Fen had learned, over years of careful practice, to design her dreams.
Not control them — that was different, and rarely worked. But she could set conditions. Choose a landscape. Decide, as she fell asleep, roughly what kind of world she wanted to enter.
Tonight she wanted to build something.
She lay on her back in the dark and thought clearly: I am an architect. I have an empty site. The site is on a hill, and the hill overlooks a sea.
She closed her eyes.
The hypnagogic images came — the shimmer and drift of the threshold state. She let them pass without grasping.
Then: a hill. A sea. Late afternoon light.
She began to design.
She started with the foundations — not physical foundations, but the reason for the building. What was it for? Who would use it? In her dreams, she'd found that form followed purpose more reliably than anywhere else.
It was for people who needed quiet. That was what she knew.
The building grew without her entirely directing it — the dream architecture doing what dream architecture always did, taking her intentions and completing them in ways she wouldn't have thought of awake.
When she woke in the morning, she reached for her sketchbook.
She drew what she had built.
She had been an architect's daughter her whole life, and she had never once thought she might be one too.
The sketch sat on her desk all day.
She kept returning to it, thinking: almost right. Almost.