Chapter Eleven
In many a fairytale, there were things that were made to sleep.
Powerful beasts that terrorized kingdoms, divine kings whose reigns lasted centuries, beautiful maidens whose beauty was so fierce it threatened to unravel the world.
There were monsters that could not be slain by mortal means, their hearts too fierce to fall under any blade, their bodies too indestructible to crumble.
These beings were made to sleep.
It was not a gentle sleep, nor a peaceful one—it was a sleep like death.
Enchanted, bound by spells, cast away into timeless slumbers where they remained unchanging and untouched.
They were placed to rest in caves deep beneath mountains, in forgotten temples carved into cliffs, and within glass coffins that shimmered with the weight of centuries.
Some waited to be awakened, their stories tied to the breaking of the spell, to the chance of being freed once more.
Others were cursed, hidden away with the desperate prayers of the world to never stir again.
To sleep was to be suspended between life and death, between waking and dying.
It was a fragile balance, one that left them at the mercy of forces beyond their control.
Thorne slept.
Thorne died.
Whether he woke or lived, that was something beyond his reach then, something that rested in hands that were not his own.
What he knew was pain.
What he knew was darkness.
The light didn't reach him.
The fire of agony raged inside him, but the light—the light that should guide him—did not come.
It was distant, unreachable, as though it was locked away in another world entirely.
Things moved without his body, but within, there was stillness.
Inside, there was only an ache, an unrelenting fire that burned his bones, that turned him to ash, to char. He drowned in this sensation. It consumed him.
He surfaced, briefly.
But even when he rose from the depths, he could not see.
He could not understand.
All that existed was agony.
All that existed was air that burned as it filled his lungs.
And then, just as quickly, he was pulled back under, into the dark, endless nothing.
The cycle repeated, over and over again, endless in its futility. There was no time in slumber, no past, no future. There was only the cage of his body, trapped in a prison of his own making, a prison of unconsciousness.
He was sealed away.
He was trapped.
He was dying.
The light didn't reach him.
Until, one day, it did.
The fire that burned within him began to extinguish, slowly.
The suffocating heat faded, leaving behind a void.
But the void was not empty.
The darkness swelled to fill the space left behind, but it, too, bore the mark of the flame.
It had been touched by the fire, damaged in ways it did not fully understand.
It began to peel away, to flake off in fragments like old paint on a forgotten wall.
And as it crumbled, what lay underneath was revealed.
Images began to form out of the nothingness.
Colors bled into shapes.
Days and nights passed by, time unfolding like the petals of a flower.
They were fleeting, too quick to hold, but they were there.
“You’re dreaming, Thorne,”
Orion’s voice cut through the fog.
It was distant, like an echo from a faraway place.
Thorne didn’t think he was dreaming.
He didn’t think, not really.
His mind was not asleep, not in any conventional sense.
It simply had its way with him, untethered and unsupervised.
“Trust to your intuition, Thorne,”
Orion said again, his voice gentler this time, as though trying to guide Thorne through the murky depths of his mind.
The images continued.
The training grounds where he used to spar with Seraphina flickered before him, like a fading memory from another life.
The dust of the earth, the sound of blades clashing in the air.
His own hand was there, gripping the hilt of a sword, thrusting it into the ground with the raw strength of his magic.
He could almost feel the weight of the sword, the familiar burn in his arm as it struck the earth.
And there, standing a short distance away, was Seraphina.
She was watching, her eyes focused on him, the way they always were when they were young. Her hair was white, shimmering in the light. She must have been thirteen in this memory—he remembered when she was thirteen, the year she returned to them, to the kingdom, to their world.
A voice echoed from beyond the edges of this fading vision.
It was low and disembodied, filled with a sense of finality.
It was done.
And then, the question: Why wasn’t he waking up?
Fourteen.
That was how old Thorne was when he killed someone for the first time.
Fourteen, when he crossed that line that once felt so distant.
He remembered it, the cold weight of that first kill.
He remembered how it didn’t feel like anything at all, just another step down a path he didn’t yet understand.
It was the same time that Seraphina began to do things in the dark.
Things that Thorne didn’t know, things that, at the time, didn’t matter. Why? Why did she do those things? He didn’t know, and at that time, he didn’t care. He just knew he felt sorry for her. He wanted to help her. He wanted to protect her, as much as he could.
Years passed, flowing together in a blur.
The memories of those years were faded now, spots of color that swirled together, washed out like watercolors left to the rain.
They dripped, they ran, they blended and formed something.
What was it? A cathedral.
A bell tower trapped inside a tree.
The Officer's Academy.
The memories were distant, as though they belonged to someone else.
That fateful first year.
In many ways, it had been unfortunately uneventful.
