The desert wanted us gone.
I could feel it in the way the sand shifted under my boots, not like normal dunes shaped by wind and time, but like an animal flexing its back, trying to shrug something off.
Us.
The sky overhead was washed-out blue, too pale to feel real. No clouds. No sun, not in the way Hallowmere had one, or the demon world had a red wound. Here, light leaked from everywhere at once, soft and harsh at the same time, as if the world hadn't decided where its star belonged yet.
Lysa walked close to me. Too close. Every few steps her shoulder brushed my arm. It wasn't subtle clinging; she was trying very hard to pretend she wasn't clinging at all.
"How big is this place?" she asked after a while, squinting at the endless dunes.
"Large enough to keep us entertained," Veyra said.
"Or small enough to get boring quickly," Kaen added.
Lyra kicked at the sand. It barely dented. "It's empty," she said, disappointed. "No ruins. No bones. No cities half-buried begging to be dug up."
"Give it a moment," Alinor murmured. "Sleeping things dream of shape."
Cirel walked backward, facing us, hands linked behind her head. "I like it," she said. "It's… clean. Nothing here yet. No stories. Just heat and silence."
"Silence doesn't last," Sareth said. His chains dragged behind him, leaving faint grooves that the wind immediately tried to erase.
My hair, tied back, stuck to the back of my neck. Sweat didn't bother me, but this heat was strange—dry, clawing, full of a faint metallic taste.
Eclipsera was light in my hand. The Crown of Ash's shard resting in my chest had gone still again, no longer pulsing with the demon realm's death throes. For now, it was just… there. A weightless weight.
Lysa looked up at the sky. "Do all worlds start like this?" she asked. "Empty?"
"No," I said. "Most start loud and get quieter. This one skipped steps."
She was quiet for a while.
Behind us there was nothing. The point where we'd fallen through was already gone, the air smooth and bland. No scars. No red. The demon world might as well have been a bad dream.
"Did I…" Lysa swallowed. "Did I really watch an entire world die?"
"Yes," Veyra said cheerfully.
"And I'm still here," she said.
"For now," Sareth agreed.
She let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh. "That's insane."
"That's us," Cirel said.
The dunes ahead rose higher. At their crest, the world blurred slightly, heat shimmering. The wind was stronger up there, carrying fine grains that hissed against my clothes.
"We should find shade before this realm remembers what wind is for," Lyra said.
"There is no shade," Lysa pointed out.
"Then we'll make some," Kaen said.
—
We found rocks.
A low spine of them, jagged and black, jutting out of the sand like exposed vertebrae. They cast a thin strip of shade on one side. Pathetic. But better than nothing.
Kaen put his hand on the nearest one and closed his eyes. A thin red glow spread from his palm into the stone, crawling like veins. The rock warmed, then began to soften.
Lysa watched, fascinated and anxious. "What are you doing?"
"Helping," Kaen said.
The stone bulged, flowed, rising into a rough arch. Two more lumps stretched outward, thickening into a partial wall. In a few breaths, the spine had become a crude shelter—a broken half-dome, open on one side, shadow pooling underneath.
Lysa's mouth fell open. "You just… melted it."
"Reshaped it," Kaen said, stepping back. "We're guests. We should build something."
"Doesn't it hurt the world?" she asked.
Veyra laughed softly. "Everything we do hurts the world."
We filed into the shade.
It was still hot, but the direct glare was gone. The stone under me was rough and strangely smooth at the same time, like it remembered being liquid. I sat with my back against it, Eclipsera resting across my lap.
Lysa sank down a short distance away, leaning her broken staff beside her. She looked small suddenly, hunched into herself, dark hair undone and sticking to her neck.
She'd changed a little when we fell.
Not in any visible mark, but in her eyes. They were wider now, but not with panic—more with a forced, brittle clarity. She'd chosen not to break. Yet.
She turned her head toward me. "What now?" she asked.
I shrugged. "We walk until something interesting happens."
"And until then?"
"Then we're bored," Kaen said.
