I close my eyes and start to drift from your world. I call it that because the place I go to is where my dreams appear. It’s my world. It’s also theirs. For as long as I can remember I’ve always had weird dreams with tangible storylines, most of the time if I could remember them I would write it down and try to craft a story out of it. Even nightmares intrigued me, they didn’t scare me so much as fascinate me and give me an adrenaline kick, it sounds weird but think about how many people enjoy horror films. The only dreams that left me uneasy were those I had when half in reality. It made them too real and it seemed a lot of the time as if the events were actually happening. Those were rare occurrences however. At least up until I became a summoner.

I think becoming an anchor is really what did it. Most summoners have a deep seated connection with their creatures anyway but as an anchor I would also be the portal that the creatures came through. I’d become a fracture between realms. At first I didn’t notice the oddities about it. I figured stress was keeping me half awake and the nightmares were also caused by that. After a while I began to realise that this was constantly happening and the dream world I disappeared into never really changed. I consulted my teacher about it once and he explained that I was just feeling pressured and unnerved by the state of the world but I think he knew more. Eine was the type of man who wanted you to learn as much as you could yourself before he’d give the final push.

My dreams continued but then in one of them I found Leiden, a wolf summon of mine. He comforted me and led me to the others three animals I could call forth. This was when I started to realise what was going on. I actually enjoyed it for a long time. We explored this new world and set up a place for us to take shelter.
It wasn’t until I started summoning my creatures more often and letting them stay in the real world that I started to get problems. They would fall asleep next to me but this meant I was ended up alone in the dream place. That was when I stumbled upon my other summons. I had a fifth mark for summoning that I had decided to rarely use, even Eine told me it was a good idea and normally he believed that practicing with a summon will make the bond strengthen. When I found what came through the rift I was genuinely scared. You see my fifth mark was a random one. It allowed the summon to use my body as a host so it could interact with the world around it. However the summon was always different each time with a few regular ones, I didn’t figure this one out until I ran into one of the ones that frequently comes forward.

The reason they don’t have their own bodies is because they’re spirits. They linger in the area I visit from many different ages and eras. A lot of them are bitter due to being dead and I’m sure they’re even bitterer that I don’t use the fifth mark as much as I could but I’m not a fan of being possessed. When my other summons are around they leave me alone but when I arrive on my own they don’t leave me be.

I told you that I don’t like it when I half wake up in the middle of a dream yes? Well the reason is because it used to feel like dreams bleeding into reality and that I couldn’t escape even if my eyes opened. Well now I’m more afraid because it’s true. The spirits try to break through the rift my body creates sometimes and the only thing holding them back is when my other summons realise this and make them go back. The problem with being half awake is that even when I see my room around me as I open my eyes I’m aware that the moment I shut them the image will reappear until I completely break from sleep. I sometimes wake up with injuries, they’re mostly minor but it’s a hint at what these spirits are capable of. I would try to stop them but I have no idea how and the horrifying truth is that on occasion I do need them so destroying the mark that links me too them would be a difficult decision.

So if you see me asleep, something I have to do to frequently keep my strength up these days, and I seem to be struggling to wake up or my creature summons in a frenzy nearby please, throw some water over me or something and jolt me back to your world.