Page 9 of Hex and the Dragon
"Back here," Ivy called, quickly closing the Chronicle before their visitors could be exposed to its influence.
Griff appeared in the doorway carrying his six-year-old daughter Tilly, who was wrapped in a colorful quilt and looked like she'd been crying. Behind them, Mara Voss carried a steaming travel mug that smelled of chamomile and protective herbs.
"Sorry to bother you so late," Mara said, her usually cheerful demeanor shadowed with concern. "But Tilly's been having some unusual dreams, and given everything that's been happening..."
"Not dreams," Tilly said firmly, lifting her head from her father's shoulder to fix Ivy and Dorian with eyes that seemed far too old for her young face. "Visions. The pretty lady is rewriting the town's story, making it all wrong."
Ivy’s blood turned to ice. "Rewriting the story?"
"She's changing what happened," Tilly explained with the matter-of-fact tone that children used to describe impossible things. "Making it so all the sad parts didn't happen, all the scary parts were just pretend. But when you change a story like that, it stops being true. And when stories stop being true, they turn into lies that eat everything real."
Griff and Mara exchanged worried glances, clearly having heard this explanation before. "She's been talking about it all day," Griff said. "Drawing pictures of shadows that move on their own, writing in languages she shouldn't know."
"May I see the pictures?" Ivy asked gently.
Mara pulled a folder from her bag, spreading several drawings across Ivy's desk. Tilly's artwork showed disturbing accuracy for a six-year-old—shadowy figures with too many eyes, landscapes that shifted between beautiful and nightmarish, and people with blank, content expressions who looked more like dolls than human beings.
But the most unsettling drawing showed the library itself, with dark tendrils reaching out from the building to touch every house in town. At the center of it all was a figure that might have been human if not for the way shadows writhed around it like living smoke.
"That's her," Tilly said, pointing to the shadow-wreathed figure. "The pretty lady who makes the dreams. She lives in a book now, but she wants to live in the world again. She thinks if she makes everything perfect, people won't mind that it's not real anymore."
Dorian leaned forward, studying the drawings with intense focus. "Tilly, when you see these visions, do you see the lady talking to anyone? Working with anyone?"
"She talks to the book," Tilly said promptly. "But the book talks back now. It's not just words anymore, it's... awake. And it's hungry for more stories to rewrite."
The Chronicle on Ivy's desk pulsed with heat, as if responding to Tilly's description. The child's gaze immediately fixed on the scaled cover, her expression growing troubled.
"That's it," she whispered. "That's where the pretty lady lives. Why did you wake her up?"
"We're trying to understand what she wants," Ivy said carefully. "So we can figure out how to stop her."
"You can't stop her by talking to her," Tilly said with the absolute certainty of childhood. "She's too good at making people want what she's offering. She's already got most of the grown-ups dreaming her dreams instead of their own."
"Most of the grown-ups?" Mara repeated with alarm. "How many people are affected?"
Before Tilly could answer, Griff's phone buzzed with an incoming call. He answered it with one hand while keeping the other securely around his daughter.
"Leo," he said by way of greeting. "What's the situation?"
Even from across the room, Ivy could hear the exhaustion in Sheriff Leo Maddox's voice as it carried through the phone's speaker. "Bad and getting worse. I've got forty-seven people who didn't wake up this morning. Not comatose, not unconscious—just sleeping so deeply that nothing can rouse them. Dr. Hayes says their vitals are stable, but they're showing the kind of brain activity associated with vivid dreaming."
"Forty-seven," Griff repeated grimly. "Out of how many residents?"
"We've got maybe three hundred people in the greater Mistwhisper Falls area," Leo said. "Which means about fifteen percent of our population has chosen the Chronicle's dreams over reality."
Ivy felt the Chronicle pulse with satisfaction beneath her hands, its scaled cover growing warm as it fed on the town's growing surrender to its influence.
"It's accelerating," she said. "The more people who choose the perfect dreams, the stronger it becomes."
"And the stronger it becomes, the more appealing the dreams get," Dorian added with growing understanding. "It's a feedback loop."
Leo's voice came through the phone again, strained with the kind of stress that came from watching a crisis spiral beyond control. "I need you all at the sheriff's station first thing tomorrow morning. We're setting up an emergency command center, and I want everyone who's still thinking clearly involved in the response."
"We'll be there," Griff promised. "And Leo? Try to get some sleep tonight. Real sleep, not the kind the Chronicle's offering."
"Working on it," Leo said with dark humor. "Though I have to admit, the dreams it's showing me are pretty tempting. A world where I never fail to protect anyone, where every crisis gets resolved before people get hurt..."
"Those aren't real victories," Mara said firmly. "They're just pretty lies designed to make you stop fighting."
