The Dream Sanctum: Beyond The End Read Online Free PDF Page B

kid.”
    “If this is a prison, I want you to be my jailer,” Lindsay said.
    “Hey, I’d love to have you over more often, but you kids and your school
and all that. I don’t think I could get Fred to drive you that far every day.”
    Kwin cleared her throat from beside them, and everyone turned to look at
her.
    “While we still have daylight left, shall we discuss our plans?”
    “Ah, yes.”
    Alastor beckoned them to sit down on the floor, and he pulled a few
books, notebooks and papers off his desk before sitting down to join them. He
spread them out on the carpet between them, then placed a few of the papers
together edge to edge. Kai was astonished to see that it was a hand-drawn
replica of the map of the Sanctum, accurate down to the smallest details.
    “Did you do this?” Kai asked in amazement.
    “Yep! Took me a month to get this right,” Alastor replied without looking
up. “Let’s see… this here is the border.   If I’ve done my calculations right, ‘The End’ is about eighty or ninety
miles away from shore. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but I based it on
measurements of the rest of the map.”
    “Is that all?” Kwin asked, looking puzzled. “That’s the farthest that
anyone has ever gotten?”
    “Well, you have to understand, once you get out ninety miles and still
see nothing but open water, you don’t really have much motivation to keep
going, do you?” Alastor said. “At some point you start to wonder if the
Creators only focused on the land mass and didn’t bother with anything else.”
    “That makes me curious… does that mean that the Sanctum has boundaries?
Or is it round, like the Earth, and if we go far enough we’ll simply reach the
other side?”
    “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Alastor said, looking quite
thrilled. “Now, I’m thinking that the best place to depart would have to be
from this area.” He pointed to a small “x” he had scrawled in blue pen on the
shoreline north of the Golden Capital. “Here the land stretches out the
farthest, so the distance between there and the border is shortest. That and
the water is pretty calm.”
    “I have a question…” Lindsay said quietly, as though unsure whether she
was allowed to ask. “How are we going to get there? Are we going to fly or
something?”
    “For a voyage at sea? Hardly,” Alastor replied. “We’ll be taking a ship!
Not anything like Kwin’s, though. Ours will be meant for sailing. Sturdy enough
to stand the currents, light enough to travel with speed, and with enough
furnishings to make us comfortable on the way.”
    “Will you be creating it, then?” Kai asked, trying to imagine what sort
of craft a man like Alastor could create with his mind.
    “Nope! We’ll be getting one built,” Alastor said.
    “Built? How will we do that?” Lindsay asked, looking very interested now.
    “I know a guy in Golden who does great work. Everyone calls him ‘The
Carpenter.’ He’s a bit off his rocker but his work is fantastic. We can meet
him this week; I’ll be taking the specs to him once I finish anyway.”
    Kai was already feeling excited. He hadn’t expected their journey to take
place so soon, and he was relieved to have people like Kwin and Alastor on his
side.
    “Why are we getting a ship built instead of creating one ourselves?” Kai
asked.
    “Well, you know that when we wake up, anything we create vanishes. This
trip is more than likely going to take at least a few days, so we want to have
something stable that we can return to every night. That makes it easier to
keep track of everything. Plus, I’m getting some special directional equipment,
so if the boat vanished it would just sink into the ocean.”
    Kai nodded, thinking about how strange and possibly terrifying it would
be to appear in the middle of the ocean without a boat or any way to tell where
they were.
    “What are all the books for?” Lindsay asked curiously.
    “Ah, these are just some books on