Sleep took Elara in uneasy waves. She drifted down, surfaced, then sank again, as though the night were a tide deciding whether to keep or cast her. Colours threaded behind her eyes—violet, amber, blue—twisting together until the dark drew them tight.
The nightmare came, as it always did.
---
The bunker was all breath and stone. Damp walls sweated; lantern-light shivered along them and made the wet look like veins. The air tasted of people—wool, old leather, cheap soap, and the salt of fear. Too many bodies crammed into a room made for stores, not souls. Children whimpered into sleeves. A man retied the same knot in a length of cord over and over. A woman mouthed a prayer without sound, her eyes fixed on a crack in the floor as though it were a scripture.
Elara stood. Not the child she had once been—small, muffled, shaking—but herself as she was now. A woman with calloused hands and a spine that had learned the shape of hard days. She felt her own weight in her feet, the steady climb of breath in her ribs. It shouldn't have been possible. The memory had never let her stand before.
The bitten woman slumped against the wall to Elara's right. Elara knew her face even before the features arranged themselves—a mother from the lower wards, hair plaited once and now coming loose, shawl torn where she was bitten.. She clutched her forearm hard enough to turn the knuckles white. Blood seeped between her fingers in dark, sticky weeps. Black filaments spread beneath her skin, creeping up from the bite like ink dropped into water.
Somebody said, "She needs a doctor."
Somebody else said, "We don't have doctors."
The banging started.
A fist like a hammer on the steel door. Once, twice, again—each blow shaking dust from the lintel. "Let me in!" a voice shouted, hoarse and raw. "Please—my son is inside!"
The room jolted as if struck. Mothers drew children close, hoods yanked low. Men stared at their boots because looking anywhere else cost more courage than they had.
A boy lurched to the door— 10, maybe, with a face not yet done growing. Elara knew that face. In some old remembering, it might have been Caleb's. In the dream, it could be anyone and it was everyone. "It's my father!" he cried, fumbling for the latch. "We can't just leave him!"
Two guards grabbed him under the arms and hauled him back. Their boots scraped the flagstones. "Stand down," one snapped. "You'll kill us all."
The boy fought like something drowning that had found air behind the door. He twisted, kicked, swore, begged. "He's right there—he's right there—"
The banging picked up, faster now, the sort of frantic that eats its own rhythm. "Please!" the man shouted, voice splitting. "Please—open—please—"
The guards pinned the boy's arms. Everyone in the room held themselves still, as if silence were a sheet they could pull over the sound.
The blows staggered.
Stopped.
Silence fell in a single piece. For a breath, no one moved. Then a dark shape seeped under the door—thick, slow, glossy where the lantern caught it. It crept with terrible patience, finding every hollow in the stone, making a map. The smell rolled in next—iron and heat, raw and sweet at the same time—filling the back of Elara's throat with the taste of pennies and old knives.
The boy sagged. The guards' grip was suddenly the only thing holding him upright. "Dad?" he whispered to the seam where the blood kept coming. "Dad?"
A woman began to sob in little hiccupping sounds she tried to swallow and could not.
Elara knew this. She had always woken before the pool reached her boots. That had been the bargain her mind made with itself: see enough to shape the fear, not enough to break.
But she didn't wake.
The pool pressed the edge of her boot and kept going.
---
The bitten woman groaned. Not like pain. Like a door opening onto a room where nothing good waited. Her shoulders jerked, head snapping back to tap the stone. Her fingers tore away from her arm. Skin twitched; muscles bunched in wrong places. Something under the surface rippled and climbed.
"Keep back," one of the guards said, voice suddenly very small. "Keep—keep back."
The woman's eyes opened. Sickly yellow light burned behind them, like oil catching fire. Her pupils thinned to slits. Her breath came in short, hungry pulls, each one a growl on the way out. Her teeth lengthened, gums splitting to make room. Blood ran from the corners of her mouth in neat lines that made no sense until you saw where the teeth had cut.
The sound of bone shifting filled the bunker. Not cracking so much as rearranging—wet and deliberate. A child screamed. Someone shouted for a rifle and got told to shut it before they made it worse. The guards edged towards the door as if it might open for them now and for them alone.
Elara's body shouted wake the way a cliff shouts fall when you stand too close to the edge. Her legs locked. The nightmare's rules had changed and she had not been consulted. She stood. She watched. She could not do otherwise.
The woman pushed herself upright in a series of jerks, joints working like badly made hinges. Her head cocked, nose flaring. She looked at the nearest knot of people—not the loudest or the closest, simply the ones who had run out of luck—and she smiled without humour. No music in it. Only teeth.
She lunged
Heat tore through the bunker, not like fire but like the memory of fire had grown teeth. Flames rushed the walls, lit the ceiling ribs, turned the damp into steam. The blood on the floor darkened and smoked. Lantern-light blew sideways as though the dream itself took a breath.
