Kaelen stood in a place that could not exist.
The ground beneath him was not stone, not soil, but shifting fragments of glass—each shard reflecting pieces of faces he half-remembered. His reflection blinked back at him, fractured and broken, yet somehow alive. Above him, the sky hung like a torn curtain, stars bleeding through as if the night itself had been wounded.
"Kaelen…"
The voice was not one but many, layered together—male, female, child, elder. He turned sharply. A woman stepped forward from the horizon's jagged split. Her hair was pale fire, her eyes pools of impossible depth. She seemed familiar, yet her features refused to settle, changing with each blink—sometimes Seralyn, sometimes Lyra, sometimes a stranger he had never known.
"You carry what should have perished," she said, her tone both condemning and mournful. "Do you even understand the weight of it?"
Kaelen tried to speak, but his voice snagged in his throat like a blade caught in stone. The air pressed down on him, heavy with unseen judgment.
"What weight?" he forced out finally, each word scraped raw.
The woman tilted her head, and suddenly he was no longer looking at her. The shards beneath his feet shifted and rearranged, forming a reflection of himself—not as he was, but draped in ancient armor, eyes burning with power he did not possess. A crown of light and shadow wavered above that reflection's brow.
"Your birthright," the voices intoned as one. "The covenant carved in blood before your first breath."
Kaelen staggered back. "No… I'm no heir, no chosen. That isn't me."
But the reflection reached out, its gauntleted hand pressing against the glass barrier that separated them. The shards quivered, and hairline cracks crawled outward.
"Then why," the voices whispered, "does the Veil tremble when you draw breath?"
The woman—no, the shifting mirage—stepped closer. Her gaze softened, as though pity warred with warning.
"They will come for you. They already do. The gods, the shadows, the ones who know what sleeps inside your blood. You cannot outrun what you are."
Kaelen felt his chest tighten. His reflection leaned closer, lips curling into a grim smile identical to his own. The cracks in the glass spread wider, a spiderweb of inevitability.
"No," Kaelen said, shaking his head. His hands curled into fists, nails biting his palms. "I'll decide who I am. I won't be chained by—"
The glass shattered.
The dream imploded in silence, shards falling upward into the torn sky. The last thing Kaelen saw was his reflection stepping free, sword of light and shadow in hand.
He woke with a gasp.
The fire at the camp had burned low, little more than smoldering embers. The night pressed in with the weight of his vision still clinging to him like smoke. He sat upright, sweat cooling against his skin, his breaths sharp and uneven.
A hand touched his shoulder. "Another dream?"
Seralyn crouched beside him, her face etched with concern. The faint glow from the fire caught the hard angles of her expression, though her eyes betrayed softer worry.
Kaelen hesitated before nodding. "Yeah. One of those."
Rhess stirred from his post on the other side of the camp, his sharp ears never missing a sound. "Dreams don't make a man wake like he's been drowning. Was it the same as before?"
Kaelen's throat tightened. He wanted to lie, to push it down as he always did, but the memory of his reflection's gaze—burning, accusing—was too close.
"Different," he admitted. "But… similar enough."
Maeve rolled from her bedroll with a groan, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders. Her voice was muffled, still heavy with sleep. "You should talk about it instead of letting it gnaw holes in you. Dreams leave marks if you keep them buried."
Kaelen glanced around at them—their trust, their unspoken reliance on him—and felt the weight of silence pressing. He could not tell them everything, not yet. How could he? The reflection, the crown, the covenant of blood—it sounded like madness. Worse, it sounded like fate.
"I saw… something breaking," he said finally, keeping his words careful, trimmed of truth. "A warning. Nothing more."
Seralyn's frown deepened, but she did not press.
Lyra's voice rose softly from her place near the edge of the firelight. She had not been asleep, though she often pretended at times like these. "Sometimes warnings are all the world offers. Better to heed them, even if you don't understand."
There was something in her tone—gentle, but laced with something unspoken—that made Kaelen's chest tighten. She was always too quick to speak at moments like this, as though she knew more than she should.
Rhess stood, brushing dirt from his hands. "Well, warning or not, we need to move at first light. The roads ahead aren't safe, and I'd rather not wait for whatever lurks in dreams to catch up in daylight."
Maeve muttered, "Or worse—both at once."
That pulled a faint, tired smile from Kaelen. He pushed himself to his feet, shaking off the lingering tremor of the dream. "You're right. We'll move on at dawn."
But even as he said it, his gaze wandered past the firelight into the shadows beyond. He swore he could still see the cracks in the air, hear the echo of his reflection's smile.
The hours until morning passed slowly. When they finally began their march, the forest canopy was heavy with mist. The trail was narrow, winding, every sound magnified in the silence. Birds did not sing here.
Seralyn walked close to Kaelen, speaking low enough that only he heard. "You don't have to carry it alone, you know."
Kaelen kept his eyes forward. "Some things are mine to carry."
Her expression hardened. "And when it breaks you?"
"Then I'll break," he said simply. "But not yet."
The words hung between them, sharp and unyielding. Seralyn wanted to argue, he could see it in the line of her jaw, but she let it fall away, perhaps knowing he would not yield tonight.
From behind, Maeve tried to cut the tension with a mutter. "If we keep walking this road in silence, I'm going to lose my mind. Someone tell a story."
Rhess obliged, spinning a tale of his youth, filled with exaggeration and bluster. His voice carried easily, filling the fog-laden path, and Maeve's laughter broke the heaviness like sunlight through clouds.
Kaelen listened but did not join. His thoughts were elsewhere, circling the dream like a hawk over prey.
The covenant carved in blood.The reflection with the crown.The words: You cannot outrun what you are.
As the mist thickened and the forest pressed closer, Kaelen found himself wondering—not for the first time—if his path was ever truly his own.
And somewhere in the quiet, he thought he heard the sound of shattering glass.