"We sleep," Alinor corrected. She slid down the stone and curled onto her side, eyes already drifting half-closed. "You burned a world today," she added dreamily. "Even you need to rest when you eat that much."
Lysa stiffened. "You're… tired from that?" she asked. "You can't just keep going?"
"Of course we can," Cirel said. "But the dreams are better when we don't."
Lyra folded her legs beneath her, sitting perfectly upright, palms resting on her knees. "We haven't exchanged in a while," she said. "The Crown shards are still fresh. It will be… vivid."
"What exchange?" Lysa asked warily.
"The Dream Exchange," Sareth said. "We trade what we see when we sleep."
She swallowed. "You mean you share… nightmares?"
Veyra smiled. "Sometimes," she said. "Sometimes we share dinner. Sometimes we share you."
Lysa blanched. "Please don't."
"No promises," Cirel murmured.
The heat made the air shimmer near the entrance of the half-dome. Outside, the dunes went on forever. No movement. No sound.
"Rest," I said. "We'll walk when the light gets bored of itself."
Kaen stretched out on his back with an exaggerated sigh. "Fine," he said. "But if nothing tries to kill us by sundown, I'm starting a fire just to see what burns."
Lyra closed her eyes. "Don't wake me unless the world ends."
"It just did," Lysa muttered.
"Then wake me for the next one," Lyra said.
Veyra flopped down beside Lysa, head on her folded arms, face turned toward her. "You can sleep too, little priestess," she said. "You're safe. For now."
"That doesn't sound safe," Lysa said.
"That's because it's not," Cirel told her, smiling pleasantly.
Alinor's breathing slowed. Sareth's eyes half-closed, his chains making soft metallic murmurs as they settled. Kaen's chest rose and fell in an unhurried rhythm. Lyra's fingers twitched once, then stilled. Even Veyra's restless energy ebbed, eyelids lowering.
Lysa looked at me, the only other one still awake.
"And you?" she asked. "Do you sleep?"
"Sometimes," I said.
"Do you dream?"
"Yes."
"Of what?"
I tilted my head, considering. "You'll see if you're still here," I said.
She swallowed again and leaned back against the stone. "I don't want to see," she whispered.
"Then don't," I said.
Her eyes closed anyway.
The desert hummed around us, a low, uncertain note.
I let my own eyes drift shut.
—
Dreams start small.
Colours. Fragments. Sounds that aren't sounds. You don't step into them; they seep under your skin.
This one began with light.
White at first, too bright, then stained orange, then red. Lines of it forming, then breaking, making shapes that weren't quite anything. I drifted in it for a while, not fully in, not fully out.
Then I felt them.
Threads.
The Eclipsed Bond shivered. Seven points tugged, found each other, wove together in the dark underthought place where we kept things we didn't want to look at too long.
I let it happen.
We always did. That was the bargain we didn't talk about: we could be alone when the worlds were awake, but not when they slept.
The light thinned.
Sand pressed against my bare feet.
—
I was standing in the same desert.
Or something like it.
The sky was darker here, streaked with bruised purple. The dunes were taller, jagged, edges too sharp. The wind blew without sound, pushing grains that never quite landed where they seemed to.
I looked down.
My body wasn't right.
I was taller. Limbs a little too long, joints bending with more than human ease. My hands were slender, fingers slightly elongated, nails sharp. My hair hung free again, longer than it was in the waking world, floating in a wind I couldn't feel.
My "eyes"—the inverted crosses—shone brighter, casting faint, bloody light on the sand.
Not my true form. Not yet.
A halfway thing.
A shadow of it.
Footsteps approached.
I turned.
Veyra walked toward me barefoot, sand clinging to her ankles, her usual grin dialed down to something quieter, sharper. In this dream, her hair was longer too, thick braids trailing behind her like living ropes. Something moved under her skin—petals, snakes, veins of light.
"You started without me," she said.
"Hardly," I replied.
