Chapter 45: To the space between
Hania opened her eyes to the Dream Library.
Everything was exactly as she had left it. The purple knitted steering wheel cover sat neatly on its display shelf. The "World's Best Transport" air freshener hung from a nearby hook, and next to it rested the custom bumper sticker that read "My Other Chassis Is a Metaphor."
She didn't care about any of it.
"Truck-kun!" Her voice tore through the stacks, echoing off the high ceilings. "Truck-kun, I need to get out of here! Now!"
The library was dead silent. The books on their shelves rustled uneasily, their pages fluttering as if they could feel the tension radiating directly from her dream-body.
"Truck-kun! Answer me!"
A familiar engine rumbled from somewhere deep within the restricted archives. Truck-kun rolled slowly into view.
"You're back early," he said. "The banquet can't be over already. Hania, what happened out there?"
"My father is dying."
Truck-kun's headlights dimmed, the bright beams dropping to a somber glow.
"There's something inside him and it's consuming him from the inside out. He pushed me away, Truck-kun. He told me to get lost. He never tells me to get lost! Lusha put me to sleep to keep me from running back into the crossfire, and now I'm trapped here, and I need to get OUT!"
She spun around and slammed her fist against the nearest bookshelf. A thick volume titled So You've Accidentally Adopted a Vampire tumbled off the ledge, striking the floor with a thud.
"I need to go back," she wept, her voice rising in a desperate crescendo. "To him! I need to reach him before it's too late!"
"Hania." Truck-kun's voice softened. "You're unconscious right now. Lusha's sleep magic is incredibly potent; it's keeping your physical body completely under. You can't just wake up by wishing for it—"
"I don't care about the rules of magic!" She whipped around to face him. "I've never tried to force my way out of this space before. I've always waited. I've always trusted that I'd wake up when the narrative demanded it, when it was safe. But this is different! He's out there completely alone, and I am trapped in this stupid space, and I am NOT going to sit here and wait while he dies!"
She raised her hands, throwing her arms wide. Mana surged through her dream-body. The crescent moon mark on her forehead burned with a searing light.
The entire library shuddered. The floorboards groaned beneath them. Books flew off their shelves by the dozens, their pages tearing as they spiraled into the air, and the grandfather clock began to chime erratically.
"Hania, STOP! You're going to destroy the foundation!"
Truck-kun's horn blared. She stumbled backward, her breath catching in her throat. The silver light flickering around her hands instantly died, and the frantic mana faded back into her chest.
"Look at what you're doing to your own sanctuary!" Truck-kun's headlights swept across the fracturing room.
Hania looked around, her eyes widening. He was right. The walls of the library were flickering violently. Deep, jagged cracks were spreading across the floorboards. The sparkling grape juice fountain had completely turned to boiling steam. Her carefully organized shelves were collapsing under the weight of her panic.
"If you tear through the dream barrier by sheer force," Truck-kun explained, his voice urgent with warning, "you'll trigger a catastrophic dimensional crisis. The space between dreams and reality isn't just an empty hallway, Hania. It's a void full of terrible things. Shattered fragments. Lost souls. Pieces of dead dimensions. If you get caught out there without a tether, you won't wake up in your body, and you won't die. You'll just... cease. You'll be trapped between spaces forever."
Hania’s hands dropped to her sides. "Then what do I do?" she whispered, her voice breaking as she looked at her trembling palms. "I can't just stay here. He's out there. He's alone. He has always been alone, and I promised myself that I wouldn't let him be alone anymore. I came to this world to find a family. I found him. And now he's..."
Her voice cracked completely, the words disappearing into a sob. The tears she had been desperately holding back finally spilled over.
"I can't lose him," she wept, covering her face with her hands as her shoulders shook. "I can't. I just got him. He taught me how to draw complex formations. He made a stupid magical frog sing for me when I was terrified. He literally cut the entire Southern Sea in half just to save my life. He gave me a useless rock for my birthday and called it practical. He says 'Hmm' instead of 'I love you,' and I understand it. I understand all of it! And if he dies out there thinking he has to protect me by pushing me away..."
She sank to her knees, her knees hitting the cracked floorboards. "I can't," she whispered into her hands. "I can't lose him. Not like this."
Truck-kun remained silent for a moment. His headlights flickered, once, twice... as if he were calculating variables across an unseen grid.
Then, he rolled forward. "Kid," he said, his tone dropping its usual sarcastic edge. "Look at me."
