Chapter 1
The dream was soft at first. Like fingertips brushing the nape of her neck, like someone murmuring a forgotten song just under breath.
Lysane stood on a road that should not have existed — polished marble slick with dew, cracked open to reveal veins of gold running beneath. Above her, the sky split wide, a raw wound leaking starlight and something thicker, something that tasted of blood when she breathed.
There was a figure waiting at the end of the road.
A body bent by sorrow and stitched together with light. Its wings were a wreck, dragging molten gold across the stones as it moved. Its voice — if it could even be called that — wasn’t sound. It was memory. It was the warmth of arms she hadn’t felt in years. The laughter of a sister long dead. The sharp breath of a lover’s kiss before it turned cold.
“Come closer,” it said. Not in words. In longing. In need.
Lysane’s bare feet moved without her wanting them to. The marble beneath her cracked with every step. Her heart beat loud enough she thought it would burst. Somewhere, a part of her screamed to wake up, to turn back, to run—
But that part was drowning under the weight of the figure’s gaze.
Eyes like black holes rimmed with dying light.
Eyes that wanted her. Needed her.
When she reached out — just a hand, trembling — the golden mist rushed up like a wave. It wrapped around her fingers, pulling tight, pulling hungry—
Lysane gasped and woke with a hand still stretched toward nothing.
The cold was a knife across her skin. Her tent had collapsed sometime in the night, battered flat by the wind that howled down from the broken city ahead. Vaelith. The city of bones. The city that still whispered in its sleep.
Her heart still hammered against her ribs, a frantic, disbelieving thing.
The dream clung to her. She could feel the gold staining her fingertips even now, could feel the ghost of the figure’s grief digging into her chest.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and found blood there. Just a thin smear at the corner of her lips.
“Closer,” the memory of the dream whispered again, almost lovingly.
Lysane pushed herself up from the cold earth and tied back her hair with shaking fingers. The sun had barely begun to scrape its way over the ruined horizon.
Vaelith stood waiting — a silhouette of broken towers and twisted archways against a sky too bright to look at for long.
And somewhere inside it, she knew, the thing from her dream was real.
She should have turned back. She should have packed what little she owned and walked south, into the wastes, into anything else.
Instead, she strapped her knife to her belt and started walking toward the city.
The wind carried something behind her. A whisper, almost too soft to catch.
“You will be loved until you are whole.”
Lysane didn’t look back.