Kaen appeared to my left, rising from the sand like it was water, molten cracks along his arms and chest glowing brighter than usual. Lyra stepped out from behind a dune, her coat shifting textures with every step, eyes reflecting threads of light that weren't there. Cirel simply blinked into existence at my right, shard-like reflections floating faintly around her like lazy satellites. Sareth walked up from behind, chains dragging, cloak made of shadow thicker than the desert heat. Alinor drifted down from above, barefoot, sleeves too long, eyes unfocused but aware.
They all looked wrong.
More themselves.
Less held in.
"You pulled us early," Lyra said, sounding impressed.
"The Crown shards are still loud," Sareth said.
"This place is loud," Alinor murmured. "Even when it thinks it's quiet."
I realized then what was off about the desert.
In the waking world, the dunes had been oddly smooth. Here, they were covered in patterns—circles carved by no hand, spirals etched into the faces of slopes, lines arranged in geometric lattices, all of it half-buried and half-exposed.
Writing.
Old.
Forgotten.
The Eclipsed Bond tightened.
We were all here now, in the same dreamed version of a world that hadn't finished being real.
"You feel that?" Kaen asked.
"Yes," I said.
Under our feet, something breathed.
Not air.
Not life.
Not exactly.
It was like standing on the chest of a sleeping god.
The sand rose and fell with each slow inhalation.
Veyra pressed her toes into it, eyes half-closed. "It's warm," she said. "I like it."
"It's hungry," Cirel corrected.
Lyra crouched and brushed away the top layer of sand. Beneath it, the surface was not more sand, but glass. Smooth. Faintly reflective. Lines crisscrossed it like veins.
"A city," she said. "Buried. Or melted. Or both."
Lysa appeared at the edge of the circle then, stumbling. She looked almost exactly as she did in the waking world—white robe, dark hair, silver chain at her throat—except for her eyes. They were wrong. Too clear. Too sharp.
She looked down at her hands and froze.
"…Am I dreaming?" she whispered.
"Yes," Veyra said brightly. "Welcome."
Lysa turned in a slow circle, taking in all of us—our slightly wrong limbs, the way our shadows didn't match us, the moving lines under our skin.
"This doesn't feel like my dream," she said. "It feels like… I'm in someone else's."
"You're in all of ours," Lyra said.
Lysa's gaze snapped to me. "I don't want to be," she said.
"That's not how this works," Kaen told her.
Above us, the sky flickered.
For a heartbeat, it wasn't a sky at all but a ceiling of glass, cracked in spiderweb patterns. Behind it, something huge and luminous shifted, like a whale drifting behind a pane of ice.
Lysa's breath hitched. "What was that?" she whispered.
Alinor tilted her head back, eyes unfocused. "A god," she said. "Or what's left of one."
"There are gods here?" Lysa demanded. "Again?"
"There are pieces of them everywhere," Cirel said. "Most of them don't know they're gods anymore."
The ground-thrum intensified.
We all felt it at once—seven pulses, then eight.
I frowned.
"Eight?" I said.
Sareth's chains coiled tighter around his arms. "It hears us," he said.
Something laughed.
Not out loud.
Inside.
Underneath.
The glass beneath Lyra's hand vibrated. Tiny fractures ran along it, then sealed themselves, indecisive.
The laugh came again, low and deep, like stone cracking.
Lysa clapped her hands over her ears, even though the sound wasn't in them. "Make it stop," she gasped.
"We didn't start it," Veyra said.
"We woke it," Lyra corrected.
"That's not the same thing?" Lysa asked wildly.
"No," Cirel said. "Worse."
The desert around us shifted.
Dunes flattened, then rose again in different places. The carved circles under the sand rearranged themselves, spirals tightening, lattices collapsing into grids. The world was… adjusting.
To us.
Or to what had recognized us.
"Little god under the sand," Veyra crooned. "We're only visiting. You don't have to get up."
It didn't listen.
The next breath under us was stronger. The ground rose several feet, lifting us with it in a slow swell, then dropped.
Lysa lost her footing and stumbled forward. Her hand brushed my arm. Her skin felt too warm, feverish.
