Chapter 20
Time seemed to still as I stood trapped within my revelation, the world I had once accepted without question was now unraveling at its edges.
I slowly took in my surroundings, as though seeing them with new eyes.
The castle appeared unchanged at first glance—the same towering walls, the same polished floors, the same distant hush that had always lingered in its halls—but the longer I looked, the more something beneath the surface began to reveal itself.
The light didn’t fall quite right, as though it had been painted rather than cast. The air felt dulled, stripped of the subtle textures I had once taken for granted.
Even the silence carried an artificial stillness, like a stage waiting for its next cue.
What I had once dismissed as dreamlike was not an embellishment of reality, but its absence.
“It appears you’ve finally realized.” Evander’s voice broke softly into my whirling thoughts.
I turned to find him watching me with an intensity no longer entirely masked by charm or calculation. There was something else there now—something quieter, more uncertain—though whether it stemmed from my realization or from what he knew would follow, I couldn’t tell.
“I realize, but I still don’t understand. How can this be a dream?” Even as the words left my lips, they felt insufficient for the magnitude of what had shifted inside me.
My gaze drifted once more across the corridor, tracing the faint distortions I could now perceive—the way the world seemed to hesitate beneath my attention, as though unsure how closely it needed to resemble something real.
From the moment I had awoken to this reality, I had sensed something was off.
Yet no matter how strange it became, I had never questioned it.
“How could I not have seen it before?”
“You had no reason to question your reality,” he explained. “No one here does.”
A quiet unease settled deeper within me. “Then everyone in this castle…?”
“Cursed,” he confirmed with a solemn nod. “Trapped, one way or another. Whether we share the same dream or each inhabit our own version of it, I cannot say. But whatever this place is, it’s not life—only an imitation of it.”
His words should have startled me more than they did.
Instead, they settled into place, aligning with something I had already begun to understand.
The life I remembered—the years of theft, of movement, of purpose—felt distant now, like a story I had once known but could no longer fully recall.
I couldn’t remember where I had been going the day I first entered the castle, nor the details of the last heist I had completed.
It was as if those memories had never belonged to me at all, slipping away the moment I ceased to need them.
“How long have I been here?” I asked quietly.
There was a brief pause before he answered. “Years.”
“Years?” The word struck harder than I expected—not because I doubted it, but because somewhere deep within me, I already knew it to be true.
He nodded. “Ever since the kingdom fell under the sleeping curse.”
Just as the Evander from the dream had told me…
only now, I understood. That had been the real Evander, and the man standing before me…
was the one who belonged to the dream. The realization settled uneasily in my chest. It still felt impossible that the world I had believed to be real was the illusion—while the one I had dismissed as merely a dream was the truth.
“Everyone is trapped,” I said slowly. “Except you.”
For a moment, he looked genuinely surprised. “How did you—” He stopped, something sharpening behind his eyes. “I see. Each time you fell asleep, you crossed over to the real world and spent time with him.”
There was no teasing in his voice now, no easy charm, only something darker—a flicker of what might have been jealousy. But the emotion faded almost as quickly as it appeared, replaced with a deep sadness that seemed to reach inside of me.
“He warned you about me.” It wasn’t a question so much as a quiet certainty.
My heart sank. “Was he right to do so?” I asked, hesitant, uncertain I really wanted the answer.
He said nothing for a long moment, avoiding my eyes. “No one knows myself—or what I’m capable of—better than I do.”
It was all the answer I needed. And yet, even with that admission, I still couldn’t bring myself to distrust him.
Silence stretched between us, heavy with everything I could not yet process, until at last I drew in a slow breath and turned away. My thoughts pulled me instinctively towards the one place in the castle where everything had begun to unravel…and where the answers I sought might be waiting.
My hand lifted again, almost unconsciously, hovering between us as though drawn towards something I couldn’t quite name.
I stopped myself just before I could close the distance.
