Page 1 of In Your Light

Chapter

One

HADEOM

Hadeom’s dreams had not been kind. Though vague and flimsy, they felt all too real.

For a moment he lay perfectly still, listening to his own breathing, waiting for the dream to return. Hoping to remember. It felt important that he remember...

But he never could.

They slipped away like memories, the way mist dissipates in the darkness. The way the sun hides the stars as the dawn rises.

There had been a hallway, impossibly long, lined with glass rooms filled with the monsters he had slayed. Time measured in eons, untold number of faces, screams that curled around his mind like spindly fingers.

Somewhere, a clock was ticking too fast.

Time counting down. No, no... time was running out.

The dream felt important, unbearably important, filled with details he couldn’t quite grasp, and now the harder he tried to hold it, the faster it dissolved.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, unsettled by the strange ache of missing something he couldn’t remember.

He let out a long sigh.

He’d come here to rest days ago, yet he now felt more tired than he ever had.

This cabin by a river deep in the woods, so utterly silent except for the water and the wind. A place to quieten his mind, to rest, Cern had said.

Perhaps a place to die, Hadeom thought.

He wondered if dying was even possible for him.

The way time stretched out behind him like an impossible, endless horizon, it wasn’t likely. He also wasn’t ever supposed to feel this tired, and yet...

And yet.

The river moved beyond the cabin walls with the slow, endless hush of black water over stone, carrying leaves and early daylight downstream toward places Hadeom would never see.

It was a comfort of sorts, the sound of the river. It reminded him that the world was still out there. That, despite the heaviness in his bones, the world still turned.

He liked that the world and time would still march on without him.

He opened his eyes to the dim rafters above him, and for a while, he did not move.

The room smelled of wet cedar, old smoke, and the wool blanket twisted around his legs. Cold blue light slipped through the old curtains and painted the room silver.

He rubbed a hand over his face. His fingers caught in the stubble along his jaw.

Another morning.

His body felt old despite not being old at all, and every scar seemed awake before the rest of him. The bite mark near his shoulder burned in the cold. The deep line across his ribs ached with his breathing. The port site on the back of his neck where the implant had been felt raw.

Even his hands hurt now—hands that had strangled monsters in swamp water, loaded silver rounds in darkness, buried knives into things that had once worn human faces.

He sat up slowly on the narrow bed.

The cabin creaked around him as though it were sighing too.