She looked up at me, panic and something else in her eyes. "We're going to die in a dream," she said. "Is that possible?"
"Yes," Sareth said.
"No," Alinor said at the same time.
They looked at each other.
"Depends what you call 'die,'" Cirel added.
The sky flickered again.
This time, it peeled.
A long crack ran from one horizon to the other, splitting the washed-out purple in two. Through the gap, I saw the real sky of the waking world—the pale blue, the hot white light. For a second, both existed, layered.
The desert didn't know which was true.
"It's close," Lyra said quietly. "We're pulling its thoughts through."
"That's what the Exchange is for," Kaen said. "Sharing."
"We're not supposed to share with the world," Lysa snapped.
"Tell it that," Veyra said.
The laugh came again.
Louder.
Closer.
Under us, the buried glass city shifted. I could see glimpses now through the thinning sand: tall structures made of translucent bone, frozen waves of crystal, long, twisting streets etched with sigils that glowed faintly.
Lysa followed my gaze and went still.
She'd grown up in a village of thatched roofs and stone wells. The demon capital had been a shock. This… this was something else entirely.
"What is this place?" she breathed.
"Memory," Alinor said. "It remembers being more than sand."
"A shrine," Sareth said. "To itself."
We stood at its center.
Of course we did.
"That thing under us," Lysa said slowly, "does it know you?"
"Not yet," Cirel said.
The ground pulsed.
It would.
—
I blinked.
Blinking in dreams is strange. It should do nothing. But when I opened my eyes again, we were somewhere else.
Not entirely different.
Still desert.
Still sand.
Still us.
But everything had moved.
We stood on a ridge of glass now, high above the dunes. Below, the buried city was laid bare, half-exposed by some unseen shift. Towers of crystal jutted from the sand at angles, leaning on one another like tired giants. A wide plaza sprawled at the center, its surface a smooth mirror reflecting the wrong sky.
Lysa swayed.
"I didn't… we didn't walk," she stammered.
"No," Lyra said. "It moved us."
"Or moved itself up," Kaen said.
Veyra walked to the edge of the ridge and looked down. Her shadow stretched long, then flickered as if it detached and tried to walk away.
"Pretty," she said.
The air tasted hot and sharp, like sun on broken stone. Every breath rasped.
Down on the plaza, shapes stood.
Statues.
At first glance.
They were tall, twice the height of a demon, carved from that same translucent material. Humanoid, but wrong—too many joints in their arms, faces smooth and featureless except for a single circle where eyes should be.
Crowns rested on their heads.
Not like mine.
Wider, heavier, packed with countless small points of light, like someone had frozen a night sky and hammered it into a ring.
The statues were arranged in a circle.
Around an empty space.
"That's where it sat," Sareth said quietly.
"What?" Lysa asked.
"Their god," he said. "When it remembered it was one."
The laugh rumbled again.
The plaza's center darkened, glass turning smoky. Cracks spidered outward from the empty space. For a moment, something outlined itself there—a huge form, crouched, arms resting on its knees, head bowed.
Then it faded.
"A shadow of what it thinks it is," Alinor whispered.
"It wants to wake up," Lyra said.
"It sees that someone else already took a Crown," Cirel added, glancing at me.
The shard of ash in my chest burned faintly.
It was… aware.
Not a mind. Not like ours. More like a reflex. A god-reflex. Something old, feeling challenged.
Lysa tore her eyes away from the ghostly figure. "Can you stop it?" she asked. "Put it back to sleep?"
"Probably," I said.
"Will you?"
"Depends," I said.
"On what?"
"If it's interesting awake," Kaen said.
The ridge trembled.
Below, one of the crowned statues shifted.
Just a little.
Just enough to no longer be stone.
Its head turned.
The featureless face angled upward.
The single circle where its eyes should be opened.
Not physically. But perceptibly.
It didn't look at the city.
Or the sky.
It looked at us.
Lysa made a small, broken sound.
"Ah," Veyra said, delighted. "Now we're seen."