While Thorne’s personal life had certainly been far from dull, it wasn’t as though the year had changed anything profound in the grand scheme of things.
It was simply another turn of the seasons, the passage of time feeling as if it would have slipped away unnoticed if not for a few key moments that anchored themselves in his memory.
And yet, as he lay suspended in this darkness, his subconscious presented him with a memory that had not crossed his mind in over six moons.
The day Seraphina disappeared.
It had been a busy day, just like many others.
The autumnal monster migrations arrived early that year, throwing the Academy and the surrounding area into chaos.
The migration—an event that occurred every year—was unpredictable, often wreaking havoc with the region’s resources, and this time, it arrived particularly early, catching everyone off guard.
For weeks, supplies had dwindled as merchants were hesitant to brave the journey to the Academy without proper protection.
The roads were too dangerous, too unpredictable.
Thorne had been sent out on an expedition to help guide one such caravan through the valley, not knowing that the moment he left, Seraphina would vanish.
When he returned that night, the feeling of something being wrong settled heavily in his chest.
He could feel it in the air, in the way Dawna acted.
Dawna was always a steady presence at the Academy, never easily shaken or unsettled, but now she was skittish, distracted in a way he had never seen before.
And what struck him as odd was that Dawna, who was normally so punctual, was alone.
Alone.
That alone was enough to rattle Thorne.
When he questioned her, Dawna played it off well, her calm demeanor fooling everyone around her, but Thorne saw through it. She wasn’t just tired, nor distracted. She was distraught. And Dawna had never been distraught.
Then, nearly two full days later, as if by some twist of fate, Seraphina reappeared.
In the dead of night, she, Havenstead, and Valen returned to the monastery.
They were filthy, exhausted from whatever it was they had endured, their clothes torn and caked in dirt.
But it wasn’t just them.
They were accompanied by a young woman—a teacher, someone Thorne didn’t recognize.
A stranger.
But the woman was dead.
The Church gave no explanation, no word as to what had transpired.
There was no grand funeral, no public memorial.
It was simply...
done.
Classes were canceled the next day, and everything seemed to return to normal, as if nothing had happened.
No one spoke of it, and the Church refused to say anything.
But Thorne knew something had happened. Something was terribly wrong. The only reason he knew of the woman’s death at all was because of Seraphina.
He found her that night, in the library, staring out of the window that overlooked the graveyard.
The area had been cordoned off for more than a day by then, and most of the building was off-limits.
Yet, he knew she must have sneaked in.
When Thorne approached her quietly, she didn’t turn to face him.
Instead, her eyes were fixed on something far below, and as he followed her gaze, he understood.
The casket was open.
The body was there.
Seraphina didn’t say a word, but Thorne watched as she sighed deeply, her entire body trembling, almost as if she were relieved.
The sigh seemed to ripple through her, and a shudder ran down her spine—one so profound that, if Thorne hadn’t known better, he might have mistaken it for a sob.
The casket was closed, and the body was lowered into the earth, swallowed by the grave.
But Seraphina didn’t say anything.
She simply stood there, staring, her face unreadable.
When Thorne confronted her later about where she had been and what had happened, Seraphina gave him a tired look.
She didn’t act evasive, nor did she try to avoid his questions.
Her response was calm, measured.
She and the other house leaders had been sent on a critical mission, accompanied by a few members of the Church for safety.
There had been no issues, except for the death of the teacher who had been accompanying them.
The explanation, while plausible, never sat well with Thorne.
There was something off about it. Something that didn’t quite add up. But at the time, he didn’t push. If Seraphina needed him to know more, she would tell him. He trusted her—he had trusted her.
(He had grown complacent, hadn’t he? He realized that now.
That year, he stopped asking the hard questions.
He stopped paying attention.
It was that complacency that led him to this moment, to this state.)
Here? Now?
“Trust your intuition, little brother.”
Thorne felt a strange, gnawing sensation.
He had overlooked something.
Something important, something vital, and the feeling ate at him now, even in the silence of his mind.
What had he missed? What had been kept from him?
Would he wake at all?
The voices were faint but present.
Only time would tell.
The darkness around him continued to peel away, bit by bit, as though it unraveled itself, revealing more of what had been hidden beneath.
Yet still, slumber kept its hold on him, binding him in its quiet embrace.
The light wouldn’t reach him.
The light never reached him.
So the dreams took him instead.
They wrapped him in their cocoon, and he was pulled deeper into the folds of his own mind, deeper into the labyrinth of what he had forgotten, into what he was too frightened to remember.
The answers were buried somewhere, somewhere in the murk and haze of his thoughts.
But would he ever reach them? Would he ever find the truth of that day, the truth of Seraphina’s disappearance, the truth of the things he refused to ask? The darkness knew, but it didn’t tell.
Only time would tell.