The dream came on like a storm.
One second I was staring into the embers of our fire—trying not to hear the voices in my blood—and the next, the world around me fractured like shattering glass.
It wasn't a dream in the gentle sense. It was a summoning.
The sky was wrong—red, but not from fire. The kind of red that made your teeth itch. The kind that soaked into your thoughts and made them spiral inward.
And in the center of it all…
Lucien.
He didn't stand.
He loomed.
As if the horizon bowed to keep him in frame. Cloaked in layers of black velvet and voidlight, his face obscured by a crown of silver thorns that pulsed with their own heartbeat. Eyes like fractured stars. A smile carved too wide.
"Well," he said, voice like a blade dragged through oil. "You woke up."
I tried to move. I couldn't.
The dream held me like shackles. The sky pulsed with each of his steps as he walked toward me across a path of floating mirrors—each one reflecting a version of me I didn't recognize.
Some of them were dead.
Others were... worse.
"You were supposed to stay gone," Lucien said, every word dipped in contempt. "Sleep. Oblivion. You had a quiet ending, and you ruined it."
I found my voice—not strength, just sound. "Who are you?"
He laughed. It cracked the dream.
"You don't even remember me," he hissed. "Typical. After everything. You steal fire from the stars, you burn the sky, you beg me to end it—and now you ask who I am?"
His voice deepened, echoing now through all the mirrors.
"I am the one who made sure you stayed dead."
One of the mirrors near him shattered. Then another. And another. Each explosion of glass sent ripples through the air, disturbing the dreamscape like a stone across still water.
"You were sealed," he continued, circling me like a predator. "Bound in chains forged from time, memory, and choice. But something slipped."
His eyes narrowed.
"Who broke your prison, star-child? Was it the dragonling? That shifty swordsman? Or maybe her—the liar with the Dawn Sigil."
I didn't answer.
Because he already knew.
Lucien leaned close. Too close.
His breath smelled like forgotten lightning and decayed futures.
"You don't get to be you again," he whispered. "You were unmade. Erased. Don't you understand what you are now? A shadow stitched into reality with thread that shouldn't hold."
I swallowed. "And yet... here I am."
Wrong answer.
Lucien's expression twisted, and suddenly the dream imploded. My lungs filled with starlight—I drowned in it. A rush of every life I never lived screaming at once.
And above it all, his voice:
"I warned them what would happen if you woke."
"They didn't listen."
"Now they'll bleed."
I gasped, choking on air that didn't exist.
Then he stopped. Held up a hand.
And the world paused with it.
The mirrors froze mid-shatter. The sky cracked but didn't fall. Even the sound in my ears—a low scream—halted like someone hit mute on the universe.
Lucien knelt.
Face close.
He removed his crown.
And I saw his eyes.
Familiar.
Too familiar.
They were mine.
"I was your final form," he said. "I was the one who accepted fate. I ended the cycle. I did what you never could—let go."
My heart thundered.
No. No, no, no.
"You're not me," I whispered.
He smiled. Sadly.
"I was," he said. "But now... I am what waits at the end of your path. The ghost of the man who tried too many times and finally broke."
He stood, placing the crown of thorns back atop his brow.
"Go ahead. Keep fighting. Keep trying. Cling to your allies. Hunt your memories like fireflies in a storm. But remember—every step forward, you're walking toward me."
He lifted a hand.
"And when you arrive..."
The crown pulsed once.
"I will be waiting."
I woke with blood in my mouth.
My breath tore from my lungs in ragged bursts. The fire had gone out. The others were asleep.
Except Kael.
He was sitting cross-legged, watching me.
His eyes told me everything.
"You saw him, didn't you?" he said.
I nodded.
And Kael, the man who had fought gods and died for me in lives I couldn't remember, closed his eyes… and winced.
Not in fear.
But in mourning.
"He remembers," Kael whispered. "That means the seal truly is broken."
I wanted to scream. Instead, I sat there, hands trembling.
"He said... he's what I become."
Kael didn't answer.
Because he already knew it was true.
And when the sun rose, I didn't feel light.
Only the weight of what I might become.