If Kilian had found her in the dream, she wouldn’t have even recognized him. As time went by ever faster, Kilian grew more desperate. What had once been neat and orderly in his life had left with Lorelai. Kilian barely even cared for himself anymore. When he wasn’t searching the unconscious world for Lorelai, Kilian ran.

He ran to escape his life and all the unhappiness that kept him here, away from Lorelai. Kilian knew that he had to keep his muscles from deteriorating, or he would be in a wheelchair when he finally found Lorelai. Kilian had first found the dreamworld last year after his accident.

He had been in the car with his mother; they had just finished the grocery shopping, and their little station wagon was practically groaning with all the school supplies Kilian needed for High School. It was raining, and his mother could hardly see the road through the deluge. They never even saw it coming; the drunk driver hit the side of their car at seventy miles an hour.

When Kilian woke up, all he saw was light. At first, he thought it was the light of ambulances, but as his vision cleared, he noticed his surroundings. There were cobblestone pathways leading nowhere, and sunlight reflecting off the water in fountains. While Kilian wandered around the town, his body was taken to the hospital. He was shocked with a defibrillator in the ambulance, but nothing happened. As he was rushed into the hospital, doctors and nurses chased after his gurney, and he was taken to the OR. After five hours, Kilian’s internal bleeding was taken care of, and he was sewn back together. When the drugs wore off, Kilian was back in the hospital. His mother was nowhere to be seen; his father had already come to identify the body.

Although Kilian looked for her every day, Lorelai was nowhere to be found. After she had passed into the dreamworld at the carnival, she was terrified of her surroundings. Every moment was spent trying to get back to reality.

As time went by, the people in the dreamworld were starting to become more accustomed to her; as though she were becoming one of them. More and more, Lorelai found herself understanding what the people were saying and the way the city worked. Lorelai was even starting to dress like the people. The jeans and jacket she had been wearing at the carnival had been traded for the leather tunic and tight leggings of the people around her. She copied the hairstyles of the women, with little bits of decoration in her hair. Little braids held bells and bits of ribbon that formed a fluffy halo around her head. Every day, she walked past the school, hoping to see someone she knew.

All of the inventions Lorelai took for granted were completely foreign to people here. Lorelai got used to doing things by hand, and to being exhausted at the end of the day. She grew used to the world and its two suns, and started to forget that she had ever known a life that wasn’t lit by two suns. She clung to her memories of Rebecca and Kilian, but disregarded her old life, embracing the freedom the dreamworld gave her.

When she had first arrived, disoriented and confused, a woman in the market has taken her home and let her sleep in the apartment over the store she ran. Lorelai started working in the woman’s bakery, and stopped walking through the marketplace. The woman that had taken her in was a middle-aged mother type named Nona. Nona always seemed to smell like flour, and always had a smile upon her face; as though she found the world around her utterly hilarious.

Kilian grew even more dilapidated. His black hair now hung to his shoulders, and his hazel eyes had a manic light to them. His golden skin had lost its healthy appearance, his long hours inside paling his skin to a moonlit glow. He had stopped going to school after the carnival, he just filled out the mountain of paperwork and got his GED. His father was a photographer and was always in Africa or somewhere tropical for the nature magazines he worked for. He paid the bills from wherever he was at the time; often arriving at a post office on the back of a camel, smelling of whatever river he had fallen into when he tried to cross it. He had never gone to college, and counted himself lucky that Kilian wasn’t roaming the streets. As long as Kilian got his diploma, his father couldn’t care less about what he did.