THE LAST DAUGHTER OF CARCOSA PART ONE

The first time Elara Vale dreamed of the city, she was nine years old.

At the time, she had no idea that it was a dream.

She remembered standing barefoot on a stone street beneath a sky the color of old parchment. The stones were wet, although she could not remember any rain, and somewhere beyond the crooked buildings she could hear water moving against a shore. There were no cars, no streetlights, no power lines, and no people she could see. The buildings rose around her in impossible angles, their towers leaning toward one another as though they had been built by men who had never agreed on what straight lines were supposed to look like.

She remembered being frightened, but not because the city looked strange.

The frightening part was that she knew where she was.

She had simply forgotten the name.

Then the bells began to ring.

Three enormous bells sounded somewhere in the distance, each one deeper than the last. The first made the stones beneath her feet tremble. The second seemed to pass through her body rather than through the air. The third was so deep that she felt it inside her chest, and when it stopped, the entire city seemed to hold its breath.

A woman stood at the end of the street.

She was tall and impossibly pale, dressed in a long black coat that moved slightly despite the complete absence of wind. Her hair was dark enough to look blue beneath the yellow sky. Elara could never remember the exact details of her face afterward. Whenever she tried, the features seemed to shift in her memory, as though her mind refused to hold onto them.

But she always remembered the woman's eyes.

They looked tired.

Not frightened. Not angry.

Tired.

The woman knelt in front of her.

"Do you know who you are?"

Nine-year-old Elara shook her head.

The woman reached toward her, and Elara saw something hanging around the woman's neck.

A small silver pendant.

A circle crossed by a dark horizontal line.

The same symbol that had hung around Elara's own neck for as long as she could remember.

Before the woman could touch her, something moved behind her.

A figure stood at the far end of the street.

He was dressed in yellow.

Elara could never see his face.

Sometimes he wore a mask.

Sometimes there was no face beneath the hood at all.

Sometimes she saw a young man.

Sometimes she saw an old man.

Once, when she was thirteen, she dreamed that he had no head.

But every time she dreamed of him, she knew the same thing.

He was looking for her.

And every time, the pale woman would turn toward him and whisper the same words.

"Run."

Elara always woke before she could ask why.

She had stopped having the dream regularly sometime during high school.

At least, that was what she told herself.

She had not thought about it in months.

Then, on a Tuesday morning in October, she woke up with the taste of lake water in her mouth.

For several seconds she did not move.

The room was dark except for the thin gray light coming through the blinds. Her alarm had not gone off yet, but the digital clock beside her bed read 6:43.

Elara stared at the ceiling.

She could hear rain tapping against the window.

For some reason, she was crying.

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and frowned at the moisture on her fingers.

"What the hell?"

She sat up.

Her heart was beating much faster than it should have been.

The dream was already disappearing.

That happened more often now. Dreams seemed to evaporate the moment she woke, leaving behind only emotional residue. Fear without a reason. Sadness without a memory. Sometimes a word or image would survive long enough for her to write it down.

This time there was only one word.

Carcosa.

Elara stared at the notebook lying on her nightstand.

She had apparently written it sometime during the night.

The handwriting was hers.

She recognized it immediately.

She also knew she had not remembered writing it.

"Great," she muttered.

She reached for her phone.

There were three notifications from Mara, one email from a professor reminding everyone about an upcoming paper, and a message from her mother asking if she was awake.

Elara opened the message.

Mom: Call me when you get up.

That was it.

No explanation.

Elara frowned.

Her mother was not a texter. When Evelyn Vale wanted something, she generally called. If she sent a message, it was usually because she was at work or driving and could not talk.

Elara looked at the time.

6:47.

She had class at eight.

She should have been getting dressed.

Instead, she stared at the word in her notebook.

Carcosa.

She had first heard the word when she was fifteen.

She had been doing what she considered research for a history project at the time, although most of the research had consisted of falling down increasingly strange internet rabbit holes. She had started with nineteenth-century spiritualism, moved into ceremonial magic, then folklore surrounding haunted houses, and eventually found references to a fictional city called Carcosa.

The name had stuck with her.

There was something about it that felt familiar.

She had looked into it for several weeks and discovered that the mythology surrounding the place was a tangled mess of literature, occult fiction, internet folklore, and later adaptations. There was a lake called Hali. There was a yellow sign. There was a king.

The King in Yellow.

She had spent an embarrassing amount of time reading about him.

She did not believe in any of it.

That distinction mattered to Elara.

She believed in mythology. She believed in folklore. She believed people could become convinced of almost anything if they were frightened enough and surrounded by enough people who shared the same fear.

She believed in the psychological power of ritual.

She believed that symbols mattered because humans gave them meaning.

She did not believe that ancient gods whispered into people's dreams.

She definitely did not believe that fictional kings could follow people home.

