In Our Hearts We're Dreaming: A Treasury of Fantastical Tales

By Seann Barbour

Fantasy is vast and it is varied. In fantasy we find the infinite and wondrous possibilities that humanity has always yearned for, that humanity has always feared and always desired. Fantasy is our dreams and it is our nightmares.

In this book you will find well over a dozen tales of fantasy, of all varieties. You will find fairy tales and tales of terror. You will find stories of adventure and of love. These stories will take you to worlds undreamed of and to mysteries hidden within our own reality. This is a book of fantasies, and fantasies of all stripes can be found within.

Some stories included in this collection:

I WAS A CHANGELING CHILD: a bittersweet fairy tale about a child different from all the others in the village

WHEN THE STARS FELL: an Aztec-inspired story about what happens when love and duty collide

THE MOON OF SIEGFRIED-7: in a future filled with magic and technology, a distress signal leads to an ancient legend

THE ASSASSINATION OF OUR LORD GOD: an account of a contract killer with a most ambitious target

Also included are two brand new, never before published stories: "The Art of Dreamcraft" and "Dead Legions."

Explore the limits of the human imagination. Explore fantasy.

Dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seann Barbour
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201480387

Seann Barbour

Seann Barbour exists. He exists and he writes fantasy and horror novels. Sometimes he writes books that are both, but sometimes he just writes one or the other. Occasionally he does other things.

Book preview

In Our Hearts We’re Dreaming

A Treasury of Fantastical Tales

by

Seann Barbour

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2023 by Seann Barbour

Contents

Introduction

The Art of Dreamcraft

I Was a Changeling Child

The Book of Lives Unlived

The Dryad

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker

The Spiritbinder

The Huntress’ Tale

Prima Nocta

Dead Legions

Winter’s Warmth

When the Stars Fell

Guests at the Funeral

The Faerie Circle

The Assassination of Our Lord God

In the Woods

Lord of Discord

Into the Cortex

The Moon of Siegfried-7

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I was born in 1992, and so I was the perfect age for the fantasy boom of the early 2000’s. I read Harry Potter and Redwall, watched the The Lord of the Rings films in theaters, and eagerly tuned into animated shows like Dragonball Z, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Fullmetal Alchemist. These were the sorts of stories I grew up with, and they provided the foundation for my love of fantasy.

As I grew older, I explored other avenues and expressions of the genre. In high school I read Discworld, The Dresden Files, and A Song of Ice and Fire. I got into comics, and discovered Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. I became hopelessly addicted to video games like Final Fantasy and The Elder Scrolls. In college, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

Fantasy was a big part of my life, and it remains so even now as I enter my 31st year of it. Sometimes I wonder at the hold this genre has on me—indeed, the hold it has on so many of us. Detractors often deride fantasy as formulaic. They call it childish and silly. To be honest, I can hardly blame anyone for such accusations; it’s completely true that the market is saturated with countless examples of formulaic and immature stories. And yet, to dismiss the whole of any genre is to display a profound ignorance.

Fantasy is varied. Fantasy is vast. Fantasy is our dreams put into words and through those words made manifest. In fantasy we find the infinite and wondrous possibilities that humanity has always yearned for. In fantasy, the imagination is unbound and the question of can be is rendered irrelevant, replaced by what might be.

The genre’s roots are in mythology, in epic poetry, and in the Romantics of the past. The old Romances told stories of knights and dragons, trolls, witches, and other impossibilities. They sought not to reflect the world, but to transcend it and achieve the sublime: a sense of something greater than what the mortal experience could offer. They chased divinity and the immaterial, and in their fanciful nonsense they sought out a deeper truth.

It is from this pursuit that fantasy is derived. It is the product of our human need to seek out and explore that which is greater than ourselves, to uncover truth in even the most absurd of notions.

In our hearts, we’re dreaming.

When I decided on that title for this collection, I thought that it surely must not be original. It was just so perfect that I had to have heard it somewhere else. Even after furiously Googling the phrase and finding nothing, I still can’t quite believe it came from my own mind. In truth, I can’t think of a better title to encompass the sheer scope and breadth of what fantasy is.

