The Doors of Dreaming
an excerpt

Chapter 1

There was a kind of earthquake going through the strange landscape, gently but firmly shaking the ground, as if to make sure that everyone had felt it before it died out. The only thing was, it wasn’t on Earth and there wasn’t really any ground to shake in a normal sense of the word.
The big, black cat sat next to a small lamp, which cast a faint, greenish glow that hit the cat’s eyes and made them sparkle. A tiny voice sounded exitedly from the lamp, and the cat nodded once in a while in that absent-minded way cats do that make you think they’re really just thinking about how clever and elegant they are.
The cat wasn’t really a cat, but rather a way of representing a fear of darkness so it felt less frightening. It had been around for a while, summoned by someone who had always liked cats and never the darkness, and already as a child had needed a symbolic way of dealing with her dislike, even though she wasn’t conscious about it. She still wasn’t, so the cat was still there, showing up whenever other factors in her life made the fear of darkness more pronounced.
Finally, the cat stretched its large, black legs and made a quick, cleansing motion, not because it wasn’t as clean as a cat can be, but because it was nervous. “Yes, I felt it too”, it said, in a soft, velvety voice. “I’m sure I know what it means, if I can just have a quiet moment or two to think about it”. The voice inside the lamp was quiet for a while, and then tiny, excited words started flowing again, forming a question. “No”, the cat said, “I do not know who will look into it”. It looked around in the purple-black darkness around them, its whiskers vibrating ever so slightly. “Others are coming, however.” The cat’s eyes fixed on the lamp, making them sparkle even more. “Let us go meet them.” It picked up the lamp with its mouth and started moving towards the entities that were gathering around them, all moving towards the same place.