The Girl Who Ate Dreams

Once upon a time—though not a good time, not a kind time—there lived a girl named Crystene in a village at the edge of a forest that had no name.

She was seventeen, with hair like spun honey and a laugh that made strangers stop in the street. When she smiled, you felt chosen. When she tilted her head and asked you questions—real questions, the kind that made you feel seen—you would have given her anything.

And she took it.

In the village by the nameless wood, There lived a girl misunderstood. Her smile was bright, her eyes were clear, But something wrong lived somewhere near.

She had no dreams inside her head, No stories blooming, wild or dread. Where others built their castles high, She had only empty sky.

Crystene did not know what she was.

That was the cruelest part—she genuinely did not understand why her closest friends grew dull after a few months of knowing her. Why the baker's son, who once spoke of opening a shop in the capital city, now just stared at flour and said he supposed this was fine. Why her mother had stopped painting years ago and couldn't remember why she'd ever started.

Crystene only knew that she felt most alive—most full—when others were speaking of their hopes. Their wild ideas. Their someday-plans.

She would lean in close. She would say, Tell me everything.

And they would.

She didn't mean to drink them dry, She didn't mean to dim their eye. She only wanted what they had— That spark, that flame, that something glad.

But wanting is a hungry beast, And Crystene could not stop its feast.

The woodcutter's daughter was the first to notice.

Her name was Mareth, and she was plain where Crystene was pretty, quiet where Crystene was bright. But Mareth had once dreamed of sailing to lands beyond the maps—had spent years drawing coastlines that didn't exist, naming countries in languages she invented.

Then Crystene became her friend.

Six months later, Mareth couldn't remember why she'd ever wanted to leave the village. The drawings in her room looked like someone else had made them. She felt hollowed out, like a gourd scraped clean for winter storage.

And Crystene?

Crystene had started sketching coastlines in the margins of her letters. Had begun murmuring words in a language she didn't remember learning.

What's yours is mine, what's mine was yours, I cannot help these hungry pores. I swallow light, I swallow wonder, I pull your bright world slowly under.

Forgive me, friend—I did not choose This curse that makes you always lose.

The old woman at the edge of the wood saw Crystene coming from a long way off.

She had seen her kind before. Twice in her long life—once a boy with gentle hands who left a trail of broken artists in his wake, and once a woman so charming that entire salons forgot how to write poetry after she passed through.

Imagination-eaters, her grandmother had called them. Born without the spark, so they feed on others'. They cannot help it. They do not even know.

The old woman watched Crystene approach—watched that golden smile, those earnest eyes.

"I'm lost," Crystene said. "I was walking in the wood and I think—I think I wandered too far."

"You did," said the old woman. "Sit. I'll make tea."

The witch—for that is what she was— Saw through the girl without a pause. She saw the void behind the grin, The starving nothing held within.

She thought: I ought to let her be, This child of hungry vacancy.

But then again—the old are wise, And truth is kinder than any sweet lies.

"You're the reason the baker's son has dead eyes now," the old woman said, pouring tea into a chipped cup. "The reason Mareth can't remember her own dreams. The reason your mother stopped making beautiful things."

Crystene's face crumpled. "I don't—I don't understand."

"I know you don't." The old woman's voice was not cruel. "That's the worst of it. You're not wicked, child. You're just... empty. And empty things must fill themselves somehow."

Crystene was crying now—confused, frightened, the way a fox might cry if you told it that its nature was monstrous.

"What do I do?"

The old woman was silent for a long moment.

There is no cure for what you are, No spell to seal the gaping jar. You are a hole cut in the world, A darkness prettily unfurled.

But here's the truth the old know well: You choose your own heaven or hell.

"You have two paths," the old woman said.

"The first: you stay among people. You keep feeding. You will live a bright and lovely life—surrounded by friends who adore you—until they're husks. Then you'll move on. Find new friends. New fuel. You'll never be lonely, and you'll never be full."

Crystene shuddered.

"The second path is harder." The old woman set down her cup. "You leave. You go somewhere no one lives—an island, a mountain, a desert. You starve. You let the emptiness howl inside you until it becomes... something else. Maybe silence. Maybe peace. Maybe you simply fade away."

"That's not a choice," Crystene whispered. "That's a punishment."

"No," said the old woman. "It's what all of us face eventually—the decision between taking what we need and becoming something that doesn't need so much."

The girl stood up, her tea grown cold, Too young to feel so very old. She walked back through the nameless wood, And wondered what it meant—be good.

To be good when you're a beast, When your love is others' least, When your warmth is others' frost— What is saved? And what is lost?

Crystene went home that night.

She kissed her mother's cheek. She waved to the baker's son. She stopped by Mareth's house and stood outside for a long time, looking at the dark window where her friend slept—dreamless now, because Crystene had drunk those dreams like wine.

Then she packed a small bag.

She left a note that said only: I love you. That's why I'm going.

And she walked into the nameless wood—not toward the old woman's cottage this time, but deeper, farther, into the dark where no one lived and nothing grew.

Some say she died there, all alone, Her hungry heart turned hard as stone. Some say she's still there, somewhere deep, A girl who finally learned to sleep.

And some say—if you walk too far, Past the last tree, past the last star— You'll find a woman, old and strange, Who warns you of a shorter range.

"Stay close to home," she'll tell you then, "Don't love too bright, don't shine again. For somewhere in these woods there waits A hungry girl outside your gates.

She'll smile at you, she'll hold your hand, She'll seem to truly understand— But when you wake, your dreams are gone, And she's moved on, moved on, moved on."

THE END

Or perhaps—not quite.

Because here is the secret the old woman never told:

In the deepest part of the nameless wood, where Crystene walked until her shoes wore through, she found something unexpected.

Another empty one.

A boy, perhaps nineteen, with hollow eyes and a beautiful voice. He had been living alone for three years, starving himself of others' light. He was thin. He was quiet. He was the first person Crystene had ever met who she could not drain—because he had nothing left to take.

They looked at each other for a long time.

"You too?" he asked.

"Me too," she said.

And they sat together in the dark—two black holes who could not devour each other—and for the first time in her seventeen years, Crystene felt something that might have been peace.

It wasn't a happy ending.

But it was an ending.

And sometimes, for girls like Crystene, that is enough.

THE TRUE END