So, what have I included in this tome?

When I began seriously writing a few years ago, I decided that a good way to practice would be to challenge myself to write a piece of flash fiction every week. I posted these stories on my blog, and many of the stories in this volume have their roots in that practice. Over the past year, I have revisited a number of these old flash pieces and I have posted new and revised versions of them on my Patreon, exclusive to subscribers. It is from these rewritten and re-edited stories that the versions here are drawn. These stories are, in order of appearance in this volume, The Book of Lives Unlived, The Huntress’ Tale, Prima Nocta, Winter’s Warmth, Guests at the Funeral, The Faerie Circle, Lord of Discord, and Into the Cortex.

But not everything in this collection began as a piece of flash fiction. Many have other origins.

In the Woods is without a doubt the oldest piece in this book. I wrote the first version of it nearly a decade ago, and posted it on some site or another (I believe it was Booksie, and since someone else had already titled a work In the Woods, that version had to be retitled as The Body in the Woods). It caused a bit of confusion among those who read it, and when I revised the story for my Patreon years later, I attempted to clear up a few things and make it a bit more obvious what was happening to the narrator.

In contrast to In the Woods, I Was a Changeling Child was written very recently. I was in my mid-twenties when I realized that I was very likely on the autistic spectrum, and that revelation caused me a bit of an identity crisis. That crisis is largely resolved now, but its effects linger, and I chose to explore this aspect of my identity in a story that harkened back to the old myth of the changeling—a myth that almost certainly came about to explain the existence of autistic children. In some ways, this is the most personal story I’ve included in this collection. It’s also the most freely available, as it is public on my Patreon and Ko-Fi pages, and has been posted on my personal blog as well as my Tumblr.

The Dryad occupies a bittersweet space for me. I wrote it with the intention of it becoming my first traditionally published story, as I am largely self-published. Its creation was something straight out of a romantic ideal of artistry: I read a submissions call for a magazine and then wrote the first draft of The Dryad in a frenzied haze, before editing it and cleaning it up. Unfortunately, the story was rejected, and I ended up posting it on my Patreon with so many others. I debated whether or not to include this piece, as one can argue that it’s a horror story more than it’s a fantasy story, but ultimately I felt that its wilderness aesthetic and environmental themes fit a fantasy collection better than any future hypothetical horror collections I may do.

The Spiritbinder is similar to the The Dryad in that it was another failed attempt at traditional publication, though my writing of it was far more reserved and less feverish. The story is a snapshot of a world where elemental spirits are bound to people’s bodies via special tattoos. My thinking was to simply introduce this idea in this story, and explore it more in-depth in others.

The third and final failed submission in this collection is The Assassination of Our Lord God, which is in my opinion the strangest piece I’ve included. It is a story that is equal parts political cynicism and theological fascination. When I showed it to my girlfriend, she called it intense, and I think that might be the best descriptor for it. Whether or not it truly is the strangest work in this collection, I would say that it’s undoubtedly the angriest.

When the Stars Fell came about when, a few years ago, I decided to look into Aztec mythology. The more I read about the gods and rituals of the Mexica people, the more I found myself thinking about a tragic romance—what happens when a sacrifice falls in love, and what happens if her sacrifice is the only thing keeping the world safe? Those of you who have read my novel The Ghosts in the Flames know that these are themes I would eventually explore from a different direction, with a more traditionally European setting and conceit, but the Aztec fantasy of When the Stars Fell represents my first crack at the idea.

There are two stories here that were written to be part one of a series. The first of these is Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker. I love fairy tales, and I wanted to write a series of pulp-inspired fantasy stories in which heroes adventure through the kind of world where fairy tales really happen. Collectively, I call this stories Baker and Butcher, and Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker is the first entry in that saga. It is origin story of the series’ heroes, Felix and Theda.

The Moon of Siegfried-7, however, was not the first story written in its saga. My tales of the Crimson Gallant started life with those old flash fiction stories, though The Moon of Siegfried-7 was written with the express purpose of serving as an introduction to the setting and characters. I have long been fascinated with the idea of Space Fantasy, a combination of spacefaring science-fiction with more traditional fantasy, and I have also been long frustrated with the lack of stories like that. The adventures of the Crimson Gallant’s crew are my attempt to satisfy that frustration.