The ground under our feet bucked. The ridge cracked. Lines of fracture raced across the glass, splintering the edge.
"Stay," Lyra snapped.
Not to us.
To it.
The fractures slowed.
Stopped.
The statue's head tilted.
Curious.
"That shouldn't have worked," Lysa whispered.
"It didn't," Lyra said. "It indulged me. It's playing."
The other statues twitched.
One lifted an arm an inch off its pedestal.
Another's fingers curled.
A third took a slow, grinding step forward, glass joints protesting.
"Are we… in the god's dream?" Lysa asked.
"Yes," Alinor said.
"I hate that," she said.
"Get used to it," Cirel told her. "We spend a lot of time in places that shouldn't exist."
The plaza's center darkened again.
This time the outline held.
A massive shape sat there, hunched. Limbs too long. Head too small. Its surface wasn't smooth like the statues; it was rough, ridged, covered in lines like scars and inscriptions. When it breathed, the air shook.
"You're waking it up more," Lysa said. "Make it stop."
"You keep saying that," Kaen said. "We don't make things stop. We make them finish."
The shape unfolded.
Slowly.
Arms uncoiled. A hand—huge, jointed wrong, fingers too many—pressed against the plaza, cracking it. The head lifted, featureless and smooth except for a single circle of darkness at the center.
The Silent God looked at us with its one not-eye.
It knew us.
Not personally. Not by name. But in the way storms recognize sparks. It felt the Crown shard in my chest, the marks under our skin, the way the desert had shifted to make room for us.
It saw competition.
The laugh that followed wasn't sound or thought.
It was intent.
It rolled through us like a wave.
Lysa staggered back, hands over her chest, gasping. "It's inside," she said. "It's—"
"It's trying to catalog us," Sareth said. "Like we're part of its dream."
"We're not," Veyra sang. "We're nightmares that visit."
The god shifted again.
The statues around it moved in unison, stepping off their pedestals, crowns flaring. They raised their arms. Lines of light surged from their hands into the god's body.
It fed.
The desert shook.
Something vast under the sand rolled, pushing more of the city up.
The sky flickered between purple and blue faster now.
"Wake up," I said.
It took Lysa a second to realize I wasn't talking to the god.
I was talking to us.
—
I opened my eyes.
Heat slammed into me.
The waking desert was back—pale sky, dunes, the half-dome of melted rock. Sand burned against the side of my face where I'd slumped while sleeping.
The others roused in the same breath.
Kaen sat up with a hiss, hand already blazing. Lyra jerked upright, fingers reaching for invisible threads. Veyra rolled onto her back, laughing breathlessly. Cirel blinked, smile wide and sharp. Alinor opened her eyes slowly, pupils blown wide. Sareth lifted his head, chains tightening.
Lysa woke with a scream.
Her voice tore through the hot air, ragged and hoarse. She scrambled away from us on hands and heels until her back hit the stone.
She stared at the sand like it might split open.
"It was real," she choked. "It was real. It's under us. It's under us."
"Yes," Alinor said calmly.
The desert around us… wasn't the same.
The dune we'd stopped beside was different—steeper, its face carved with faint, circular depressions. The horizon was less smooth; dark shapes broke it here and there, half-buried towers of glass pushing their heads above the sand.
The world had shifted.
Our dream had leaked.
Lyra stood, brushing grit from her coat. Her eyes tracked the new shapes with bright, greedy focus. "Well," she said. "That escalated quickly."
Kaen grinned, teeth bright against his darkening skin. "I like this one," he said. "It does half the work for us."
Lysa hugged herself, shaking. "You… you do this in every world?" she asked. "You sleep and wake monsters?"
"No," Cirel said. "Sometimes we find them awake already."
"Sometimes we are the monsters," Veyra added.
"Sometimes?" Sareth repeated dryly.
I pushed off the stone and stood. Sand hissed under my boots. The Shattered Crown shard in my chest throbbed once, responding to the faint presence below.
The Silent God wasn't fully awake.
Not yet.
But it had turned over.
