"Dream Count."

Dream Count

Every wish has a cost, and she’s keeping score.

The stars whispered numbers in her sleep.

Eris woke with them stitched behind her eyelids—1,845. They glowed faintly even as she blinked against the dark. In her hand, the Dream Count ledger pulsed, its spine warm as breath, its pages shifting softly like restless sighs. Each number in it told a story, a dream bought with hope, and bartered against time. And every one of them came with a cost.

Tonight, the staircase had grown longer.

She rose silently from the floating page she’d been resting on, her robe trailing sparks of celestial dust behind her. The stairs, formed from ink-stained ledgers and ancient books, spiraled through a sky of midnight blue. Around her, constellations churned—faces half-formed in stars, mouths slightly parted in endless sleep.

Eris had once tried to count the faces. She’d stopped at ninety-nine.

A whisper brushed her ear. Not words—never words—but a sense: someone, somewhere, had made a wish. A new entry was forming.

She climbed, step by shimmering step, toward the source.

Each step beneath her feet flickered with a dream: a child flying over a field of golden wheat, a woman reunited with a sister lost to the sea, a boy whispering to a ghost that looked just like him. Some dreams glowed bright as constellations. Others flickered, cracked down the middle, their light leaking away.

Eris had once believed dreams were always beautiful. Now she knew better. Some dreams were bargains. Some were debts.

At the summit of the staircase, a new page waited. She approached, and the journal in her hand flared open on its own.

Wish #1846

“I want my father to remember who I am.”

—Nina R.

Eris paused, quill already in hand. This was not the grandiose request of a greedy soul, nor the reckless yearning of someone desperate to change their fate. This was a quiet wish, small but aching. The kind that cut the deepest.

She dipped the quill into starlight and wrote the wish down. The journal shimmered, then whispered a cost.

Cost: Seven Years of Her Brightest Days.

“No,” Eris murmured, voice catching.

She tried to erase it. She had learned the gesture long ago. But the numbers didn’t fade. The tally hovered in the air—7 gleaming motes of gold, orbiting her fingers.

She closed her eyes, willing herself not to feel.

The ledger never lied.

Once, Eris had made a wish too.

She had wished for her brother not to die.

In the days that followed, he rose from his hospital bed, whole. Her mother wept, her father laughed through tears, and Eris watched with numb wonder.

Three days later, her shadow vanished.

She hadn’t noticed it at first, the subtle fading of her presence. Over the years, things continued to be taken—her reflection, her name from family memories, her warmth, her voice.

By the time she was fifteen, the world no longer remembered her at all.

And so the staircase came.

The ledger found her.

And the cost became hers to count.

Back on the glowing stair, Eris looked again at Nina’s wish. The ledger shimmered with finality. The cost would be taken. The dream granted.

But for a moment, just one, Eris hesitated.

She turned the page. Another number hovered ahead: 1847.

She felt it before it appeared—sharp, hungry, desperate.

“I want to live forever.”

—R.G.

The cost?

The memories of everyone who has ever loved you.

Eris almost dropped the book.

These were the cruel ones. Wishes wrapped in fear, greed, or pride. The cost was often equal, sometimes worse. She had tried to argue with the ledger once. It had burned her skin, blistered her thoughts with a searing truth:

She was not the judge. Only the counter.

Her hand trembled as she wrote the entry.

Night deepened, though there was no moon—only dreams above and below. Eris stood on the page-steps and gazed down at the spiral path. She had never seen the bottom. Some said it had none. Others whispered it ended in a single cradle, or coffin.

A glimmer at her side drew her attention. The journal had opened again. But this time, it was blank.

Then, slowly, a line of text formed, not written by her hand:

“Do you still wish?”

Her heart stilled.

She stared at the page, breath shallow. For the first time in years, she thought of her brother’s laugh, the smell of burnt toast on weekends, the way she used to write poems no one would read.

Did she still wish?

Eris touched the page gently.

The ink faded.

Another line appeared.

“Then keep counting.”

She closed the ledger, pressed it to her chest, and climbed the next step.

Behind her, stars blinked awake. Ahead, more dreams waited to be written.

And somewhere, in the distant dark, a wish was forming.

She would be there to meet it.

And she would keep score.