Finally, there are two stories in this collection that are brand new: The Art of Dreamcraft and Dead Legions. The first, The Art of Dreamcraft, explores the idea of dreams, and was written largely to riff on this collection’s title.

The second, Dead Legions, is the longest story included here, and attentive readers will notice that it shares many similarities with The Spiritbinder, depicting magic in much the same way. I have not yet decided if I want these stories to take place in a fully fleshed out shared setting, or if I merely want to use this magic system as a backdrop for whichever fantasy stories I feel like telling. Ultimately, I think I may decide to keep the setting as vaguely-defined as possible, with the craft of spiritbinding being the only concrete connection between stories in this universe.

Because as I have grown older, I’ve found that more and more I crave the mystery that fantasy once held. Long and detailed histories and pseudo-scientific hard magic systems impressed me in my adolescence, but what is magic without mystery and wonder and whimsy? I now want my fantasy to be strange and bizarre, to have blank and ambiguous spaces for the reader’s imagination to run wild in. I hope that the stories in this collection, whether they are dark and morbid or light and wholesome, have captured that sense of whimsy.

That was my aim: to show the breadth of what fantasy can be, and to spark the imagination. As to whether or not I have succeeded? Well, I leave that judgment to you.

-Seann Barbour

December 17, 2022

The Art of Dreamcraft

Night fell, and a husband and wife put their child to bed. This was not an unusual thing; it had happened many nights before and would happen many nights hence. The child slept, and by midnight the couple too were sound asleep. This was also not unusual. And as they slept, two figures stepped forth from the shadows of their room and stood over them, inspecting the sleeping pair. The husband and wife would have been surprised to learn that this too was far from unusual.

One of the two figures, an old woman with a wrinkled face and wrinkled hands, placed a bag on the floor and set about removing its contents. The other figure, a boy who had barely seen the passing of two decades, watched her in silence.

What is the most important material for dreamcrafting? the old woman suddenly asked, not looking up from her task.

The boy scrunched up his face and considered the question. Your brush? he ventured. You need it to define the dreams. Otherwise, it’s all just a mass of random shapes and sounds.

My brush, interesting, said the old woman. She held up a paintbrush, its bristles shorn from starlight. You speak of this? The boy nodded, and the woman shook her head. You are wrong. It’s not the brush. Would you care to guess again?

From her bag, she removed a sheet woven from still wind, a palette sculpted from the wood of a tree that had never cracked its seed, and clay that had been gathered from earth which had never touched the ground. She laid these out along the edge of the bed beside the sleeping couple. As she did this, the boy again considered the question.

Is it the clay? he asked. Without form, the paint would have nothing to define. You need the shape of the dream before you craft anything over it.

I will admit that you have stumbled upon some wisdom, the old woman said. Without the clay, the brush is useless, yet without the brush the clay means nothing. It is something to think about, to be sure. Unfortunately, you are still wrong.

The paint! cried the boy, certain that he at last had found the answer. Then he clamped his mouth shut and looked anxiously at the sleeping couple, but neither husband nor wife stirred.

Now the old woman smiled. You are close, she told him. You are very close to the answer. But think: what is it that gives shape to the clay? What is it that gives colors to the paint?

Again, his eyes went to the sleeping couple, and the old woman nodded.

Precisely, she said. Art requires a canvas, does it not? And our canvases are the minds of those who slumber. They provide the shapes which our clay must take, and they provide the colors which our brush must paint. She took a small lump of clay and pressed it against the slumbering forehead of the wife. There can be no dream without the dreamer, after all.

She kneaded at the clay with her old and wrinkled fingers, spread it about the wife’s head, and then removed it and set it down upon the sheet next to the sleeping woman. She worked, and the clay took on the form of a dog, a tree, a man.

The clay wants to be shaped, she explained as a scene appeared in her work. "Its form is within it, and we simply must reveal that form. To try and force the clay is to ruin the dream. You must learn to allow the clay to guide your fingers,