For once Raine smiled at him, a satisfied little expression. "We are," she said, "and even if it's not exactly what's needed, the parameters can be shifted, and I believe there are also other methods for entering the Dreaming. As I said, I don't think it's the arch specifically that matters; it's the Dreaming."

Things were certainly dire, but they had a chance.

"The Dreaming itself," she added, tone shifting slightly toward lecturing, "is another plane of existence, safely accessible to living beings, which has qualities we would think of as being dream-like, including, as far as I've observed, malleability of the surroundings and a tendency to draw from that which is familiar to the people in it."