There is a moment between waking and sleeping and between sleeping and waking when the mind seems to be in many places at once, when memories mingle with dreams, when what has been and what is yet to be exist side by side, and when the mind slips free of time and personality to wander in strange halls where the familiar and the strange become indistinguishable and ghosts and visions walk hand in hand. Aelis tumbled toward sleep and fell into this place, to the mind's borderlands, where magic is.