Chapter VII
✦ ✦ ✦
A Forest Clearing — Dawn
The light came in sideways through the trees, the kind of early morning light that makes everything look more real than it is. Dot lay on the grass and felt the warmth on his face and let himself believe it.
He opened his eyes.
Liora knelt over him. Exactly as he remembered — the gentle tilt of her head, her silver hair catching the light, her robes moving in a breeze that didn't seem to touch anything else. She held out her hand, palm up.
"Dot," she said. "Take my hand."
He took it. Her skin was warm. He'd expected it not to be.
She pulled him upright and he stood on uncertain legs, looking at her face with the careful attention of someone who knows they are being given something they don't deserve and intends to memorise every detail of it.
"You're alive," he said. Not a question — more like something he was trying out. Testing the weight of it.
"Were you planning to kill me off so soon?" She smiled the way she used to when she already knew she'd won an argument.
He laughed — short and ragged, the kind that only comes when the alternative is something worse. "You're really here."
They walked through the woods together. She watched him try to skip stones across a stream and fail dramatically, spray going everywhere, and she leaned in and wiped his face with her sleeve without being asked. Later they sat on a fallen log, her head against his shoulder, her hair smelling of something clean and warm.
"When we get out of here," she said, "let's go to Valdheim. Find somewhere small. You do all the chores. I do all the eating."
"That's not a fair arrangement."
"It isn't," she agreed, cheerfully.
He looked at her. "I've missed you."
"You're weird," she said. But her voice was soft when she said it.
He felt something he hadn't felt in three years settle in his chest. Not peace exactly — more like the memory of peace. The shape it used to leave.
Then the clearing opened ahead of them, wider than it should have been, ringed by trees that stood too still and too straight. Something about the light had changed without changing.
He turned to her. "Liora, I—"
The shadows at the tree line moved.
Dark-robed figures stepped out. Martha. Jeze. Others whose faces he knew. They moved without urgency, spreading into a circle around him, and their expressions were identical in the way that expressions are when they don't belong to real people.
Chains erupted from the ground and seized his wrists. He was yanked to the centre of the clearing where a wooden cross stood waiting, driven deep into the earth. He was hoisted up before he understood what was happening. Nails went through his palms.
The scream came out of him raw.
"Liora—help me—"
She stood at the edge of the circle. Tears ran down her face. She looked at him the way she always had — like he was someone worth looking at.
"Kill the demon," she whispered.
The mages began to chant. Low. Relentless. Kill the demon. Kill the demon.
"I'm not a demon." His voice cracked apart on the word. "Liora — please—"
She stepped forward. The crying stopped.
A slow smile replaced it. The wrong kind of smile — one that didn't belong to the face it was wearing.
"Kill him," she said. Ice where the warmth had been.
Something snapped in him. He vanished from the cross — and reappeared beside her, close, eyes locked on hers.
"Who are you?" he said. Quiet. Absolute.
She laughed — first soft, then sharp. The clearing collapsed. The mages dissolved into nothing. The cross fell to dust. The trees, the light, the stream, all of it folded inward and disappeared, leaving only dark. A void with no floor and no ceiling.
In the middle of it: a single wooden bench.
The thing wearing Liora's face walked to it and sat down, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap. Patient. At home.
Dot stood before her, fists closed, breathing hard.
"Tell me who you are."
"Who am I?" She tilted her head, still using Liora's voice — the soft, teasing register he'd known better than any other sound in the world. "I'm Liora. Your dead girlfriend. The one you let slip away."
He lunged. She dissolved before he reached her and reappeared on top of the bench, looking down with wide, innocent eyes that were nothing of the sort.
"I'll tear you apart," he said.
"You really are fascinating."
The word hit him like something cold thrown into his face.
Fascinating.
Memory moved violently in him — fast and involuntary. The night Hidenheim fell. Liora's body on the ground. The demon standing over him, claws raised. And then a hooded figure stepping between them with the unhurried ease of someone arriving exactly when he meant to, touching the demon's hide with one hand, the creature exploding into black before it understood what was happening.
The figure turning. Voice carrying something that was neither amusement nor hunger but contained elements of both — ancient and quiet and patient.
"Interesting."
Then, lower, almost to himself:
"Fascinating."
Dot's eyes opened wide in the dark.
The thing on the bench watched the recognition arrive. Watched it move across his face like weather. Watched it settle.
"It's you," Dot said.
Not loud. Barely above breath. The voice of someone who has just run out of space for volume.
The smile on the borrowed face widened into something genuine — the first unmasked thing it had shown since the dream began.
"Long time." A pause that contained something vast. "Demon."
— ✦ —
Dot gasped upright on the grass, chest heaving, hands going to the ground beneath him to confirm it was there.
Real trees. Real dawn. Real light through the canopy making the same patterns it always made.
Dren crouched a few feet away, running a whetstone along his blade in slow, even strokes. Sylric leaned against a trunk with his arms crossed and his eyes open. Yiva sat with her knees drawn up, watching Dot with an expression she hadn't quite decided to make unreadable yet.
"You've been out since yesterday," Dren said, not looking up. "Regeneration must've taken more than usual."
"You were talking in your sleep," Yiva said. Quiet. No follow-up question — just the information, offered plainly.
Dot looked at Dren. His voice came out rougher than he expected. "I saw him. In the dream."
The whetstone stopped.
"Who?" Dren asked.
Dot swallowed once. "The Redman."
Silence settled over the clearing like something with weight. Sylric came off the tree slowly. Yiva's expression changed — not shock, but the particular stillness of someone hearing a name they had hoped not to hear for a long time.
Sylric's voice was careful. "The Redman."
Not a question. The repetition of someone confirming what they just heard and not yet deciding what to do with it.
— ✦ —
Aetherion — An Abandoned Castle
The man detached the last glowing tube from his forearm. Green liquid dripped from it onto the cracked stone floor and spread into the gaps between the flags, faintly luminous, slowly fading.
He held the tube up briefly, studying it, then set it aside.
The woman in dark robes stepped forward. "How was it, Master?"
"Shorter than I expected." He leaned back, something quiet and satisfied in his expression. "The piece has made contact. Begin."
"Yes, Master."
She withdrew. He sat alone in the ruin with the fading green light and the dark, and something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile and not quite something else.
"Time for the next phase."
To Be Continued