Chapter 10 Dreams of Ruin
Dreams of Ruin
CAELIRA
Sleep didn’t take me gently. It never did anymore. It pulled. One breath I was staring at the rafters, the next I was listening to the faint hum threading up from beneath the floor, where the shard of stormglass lay hidden like a buried pulse I could never quite forget.
The shard hummed in time with my heartbeat, the vibration threading into my bones, until I went under as if both sea and sky had claimed me at once, dragged down and pulled upward, nowhere left to stand.
The ruins waited.
The walls sagged as though sinking back into the earth, their faces veined with moss, their edges dripping stormwater in slow, constant tears.
Towers broken off like snapped teeth. The air seemed to shiver, a vibration deep enough to rattle bone.
I stood where I had before, ankle deep in black water and grit, the ground slick with the storms refuses.
But this time everything was clearer. The lightning burned sharper, the echoes louder, as if the storm had decided I was ready to see more.
A raven perched on a topple column. Ember right eyes found mine, and when it opened its wings, ash lifted with it in a black spiral. It cried once, ragged, insistent, and took flight.
I followed.
The raven wove me deeper into the ruins.
Statues stared down with blank faces, their features scoured by rain until only hollow sockets remained.
Archways sagged, vines threading their ribs until the stone looked alive again.
Every step forward felt like trespass, but also recognition, as if the ground knew me even if I didn’t know it.
Then the air shifted, and for a moment, the ruins were not ruins at all.
The world snapped into a vision so alive that it hurt.
The towers stood whole, carved from stormstone, slick and gleaming, their veins alive with trapped lightning.
Banners snapped in the wind like sails unfurled for war, blue-black cloth embroidered with silver that shimmered when the storm struck it.
People walked in the streets below, their heads tilted into the rain as though it were sunlight, faces open and fearless.
Children darted barefoot through the puddles, laughing when lightning broke overhead. Their laughter was not drowned out, it was carried by the storm itself, folded into the thunder like harmony.
Storm court.
I knew it without being told.
And Gods, it was beautiful.
The vision shattered, a circle of figures stood cloaked in relics stolen from Gods.
Their armor glowed faint with stormglass, jagged and cruel, humming as if voices long dead were still trapped inside.
In their hands they bore the remnants of power: fangs pried from titans, claws torn from primordial beasts, crowns broken from dead gods.
The air itself recoiled from them, as if it knew.
At their center was a pillar carved from shipwreck wood, and to it, a man was bound.
Chains of stormlight coiled around his limbs, serpents of lightning that sank into his flesh and tightened with every breath. His head was bowed, hair dark with rain, blood carving rivers down his chest.
Atlas.
I knew his name before his eyes lifted.
And when they did, the sky split, a sound sharp enough to shear the world in two. His eyes were black, not with emptiness but with depth, the color of stormclouds swollen with lightning, the kind that split horizons when they finally broke.
The pillar shook as thunder cracked overhead. I could feel the words before I heard them, a vow thrumming through every nerve like lightning made flesh, filling even the hollow my breath until there was no space left.
Mine.
It was not command, not plea. It was truth, spoken the way lightning speaks, absolute, impossible to ignore. I should have run. I should have woken myself with a scream, torn my body out of this dream and into safety. Instead, I stepped forward.
The ravens cry cut overhead, ragged, urging.
I pressed my calm into the pillar, the mark flared silver, flooding into the wood. The chains pulsed in answer, their stormlight rippling like something waking from sleep.
And then the lightning struck me.
It tore through my chest, into my bones, into my blood. It should have killed me, should have burned me hollow, but instead it filled me. The storm didn’t lash at me, it claimed me, fierce and unrelenting, as though it had only ever been waiting for this.
The chains binding him lit a silver-white, splintering under pressure. One after another, they cracked, the sound like ribs breaking, like stone fracturing under frost.
I gasped, my knees buckling, but still I pressed my hand against the pillar. I knew this was not bloodline, not chance, not prophecy. It was something beyond words, the kind of tether even the sky could not unmake.
His gaze caught mine, and for one breathless moment, the storm itself held still.
Mine, the vow hummed through me again, through him, through the chains breaking like glass under the sea.
The last bond split, light searing white and I woke with the taste of lightning still in my mouth.
Lightning split the sky, so bright it burned white against my closed eyes, and thunder followed so violently the cabin shook, a sound that rattled the marrow of the valley itself. I jerked awake with the echo of it still in my chest.
The world snapped back, but I did not.
The cabin stood in darkness, rain whispering against the roof, while my breath tore through me and my heart raged like a storm caged too small.
Silver fire pulsed in my palm. The mark burned brighter than ever before, alive beneath my skin, its light bleeding through the bandage until smoke curled from the edges.
The dream clung, shards of it catching me like glass in the skin. Not just ruins, not just storm. His eyes, the crack of thunder, the flash of chains fracturing, images too vivid to be forgotten, yet too fractured to name.
The shard of stormglass under the floor hummed once, faint but certain, like it had drunk from the same lightning that had poured through me.
I tried to steady my breath, but the air was too thin.
I stumbled to the window, shoved the shutters open, let the night air slap me across the face.
The storm had already broken loose, rain lashing sideways in sheets, thunder rolling so hard it felt alive.
The sky wasn’t promising anymore, it was delivering, and it would not stop soon.
A raven wheeled above the tree line, its cry slicing through the heavy dark.
“Not real,” I whispered to myself, to the storm, to the mark that blazed like a brand. But it sounded like a lie to even my own ears.
The oak’s memory still pulsed in my palm, the ruins bleeding into waking, the court alive, the chains shattering. The storm was no longer a whisper pressed against the edges of my life. It lingered like a presence in the room, watching, waiting as though the next move was no longer mine to make.
The storm hammered on, thunder rolling over itself, rain clawing at the shutters. Time lost its shape in the noise. I couldn’t tell if hours or minutes passed. Only when the dark began to lift, and the blackness of the night was smudged into gray, did I realize dawn was breaking.
My dream had barely loosened its grip when the sound split the air, three knocks, sharp as a verdict, rattling the wood like chains shaken free.
I swung my legs to the floor, the boards cool under my bare feet, the air heavy with rain and something more. A summons at this hour could mean only one thing. My hand hesitated on the latch, as if holding it closed might hold the world out for a moment longer.
When I opened the door a Verdant court runner stood there, soaked through, hair plastered to his brow, cloak heavy with rain. His eyes flicked once to the mark seared into my hand, then down, as if he regretted the glance.
“The rulers,” he stammered, voice rough with cold and dread, “summon you. N-n-n-now.”