Sleep took her like drowning.No gentle drift, no warmth just a slow pull downward through silence and cold.
Aira floated in a half-world between breath and heartbeat. The forest was gone, yet its whisper lingered a pulse against her skin, a low rhythm beneath the ribs. She reached out, but her fingers met fog.
Then came the light.Faint, flickering the color of dying embers.
It bled through the mist until it formed the outline of a corridor. Stone walls. A ceiling of roots. And at the end, a door carved with spirals that glowed like veins of fire.
"Kieran?" she called, voice small, echoing too far.
The air stirred. Shadows folded into themselves, shaping something tall, familiar, wrong.
Kieran stepped out, but not as she remembered him. His eyes were no longer warm; they were eclipsed, shot through with threads of red. His smile was tender too tender.
"Still fighting," he murmured. "Even here."
Aira took a step back, but the ground softened beneath her. Mud became ash. Ash became water. It lapped at her ankles, whispering in a hundred voices not her own.
"You shouldn't be here," she said. "You're"
"Gone?" He tilted his head. "I told you. Blood doesn't vanish. It calls."
The fog pulsed, dimmed, then brightened again, revealing shapes half submerged villagers' faces, eyes open, mouths moving soundlessly beneath the surface.
Aira's throat closed. "This isn't real."
"Does it matter?" Kieran's voice gentled, the way it had when they were children hiding under the same roof, afraid of thunder. "The pain feels real enough. The fire. The loss. The guilt."
His hand rose; ash spiraled up his arm like smoke. "You could end it, you know. Let it burn clean. Come to me, Aira. We can be whole again. One flame. One shadow."
Her chest twisted. She wanted to believe him to step into that voice and stop the ache. But the faint echo of the oak's warning stirred somewhere deep: The forest tests what it fears.
She shook her head. "If I follow you, there'll be nothing left of me."
He smiled sadly. "Maybe that's the mercy."
The door behind him flared brighter, cracks of red light spilling out as if the stone itself bled. Kieran stepped aside, extending a hand. Beyond the doorway waited something vast and breathing the shape of the curse itself.
Aira's feet moved on their own. Each step forward tightened the air, thickened it, until her lungs burned. The fog thinned. Her fingers brushed his palm
Then heat scorched her arm.
The light from her hand erupted, tearing through the dream like shattering glass.
Kieran's form flickered. His voice twisted from sorrow to fury. You can't hide forever, little flame.
The words cracked the air and she was falling.
She gasped awake with a scream, heart hammering, forest spinning. Sweat and tears mixed down her face. Her arm still burned where she'd almost touched him.
But the glow fading beneath her skin told her it hadn't just been a dream.
Something had reached back.
And it knew where she slept.