The Dream Without a Door
It began with wind. Not the howl of a storm, but something stranger. A whispering breeze that carried no cold, no scent—only memory.
Mira slept in the high keep, her body guarded by the most trusted of Alaric's sentries. But her soul wandered elsewhere.
She stood beneath a sky that did not belong to her time.
Moons—three of them—hung in the heavens, each casting a different hue: one crimson, one violet, one ash-white. The earth below her feet was cracked glass. Water floated in glimmering arcs across the sky, defying gravity.
She was not surprised. She had learned, by now, not to question where the dream took her.
She was surprised by what waited in the distance.
A shape.
Not a place. Not a person.
A wound.
It pulsed like a heart made of void.
She stepped forward, and with each movement, the landscape twisted. Trees grew sideways. Wolves turned to ash and reformed as birds. Time bent—not backward or forward, but around.
And then she was standing in the Hollow Cliffs.
She knew it, though she had never seen it with waking eyes.
The stone hummed.
The ground breathed.
And Caelen knelt in the center of a rune-marked circle, head bowed, his breath shallow and gold.
Not the boy she remembered.
Not the brother Alaric lost.
This was something rebuilt. Not healed. Rewritten.
Mira moved closer.
She should not have been able to, but dreamwalking was not about rules. It was about resonance.
And whatever force had unmade Caelen—it knew she was watching.
Caelen lifted his head.
And looked at her.
"Do you see now?" he asked, softly.
Mira flinched.
"You're not supposed to—"
"Supposed to?" he laughed gently. "You think dreams are safe? The First Moonless laughs at 'supposed to.'"
Mira stared.
He wasn't speaking like the boy who had played knives with Alaric in the old yard. His voice carried weight. Like thunder that had chosen to wear a whisper.
"You died," she said.
"I was undone."
"Caelen… what did you become?"
He rose. Slowly. Power coiled around him like smoke that remembered being lightning.
"I became what they buried. The part of us that didn't fit into the Council's neat little rules. The part Alaric locked away because it frightened him."
"You blame him?"
"I blame them all. But him most of all."
Mira's dream-skin trembled.
"You're wrong," she whispered. "He never stopped grieving."
"Grief is not the same as atonement."
The sky cracked above them.
Not from storm.
From attention.
Something was watching them now—neither of them, yet both of them. The First Moonless.
> "Daughter of waking mind," the voice rumbled. "Your path forks now. You see both brothers. One born to preserve. One born to end. What is your choice?"
Mira's heart raced.
She had never been given a choice before.
Dreamwalking had always pulled her like a tide. But now… the tide asked.
She looked at Caelen.
His eyes weren't cruel. Not entirely.
Just sure.
Sure of a pain that had found purpose in wrath.
"I won't choose either of you," Mira said. "Not yet."
The sky thundered.
Caelen smiled—just barely.
"That's the most honest thing I've ever heard in a dream."
He stepped backward.
The runes rose around him like pillars of fire.
And then he was gone.
Mira awoke in her chamber, gasping, the dawn just cresting the window.
Her fingers were clenched in her sheets—and one of her nails was blackened.
A mark of the Moonless.
Not imagined.
Earned.
---
Mira did not tell Alaric what she saw. Not yet. Because a storm was coming, and for the first time, she realized the truth:
It might not be Alaric or Caelen who decided the future.
It might be her.