The Familiars #4: Palace of Dreams by Adam Jay Epstein, Andrew Jacobson

seen before. Are you sure you’ve transcribed it correctly?”
    “I am,” Skylar said.
    She stared at the message for a few moments longer, then slowly closed her eyes.
    Aldwyn lay there. There was so much to think about. So many puzzles that needed solving. His mind raced from one mystery to the next. But the answers would all have to wait.
    He had fallen asleep.
    Not a second had passed outside, but it felt to Aldwyn as if he’d been lost in slumber for the better part of a day. Once he and his companions agreed that they were all fully rested, Edan lifted his chin from the ground and the shell disappeared. The chill of the mountainside returned and final farewells would be quick.
    “What will you do now?” Aldwyn asked Edan.
    “I suppose I will continue on to Bronzhaven. I have been a stranger to the land for many years. I am interested to see how it’s changed.”
    The familiars gave one last nod and began their journey to the Turn, leaving Edan inching his way down the gentle slope to the north.
    As the dark of midnight approached, the moon was not even a sliver, making it difficult to see. Aldwyn was taking cautious steps forward, feeling for solid ground so he didn’t fall off a cliff. The trip downhill was less tiring, but more strenuous on the knees. And unfortunately it was no faster than the trip up, especially given the low visibility.
    “I had another dream about the queen,” Aldwyn said. “This time I was standing on a rug in the middle of a field of dandelions and my paws started to sink into the fabric like it was quickmud. I was being pulled in deeper and deeper, until I fell through a hole and landed in Queen Loranella’s royal chamber. She was standing there about to tell me something but I woke up.”
    “I was dreaming, too,” Gilbert said. “Well, it was more of a nightmare really. Anura and I were swimming in a pool of maggots as far as the eye could see.”
    Aldwyn shuddered. “That does sound terrifying.”
    “No, that was the good part. Then they all disappeared and we were sitting in an empty hole. Talk about a cruel joke.” Gilbert had a faraway look in his eyes. “With Anura, I feel like it’s the first time somebody’s really gotten me. Everything in my life was finally starting to go so great. Now all of this. What’s Anura going to think? What’s my family going to think?”
    “I don’t want to go back to the way things were, either,” Aldwyn said. “Before I met Jack and the two of you I was a nobody and an outcast. But no matter what happens, you’re still you and I’m still me.”
    Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of hammering. They quietly followed it to a wall of ice. Through the darkness Aldwyn could make out a trio of howler monkeys chipping away at the ice with pickaxes. They held glowing torches, barely illuminating the night.
    “What are howler monkeys doing this far from the Forest Under the Trees?” Skylar whispered.
    The monkeys broke through the frozen surface and one of them lowered a torch, bringing it close to the exposed object within. A mountain moose was revealed in the light, having been chilled solid for who knows how long. When the monkeys extracted it from the icy cocoon, they took knives to its hide and began to skin it.
    “Ah,” Skylar said. “They’ve come for its hide. This must be what they use to make their drums.”
    Aldwyn squinted and stared across the mountain slope. About fifty feet away, he saw stripes of red against the white snow. He looked closer and realized they were the wings of a giant moth, one born from the colossus sap at the tops of the great trees where the howler monkeys lived.
    “Maybe we can ask to hitch a ride,” Aldwyn said. “That moth could make the half day’s journey by foot to the Turn in less than an hour.”
    “Probably best not to let anyone know where we’re going,” Skylar said.
    “Then we won’t ask,” Aldwyn said.
    Skylar and Gilbert both looked at him.
    “I thought you