Most people forgot their dreams the moment they woke up.
It was a common thing, something no one thought twice about. A dream would come, vivid and strange, full of colors that did not exist in the waking world or places that defied the laws of physics, and then the alarm would ring, eyes would open, and all of it would dissolve like sugar in water. Sometimes a feeling lingered, a trace of happiness or fear or confusion, but the dream itself was gone. People accepted this. They had to. There was work to do, schedules to keep, a life that demanded attention. Dreams were for sleeping. They had no place in the hours that mattered.
Hoppy Solis had stopped remembering his dreams a long time ago.
It was not something he had consciously decided. It had happened gradually, the way a room grows dark when the sun sets. He would fall asleep in his narrow bunk on Aethon Space Station, and then he would open his eyes to the same grey walls, the same flickering lamp, the same faint hum of the ventilation system. There was nothing in between. No images, no sounds, no stories his mind had woven while his body rested. Just the click of a switch, from awake to asleep to awake again.
Sometimes he wondered if he was still dreaming at all. Not in the poetic sense, but literally. Was sleep just an absence now? A gap in his consciousness that meant nothing and gave him nothing?
The other mechanics on the station did not seem to mind. They talked about their shifts, their rations, the occasional malfunction in the hydroponics bay. They did not talk about dreams. Maybe they had stopped having them too. Or maybe they had simply learned, as everyone did, that there was no use dwelling on something that disappeared the moment you reached for it.
Hoppy lay in his bunk one night—or what passed for night on the station, which was just the period when the main lights dimmed to seventy percent—and stared at the ceiling. His hands were clean for once. He had spent the day repairing a coolant valve, and the grease had come off with the special solvent they kept for that purpose. His fingers felt strange without the usual residue. Too smooth. Too new.
He closed his eyes.
The ventilation hummed. Somewhere in the corridor, someone was walking with heavy steps, probably Tern from the lower decks heading to the night shift. The metal of the bunk was cold beneath his back, the blanket thin but sufficient. Everything was as it always was.
He thought about his parents.
He did not do this often. It was easier not to. They had died four years ago, a pressure failure in their section of the station, and the official report had used words like "unforeseeable" and "containment protocols" and "no survivors." Hoppy had read the report once, put it in a drawer, and never looked at it again. There was no grave to visit, no memorial service to attend. On Aethon Station, when someone died, their name was removed from the rotation schedule, and that was the end of it.
He did not remember their faces as clearly as he wanted to. He remembered his mother's hands, always stained with lubricant like his own hands now. He remembered his father's laugh, a surprising thing that came out rarely but fully, like a crack in something that had seemed solid. He remembered sitting between them in the mess hall, the three of them eating nutrient paste in silence, but a comfortable silence, the kind that did not need to be filled.
That was all. The rest had faded, worn smooth by the years like the edges of an old tool.
He was not sure why he was thinking about them now. Maybe it was the cleanliness of his hands. His mother had always told him to wash up before eating, a habit he had abandoned years ago. Maybe it was the silence of his room, which felt different tonight, heavier somehow, as if the walls were pressing in just a little more than usual.
He fell asleep without meaning to.
And then—
There was something.
It was not the click of a switch. It was not the sudden opening of eyes to a familiar ceiling. It was a slow awareness, like waking up inside a memory that did not belong to him. He felt warmth first, spreading across his back and shoulders, then a softness that did not match the rigid surface of his bunk. His fingers, still clean, touched something that gave way beneath them, light and dry, like the dust he had seen in old videos of deserts but softer, much softer.
He opened his eyes.
The sky above him was wide.
There was no other way to describe it. It was not the narrow corridor of the station, not the low ceiling of his room, not even the vast emptiness of space that he sometimes glimpsed through the observation ports. It was wide in a way that had nothing to do with distance. It was lavender and deep purple, with veins of pink running through it like the inside of a seashell, and it went on forever in every direction. There were no walls. No ceiling. No boundaries at all.
Hoppy lay there for a long moment, breathing.
