My words echo strangely in the enclosed space. Hollow. The stone walls swallow sound instead of reflecting it.
He doesn’t respond.
“The wounds from yesterday’s fight?—”
“Healed.”
“Your body still needs recovery time. Dragon healing isn’t free.”
His head turns slightly. Not enough to look at me directly, but enough that I know he’s registering my words.
“I’ll rest when the storm passes.”
“The storm might last until morning.”
“Then I’ll rest in the morning.”
There’s no point pressing the issue. When he decides on a position, he holds it with the immovability of bedrock.
I don’t question why his refusal irritates me. Why the sight of him standing there, wound-tight and vigilant, makes me want to drag him down to the stone platform and force rest on him the way he forced it on me.
Sleep comes in fragments.
I don’t remember deciding to close my eyes. One moment, I’m watching the storm, tracking the rhythm of the wind, calculating odds and survival percentages. The next, darkness claims me with the swift totality of exhaustion.
The dream arrives without warning.
Fire. Not the destructive kind—the kind that drives back darkness, that makes monsters hesitate, that means the difference between dying cold and surviving until morning. I feel the heat against my skin, not burning but present. Demanding acknowledgment.
He’s there. In the dream, he’s always there now.
Kaster stands between me and the shapeless threat that stalks my sleeping mind. His back to me. His hands bloody. His body a barrier against everything that wants me dead.
I should move away. In the logic of dreams, I know this. Distance is safety. Proximity is danger. Every survival instinct I possess screams at me to run.
I move closer instead.
My hands reach for the space between his shoulder blades. The heat intensifies as I approach, not painful but overwhelming. All-consuming. He turns his head, and his eyes catch mine, and in the dream those eyes are fire—not human, not dragon, but pure elemental force contained in a shape that looks like a man.
“Stay where I can reach you.”
His voice echoes strangely. Present tense and memory simultaneously, the words he spoke to me in waking life now taking on new weight in the landscape of sleep.
My hand touches his back.
The fire doesn’t burn me.
TEN
SOREIA
Iwake gasping.
The shelter is dark. The storm continues outside, muted by the stone walls but still audible—a constant shriek of wind that sounds less like weather and more like mourning. The cold has deepened while I slept, turning my breath to fog.
Kaster hasn’t moved.
He’s still standing near the door, still scanning the storm. But his head is angled differently now. Watching me.