She slowly lifted her head, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red and tear-streaked.
"You said you need to reach him," Truck-kun stated clearly. "Not just wake up or just go back to your physical body. You want to reach him. Directly. Is that right?"
"Yes," Hania whispered, nodding quickly. "Yes, whatever it takes."
"Then you need a tether. Something intimately connected to his current space. His magic. His..." Truck-kun paused, searching for a mechanical equivalent before settling on the truth. "His heart, for lack of a better word. Do you have anything like that on you? Anything he gave you that links your soul directly to his?"
Hania's hand went instinctively to the hidden pocket of her dress. Her fingers brushed against empty fabric. Her heart dropped. The storage crystal, the glowing stone he had given her on her very first birthday when she was a baby—was sitting at the dark bottom of the Southern Sea. She had watched it sink into the abyss.
"I had something," she choked out. "A stone. He gave it to me when I was a baby. But I lost it in the ocean. It's gone. I have nothing left of him here."
Truck-kun's engine let out a soft whine, a sympathetic sigh. "Is there anything else? Think, Hania. Anything at all."
Hania closed her eyes, forcing herself through the fog of her panic. She thought of the Tower—but the Tower was a physical building, not a soul-tether. She thought of the training room, the grand library, her nursery. All of those places were connected to her father, but they weren't of him. They didn't hold his raw essence.
And then, a memory sparked through the darkness.
The garden.
The one with the permanent pink sky, the weeping willow, the pristine lotus ponds, and the cherry blossom trees. The place he had carried her to when she was barely old enough to balance on her own two feet. The place where she had spoken her very first word to him. The place where he had spent hours creating a magical symphony.
The place with the seven stone graves.
"It's a pocket dimension," she said slowly, her eyes snapping open as the realization took hold. "It's completely tied to his personal mana signature. His memories." She swallowed hard. "I think it's the only place he goes when he can't bear the outside world. When he needs to..."
She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence. She didn't have the emotional vocabulary to describe her father's profound isolation.
Truck-kun's headlights instantly flared into a bright white. "A pocket dimension constructed entirely from his own soul-bound mana. That's not just a tether, Hania. That's an open back door."
She scrambled to her feet, grabbing onto his side mirror. "Can you get me there? Can we punch through?"
The library fell completely still as Truck-kun's engine rumbled contemplatively, vibrating against the floor.
"I've never attempted anything like this before," he admitted, his voice dropping into a serious tone. "Interdimensional navigation inside a single world isn't in my factory settings. I'm a reincarnation vehicle. My job is to move souls across the grand threshold between entirely different universes, not weave through the micro-layers of this one. But..." He paused, his grill twisting into a determined line. "The space between dreams and reality—that is my highway. And if you can feed me the exact coordinates of that destination, if you can hold that memory of his mana in your head, I might be able to steer us right through the gap."
"Might?" Hania pressed, her fingers tightening on his frame.
"There are massive risks," Truck-kun said bluntly. "If my calculations are off by even a fraction of a millimeter, we could end up flung into a completely wrong dimension. Or worse, caught in the dead zones between them. You could be erased, Hania. But..." He shifted into gear, his transmission clicking loudly. "We could also succeed. You'd reach him. But you need to understand something—once you're inside that pocket dimension, you will be standing in the center of his unedited mind. His grief. His rawest memories. Are you absolutely sure you're ready for what you might find hidden in the dark in there?"
Hania closed her eyes for a split second. She saw her father's face through the wall of ice he had thrown up between them. She saw the terrifying black veins crawling across his temples, the red crescent moon blazing like a curse on his forehead. She remembered the sheer terror in his eyes, for hers.
She opened her eyes, and the doubt was completely gone. "I'm ready. Take me to him."
"Then hold onto your chassis, kid! This is going to be a bumpy ride!"
The Dream Library disappeared around them. Books tore off their shelves, their pages scattering like autumn leaves before being sucked into the growing void.
Hania gripped Truck-kun's side mirror with both hands.
"Where are we going?!" she shouted at the top of her lungs over the deafening roar of the collapsing dimension.
"To the space between!" Truck-kun roared back, his tires spinning violently against the disintegrating floor. "And then, if my engine doesn't blow, straight to him!"
The library shattered into a million jagged shards of glass.
They fell through the darkness. A place where space and time had never been meant to exist, let alone be crossed by a human soul. Hania clung desperately to Truck-kun's metal chassis as they tumbled head-over-heels through a void thick with conceptual fragments.
