Everything was the same, save for one tiny, gaping detail.
There was an additional person in the room. Everything else remained precisely as it had been.
No—there was yet another difference, subtle but significant. The couple by the window still sat in the midst of their meal, and Zane no longer carried a tray with a leather folio. Instead, his hands cradled a bottle of expensive-looking wine, its label ornate with gold-leaf lettering he couldn't quite make out.
Understanding arrived instantaneously, settling over him like a second skin.
The dream had looped back. Reset itself. Returned to some earlier point in its predetermined sequence.
If so, the dream's true nature seemed to be "dinner in a fancy restaurant" rather than the "city street at night" Lady Sylvia had mentioned. Or perhaps both were true simultaneously—the dream containing layers, perspectives, multiple points of focus woven into a single remembered experience.
For this to manifest as it did, the dreamer would need to be in a profoundly calm state of mind, feeling both joy and nostalgic longing for a city street at night. They could be looking at it in the present moment of the dream's creation, or remembering it from some distant vantage point, the memory sweetened by time and loss.
The couple continued their performance of romance—the lady smiling with practiced delight, laughing at jokes Zane couldn't hear, her body language speaking of calculated charm. Neither appeared remotely interested in the street visible through the large glass wall that dominated one side of the restaurant. Their world had contracted to the space between them, the intimate theater of courtship.
The additional person—a back waiter wearing an identical uniform to Zane's own—moved efficiently between table and kitchen, collecting emptied plates and leftover courses with the invisible grace of professional service. The table that had been piled high with evidence of gluttony now held only the current course, clean and orderly, the meal still in progress rather than concluded.
Zane's role had shifted. He was no longer the bearer of bills and receipts.
He was the sommelier.
His foot moved forward, breaking the momentary paralysis that had seized him during his contemplation. Questions spiraled through his mind, each spawning three more in fractal complexity. Was the dream actively changing in response to something, or was there a pattern he was missing, some underlying logic he hadn't yet perceived?
None of it made coherent sense.
Two waiters alone did not suffice to operate a restaurant of this apparent caliber. Last time—in the previous iteration—he'd glanced through the kitchen porthole and seen no one. So who had prepared the elaborate courses now gracing the couple's table? Had it been him, in some role the dream had assigned but not shown? Or did dream logic simply not require such mundane consistency?
And now there was an additional waiter, but that contradiction compounded rather than resolved the mystery. According to the intelligence he'd gathered, benign dreams never changed—they were static, non-progressive, faithful recordings of memory. They were meant to be like fine wine itself: complex, layered, but ultimately fixed, their essential nature unchanging no matter how many times you returned to savor them.
Wine.
The thought triggered a cascade of associations, memories bubbling up from his past life. Working as a waiter at Sywane Bridge had granted him countless opportunities to observe the ritual consumption of exquisite vintages. He'd become an accidental connoisseur, developing taste for this fermented delicacy through stolen sips and careful attention. He'd studied the elite archons he served with the focus of an anthropologist—watching while pretending not to watch as they savored their expensive selections, noting how they held their glasses, how they sipped, how they achieved that particular state of being drunk while somehow remaining not-drunk, maintaining the careful equilibrium that separated sophistication from inebriation.
There was something about wine that fundamentally differed from all the other alcohol he'd consumed at McNeill's Night Club during those blurred, desperate months. He couldn't quite articulate whether it was the tantalizing complexity of flavor or the particular quality of intoxication it produced—probably something ineffable between the two. For once, after developing what he recognized as genuine addiction to drinking—whether from prolonged exposure working in a club or from life's accumulated stresses, likely both—Zane had found something that felt like appreciation rather than mere escape.