The air was different here. On the station, the air always had a faint metallic taste, scrubbed and recycled so many times that it had lost whatever original quality it might have had. Here, the air was sweet, not in a cloying way but in the way a piece of fruit was sweet, something natural and whole. It filled his lungs easily, without the slight resistance he had grown used to.
He turned his head.
He was lying on something pink. It looked like a cloud, but clouds were made of water vapor and could not support a person's weight. This was solid enough to hold him, yet soft enough that his body had sunk into it slightly, creating a warm depression around his shape. The surface was covered in fine fibers, like cotton, and they shifted gently with a breeze he could not feel on his skin.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position. His arms moved without the usual heaviness. The station's artificial gravity was calibrated to standard Earth norm, but there was always a pull to it, a constant pressure reminding him that he was in a metal box spinning through the void. Here, his limbs felt light, almost weightless, as if the world beneath him was holding him up without effort.
He looked down at himself. He was wearing the same grey jumpsuit he had gone to sleep in, but it looked different in this light. The grey seemed softer, the edges of it blurred by the pink glow that came from everywhere and nowhere. His hands, still clean, looked smaller than he remembered, or maybe it was just that there was nothing around them to compare them to.
He looked up again.
The sky was full of stars. Not the cold, distant pinpricks he knew from the station's observation ports. These stars pulsed with a slow rhythm, like hearts beating in the darkness. Some were blue, some were gold, some were the same soft pink as the cloud beneath him. They were connected by thin threads of light, forming patterns that shifted as he watched, constellations that moved and changed like living things.
He sat there for a long time.
The part of him that had been shaped by the station wanted to understand. It wanted to know where he was, how he had gotten here, what the logical explanation was. He was a mechanic. He understood systems, cause and effect, the way one thing led to another. This did not fit into any system he knew.
But another part of him, a part he had almost forgotten existed, did not care about any of that. This part was simply looking. Simply breathing. Simply existing in a place that did not demand anything from him.
He heard a sound.
It was small, a soft chirp like the squeak of a well-oiled hinge. He turned toward it and saw something moving a few feet away.
It was a ball of fluff about the size of his forearm. Its color was a pale purple, close to the cloud beneath it, and it had two small black eyes set into its round body. It had no visible legs, but it moved by hopping, compressing itself and then springing upward in a slow, bobbing motion. It looked like something a child might have drawn, a creature made of cotton and imagination.
It hopped closer.
Hoppy did not move. He watched as it approached, its movements unhurried, its eyes fixed on him with an expression that might have been curiosity or might have been nothing at all. When it reached his leg, it stopped and tilted its body to one side, as if examining him from a different angle.
"Hello," Hoppy said.
His voice sounded strange to his own ears. It was too loud in this quiet place, too rough. But the creature did not seem startled. It hopped closer and bumped gently against his knee.
He reached out a hand, slowly, and let his fingers brush against its surface. The fluff was warm and fine, softer than anything he had ever touched. The creature made another chirping sound, and he felt a faint vibration run through its body, like the hum of a machine that was running perfectly.
He smiled.
It was a small smile, barely a movement of his lips, but it surprised him. He could not remember the last time he had smiled for no reason. On the station, smiles were for jokes or for completing a difficult repair. They were responses to specific events. This smile was not a response to anything. It was just there, rising up from somewhere inside him like a bubble in still water.
The creature settled down beside his leg, its body pressing against him, and closed its eyes. The vibration continued, steady and warm.
Hoppy sat with it for a while, watching the pulsing stars and the shifting clouds. The light did not change. There was no sun to rise or set, no cycle of day and night. This was a place outside of time, or a place where time moved differently, in rhythms he could not measure.
A shadow passed over him.
He looked up and saw a figure descending from the sky. At first he thought it was a bird, something with wings spread wide, but as it drew closer he saw that it was a woman, and what he had taken for wings was a coat made of paper. The papers moved around her as she descended, pages of writing in a language he did not recognize, and they rustled softly like the turning of a book in a quiet library.
