring. The Varthii’ak sucked up all of the mana, leaving the rest of the galaxy to starve.

  “The mana coming to this world would have started to dry up around 4200 of your years ago,” Zell said as the border of the dark area crossed the space where a tiny blue-green dot flared to indicate Earth’s location. “Before that time, your world had as much access to mana as every other. The number of Aetheris-rich bloodlines that lie dormant in your species speaks of a rich magical heritage. But all of that would have collapsed when your world was starved of the force that made it possible. The gods and magical beings would have felt the lack first, but it wasn’t an abrupt end to the magic. It would have been a sharp drop followed by a slow fade over about a thousand years. The last dregs would have been used up around the time of your Bronze Age collapse.”

  Char tried to put that into context, but she didn’t know enough about history that far back. It made sense though. It was long enough ago that whatever stories survived would be considered legends and myths. Civilization would have just been getting started. She suppressed a smile as she realized that the Ancient Aliens guy might not have been too far off the mark with his wild theories.

  Several smaller light sources appeared, scattered through the galaxy, pumping out much dimmer blue glows. “There are other black holes, of course, so the mana was never entirely gone, but none of them can produce the lifeblood of magic on the scale of the Galactic Heart.”

  “So, what happened?” she asked.

  “Greed, envy, hubris. The same forces that plague nearly every sapient species that seeks power. The Empire controlled the flow of mana, and numerous forces from both within and without the Empire wanted to take that control for themselves. No one knows what actually happened. The Empire fragmented and warred with itself, and in the chaos, the great Mana Engine was destroyed, releasing all of that stored mana in a cataclysm unseen since the universe itself was born.”

  The sphere containing the Galactic Core flared with blinding light, making Char squint her eyes. Then, with a suddenness that made her heart skip a beat, it pulsed once and blew outward in a vast ring that spread across the whole galaxy. The spreading wave of power was followed by the blue glow of mana, refilling the space that had been starved of it for so long. Char felt a shiver run down her spine as she watched it play out.

  “So, basically, ancient gods built a cosmic vacuum cleaner and blew themselves up, and now the rest of us are paying for it,” Char muttered. “That figures.”

  “From the destruction, a shockwave of power, raw, chaotic, and impossibly vast, blasted outward across the galaxy at the speed of light,” Zell said. “The Aldevari Dominion, and other Hegemonies like them, have learned to harness its arrival. They use its advent upon unsuspecting worlds to swoop in and take control, descending upon a world and reshaping it, using tricks to forcibly awaken the native population and bind them under their control before the natives can even understand what is happening.”

  He leaned forward on his odd chair, his eyes meeting hers. “Your world was in the path of the shockwave. Mana would have returned even without the Aldevari interfering. Do not believe their lies when they try to tell you that they brought you this power, that they’ve given you some sort of gift. It was always yours. It was the birthright of all the galaxy’s denizens before the Varthii’ak stole it.”

  This was the truth as Zell knew it. She could feel his earnestness, his underlying rage at the unfairness of it all, his white-hot hatred of the Dominion and the others like them who took advantage of calamity for their own gain, and most of all, at the Varthii’ak for setting it all in motion.

  She tried to digest what Zell was telling her, but it was too big. Her thoughts whirled and condensed into questions, but there were so many of them that the only word to escape was, “Why?”

  “Greed. When the Varthii’ak destroyed themselves, they took the secrets of their power with them. The center of the galaxy, where the ruins of their civilization lie, is a roiling maelstrom of chaotic and destructive energy that none can pierce, but many of their outlying colonies and outposts still stand, in ruins, abandoned, infested with magical side-effects of the explosion. The warring factions all want to plunder their riches. The Galaxy has been at war over the scraps ever since the Varthii’ak fell, and every war needs soldiers.”

  Char dropped back into her chair, her eyes focused on nothing. “Thirty thousand years of war? That’s…” she trailed off, unable to articulate the scale of the tragedy. “And these Hegemonies have been making slave soldiers of whole worlds?”

  “Some of them. Others use gentler methods. But essentially, yes. The entire Galaxy is being swept into the war, quite literally, at the speed of light.” He swept both hands outward in a graceful gesture that encompassed the entirety of the hovering galaxy between them.

  Her gaze sharpened, and she met Zell’s alien eyes, “OK, so tell me about the Aldevari in particular. I can’t fix the whole galaxy, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Humanity become conscripts in their war.”

  Zell’s mouth didn’t turn upward in a smile. Char wasn’t sure it even could. But she could feel pleasure and satisfaction rolling off of him. A row of webbed spines she hadn’t noticed before lifted along the top of his head, like the fin of a sail-fish. She got the feeling that this was his species' equivalent of a toothy grin.