He'd discovered wine properly through the unfinished bottles left by Ashburn's gang bosses and minor elites at Sywane Bridge, back on Earth in his original life. It was never as much as he wanted—wine bottles almost universally returned to the kitchen with only dregs remaining, the expensive liquid consumed with a thoroughness that spoke to its value. He rarely found himself with even small portions of cheap wine to appropriate. As for the truly exceptional bottles, the ones whose labels alone cost more than his weekly wages—those were monitored with predatory attention by the manager and maître d', who shed their carefully maintained dignity the instant important guests departed, practically scrambling over each other for whatever remained of "the finest from the cabinet."
Zane had only ever gotten to smell those transcendent vintages as he poured them with steady hands and professional detachment. The cheap bottles, the ones nobody guarded with particular care, occasionally yielded opportunities—but only when circumstances aligned perfectly. When a guest received an urgent call mid-meal, or checked their watch with sudden alarm, or simply lost interest for reasons he couldn't fathom. Most patrons in Ashburn's fanciest restaurant wouldn't rise until they'd drained their glasses, unwilling to waste a drop of even mediocre wine. Only in those rare moments when someone rushed away without finishing would he be lucky enough to spirit a bottle to the back for later appreciation. The manager and maître d' rarely paid attention to cheap wine, their avarice reserved for bottles that mattered.
But now—
Now he stood in a dream bubble that recurred and reset, and quite possibly the most expensive wine he'd ever held rested in his hands, label glinting gold in the ambient light. The other waiter, having returned from delivering used utensils to the kitchen, watched him with mounting confusion. Not saying anything verbally, but every aspect of body language screaming "What are you doing? Take the wine to the table! They're waiting!"
The couple had turned their attention toward him as well, summoning him with their gazes, expectation written in the subtle shift of their postures.
But today, in a dream bubble that would loop back—perhaps changed in unpredictable ways, perhaps not—this expensive wine was his. The couple and their romantic theater could be damned.
His focus shifted to the glass door with its elegant golden handle, the entrance he'd not yet explored.
He simply walked toward it.
He might as well see the city street at night that was supposedly the true heart of this dream bubble. And while he was at it, taste and properly drink expensive wine without restraint or supervision. How did wine taste in dreams? Did it produce genuine intoxication, or merely the memory of it? The questions burned with immediate urgency.
He wanted to know. Needed to know.
And he was about to find out.
He also needed to locate wherever Cozysprouts, Blendriad, and Lady Sylvia had ended up in this manifested memory. Presumably they were somewhere outside in the street, performing their assigned roles: Cozysprouts methodically collecting harvestable memories, the ranked hunters attempting to absorb the essence of the dream through observation and comprehension, consuming its substance until it was conquered and the ancestor—the dreamer whose consciousness had birthed this place—bestowed whatever gifts such mastery warranted.
…
The crisp night air struck Zane's face as he pushed through the golden-handled door, the expensive wine bottle still clutched possessively in his hand. Behind him, he could feel the physical weight of confused stares—the couple, the back waiter, all frozen in a tableau of interrupted service, their dream-scripted expectations violated by his improvisation.
The city street stretched before him, and for the first time since entering this dream bubble, Zane understood with crystalline clarity what Lady Sylvia had actually meant.
It wasn't about the restaurant at all.
The street was the dream. The restaurant was merely the frame through which someone—the dreamer—had gazed outward at this particular view, this specific moment crystallized from the flow of experience. Perhaps they'd sat at that corner table once, years or decades ago, looking out through rain-streaked glass while sipping wine and feeling... what? Pure contentment? Bittersweet longing? That peculiar melancholy that accompanies perfect moments when you're conscious enough to know they won't—can't—last?
Or perhaps this represented how the dreamer had imagined the view from outside, a perspective they'd constructed mentally while seated within. Who could truly know? He was merely speculating, assembling narrative from insufficient evidence.
The street itself possessed an aching beauty rendered in that artificial, hyper-realized way dreams often achieved. Gas lamps cast pools of warm amber light along cobblestones that gleamed as if recently rain-washed, each stone distinct and perfect. Small villas rose on either side, their windows glowing with honey-colored warmth that suggested lives being lived within—families gathering, conversations unfolding, the comfortable intimacy of evening domesticity.