I felt his gaze drop to the movement, following it with a stillness that didn’t belong to the man who had once met every interaction with wit and ease.
For a fleeting, fragile instant, something flickered in his expression—not charm or calculation, but something far more uncertain, like a door closing just before it could be opened too far. For the first time since I had known him, I saw something that had nothing to do with control: fear.
His breath caught and he stepped back, the distance snapping sharply back into place between us. “This is…a dangerous development.”
The mask had returned. But now that I had seen beneath it, I couldn’t forget it.
“I need to see the mural again,” I murmured. “Will you take me there?”
Evander hesitated. “Are you truly certain?” he asked. “Some choices, once made, can never be taken back.”
I hesitated a faltering moment, unsure if I was brave enough to face what would likely be revealed. I had wanted to uncover his secrets for far too long to turn away now—but for once, I wasn’t driven by curiosity alone, or by the hollow need to fill the emptiness left by everything I had lost.
This time, I wanted to know for his sake. Even if I didn’t like what I saw, it would still be part of him—the man who had tested me, bested me, and stirred something in my heart that no one else ever had.
My insistent curiosity had waited too long to be denied any longer, demanding to be answered at last. I gathered my composure and nodded.
He released a quiet, resigned sigh, then fell into step beside me as I made my way through the corridors. Neither of us spoke as we walked, though I could feel his watchful gaze on me more than once, as though he were trying to read something in my silence that I was not yet ready to voice.
It wasn’t long before the familiar doors of the mural room came into view.
I slowed, a strange, unspoken tension tightening my chest as I approached them—whether born from anticipation or instinct, I could not say.
The last time I had stood here, I had sensed something lay hidden beneath the surface that I had not yet been ready to uncover.
Evander lifted a hand as though to stop me as I reached for the doorknob. But now the pull was unmistakable, stronger than curiosity and even caution; I ducked under his arm. This was where the truth waited to finally be revealed. With a steadying breath, I stepped inside.
The mural stretched across the far wall exactly as I remembered, its painted surface depicting the twin castles separated by the mirror-like lake—one bathed in golden light, the other steeped in shadow.
And yet, as I approached it now, I could see what I had missed before—not a flaw in the artistry, but a subtle shift in the way the image held itself, as though it were less a painting than something pretending to be one. As if it might change, if given reason to.
“Now that you know the truth about the nature of this world you once believed to be real, you feel it, don’t you?” Evander said quietly from behind me.
I didn’t turn. “It isn’t just a mural.”
“No,” he agreed. “It never was.”
Something in his tone should have warned me—not the words themselves, but the careful way they were offered, as though he were guiding me towards a conclusion he had already reached. And yet, even as the thought brushed against my mind, I did not pull away.
Perhaps because I yearned for the answer too much. Or perhaps because, despite everything, I still trusted him more than I should have.
My hand lifted almost without my permission, drawn towards the painted surface, as though something within it called to me.
I closed my eyes and reached out with my magic, gasping as I was met with a hum of power stronger than anything I’d ever felt before.
An immense, ancient magic lay coiled within the mural. Waiting.
“Careful,” Evander said, unable to fully sense what I could. “You may not like what you discover.” The warning came more softly this time, more an urgent plea than caution.
I hesitated only a moment before I reached out towards that power, careful this time not to make contact after what had happened the previous time. The instant my fingers hovered over the painted surface, the enchantment woven into each brushstroke answered.
The world shifted—not all at once, but slowly unfolding, as though reality itself were adjusting to accommodate something it could no longer conceal. The distant castle seemed to draw nearer, its edges sharpening as though no longer bound by the illusion of distance.
My breath caught as one of the painted turret windows darkened, then deepened—not with shadow, but with realness, as though the illusion had finally given way to something that had been waiting beneath it all along.
A faint, not fully formed memory stirred—a certainty that I had stood here once before. Not in this world of dreams, but in the real one before I’d been imprisoned in slumber.