The Architect of Dreams (eBook)

Some dreams aren't meant to be remembered. But he did.

Bilal Salman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
295 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-112521-6 (ISBN)

Infos

The Architect of Dreams
A boy who remembers. A world that forgets. A dream that holds it all together.

Elian Vale dreams of drowning.
But it's not water that pulls him under-it's memory.

In a world where dreams shape reality and forgetting is a disease spreading through waking minds, Elian discovers he is a Dream Architect: one of the last who can walk between dreams and stitch the fraying Thread that holds the world together.

As people begin to vanish from their own lives-forgotten by friends, family, and even themselves-Elian must enter the subconscious minds of those on the brink of oblivion. Guided by the mysterious silver-haired girl in the mirror, and armed with fragments of a mother he can barely recall, Elian confronts nightmares, Memory Eaters, and the chilling force behind the unraveling: The Sleeper.

But saving others comes at a price.
The more Elian remembers for the world, the more he risks forgetting who he truly is.

A breathtaking coming-of-age journey through surreal dreamscapes, heartbreaking memories, and the power of love that refuses to be erased-The Architect of Dreams is a story for anyone who's ever tried to hold on to something worth remembering.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

 

 

Elian Vale dreamed of drowning again.

It wasn’t the frantic kind of drowning—the kind where lungs claw for air and arms flail toward a surface you can’t reach. No. This was deeper. Slower. Almost deliberate. He sank as if gravity itself had remembered him and was claiming him back, pulling him down through layers of dark water that pressed close against his skin.

Sound was swallowed whole. His heartbeat was muffled to a distant thud, and every movement of his limbs came sluggish, boneless, as though the water had replaced his blood with heavy syrup. The taste of salt clung to his tongue even though his mouth was closed. His chest tightened—not in panic, but in the strange calm of inevitability.

And then he saw her.

The girl in the mirror.

She hovered before him in the twilight murk, her hair drifting like strands of pale silver thread, catching light where no light should exist. A dress clung to her legs as though woven from melted silk. She wasn’t standing on anything. She wasn’t swimming. She was simply there, suspended in the same stillness that held him.

The mirror itself had no frame, no wall to anchor it. It floated, tall and freestanding, an impossible sheet of cracked glass that pulsed faintly with its own breath. Cracks ran across its surface like frozen lightning, splintering her reflection into shards. Her face, though fractured, was steady. Calm. Not pleading. Not furious. Just watching.

She lifted her hand and pressed her fingers to the inside of the glass.

Elian’s body responded before thought caught up. His hand rose through the weightless water, trembling, reaching for hers.

The mirror groaned. A sound like stone dragged across stone vibrated through his bones. A single crack widened, slicing the surface from corner to corner. The girl opened her mouth. Not to speak. Not to scream. Simply to draw breath—from a place where there was none.

And then the mirror shattered.

Elian woke with a gasp that tore his chest open.

He sat bolt upright in bed, lungs heaving as though they’d been carved from ice. Morning light filtered through the crooked curtain, weak and pale, painting long stripes across wallpaper that peeled like old skin. Sweat clung to him, cold against his shirt. His throat was raw, his tongue dry as paper.

Just a dream, he told himself. Only a dream.

But when he dragged his palm across his face, something stung. He looked down. A thin red line cut across the base of his hand, beaded faintly with blood.

His breath hitched.

Dreams weren’t supposed to follow you back.

This one always did.

Downstairs, Aunt Mira’s voice carried through the narrow hallway like static. She was already pacing the kitchen, cigarette between two fingers, phone wedged against her shoulder. The scent of burnt toast and cheap tobacco drifted upward, mixing with the faint lemon of cleaning spray she never quite wiped away. She was always multitasking, always in motion, as if standing still might let the silence catch her.

Elian hovered in the doorway, not sure whether to step in or disappear.

“Yeah, well, the property taxes don’t pay themselves, do they?” Mira snapped into the phone, her tone sharp enough to cut. She jabbed ash into a chipped mug instead of an ashtray. “No, I don’t care what Cheryl said. I’ll come down there myself and explain it if I have to—”

Her eyes caught his. She pressed the phone against her chest, her expression softening by a fraction. “You’re up. Want tea?”

He shook his head. His voice felt trapped in his throat.

She gave a sharp exhale, not quite a sigh. “Fine. Suit yourself.” She returned to the call. “I’ve got to go. My nephew looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

The line clicked off. Mira leaned against the counter, studying him like he was a puzzle with missing edges. “Another dream?”

He nodded once.

“The same one?”

Another nod.

“You should see someone, El.”

“I’m fine,” he muttered, though the word sounded brittle even to him.