Shattered mirrors floated past, reflecting faces of people she had never seen; doors drifted by, opening onto vast, empty fields of nothingness; and whispers echoed from the dark in dead languages that made her head ache just to hear them.
"Stay close to my frame!" Truck-kun’s voice sounded strange, distorted by the immense atmospheric pressure of the void. "Don't touch any of the debris! Don't look at the fragments for too long! And whatever you do, Hania, do not let go of my mirror!"
Hania buried her face against his metallic hood, shielding her eyes. She could feel the crushing weight of the universe pressing in on her from all sides, a terrifying gravity trying to tear her dream avatar into microscopic particles.
Dad, she thought, closing her eyes and squeezing them shut. I'm coming. Please, just hold on. Don't leave me behind.
Suddenly, a tiny flicker of light pierced through the absolute blackness ahead.
"There it is!" Truck-kun’s engine let out a triumphal roar. "The pocket dimension! I've caught the anchor—your father's mana signature! It's incredibly faint, it's bleeding energy, but it's there!"
"Can we reach it?!" Hania screamed over the cosmic wind.
"I'm shifting into overdrive! Hang on!"
Truck-kun's tires spun furiously against the empty air, suddenly finding a bizarre kind of traction on a conceptual boundary line, and pushed forward. The debris grew thicker, flying past them like meteors—a child's wooden toy spinning aimlessly, a cracked, jewel-encrusted crown, and a massive floating mirror that briefly reflected a face.
Hania caught a glimpse of it. It looked almost exactly like Dravin, but he was younger. His features were softer. His eyes were bright.
Don't look. Don't touch. Don't let go. She forced her eyes shut again, repeating the mantra in her head like a prayer.
The pink light expanded, becoming blinding. Hania could feel the sudden shift in temperature. She could see the distinct shapes of trees now, the sweeping branches of the willow, and the silver glint of water.
"We're on top of it!" Truck-kun shouted, his entire frame shuddering under the strain. "Hold on to your soul, kid. The boundary wards are incredibly dense—I need to punch a hole straight through—"
There was a deafening sound, like the fabric of reality being torn in half by bare hands. And then, the violent tumbling stopped. Her feet hit solid ground.
Hania gasped, opening her eyes.
She was lying flat on her back on soft, cool grass beneath a twilight pink sky. Cherry blossom petals drifted lazily through the calm air, falling in silent patterns around her.
She had made it. The garden. Her father's most sacred, hidden sanctuary.
She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, shaking her head to clear the dizziness. Her body felt incredibly strange here.
"Truck-kun?" she called out, her voice trembling as she looked around.
There was no immediate answer. She scrambled to her feet, searching the clearing, and found him several yards away. He had crashed hard into a thick cherry blossom tree, his front bumper wedged slightly into the dirt, and he was currently buried under a massive pile of pink petals. His engine was smoking faintly from beneath the hood.
"I'm fine," he wheezed, his headlights flickering weakly as he emitted a pathetic puff of black smoke from his exhaust. "Totally fine. Don't look at the dent in my fender. Just... give my alternator a minute to recover."
"Truck-kun." Hania’s voice hitched, a mixture of disbelief and relief washing over her. "We actually made it. You did it."
"Of course we made it," he wheezed, trying to rev his engine to sound impressive but ending up coughing instead. "I'm an interdimensional transport vehicle. This is literally what I was manufactured to do. More or less."
Hania turned away from him, turning in an agonizing circle to take in the entirety of the garden. It looked exactly as it had when she was a baby.
Then she suddenly saw, beneath the sweeping green curtain of the willow tree, where her father usually sat in silent contemplation, there was a figure.
Hania took a slow step forward. The figure beneath the willow tree didn't move an inch. It was small, far too small to be an adult. A child? A phantom? A statue? From this distance, she couldn't tell.
"Hania," Truck-kun said quietly, his headlights dimming into a serious, watchful gaze. "Before you take another step... remember what I warned you about. This isn't a normal space. This is his unfiltered memories. You are about to see things that he has spent centuries hiding from the rest of the world. Things he never intended for you to see. Are you still absolutely sure you want to walk into that?"
Hania looked away from the mysterious figure for a brief moment, her eyes tracking down to the edge of the pond.
"I'm sure," she said out loud, her voice steadying.
She took a deep breath, lifted the hem of her dress, and began to walk toward the shadow of the willow tree.