Elara closed the notebook.

"Carcosa," she said quietly.

The room did not answer.

Her fingers found the pendant beneath her shirt.

It was cool against her skin.

She pulled it out and looked at it.

The pendant was small enough to fit between two fingers. Silver, though it had never tarnished. Her mother had given it to her when she was a child, and whenever Elara asked where it came from, Evelyn always gave the same answer.

"It belonged to your family."

That was all.

Elara had asked whose family.

Her mother had never answered.

She slipped the pendant beneath her shirt again.

Then her phone buzzed.

Mara: IF YOU ARE ALIVE I NEED COFFEE.

Another message appeared immediately afterward.

Mara: Also you have class in one hour.

Then:

Mara: Also I am outside.

Elara stared at the screen.

She hurried to the window and pulled the blinds aside.

Mara stood on the sidewalk below, wearing a black hoodie, ripped jeans, and the expression of someone who had been personally betrayed by the existence of mornings.

Elara opened the window.

"You could have texted me that you were here."

"I did."

"I mean before you got here."

"That defeats the purpose."

Elara laughed despite herself.

Mara looked up.

"You look terrible."

"Good morning to you too."

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I just had a weird dream."

"You always have weird dreams."

"This one was different."

Mara cupped her hands around her mouth.

"Coffee?"

"Give me five minutes."

"Three."

"Five."

"Four."

Elara closed the window.

"Insufferable."

She smiled.

For the next twenty minutes, Carcosa disappeared.

That was how life worked.

There were strange dreams and unfinished assignments, but there were also showers to take, clothes to find, coffee to drink, and professors who did not care whether the universe was secretly collapsing beneath reality.

By 7:21, Elara was walking across the Arkham University campus beside Mara.

The university was old enough to have developed its own weather.

That was what Elara liked to tell people.

The oldest buildings were made of dark stone and brick, their walls stained almost black by decades of rain. Ivy crawled across the sides of the humanities buildings. Narrow paths wound between courtyards where students hurried beneath umbrellas.

Arkham itself was an old New England town with a reputation for being stranger than it deserved.

At least, that was what Elara believed.

The town had legends, obviously.

Every old town did.

There were stories about disappearances, strange lights in the woods, abandoned houses, and a cemetery where supposedly nobody could count the graves correctly.

Students loved that sort of thing.

Elara loved it too.

She just did not believe it.

Mara did.

Or at least Mara claimed she did.

"So," Mara said, holding her coffee in both hands. "Did you write down the dream?"

"Unfortunately."

"Unfortunately?"

"You know how I feel about dream journals."

"Yes. You think they're the fastest way to discover you're secretly boring."

"They are."

Mara smiled.

"What was it?"

"Same city."

Her expression changed slightly.

"The yellow one?"

Elara nodded.

"That's the one."

Mara took a sip of coffee.

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Elara."

"I don't know. It was just a dream."

"You wrote something down."

Elara glanced at her.

"How did you—"

"You have your notebook in your hand."

Elara looked down.

She had forgotten she was holding it.

Mara raised an eyebrow.

"Okay. Fair."

Elara opened the notebook.

"Just one word."

She turned it around.

Mara read it.

For several seconds, she said nothing.

Then she looked at Elara.

"Where have I heard that?"

Elara laughed.

"You've heard it from me approximately a thousand times."

"No."

Mara took the notebook.

"Carcosa."

She said the word slowly.

Something about the way she pronounced it made Elara uncomfortable.

"Yeah."

Mara looked toward the humanities building.

"Didn't Professor Voss mention that?"

Elara stopped walking.

"What?"

"Last semester."

"I don't remember."

"He was talking about nineteenth-century occult literature."

Elara frowned.

"Professor Voss talks about everything."

"Exactly."

Mara handed the notebook back.

"You should ask him."

Elara looked at the old stone building ahead.

Professor Elias Voss had been teaching at Arkham for almost thirty years. He was one of those professors students either loved or avoided. He taught history, folklore, comparative religion, and several courses that seemed to exist solely because he had convinced the university that they were academically important.

He was also the kind of professor who could spend an entire lecture discussing a single footnote.

Elara had always liked him.

She had never told him about her dreams.

She was beginning to wonder whether she should.

"Maybe," she said.

Mara smiled.

"You know what that means?"

"What?"

"We're going to the library."

"We have class."

"After class."

"I have work."

"After work."

Elara sighed.

"You are relentless."

"I prefer committed."

The warning bell rang from the humanities building.

Mara grinned.

"Come on, occult girl."

Elara rolled her eyes.

But as they walked inside, she touched the pendant beneath her shirt.

For the first time in years, she wondered why her mother had always insisted she never take it off.

And somewhere, very far away, beneath a yellow sky neither of them could see, a bell began to ring.