She landed a few feet away, her feet touching the cloud without sinking into it. She was tall, with silver hair pulled back from her face and eyes the color of old gold. The paper coat settled around her, and for a moment she looked like something out of a story, a figure from a tale he might have heard as a child and forgotten.
The creature beside him opened its eyes, chirped happily, and hopped toward her.
She bent down and let it bump against her foot, then straightened and looked at Hoppy. Her expression was calm, but there was warmth in it, the kind of warmth that did not need to be expressed in words.
"You are awake," she said.
Hoppy looked around again. The pink clouds, the pulsing stars, the soft creature now rubbing against the woman's ankle. It did not feel like waking. It felt like something else, something he did not have a name for.
"I think so," he said. "Where is this?"
"This is Cottonia," the woman said. "The first planet of the dream worlds. You have found your way here through sleep, as all Dreamers do."
Dream worlds. Dreamers. The words did not make sense, but they also did not feel wrong. He looked at his hands again, at the soft pink light that seemed to come from everywhere, and he thought about how he had fallen asleep thinking of his parents and woken up here.
"I did not find anything," he said. "I just went to sleep."
The woman smiled. It was a small smile, not unlike the one that had appeared on his own face a few minutes ago.
"That is how it begins," she said. "The Astral Tide carries those who are open to it. You are Tide-touched, it seems."
She took a step closer, and the papers of her coat rustled. Up close, Hoppy could see that the writing on them was not ink but light, silver lines that shifted as she moved. Some of the words looked like they might be names, or places, or something else entirely.
"My name is Monna," she said. "I am a Stargazer. I help those who first arrive here find their way."
Hoppy stood up. His legs did not ache. His back did not hurt. Everything felt easy here, as if his body had been waiting for this place without knowing it.
"Hoppy," he said. "I am a mechanic. On Aethon Station."
Monna tilted her head slightly, as if the information was interesting but not important. "You do not need to tell me your profession here, Hoppy. Here, you are a Dreamer. That is enough for now."
The small creature hopped back to Hoppy's feet and settled there, its warmth pressing against his ankle. Monna watched it with a knowing look.
"Fluffbunnies," she said. "They are the first inhabitants most Dreamers meet. They have been here since the Age of Living Stars, or so the old stories say."
"How long ago was that?"
"No one knows. Time in the dream worlds does not move the way it does in your waking world. What matters is not when something happened, but that it happened at all."
She began to walk, and Hoppy followed. The Fluffbunny hopped along behind him, occasionally bumping into his heel and then hopping ahead to catch up. The cloud surface was soft under his feet, and each step felt like walking on something that was both solid and not solid at the same time.
"There are more planets?" Hoppy asked after a while.
"Many more. The dream worlds are vast, larger than your waking world, perhaps. They are made from the memories of stars that have died. Each planet holds fragments of what those stars once knew, what they once were."
Hoppy tried to imagine a star with memories. He tried to imagine a star at all, not as a point of light in a video, but as something that had lived and died and left behind worlds made of its own thoughts. The idea was too large to hold, so he let it drift and focused on the clouds beneath his feet.
"How do I go back?" he asked.
The question came out before he had thought about it, and he was not sure he wanted an answer. The station was grey and cold, and his room smelled of metal and old grease. But it was his. It was the only place he had.
Monna walked beside him without answering immediately. They crested a small hill, and below them was a cluster of Fluffbunnies gathered around something that glowed. It was a small point of light, hovering just above the cloud surface, pulsing with the same slow rhythm as the stars above.
"You can return whenever you wish," Monna said. "Waking is as simple as choosing to wake. But most Dreamers who arrive here do not choose to leave so quickly."
They reached the glowing light. It was no larger than Hoppy's fist, and when he looked into it, he saw something moving inside. Not a clear image, but the suggestion of one. A shape that was almost a face, almost a tree, almost a song. It pulled at him, not with force, but with a gentle curiosity, like something that wanted to be known.
"This is an Ember of Extinction," Monna said. "A fragment of light from a dead star. Each one holds a memory, or sometimes a small ability. When you find one, it becomes part of you, if you let it."
