44. Cassiel
Ispend the days waiting in a quiet kind of unrest. The library becomes both refuge and prison, its towering shelves offering answers I’m not sure I want, its silence pressing too tightly around thoughts I cannot escape.
I read everything I can find on dream-walking: fragmented records, fey folklore awkwardly translated into human script, half-dismissed accounts scrawled in margins by scholars who clearly didn’t believe what they were writing.
There is logic to it, in its own strange way. The mind as a place. Consciousness as something that can be entered, navigated… even altered.
But there are gaps. Too many gaps, because it isn’t something humans are known to do and no one has any first hand experience of it at all.
I want to ask Wren for a book on it before we dive in, although I doubt she has access to anything either.
My mind thrums through worse-case scenarios for days.
Wren is banking on me being able to come into the dream with her, but what if I can’t?
There’s only a minute amount of fey blood in me, after all.
I can’t do runes like Runara. I tried, of course, the first chance I had, to summon a barrier using procta like Ru did.
Nothing. I tried the strength rune too, after I found a book on them. That didn’t work either.
Ru lifted the whole desk.
There’s a tiny, miniscule amount of information on half-fey in the library, but while some must have existed before Wren, they tended to live in secret.
I find passages that speak of diluted blood still carrying echoes of power, but little else, and the accounts I manage to find depicting dream-walking are… not encouraging.
I read one of a half-fey man who entered his wife’s dreams to pull her from a fevered sleep she sunk into after childbirth. He never woke. His body lived for three days after, breathing shallowly, eyes moving beneath closed lids, before it finally stilled. A few days later, his wife followed.
Their child was left an orphan.
Like Runara will be if we fail.
Another account tells of a fey woman who wandered too deeply into another’s consciousness and forgot her own name. When she returned, she wore someone else’s half-remembered memories. Her own were lost to her forever.
A third tells of twins who entered into their father’s dream after he fell in battle and did not wake. Only one made it back, her sister opting to remain in the dreamscape her father had constructed. Her body remained alive for decades afterwards, but she never woke.
She died the same day as her twin.
That one is a particularly difficult read.
I know, with a cold certainty settling in my bones, that this is not something to attempt lightly, not something to gamble with.
And certainly not with Ru in the mix.
But at the same time—
She needs her mother.
The thought cuts through every warning, every rational hesitation. It sits in my chest, heavy and immovable.
She needs her mother.
I need her to have her mother.
I need Mother too.
There are ways to mitigate the risks, that much becomes clear as I read deeper.
The most important safety measure seems to be that of an anchor.
Fey rarely attempt dream-walking without them.
It’s something that tethers them to the waking world.
Objects can serve the purpose—items of personal value, imbued with memory and meaning—but every account agrees on one thing:
People are better.
And Wren doesn’t have one. She barely has an object to her name, let alone a person tethering her to the world… apart from me.
If she goes in, it will be with me. We both know my mother won’t wake for her alone.
And if I go in…
I’ll need an anchor too. If it can’t be Wren—
It can only be Ru.
The thought makes something in me recoil. Ru isn’t even ten. Ten.
The age I was when my father died. The memory rises like bile. The hollow ache, the desperate, impossible wish to undo it. To fix it. To bring him back, no matter the cost.
I would have done it.
At that age, I would have risked anything.
Everything. My life wouldn’t have mattered, no logic or reasoning.
I wouldn’t have cared that no parent would ask their child to risk their life for them.
All I would have seen is my life without him in it and the desperate chance to have any other reality instead.
I sit back in my chair, staring blankly at the open page in front of me, the words blurring into meaninglessness.
Does Ru deserve the same choice? Or is that cruelty disguised as honesty? Is it selfish to ask her—to place that weight on her shoulders, to make her complicit in a risk she cannot fully understand?
Or would it be worse to take the choice away?
Would she hate me for it, one day?
Or… would she respect me for asking?
I don’t know. Saints, I don’t know.
I agonise over it for far longer than I should, hours slipping into days, the question circling endlessly with no clear answer. Every argument I make is undone by another. Every certainty dissolves the moment I try to hold onto it.
In the end, I’m left with only one truth:
Whatever I choose, I may not be the one to live with it.
But Ru will be.
By the time the third day comes—and Wren is due to return—I can’t delay it any longer.
