Page 2 of A Match Made in Slumber

Given a chance, I would’ve signed up for such a deal without hesitation.

I glanced up at his face, catching that tender, playful expression I adored. For all the sternness carved into his handsome features, the glacier in his blue gaze melted the moment he looked at me. My ribcage swirled with emotion. I lifted my chin towards him, but he caught my wrists, pinning them above my head with effortless strength before leaning down to seal our lips in a deep kiss.

His mouth tasted of something forbidden and intoxicating, his tongue sliding over mine, hot and slick, demanding a surrender. I offered it with no reservation.

It left us both panting, our breaths mingling in the narrow space between us.

He tilted his hips forwards, his hardness stroking mine with insistence, no longer so leisurely.

Oh yes, things started to go my way, at last.

“And now, why don’t you—” His husky voice, laden with command, shattered into an… abrasive racket of metal scraping across the cobblestones.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

I awoke face down in my workshop, my cheek mashed flat to the oak counter. Flustered, I peeled myself back, only to observe a shiny trail of drool seeping into the fibre of my latest elemental matchstick blueprint.

Damn my neighbour and his shitty, rusty milk cart. Will he ever fix that bloody thing?

My hard-on pressed against the seam of my smalls, one step away from a laundering emergency, draining the blood from the rest of my body and leaving me lightheaded. For several disoriented heartbeats, a profound sense of displacement gripped me. A chasm akin to separation anxiety constricted my lungs—a distressed, hollow longing for my dream man defying all sanity. Yet again, I felt ripped from the place I truly belonged, fighting the unsettling ache that followed every single one of these encounters. Waking up those days seemed more like bereavement, as though each sunrise severed me from the life I should’ve been living.

“For the love of the goddess, this needs to stop,” I whined, burying my face in my hands and pressing the heels of my palms deep into the hollows beneath my brows in sheer desperation.

I couldn’t go on missing someone who wasn’t real. Grieving his loss anew every time I opened my eyes. This had gone too far.

I checked my reflection in the polished belly of a nearby brass kettle, grimacing at the horrific, dark circles bruising the skin beneath my eyes. I looked and felt wretched. Tense and unquiet, too. Staring blankly at the wall for a long moment to regulate the emotional static roaring inside my mind, I forced my breathing into a steady rhythm.

Once my pulse slowed and my head cleared, I reached for my charcoal pencil and leather-bound journal. My hand moved with obsessive familiarity, noting the sharp angles of the soldier’s shoulder muscles, the lean slope of his back, and the delicious curve of his hips.

The sketching had devolved into a mandatory morning activity, an obsessive ritual. But it served as a necessary catharsis, allowing me to unload my choking emotions onto the parchment. To purge all those confused feelings from my system so I could breathe. Think. Function. And pretend everything was fine and dandy in Elian’s world.

By the time I set the pencil down, two hours had vanished.

Two hours of pathetic, useless pining after an imaginary man who existed only in my fantasies. Two hours amounting to zero matchsticks produced for the biggest event of the season, which commenced in a week. A week.

A sharp spike of dread kicked in my stomach. The dreams had grown more intense, frequent and vivid over the past fortnight, leaving me exhausted, jittery and unfocused. The clock wouldn’t stop ticking. The Great Midsummer Market secured my financial survival for the entire year and I’d spent what should’ve been my most productive time being useless and in anguish. Brooding and drawing a phantom.

Worse still, the dreams carried a frightening emotional weight. I recognised I’d become attached to a character manufactured by my own subconscious. This relationship felt real, far more substantial and important than the sparse, superficial courtships of my actual past, however few they were. That realisation messed with my head, yet it illustrated the scale of the issue. I’d allowed this whole thing to go too far already and I needed a remedy before it spun completely out of control.

“This has got to stop,” I repeated to the empty room, berating my own brain for granting the mystery man a permit to trespass my head space to his heart’s content, during the busiest week of the season to boot.

If I couldn’t evict the tenant from my mind, I would have to force him out chemically. I just needed a spell that would grant me a few nights of absolute, unbothered peace. Dreamless sleep. Simple, but genius. A piece of cake for an alchemist of my calibre.

Muttering curses at myself for not having thought of this brilliant fix weeks ago, I whirled towards my alchemy hearth. I would have the Match of Tranquillity invented before sunset, or my name wasn’t Elian Fountenblym.

Idecided against the name change on this occasion, even though developing a working prototype for the Match of Tranquillity had taken six entire days.

In my defence, however, I also had to apply some finishing touches to three other new designs in time for the grand opening. So, I ended up stretched way too thin.

I’d had the actual enchantments drawn up in a jiffy. Spell creating always came naturally to me, constituting the easiest part of my inventive process. But translating raw elemental theory into physical tinder required tedious, precise calculations. I spent days choosing the appropriate crystalline resin for each tip, measuring and rechecking their mass to the grain, testing the viscosity of different aromatic binding pastes and oxidisers—and determining which timber density would best support the spell matrix without burning through the wood prematurely. Aesthetic considerations also demanded my attention, such as the colouring of the final product—both the match head and its splint—and an exact level of glitter saturation.

After all that effort, however, the result of those six sleepless days sat on my bench, a testament to creative triumph rising from utter chaos. The moment more than called for a satisfied sigh.

My workshop couldn’t be called tidy on my best day. But the space, filled with a sweet, grounding perfume of wood and camphor, maintained a cosy, homely feel, with bunches of dried lavender and heather hanging from the ceiling rafters, nearly brushing the tops of haphazardly stacked crates containing goddess-only-knew-what. I didn’t.

Now it had devolved into a full-blown, catastrophic shambles.

The chalky scent of raw crystals and various minerals, toasted vanilla bark and creamy sandalwood shavings fought for dominance over the sharp, chemical tang of crushed sulphur and starchy gums. Every flat surface bore the marks of my frantic activity. Stacks of half-empty boxes and containers threatened to topple onto a scatter of notes. Discarded wooden curls covered the floor like a brand-new carpet, providing a squishy sensation every time my boot pressed down on them. A nibbled-upon and, at this point, rather crusty pastry sat abandoned, balanced on top of a heavy leather tome about elemental geometry.