Chapter 67: Santa Crypto and the Dreamtime Garden

"Chapter 67. Maybe a dream. Maybe real. Maybe a dance between the worlds and universes. Santa Crypto and Ambrea Rose live together in a house, together they raise their children, but what stories do they have tell of wonders happening everywhere. What dream-like waking state will take us on a journey into the wake. Deliver me a chapter of random and wonder. "

Chapter 67: Santa Crypto and the Dreamtime Garden

Maybe it was a dream. Maybe it was a memory from another life. Or maybe it was the subtle flicker between worlds—that place just past dawn where dreams hold hands with waking, where time folds in on itself like sourdough rising in a warm kitchen.

The house was odd but beautiful. It had no front door, only a wide arch framed by living vines that hummed softly if you got too close. The walls were adobe, but occasionally breathed, exhaling warm cedar-scented air as if the home itself was alive. It stood halfway up a mountain that didn’t exist on any map, at the edge of a forest filled with lavender mist and purring owls.

Inside lived Santa Crypto—part myth, part market watcher, all mystery. Red velvet pants and a woolen robe of shifting constellations. His beard twinkled with snowflakes even in July, and he spoke in riddles that somehow made perfect sense. You could ask him about Bitcoin or the nature of love, and he’d hand you a peppermint stick and say, “Only those who leap without asking where shall find the ledge that flies.”

Ambrea Rose, meanwhile, shimmered. Not walked, not stood, but shimmered—like a candle’s flame trapped in human form. Her hair was starlight braided with moss, and her eyes held the whole ocean, all at once. She grew herbs by whisper, healed with touch, and carried ancient wisdom in a porcelain teacup.

Together they raised their children of the wake, as they called them—each child born under a different moon phase, each able to see through veils others mistook for air. There was Sol, who could speak to bees. There was Rune, who mapped dreams in chalk on the living room floor. And Lotus, the youngest, who sang to the tomatoes and made them taste like cherries.

The family garden did not follow the rules of nature. You could plant a riddle and grow a book. Tomatoes grew in the shape of laughing mouths. Pumpkins whispered bedtime stories to the worms. Every so often, a new plant would appear with no memory of being seeded—a gift, perhaps, from another realm.

On Tuesdays, they held Council with the unseen. Fairies with corporate agendas. Mushroom people delivering cosmic telegrams. One time, a delegation of Data Ghosts arrived, floating in pixelated cloaks, requesting sanctuary from the dying metaverse. Santa welcomed them in, offering them black coffee and sweet potato hash.

Every room in their home had its own weather pattern. The kitchen rained lemon drops. The study smelled like thunder and typewriter ink. Their bedroom was warmed by aurora borealis that curled around the ceiling beams like sleepy cats.

But the true wonder wasn’t in the walls or the stars or the infinite rabbit holes of their daily life.

It was in the love.

Not a quiet love. Not a neat one. But wild and spiraling. A dance. A swirl of glitter and compost. They disagreed over soup recipes and crypto regulations. They laughed until they cried watching Willow, now slightly translucent, chasing her own tail through dimensions. They made love like time was melting. They fought sometimes. They held each other always.

And in the in-between—those long quiet spaces between breath and dream—they told stories. Stories that made the earth lean in. Stories that made the clouds pause their drifting.

One such story began like this:

“There once was a man who planted a tin can in a tomato garden...”

And so the tale would spin, new every time, but familiar. As if you’d heard it once, in the womb of a sleeping star. As if the tale had always existed, and you were only now remembering.

Chapter 67 ends with this:

A knock at the garden gate.

But the gate was never there before.
And the one knocking?
Well.
That’s for the next chapter.