I go to find Ru.
She’s just finished her lessons for the day, seated near the window with Aunt Imogen in the school room not far from the library. There’s ink on her fingers again, and she’s talking animatedly about something I don’t quite catch—something light, something normal.
For a moment, I hesitate in the doorway.
Let her have this, a voice in my head whispers. Let her have one more day of being a child.
But there is no time left for that.
“Ru,” I say.
She looks up at once, her face lighting in a way that twists something deep in my chest.
“Cass!”
Aunt Imogen turns too, her expression shifting the moment she sees me. Her brow arches, almost imperceptibly. She can read something on my face that Ru can’t.
“I need to speak with Ru,” I say. “Alone.”
Imogen’s brows draw together slightly. She glances at Ru, then back at me, clearly wanting to question it, or to insist on staying. But she doesn’t. I am the Prince Regent, after all. My word is law.
Even when I really, really wish it wasn’t.
“Of course,” she says after a moment, rising from her chair. “I’ll summon tea for us in the courtyard.”
She pauses briefly at Ru’s shoulder, resting a hand there—reassurance, or perhaps warning—before stepping out and closing the door softly behind her.
The room feels painfully quiet without her.
I cross the space between us and sit down beside Ru on the floor. A chair feels far too formal. The floor makes me think that I’m a child again too, that we’re just two normal siblings, playing make-believe.
“Cass?” she asks. “What is it?”
I take a deep breath.
She looks at me, all bright-eyed curiosity and ink-smudged fingers, her lesson book still half-open in her lap. For a moment, I almost abandon the idea entirely. Let her be a child a little longer. Let me carry this alone.
But I can’t.
“Ru,” I begin carefully, “there’s something I need to talk to you about. Something important.”
Her expression shifts at once—she straightens, attentive, a flicker of seriousness settling over her small features that feels far too old for her years.
“Is it about Mama?” she asks, eyes brimming with tears. “Is she—”
“No, no,” I assure her. “She’s still fine, I promise you. I mean, she’s still asleep, but she isn’t… you know.”
Ru breathes a sigh of relief, her eyes glossy. She doesn’t say anything else.
I take another careful breath. “There may be a way to wake her.”
Hope blooms instantly across her face. “Really?”
“Yes,” I say, forcing steadiness into my voice. “But it isn’t simple. Or safe.”
The hope falters, though it doesn’t disappear. “How?” she asks.
I hesitate, searching for words that won’t frighten her—and finding none that don’t.
“We think… we think, given Mother’s fey ancestry, that she may be trapped inside her own dream. Not asleep as we understand it, but somewhere deeper. And the only way to wake her… is to go in after her.”
Ru blinks. “You can do that? Walk into someone else’s dream?”
“Wren thinks we can,” I reply. “Because of… what we are.”
She absorbs that quietly. A few moments tick painfully by. I wait for more questions, knowing that they’ll come.
“And it’s dangerous,” she says finally.
“Yes.”
“How dangerous?”
I force myself not to soften it. Softness will not protect her here. She needs to know exactly what’s at stake, even though I hate myself for placing her in this position, and the world for demanding it in the first place.
“There are stories,” I say, “of people who go into dreams and don’t come back. Who lose themselves, or become trapped there. They never wake.”
“They die?”
I nod. “Eventually.”
Her fingers tighten slightly on the edge of her book. She places it down, folding her hand in her lap, like the proper young royal she’s been taught how to be but rarely behaves as such.
And never in front of me.
“And you want to go,” she says.
I swallow. “Yes.”
A small silence stretches between us.
“And Wren?” she asks.
“She would come with me.”
Another pause. I wait for her to continue, even though I want desperately to snatch back my words, rewind time, and stop this conversation—this future—from ever occurring.
“And me?” she asks, her voice little more than a whisper. “What would I do?”
I close my eyes briefly, then open them again, meeting her gaze. I wish I was still blind and didn’t have to.
“You would be my anchor,” I say. “Something to keep me tied to the real world. Something to help guide me back.”
Her brow furrows. “Like… holding a rope?”
“Something like that,” I say, managing a faint smile. “But stronger.”
She considers this, chewing lightly on her bottom lip in a way that reminds me so much of—
I swallow the thought before it can finish forming.
“Would I have to go into the dream too?” she asks.