Imara
FIFTY-FOUR
Idream of silence.
For years—for my entire life—the Vale has never been quiet. The hum of blood-wards. The echo of screams. The constant pulse of accumulated death, beating beneath the surface. Even in sleep, the noise was there. Background music to nightmares.
Now there’s nothing. Silence so complete it feels like a physical thing. Pressing against my ears. Filling the spaces where horror used to live.
I dream of walking through the Red Fields. Not as they were—rust-colored, bleeding, thick with the stench of copper—but as they are now. Gray earth. Barren soil. Dead, but cleanly dead. Not rotted. Not tainted. Simply… empty.
Waiting for a new feeling to grow.
I dream of Kharvek. His arms around me. His heartbeat against my cheek. The steady warmth of his presence, more real than the destruction that surrounds us.
I dream of Sera. She died holding my hand, asking about the sunrise she’d never seen.
I called the disposal team afterward. I closed her eyes first. I’ve thought about that moment every day since—whether it was enough, whether anything I did was enough, whether the weakness I planted in the wards that let her try to run was a gift or a death sentence.
She never knew it was me. She died thinking she’d found a miracle.
Maybe that was kinder. I hope it was kinder.
I dream of Tomek. A few hours in the dark, a map pressed into my hands, a name—Dena, keep her safe.
Then a corridor and a sound I didn’t look back at.
He knew the odds. He’d been calculating them for years and feeding the answers to us one careful note at a time.
His whole rebellion was contained in those scraps of paper, in that single charge into the dark.
I never knew him well—never broke bread with him, never asked about his life.
I carry him anyway. That’s the only funeral the clan’s dead ever get—someone who survives deciding to remember.
And I dream of the future.
Not the future the Matron planned—children bred for power, bloodlines cultivated for sacrifice, generation after generation of controlled horror. A different future. One where children grow up free. Where people choose their own paths. Where bodies aren’t currency and family isn’t inventory.
A future we burned the old world to create.