Chapter Eighteen #2
Maps are spread across the far end of the table.
I step closer. My gaze follows thick lines drawn through mountain ranges and forests I’ve never visited, borders marked with careful intention.
My fingers hover, then press down, tracing paths that feel familiar, like routes I’ve walked before, even if my feet have never touched the ground.
Something shifts at the edge of the scene.
The table fades.
The room tilts.
The sense of knowing tightens, sharp enough to hurt.
I see violence.
Blood on snow.
Bodies that don’t die properly.
Creatures that wear human faces but move like predators who have never known what it means to be prey.
I see a man with eyes the color of glacial ice, standing in the center of what might be a cathedral or might be a clubhouse, the architecture refusing to settle into either category.
He’s watching something in a crystal dome, a flame that burns in impossible colors, dying slowly despite his presence.
He turns.
And looks directly at me.
And I wake gasping, clutching at sheets soaked with sweat, my heart hammering so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t crack my ribs.
I lie there for a long time afterward, staring at the ceiling while my pulse slowly drags itself back into something survivable.
My memory is a blank slate with whole days gone.
Faces I’m told I should recognize are reduced to names spoken gently by strangers.
And yet what I just saw, what I felt, lingers with a weight that refuses to fade.
The table beneath my hands. The numbers I understood without knowing why.
The borders I traced like they belonged to me.
And him.
The image of those glacial-blue eyes won’t loosen their hold, bright and intent in the darkness behind my eyelids. There was grief in them, fury, a terrible, restrained longing that made my chest ache like something vital had been misplaced, and my body hadn’t stopped searching for it yet.
I don’t remember what happened to me.
But I remember that.
The unfairness of it settles in my ribs. Whatever I lost in that crash, it wasn’t everything. Something survived the impact, intact and waiting, and chose to surface in dreams rather than in daylight.
I curl onto my side, pressing my face into the pillow like it might anchor me back there, back to the world where things made sense in ways this one doesn’t anymore. My sheets are cool now, sweat dried, but the heat of the dream hums under my skin.
For one reckless moment, I hope sleep will take me again.
I hope I’ll find my way back to that table.
To that flame.
To those eyes.
But exhaustion doesn’t oblige longing.
It drags me under without ceremony, dreamless and empty this time.
Three Days Later
After doing as many tests as humanly possible, they discharged me with aftercare instructions and a prescription for painkillers I won’t take.
Everything is slightly off. Colors are too bright, sounds too loud, the city is cramped and suffocating in ways it never was before.
But my apartment is exactly how I left it.
Dishes in the sink, camera equipment scattered across the kitchen table.
A half-finished coffee is growing mold on the counter.
I stand in the center of my living room and try to remember being the person who lived here. Try to reconnect with the Roxy who drank that coffee, loaded those cameras, and walked out the door, planning to return in a week.
She’s gone.
Erased.
And in her place is this hollow girl who can’t stop dreaming about ice and fire.
That night, I don’t sleep. I sit on my bed with my laptop, searching for anything about the mountains, about Route 16, about Johnathan Jones. The official reports give nothing.
Man found dead.
Suspicious circumstances.
Investigation ongoing.
But there are other things. Whispers on forums dedicated to conspiracy theories and unexplained phenomena. Stories about the Appalachians stretching back centuries, warnings about territories where people disappear.
One phrase appears repeatedly, posted by different users across different platforms…
Stay away from the Kings.
The words punch through me, recognition flaring bright before guttering out.
I know this.
I know what it means.
But the knowledge hovers just beyond reach.
I dig deeper, and find nothing substantial.
Just fragments and shadows, stories that contradict each other, but underneath it all is a current of genuine terror.
People who have seen something they shouldn’t have.
Warnings to stay away from certain coordinates, certain stretches of road where the forest grows too close and too dark.
The sun rises while I’m still searching, light creeping across my floor in shades that remind me of fire in a crystal dome. I close my laptop with shaking hands.
I try to return to normal.
Go back to work, editing photographs, responding to emails, planning projects. My boss is understanding, but I see the way he looks at me sometimes, worry creasing his forehead.
He’s not unjustified.
Because the dreams don’t stop.
They intensify.
For the next four nights, more vivid until I wake with ash and snow on my tongue, phantom sensations of cold that burns. I dream of chains that sear like brand, of darkness with weight. Of a voice that speaks my name like a curse and prayer tangled together.
Roxy.
Not Vale… just Roxy.
Said in a tone that suggests ownership, possession, the kind of claiming that should terrify me, but instead makes something in my chest tighten with longing I can’t begin to explain.
I wake from these dreams disoriented and aching, hands reaching for something that isn’t there, loss carving through me despite having no memory of what I’ve lost. It’s maddening, unbearable, like grief for a person I’ve never met, for a life I never lived.
Three weeks after the accident, I find myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror at two in the morning, studying my reflection as though it might offer answers.
The bruises have faded. The cut on my temple has healed to a thin pink line that will eventually disappear entirely.
But there’s something different in my eyes now, something haunted and searching that wasn’t there before.
I look like someone who’s been fundamentally altered and doesn’t understand how or why.
“What happened to me?” I whisper to my reflection, and it stares back with the same desperate confusion, offering nothing except the certainty that the answer exists somewhere in the blank spaces of my memory, waiting to be remembered.
Or waiting to find me.
I glance past my reflection, down the short hallway toward the spare room I had turned into something between an office and a shrine before I found myself with a gap in my memory and a trip to the hospital.
One wall is covered from corner to corner, paper layered over paper, photographs pinned beside notes written in my own handwriting that I don’t remember writing.
Strings of red and black thread crisscross between points that mean something, even if I don’t yet understand what.
I keep going back to it and standing there for hours, tracing connections with my eyes. Trying to feel the logic behind it all, the shape of a life I was clearly living before everything went dark.
None of it feels random.
None of it feels finished.
Because sometimes, in the space between sleeping and waking, I swear I hear engines.
Motorcycles growling through the night.
Getting closer.