Chapter 36 Romie
ROMIE FOUND TOL IN DREAMS.
It was an easy thing to follow the vibration of that song, pulling her right to him.
She knew instinctively that it was the key in him calling to her soul.
Why she felt that connection to him, to Aspen, and yet not to Emory, was beyond her, and not something she wanted to ponder here in the sleepscape.
Tol’s dream was warmth and sunlight, the feeling of hugging someone you love. He was sitting around a large meal with people Romie assumed were his family. A mother, a father, three sisters. There was laughter and love so deep it made her miss her own family with a sudden excruciating pang.
Tol turned to Romie. She recognized him as the young man she’d seen when she’d found Aspen scrying in the sleepscape.
His face was like the golden glow of dawn on those sandstone formations they had traveled through, and the eyes that met hers were a striking shade of topaz.
Where before he’d had shoulder-length, dark hair, his head was shorn now, as she imagined all prisoners’ must be.
And the muscles on him—he truly looked the part of the warrior, a weapon forged by this fiery world.
“Anatolius?”
Something flared in his molten eyes. “No one but the draconic masters calls me that.”
“Tol, then?” Romie took a tentative step toward him, not wanting the dream to get away from them. “I’m Romie. I’m a friend of Aspen’s. She sent me here to give you a message.”
He frowned. “Aspen?”
Right—Aspen could see through his eyes, but he wouldn’t have felt her presence in his mind. He wouldn’t know her name.
“A friend of Caius’s.”
“Caius,” Tol repeated with recognition.
“We need you to hang on, all right? We’re getting you out of there.”
Confusion grew thick around him. “I don’t understand.” The dream shifted in a way that told Romie this was too much for him, that reality was seeping in again and he would soon be pulled out of sleep.
As the dream began to dissolve, the only words Romie could think of were those of Song of the Drowned Gods. “Patience,” she called out to him. “Take heart.”
And then she was in a different dream, in a mind she would recognize anywhere.
Emory’s dream was more of a memory: three kids running barefoot through fields of gold, laughing their way to the shore, dancing with a flock of gulls.
Romie watched as the younger version of herself pulled a young Emory up from where she sat with Baz, and the two of them ran into the water, laughing and shrieking as waves crashed around them.
There was nothing sad about the memory. But Romie was hit with a sense of melancholy so poignant she wanted to cry. She met Emory’s eyes—the real Emory suddenly standing next to her, not the dream one—to see them wet with unshed tears.
“Do you think we can get back to that?” Romie asked.
Emory didn’t reply, only rested her head on Romie’s shoulder. In silence, they watched the dream together, letting the gulls carry their burdens for a time.
Suddenly Emory lifted her head, brows knit together in confusion as she peered at something in the distance. “Is that…?”
Romie hadn’t noticed the darkness pressing in at the edges of the dream. And she certainly hadn’t noticed him there.
“Kai?”