That was enough.
"What is this place called?" Lysa asked suddenly.
"Does it matter?" Kaen said.
"It will," Lyra said. "Everything needs a name when it dies."
Lysa looked out at the dunes, at the glass towers, at the faint circles carved into the sand by no hand.
"In my world," she said slowly, "we had stories of a place beneath all deserts. A bed of glass where the first suns went to sleep. We called it the Still Bed. The place where light forgot itself."
Veyra wrinkled her nose. "That's a terrible name."
"It's a mortal name," Cirel said.
"We'll give it a better one," Lyra promised.
Lysa hugged her knees. "You're going to break this one too," she said.
"Yes," Sareth said.
"Why?" she demanded.
Veyra tilted her head. "Why not?" she asked.
"Because—because maybe this one doesn't deserve it," Lysa said. "It hasn't done anything. It was just sleeping."
Kaen shrugged. "We've destroyed worlds that did more."
"This isn't about deserving," Lyra said, almost gently. "It's about proximity."
Lysa slammed her fist into the sand. "There has to be something that makes you stop," she snapped. "Some line. Some rule. Some—"
"There is," I said.
She glared at me. "What?"
"Boredom," I said.
She stared at me for a second, then made a noise that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so full of despair.
"I hate you," she said.
"I know," I said.
The wind picked up.
It carried a new sound now, under the hiss of sand: a low, deep rumble, like distant thunder. But the sky was clear.
"That's it," Alinor said softly. "It's turning over again."
"We should greet it properly this time," Kaen said.
Lyra smiled. "Awake."
Lysa looked between us all and then back at the changing horizon.
"What happens," she asked quietly, "if it fully wakes up and you don't transform?"
"We die," Veyra said.
"Or we get hurt," Kaen said. "Badly. Which is new. Could be fun."
"We'd kill it anyway," Sareth said. "But slower. Messier."
"Could we lose?" Lysa asked.
The question hung in the hot air.
Veyra laughed as if she'd heard a joke. Cirel smiled with too many teeth. Lyra tilted her head, intrigued. Kaen's eyes lit. Alinor's fingers twitched. Sareth's expression didn't change.
I considered it.
"Yes," I said finally. "If we refused to be what we are. If we stayed small on purpose. If we let the god be the only impossible thing in the room."
Lysa stared at me. "Will you?"
"No," I said.
She closed her eyes briefly. "Of course not," she whispered.
The rumble grew louder.
Under the sand, glass shifted.
The Silent God was waking to the taste of seven dreams and a crack in its ceiling.
We had one more quiet moment.
I sat back down in the half-dome's shade, Eclipsera across my knees, watching the desert reconfigure itself, watching the buried city slowly rise.
Behind my eyes, the Dream Exchange still hummed, threads binding us tighter.
We'd seen its first blink.
Next, it would see ours.
Not yet in this chapter.
But soon.
Very soon.
"Rest," I said again, though none of us would. "When gods wake, they're noisy."
Lysa wrapped her arms around herself and stared out at the shifting dunes.
"I was a village priestess," she said softly. "I thought my biggest problem was keeping children from stealing apples from the offering bowls."
"And now?" Cirel asked.
She laughed, weak and disbelieving. "Now I might be one of the last things a god sees," she said.
Veyra leaned her head on Lysa's shoulder, eyes half-closed. "You're moving up," she said.
The desert shook again, a little harder.
The first shard of glass broke the surface not far from us—a jagged spire, slick and reflective, catching the pale sky and warping it.
Alinor watched it with a small, strange smile.
"It's waking," she said.
"And when it fully does," Lyra murmured, "we'll have to stop being polite."
The Eclipsed Bond pulsed.
The marks beneath our skin warmed.
The desert, which had tried so hard to pretend we weren't here, finally admitted we were.
And underneath it, something that had once been a god remembered that it had a crown too.
The sand rippled.
The glass spire groaned.
Somewhere, deep below, a huge hand flexed.
We smiled.
The desert did not.
It had no idea what it was inviting.