Sleep should be sanctuary.
This sleep is a mouth.
It chews through me — thought first, marrow next.
I do not lay down. I fall.
Gravity forgets me, and I spin into a sky made of parchment skin stretched over stars like bruises.
A whisper threads through the dark, slick as oil:
"We are the same."
I know the voice before it forms a shape.
Varyn.
My older self. My ruined self.
The name tastes like ash and inevitability.
I try to open my eyes — but dreams don't have eyes.
Or maybe I don't anymore.
I exist everywhere and nowhere.
Feet in snow that melts into fire.
Hands — too many — reaching through silk curtains of time.
A thousand heartbeats, none steady, all foreign.
I hear Lyra calling me.
Her voice sounds like it's been dead for centuries.
"Wake up. Come back."
But her words are moths — wings dusting apart before they reach me.
Then I see him.
Standing upside down.
Or the world is wrong.
Maybe I am.
Varyn is draped in celestial tatters, like a king's mantle eaten by space itself.
His skin glows faint, veins filled not with blood but constellations.
A crown of fractured midnight hangs above his head — not touching, orbiting, like frightened moons.
His eyes — my eyes — are bottomless pits with embers floating in them.
He smiles with sorrow sharpened into cruelty.
"You dream with borrowed breath."
"You live in stolen time."
"You are unfinished."
I try to speak — but my throat is sewn shut by starlight threads.
He lifts a hand.
Reality screams.
Space bends backward, bone‑white and cracking. Shadows pour like liquid silver across the ground, then rise, forming versions of me.
I see my other selves again.
One — crowned, divine, worshiped.
One — skeletal, curved like a blade, smiling with hunger.
One — wings of glass, bleeding galaxies.
And one — kneeling before Varyn, begging.
I feel them in my skull. Their memories clawing forward.
Tasting them is like swallowing molten stone and cold iron all at once.
"We are the same," Varyn repeats softly, a blade behind velvet.
My stitches dissolve. I speak.
My voice is not a voice.
It is a fractured melody. It hurts to hear myself.
"I will not become you."
Varyn steps closer — and the dream bleeds.
Each footstep births newborn stars that die instantly, crushed by his aura.
His hand touches my chest — where my soul hangs like a lantern inside a cage of skin.
Warm. Terrifying. Familiar.
"You already are."
Something — someone — screams far away.
Aeris?
Lyra?
Kael?
Or is it me, in another life, losing my sanity for the thousandth time?
Varyn leans close, forehead pressing to mine, a mockery of tenderness.
His breath tastes like funeral incense and burning dawns.
"You are the seed."
"I am the bloom."
"We are not enemies."
"We are… chronology."
The world splits like wet paper.
Suddenly—
I am standing in a different place.
A throne room.
Columns made of kneeling angels.
A floor of screaming stars crushed into gold tiles.
I sit the throne.
Hands stretched outward — holding a dying sun like a fragile bird.
Its light hurts.
It pleads.
It burns.
My voice — Varyn's? mine? both? neither? — commands:
"Fall."
The sun shrieks like a child as I crush it.
Gold ash.
Then nothing.
And the universe bows.
I remember this.
I remember loving this.
Hunger claws through me — ancient, exiled, patient.
"Let me in," Varyn whispers.
"Become."
My heart trembles.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
Then — hands pull me back.
Voices.
Mortal, trembling, desperate.
Real.
"Wake up."
"Wake up!"
"Come back to us!"
Aeris' breath — frantic.
Lyra's voice — shaking with magic and grief.
Kael's grip — iron, prayer, vow.
The dream fractures.
Light floods in.
I wake.
I gasp hard enough to tear air.
My lungs feel like they've never breathed before.
The world returns in blinding shards:
Snow.
Firelight.
Three silhouettes around me.
Aeris clings to my sleeve, shaking like a fevered pup.
Lyra's eyes burn with runic fear — and something deeper.
Recognition?
Guilt?
Kael's sword is drawn, his knees in the dirt, like he had been ready to kill whatever I became.
They stare at me like I came back from a grave they watched me fall into.
Maybe they're right.
My throat is raw. My voice a ghost.
"…I saw myself."
Lyra whispers, terrified:
"Which one?"
I look at my hands.
They are shaking.
My voice breaks.
"All of them."
A breeze passes — carrying a whisper that crawls under my skin:
"We are the same."
Something inside me answers.
Quiet.
Hungry.
Waiting.
Not yet.