The Forgotten Land: The Return of the Giants

The Weird Dream

Faith and hope is a strange thing, Dalton and Pipper knows, tenuous, erratic, often irrational.

Perhaps it’s this, most of all, that makes it so painfully easy to suspend hope. For a minute, an hour, a full day. Perhaps the ease with which humans manage it –synapses shutting down with a whine before the brain can even comprehend the image.

Because what the eyes are seeing isn’t there at all, can’t possibly be there– is a sort of elaborate defense mechanism, evolved over the centuries to preserve the sanity of the species.

Pipper never believed in the otherworldly and yet he’s experiencing something that is beyond imagination. Beyond what he could comprehend, but he’s willing to cast that aside, for now, willing to trust that he isn’t hallucinating.

What he does hope for though, is that the boy’s face was something he hadn’t seen before. He felt so real, yet isn’t real — real like he is, flesh and blood and bone, real like the wood of his bedstead.

What he gives faith, even now, even a