Chapter 1: Prologue

As I wait for the bus, I’m smiling. Soon, I will finally graduate from college. Even though I like my major, I am growing more tired from my studies with each day passing. Despite being only twenty-two, I suffer daily headaches, anemia and exhaustion. This did not help me at all during my exams, of course, but I still managed to succeed. 

Hence why I’m smiling.

Seated in the back of the desolated bus, I think about the future. Whether I become an engineer or I instead work on a thesis in physics, I secured my place by creating close ties with my teachers. I am not extremely bright, although I would say I am way above average.  Thanks to my hard work, my future is surely assured.

 

… Or so I thought. I realized something was truly wrong with me when I collapsed from an intense headache as I returned to my apartment.

I had been having enormous headaches for the last few months and had to deal with difficulties to think. In denial, however, I convinced myself all this time that it was due to my lack of sleep as my exams were approaching. Still, after the headaches became constant all day long, I finally chose to take some time off to pass some medical tests.

 

The result? A freaking tumor. A grade IV tumor in my brain, a Glioblastoma. Yup, I got myself a stage 4 brain cancer. A few weeks ago, I looked up what could possibly cause my symptoms on medical forums. Surely, the brain cancer hypothesis was written on every single site I searched. 

Even so, I told myself these people writing these things on the internet were not doctors and that my symptoms probably had another explanation. 

Just before I passed all these tests, I was even ready to be told I had a small tumor that could be safely removed. But a high-grade tumor? Really?

So, I was gently told on top of this that my tumor was located in a high-risk area of my brain, that it couldn’t be removed with surgery, and that chances were thus clearly not in my favor.

After all, out of four people having Glioblastoma, one statically died in a year after being diagnosed.

The odds of surviving for more than five years are very slight, especially when it is diagnosed so late, like mine.

As such, I listened to the doctors and chose to get some drug therapy that could at the very least ease my constant pain and … I had to quit college. I managed to say goodbye to my teachers, my few friends from college, and basically all the future I had managed to build during all these years. At some point, I had to move back to my parents’ place where I would spend my last few months surrounded by my family and my few childhood friends who were still there.

 

And just like that, I met my end.

 

***

 

That was at least what the little girl had been dreaming about for the last three months, bit by bit. Since she learned to read and write at the tender age of five, she had been keeping notes of every dream she had at night. By keeping this routine, she got particularly trained at remembering an impressive amount of details of her dreams.

Being eight years old, she had slept about one thousand times since she started writing in her notebook of dreams. Plus, since she was used to remembering two or three of her dreams every night, there should be between two and three thousand dreams in this notebook. 

Well, to be fair, this was actually her fifteenth notebook of dreams.

Anyway, the girl was fairly used to envisioning in her dreams some familiar places and some … less familiar ones. For example, there were at least a few hundred dreams in which she would just be flying over neighboring kingdoms, discovering new lands or even visiting the realm of the Gods in some cases. 

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(However, I feel like every single dream I've had for the last few months is much different compared to my usual fantasy dreams before.)

To begin with, these specific dreams were weird. They told the story of someone who wasn’t her at all, something that rarely happened in her other dreams. They seemingly occurred in a strange foreign kingdom too, where people’s behavior was different in every way imaginable from common sense, and where magic didn’t even seem to be used regularly. Plus, there were all these weird means of transportation that used wheels but without any animal or even magic.

These dreams seemed so foreign to the girl, and yet they felt somewhat nostalgic. The strangest thing was probably that they were incredibly detailed, to the point that all her dreams prior to three months before seemed like a joke. The girl remembered every single detail, even without writing anything in her notebook. 

On top of that, these visions took the place of all the other “usual” dreams, and the girl dreamt four or five times of this woman every single night.

At this point, could those even be called dreams? 

(This kingdom is so bizarre that even the realm of the Gods is ordinary by comparison.)

Another strange thing was that these visions were consistent with each other, even though they did not necessarily occur chronologically. For example, the young girl already had a good idea of the foreign woman’s life from birth to death just with the first month of the dreams but, since then, she still had a lot of dreams depicting additional parts of her life some years before her death or even during her childhood.

(This is so weird to me, though. From the moment I wake up and even months after, these dreams seem more vivid than my own memories.) 

She was starting to be really confused about what she remembered and she was afraid for her sanity. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop for quite some time.

 

***

 

Just like that, two years passed.

It didn’t stop at all. If anything, it even worsened at some point, with a dozen dreams every single night.

Through this very slow process, the girl couldn't possibly pretend that she was completely different from the person from her dreams anymore. She knew every day of the foreigner better than her own memories from even three years ago.

If she had to be honest, she didn’t really know if her mind was slowly being eaten away by these dreams or if they were simply being added to her own memories of being a young noble child. Were some of her own memories being replaced? She wasn’t sure, since she didn’t know what she didn’t know.

(But I’m now pretty certain that this “foreign kingdom” is actually another world and that this woman was me in a former life. It actually checks out with some stories I saw in my dreams through the eyes of this woman.)

Remembering two different lives weirded her out so much that she couldn’t say for sure who she really was anymore. 

At least, she hadn’t had those dreams for two days in a row, potentially marking the end of this torture. Since she still had (most of?) her memories from before the dreams and also from how she felt during this psychological hell of these last two years, she was still inclined to identify herself as Alice de Ravendall. 

However, maybe she was just trying to convince herself of that because her pride wouldn’t allow her to accept that she lost her identity along with her sanity.

This mental pain was further increased by the fact that nobody had reassured her, since she didn’t talk to anybody about these dreams. After all, nobody would have taken her seriously.

The only thing Alice could do was wait a few more days, hoping these dreams would not come back.

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