But the truly spectacular element was the vista.
The restaurant sat elevated, positioned on what must have been a hillside location—an actual hill that had been swallowed by the city's outward expansion over time. Not quite in the heart of the urban sprawl, but occupying a privileged perch in the outer zones, high enough to command a sweeping view of the metropolis below.
The sight was breathtaking.
The city spread beneath him like a carpet of lights—thousands upon thousands of illuminated windows, streetlamps forming glowing arteries, the occasional spire or tall building punctuating the horizontal expanse. The view captured that particular drama of urban existence, the concentrated density of human life made visible through light against darkness.
With modern social media, Zane thought distantly, this restaurant would be perpetually crowded, the secret exposed and exploited. But this was a memory from before such things, or from someone who'd deliberately kept it private—a treasure known only to the fortunate few who discovered it, preserved in their hearts precisely because they hadn't ruined it through sharing. A lovely dinner in quietly luxurious atmosphere, in a not-overly-posh establishment, accompanied by this magnificent view of a city with all its abundant life. A city whose drama rivaled even Ashburn's gang-dominated chaos, though expressed through different architectures of survival and ambition.
All of it existing here, in a dream bubble, in a tiny sealed realm—not on Earth, not in the vast universe he'd originated from, but in a pocket dimension spawned from a single human consciousness.
Zane raised the wine bottle to his lips and drank directly from it, abandoning all pretense of sophistication.
The taste was... transcendent. Perfect. Too perfect, perhaps. Every note of flavor he'd ever imagined truly exceptional wine might possess manifested simultaneously on his tongue—the crisp effervescence, the subtle fruit undertones, the complex minerality, the way it seemed to dance across his palate in waves of revelation. It exceeded expectation, surpassing even the idealized versions he'd constructed during those nights stealing sips from abandoned bottles.
Perhaps too much was there, like experiencing a memory of taste rather than taste itself—like someone remembering the best wine they'd ever consumed and somehow making it even better in recollection, stripping away the small imperfections that reality always contained.
The aftertaste clung to his tongue, almost unbearably sweet, refusing to fade even after he swallowed. Not unpleasant, but intense in a way that suggested dream-logic operating on sensation.
He took another long pull from the bottle, then another, waiting to feel the familiar warmth spreading through his chest, the pleasant loosening of inhibitions, the soft fog that good wine brought to the edges of consciousness. But it didn't come—or rather, it came all at once and not at all. He felt the idea of being pleasantly tipsy without experiencing the actual physical sensation. The dream couldn't quite replicate genuine intoxication, only the memory-shape of it, the cognitive impression divorced from somatic reality.
He took another substantial drink. Honey couldn't taste better than this.
He was taking back his earlier assessment. The wine was intoxicating, just in ways that bypassed normal physiology. Drunkenness approached through strange vectors, consuming him through dream-channels rather than bloodstream.
A bench materialized in his awareness—had it always been there, or had the dream provided it in response to his need?—and he moved toward it, settling onto the wooden slats before taking another long drink. This was only the beginning. How many cycles existed for him to exploit? The bottle might refill with each reset, an infinite supply of impossible wine. The hunters accompanied by a rank three knight could manage whatever needed managing within the dream. As an honored guest, he had every right to enjoy himself.
What he didn't know—what he couldn't know, lacking the theoretical framework to even conceptualize it—was that his presence, his active awareness as a living human consciousness rather than a passive observer, was causing the dream to change in fundamental ways.
The dreamer had been replaced, or perhaps overlaid, by a will vastly stronger—an actual person, fully present and exerting unconscious influence. Not merely the fading memory-impression of a dreamer, nor the gentle observational presence of gentlets whose existence couldn't significantly affect dream-structure beyond their consumption of harvestable memories.
Zane was real in a way this place had never encountered.
And reality, even secondhand, had gravity. It warped the space around it.
The dream was beginning to dream him.