In the glossary he found entries that were similar enough in concept to what he was searching for (he scanned a long list of terms following trees, and ghosts, since there wasn’t one for haunting), but these broad categories narrowed down into more concrete images which didn’t appear in his dream. He sat in his favorite armchair-plush and deep, emerald green with dark wooden legs-next to the side table where he had done his homework the night before, and flipped the book open.

It was all emotion, with no concrete symbols to analyze, so he had no reason to assume that the book would suggest they were remotely precognitive, or meaningful at all, but he was compelled to investigate. In the dreams Rosemary was incapacitated by a looming anxiety, running away without thinking. Every night at the wizard’s house so far he had been plagued with identical nightmares in which the wizard was a shadowy, threatening presence that followed him through the forest surrounding the house. Precognitive dreaming required powerful magic, and even those who were capable weren’t supposed to experience them spontaneously they were induced with herbs, rituals-magic he couldn’t manage if he tried.īut there was no denying that his dreams had a distinctly strange quality. Rosemary knew, of course, that he wasn’t having prophetic dreams. This was exactly what he was looking for. When he pulled it down he flipped to the table of contents, and smiled to himself with the discovery that the book contained a glossary of meanings. After only a few minutes he came across something promising his fingertip grazed the spine of a thin green tome, which read in simple bold black text: Dream Symbology. Nearly all of them were incomprehensible to him they were far beyond his rudimentary grasp on magic, or else they were written in languages he couldn’t read, or contained pages of proofs and symbols and equations that meant nothing to him.Īt one point, on his second day, he collected a small stack of reference materials on the properties of plants, including an illustrated encyclopedia that he consulted every day as part of his homework assignments since then, he had found nothing of use or interest to him.įor the first time, this morning-the fifteenth day of his apprenticeship-he was combing through the wizard’s book collection with his own intention in mind, seeking out knowledge for its own sake. This entire wall of the library, and the wall opposite, were both lined with hundreds of books on the practice, potential, and limitations of magic, but he was disinterested in most of them.ĭuring the first two weeks of his apprenticeship he had passed countless hours exploring the library, surveying the titles and pulling books down at random to flip through them. Rosemary stood on his toes in front of the wizard’s floor-to-ceiling bookcase, searching, running his fingertips along the books’ spines as he scanned their titles.

Mirrored in Evergreen by B. Pigeon