Amber raised her head and met Gawain's calm, unfathomable gaze.
"Then... what happened next?" she asked curiously.
Gawain turned to the next page of the travel journal. Amid the mottled, ancient handwriting, the final passages of this record gradually unfolded before the reader:
"...Brian's answer filled me with an inexplicable fear, and I believe that fear had nothing to do with his words themselves—a kind of transcendent 'premonition,' born from a Supernatural Being's intuition, brought it about. Instinctively, I felt that what Brian mentioned was a rather terrible scenario. Should these Shadow Dwellers wandering along the edge of the Deep Realm Dream, maintaining the boundary between wakefulness and dreams, awaken as one... it would likely bode ill for the material world.
"The only fortunate thing is that this does not seem likely to happen anytime soon—at least, that was Brian's answer. He said: We will awaken eventually, but that time still seems far away. The Deep Realm Dream once came close to waking, but not long ago, it regained its stability. That stability may endure for a long time yet.
"I asked him what had caused the fluctuations in the Deep Realm Dream, what had awakened it, and what had stabilized it again—but Brian did not answer. He returned to his state of sleep-talking and wandering. I tried several more times afterward, including with other Shadow Dwellers, and the results were much the same. It seemed that whenever this question was involved, they immediately sank into a deeper level of dreaming... further worsening my unease.
"X month, X day... Days of fruitless investigation have been frustrating, but even more frustrating is... I have realized that I must leave.
"Without realizing it, I have remained in this world ruled by Shadow Power for far too long. Even though I had opportunities