PROLOGUE
This void is not a place mortals understand.
There’s no softness—no featherbeds of cloud or warm light behind the eyes.This is the seam where waking loosens its grip, where a soul can be touched if you know where to press.
Tonight, I press.
The dream-world ripples like black water, echoing with sleeping cities—heartbeats under stone, prayers whispered into pillows as if the dark might listen.
I hear them all.
And I choose one.
Yara drifts at the edge of the between, suspended in the part of herself the sun has never been allowed to see.Here, she is not the careful woman who grinds remedies and pours herbal teas.Here, her truth glows faintly: devotion so deep it has devoured the shape of fear.
Her dream is always the same.
A corridor of candlelight.
A door she never opens.
I move closer, drifting in a sea of smoke, the edges of her dream fraying with the bow of the candle flames.
“Yara,” I say—not with breath, but with inevitability.
Even though her body remains far away in bed whose sheets smell of lavender and lies, her dream-self shudders before dropping to her knees.
“My Divine.”The words come out of her like blood from a cut.
Devotion tightens in her face when she sees me.Relief.Terror.Joy.An ache she mistakes for holiness.
“You have done well, my faithful,” I tell her, the void brightening with a brief, cold satisfaction.Praise is a hook, one that I don’t often need with her—but it pleases me to see how quickly she bites.
Her breath catches.“Have I…pleased you?”
Pleased.What a small word for what she is to me.
“You have steadied the path,” I say.“You have remained a constant in the girl's life—kept the whispers from waking the wrong ears.”
A tremor passes through the dream-world.Somewhere in the waking realm, a dog barks.Somewhere else, a child cries and is soothed.My world and its people continue, ignorant of the teeth at its throat.
Yara’s gaze flickers down, reverent.“The time is coming.I can feel it.”
Not a question.A recognition.
I let silence stretch until she feels it as a weight on her lungs.
“Yes,” I say at last, relief sagging through her already aged skin.“It is near.”
The corridor’s candlelight gutters as shadows climb the walls like living things, reaching for her.
“The balance shifts,” I tell her.“The Light has begun to move its blade.”
“I can feel it,” she whispers.
“Yes.”I tilt my attention, and the void responds—showing her not a vision, not truly, but an impression: iron discipline, white stone halls, vows spoken over illuminated palms, a man shaped into weaponry by a court that calls itself holy.
Yara’s throat works.She understands without understanding.