“You’re thirteen. You’re not supposed to be fine. You’re supposed to…” She stopped, her mouth tightening, as though finishing the sentence would hurt her more than him. She tried again, softer this time. “You’re supposed to have someone to talk to. Someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“You mean a shrink.”

She didn’t answer. Her silence was heavy enough.

Elian looked down at his hand. The cut was still there.

School was worse.

He walked through the day like a ghost no one had invited back. Faces blurred. Voices slid past him. Condolences came in thin, prepackaged phrases: “Sorry for your loss.” “She was a kind woman.” “Time heals.” None of them looked him in the eyes when they said it. Grief made people uncomfortable; they shifted around it like it was an open flame.

Even teachers avoided him. He was present, but not. A name on the attendance sheet. A shadow in the corner of the classroom.

Only Len still treated him like he was real.

At lunch, Len plopped down beside him with all the grace of a falling anvil, unwrapping his sandwich with exaggerated care. “Okay, don’t laugh. I’ve been having this dream where I’m in a library, and every single book has my name on it. But they’re all blank.”

Elian frowned. “That’s… not normal.”

“Gets worse,” Len continued, waving a crust like a pointer. “There’s this dripping sound. I try to find it, but the hallway just keeps going forever. Same lights. Same floors. Like someone copied and pasted reality on loop.”

Something inside Elian went cold.

“You ever see people in it?” he asked carefully.

“In the dream?” Len shrugged. “Not really. Why?”

Elian hesitated. The weight of the cut on his palm pressed against him like a secret. “Just curious.”

But he wasn’t. Not at all. Because now there were two of them.

That night, Elian didn’t resist sleep. He went to it willingly.

If answers lived behind the mirror, he would find them—even if it meant bleeding for them.

The dream came quickly.

This time he wasn’t drowning. He stood in a hallway that stretched endlessly in both directions, lined with wooden doors carved with symbols that pulsed faintly, like breathing skin. Spirals. Feathers bound in thread. A hand with an eye etched into its palm. Symbols he almost recognized, like words half-remembered in another language.

He began to walk.

The lights overhead flickered. The walls shivered—not visibly, but deep within their bones. A sound followed him.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

At the far end of the hall hung a mirror.

The girl stood inside it.

This time the glass was already broken. Shards hovered in the air like fragments of a shattered moon. Each piece reflected only part of her face—an eye, lips, cheek, a pale sliver of expression that never came together fully.

She reached toward him. Her gaze caught his. And then, from the fragments, the mirror whispered a single word.

Remember.

Elian’s eyes flew open.

He was no longer in bed. He was standing in the hallway outside his room. His hand throbbed. Drops of blood darkened the floorboards beneath him.

He stumbled into the bathroom, heart pounding. The cut had deepened, a clean slash across his palm as though carved by something sharp. Too shallow for stitches, too deep to dismiss.

He splashed water over it, breath shaking.

When he looked up—she was there.

The girl. In the mirror. Not a reflection. Not a trick of light. She was standing on the other side of the glass, her expression soft, sad, as though she longed to speak but could not.

And then she vanished.

Elian yanked a towel over the mirror, his pulse racing. He sat at his desk long after the house went silent, the cut bandaged, the mirror hidden from view.

Finally, with trembling hands, he opened the drawer where his mother’s journal lay. The leather was worn, the corners bent, the pages still smelling faintly of lavender and ink—her scent, clinging like she had only just touched it.

He turned the first page. Blank.

The second page wasn’t.

In her precise, slanted handwriting, his mother had written:

“Dreams are threads. Some are soft. Some are sharp. Some bind us together. Some pull us apart. And a few… lead somewhere else entirely.”

Elian’s chest tightened. He flipped the page.

A sketch waited for him there.

A mirror. Broken.

And scrawled in the margin, in his mother’s hand:

“Find Aveline.”

 

Elian didn’t sleep the next night—not because fear held him awake, but because anticipation did. He sat on the narrow windowsill of his bedroom, knees tucked to his chest, staring out at the fog that blanketed the street below. The mist clung to the lamppost like a veil, bending the orange glow into strange shapes that shifted with every breath of wind. The air pressed heavy against the glass, carrying the faint, metallic scent of rain even though the sky had not opened yet.

The journal lay open beside him, its pages breathing faintly in the candlelight. He had read them again and again until the words blurred. Three pages in, it had stopped being a diary and turned into something else—sketches of doors that had no hinges, windows stitched with symbols, diagrams that looked more like blueprints than memories.

One drawing in particular refused to leave him: a tall, arched...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-112521-4 / 0001125214
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-112521-6 / 9780001125216