Hoppy crouched down. The light was warm on his face, and the Fluffbunny that had followed him sat beside the Ember, its small body bathed in the soft glow.
"How do I let it?" he asked.
"You reach for it. Not with your hands. With your mind, or your heart. However you want to think of it. You open yourself to what it carries."
Hoppy had never been good at opening himself. He kept his tools organized, his thoughts to himself, his feelings buried so deep that sometimes he forgot they existed. But here, with the pink clouds stretching out in all directions and the small creature watching him with its patient eyes, it did not seem so hard.
He reached out. Not with his hand, but with something inside him that he had not known was there. It felt like leaning into a warm wind, letting it push against him without resistance.
The Ember brightened.
For a moment, he was not on the cloud anymore. He was somewhere else, or somewhen else. He saw a sky full of stars, brighter than any he had ever seen, and beneath them a world with oceans that glowed and mountains that reached into the clouds. He saw people walking through cities made of crystal, carrying lights in their hands, and their faces were peaceful, content. He saw the stars begin to dim, one by one, and the world below grew darker, and the people gathered in circles to tell stories about the light they had lost. They passed the stories from one to another, keeping them alive, holding onto what the stars had given them even after the stars themselves were gone.
The vision faded.
Hoppy was sitting on the cloud. He did not remember falling. The Ember was gone, but there was something in his chest that had not been there before. It was not heavy. It was warm, like holding a cup of something hot on a cold day, and it seemed to pulse gently, in time with the stars above.
Monna was watching him.
"What did you see?" she asked.
"A star," Hoppy said. "A world beneath it. People telling stories about the light after it was gone."
Monna nodded slowly. "That is the memory of the first Ember many Dreamers find. It is the memory of remembering. Of how those who lived under the stars chose to keep their light alive through stories."
Hoppy pressed his hand to his chest. The warmth was still there, steady and quiet.
"It feels strange," he said.
"It will, for a while. You have carried only your own memories until now. Adding the memory of a star takes time to become comfortable."
The Fluffbunny that had been sitting beside the Ember hopped onto Hoppy's knee. He looked down at it, and it chirped once before curling up against his leg. Its warmth joined the warmth inside him, and Hoppy felt something he had not felt in a long time.
It was not happiness, exactly. It was quieter than that. It was the feeling of being somewhere he did not have to leave. Of having time. Of being allowed to just sit and breathe and let the world be what it was without needing to fix it or understand it or make it useful.
He looked up at Monna. She was standing with her hands in the pockets of her paper coat, watching the Fluffbunnies that had gathered around them. Her expression was patient, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world and was in no rush to use it.
"What happens now?" Hoppy asked.
Monna looked at him, and her smile returned. "That depends on you. You can stay here on Cottonia for as long as you like. The Fluffbunnies will keep you company, and there are more Embers to find if you wish to look for them. Or you can move on to other planets. There is a Gate not far from here that leads to the next world."
Hoppy looked down at the Fluffbunny on his knee. It was asleep now, its small body rising and falling with each breath. He thought about the station, about his room, about the tools he would need to clean in the morning. He thought about the warmth in his chest and the pink sky above him and the way the clouds had felt under his back when he first woke up.
He thought about his parents. He did not know if they had ever dreamed of places like this. He did not know if they had ever found a world made of clouds and starlight, a place where the air was sweet and the creatures had no fear.
He thought he would like to stay. Just for a little while. Just to see what was on the other side of the Gate.
"I would like to see it," he said. "The Gate."
Monna's smile did not change, but something in her eyes softened. She turned and began walking again, and Hoppy stood up carefully, the Fluffbunny still sleeping against his leg. It opened one eye, chirped once, and then closed it again, apparently deciding that wherever Hoppy was going was a fine place to continue sleeping.
He followed Monna across the cloud hills. The warmth in his chest pulsed gently, in time with the stars, and for the first time in a very long time, he did not wonder what would happen tomorrow. He was here. That was enough.
The dream was not fading. It was not dissolving like sugar in water. It was holding him, carrying him, and for once, he let himself be carried.