Through the blaze came a man.
He didn't arrive; he happened to the space, and the space obeyed. Broad-shouldered, strong and muscular moving with that ease predators wear like a second skin. Scars mapped his chest and shoulders—pale, raised, some straight as a blade's edge, some crooked like lightning. Muscle moved under them in calm, coiled waves. The fire leaned from him, as if even heat understood there were rules here.
His eyes were gold. Not the sick gleam of the broken, not the warm amber of a hearth, but the clear, hard light of a full moon caught in a still lake.
Riven.
Elara recognised him as surely as she knew her own name. Recognition hit with the force of falling; it was in her bones already, and the dream only reminded them.
He crossed the space between standing and striking without a step wasted. One arm swept; the feral woman came apart, not in blood but in sparks, the nightmare dissolving its own horror with a hiss. The sound died. The smell of iron thinned. The fire stayed, but it seemed to whisper now rather than roar.
Silence gathered around him like a cloak.
His gaze found Elara and held.
"You are not prey, Luna-born," he said.
The voice—Gods, the voice—rolled through the room like thunder sliding along a mountain's spine. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The words carried weight, old and exact, as if they'd been said once before at the beginning of something and had waited ever since for a mouth to use them again.
"You were never meant to run."
Elara's chest loosened and tightened at once. Relief and fear and something she didn't have a name for twisted together until each felt like the other. She wanted to speak. She wanted to say how are you here, what is this, what am I. Her lips parted; air moved; nothing sensible came.
He stepped nearer, and the fire traced his body with delicate attention. Up close the scars told their stories in the language of white lines and old hurts. She counted three across his ribs, one high on his shoulder, a crescent at his hip. He smelled of heat and pine and something metallic that wasn't blood.
His hand rose.
Everything in her said move. Her body did not listen.
His fingers touched her cheek.
Heat struck, clean and bright, a spark taking to dry tinder. It slid along her jaw and down her throat, pooling behind her breastbone and blooming outward. Her veins answered. She saw them—no, felt them—blue as moonlight waded into deep water, pulsing once, twice, again, until the glow belonged as much to the dream as to her.
She sucked a breath through her teeth.
"You carry it," he murmured. The thumb at her jaw drew the smallest circle, and it was somehow the most intimate thing a person had ever done to her. "The mark of the Moon. The blood that waits."
"What does it—" She forced the shape of words, thin and dragging. "What does it want?"
The smallest smile ghosted his mouth. Not mockery. Recognition. "Not what," he said. "Who. And you will know when you're ready to stop running."
Her temper flared, as helpless as her fear. "I don't run."
His eyes held hers. If there had been a humour there, it was gone now, replaced by that steady bright that felt like being looked at by weather. "You will not," he said. "Or you will not live."
The heat under her skin surged once more—too bright, too much—and the dream cracked along that light like glass taking a blow.
The fire guttered. The bunker's damp returned. The blood, the people, the lanterns—all the nightmare's furniture—unstitched itself and blew away into black.
---
Elara came up out of sleep fast enough that the room took a moment to remember itself around her. Darkness pressed, softer than it had been in the dream, kinder. The smell was stone and old smoke. Her heart hammered as though it meant to be a drum.
Her hand flew to her cheek. The skin there tingled under her palm, heat lingering like a secret. For a ridiculous instant she expected her fingers to come away glowing. They did not. Her veins settled, their pulse loud only in her ears.
The corridor's banked coals threw a faint red wash through the doorway. Shadows lay long along the walls. By the bed, Luke slept in the precise shape of someone who had practised sleeping armed: one arm bent beneath his head, body angled to the door, blanket pulled to his ribs so his shoulders were free. Even at rest, the set of him said between her and anything.
She found herself matching his breathing without meaning to.
Caleb wasn't there. The absence made a shape on her chest, not heavy, just exact. She pressed her hand flat over her heart as if she could keep it from falling through.
But Riven lingered. Not like a thought. Like a weather change that had happened and would take its time leaving. His eyes re-lit themselves each time she let her own close. His voice went on saying what it had said until the words became a thing she could touch. The heat in her cheek pretended at being ordinary warmth and failed.
She looked down at Luke and wondered—briefly, wildly—whether he'd wake if she whispered what she'd seen. Whether he'd say of course, as if he had known she would be visited like this from the moment he rolled his blanket out on the floor; whether he'd say no, as if dreams could be kept at the threshold like dangerous men. She did not wake him. There was a line between being guarded and being watched. She didn't know which side of it she was on tonight.
She drew the blanket tighter around her shoulders and stared at the ceiling until the grain resolved into boards and not a sky about to fall. The rim of the bedframe was hard against her spine. The world was honest again. Honest and too small for what she now had to carry inside it.
She let out a breath that shivered as it went.
"Well… that was different." she whispered to herself.