47. Cassiel
We wake in my mother’s chambers. For a moment, I don’t think it’s worked. We’re still where we were before. Nothing’s changed—
Only my mother isn’t in the bed, and Ru, Imogen and Dain are gone.
Sunlight streams through the windows, hot and bright.
Other things in the room are different, too.
There’s another trunk, a different blanket on the bed.
I think the tapestries have changed, too, but I can’t quite pick out the details.
I’m not even sure the details exist. The more I state, the less the shapes make sense.
The threads of the tapestry blur, colours bleeding into one another like wet paint.
The carved posts of the bed soften at the edges, as if they’ve forgotten what wood is supposed to be.
Even the sunlight feels wrong—too thick, too golden, like it’s something you could scoop up in your hands.
I inhale, and pause. There’s nothing in the air. No dust. No movement. No weight to it at all. The light pours through the room uninterrupted, perfectly clear, like I’m looking at the idea of a room rather than the room itself.
The air doesn’t taste of anything. It barely feels like it exists.
And yet—
Everything else does. There’s a smooth floor beneath my feet, a soft blanket on the bed, a warm body beside me.
“I thought…” My voice comes out quieter than I expect. “I thought it would be less… real.”
Beside me, Wren shifts. “Dreams aren’t unreal,” she says, rising from her spot. “Not like people think. They’re just not… stable.”
I flex my fingers, tracing the weave of my sleeve against my skin. The weight of my boots. The faint drag of breath in my chest. It’s all there—every sensation, intact.
It somehow makes the emptiness in the air worse.
“That’s not unsettling at all,” I mutter.
She huffs something that might be a laugh, then her tone turns more serious. “Stay close to me.”
I glance at her.
“Why?”
“Because,” she says, as if it should be obvious, “if we get separated in here, we might not find each other again.”
The room seems to tilt slightly. Before she can say anything else ominous, I reach for her hand, linking my fingers into hers.
“Just in case,” I tell her. “For safety.”
“Of course,” she replies.
I kiss her fingers. She tries not to smile and fails beautifully. For a moment, despite everything, something steadies in my chest.
“Right,” she says, clearing her throat. “Let’s move.”
We step away from the bed together. The door is where it should be when we walk towards it, but for a second, it seems farther than it should be, stretched along the wall like a reflection in warped glass. Then, when I blink, it snaps back into place.
Wren opens it.
The corridor beyond is dimmer than the room, though the same impossible sunlight leaks in from nowhere. The air there is just as empty—no dust, no drift, nothing to catch the light at all. It should feel clean.
Instead, it feels unfinished.
We walk. Our footsteps echo, but not quite in time with our steps. The sound lags, then rushes to catch up, like it’s unsure when it’s meant to exist.
Music filters down from somewhere. It’s faint at first. A single thread of melody, thin and distant.
I stop.
“You hear that?” I ask.
Wren nods immediately. “Yes.”
The tune curls through the corridor. It doesn’t echo like everything else.
“This way,” she says, tugging my hand.
We follow it.
The corridor bends when it shouldn’t, stretching longer than I remember, then folding in on itself so that doors pass us twice, then not at all.
At one point, I’m certain we walk the same stretch of corridor three times—but each time something is slightly different.
A door handle shifts. A shadow leans the wrong way.
The space keeps… revising itself, like a composer is making it up as they go along.
The music grows louder and clearer. There’s something familiar about it. Not the melody exactly, but the feeling of it—like a half-remembered lullaby.
The corridor branches into the main hall.
I stop dead.
“This isn’t right,” I say. “This shouldn’t be where it is. There’s the shrine, and the parlour—”
The hall itself doesn’t fully make sense.
It stretches vast and high above us, just as it always has, but the proportions are…
off. The ceiling is too far away, disappearing into a haze of gold-lit brightness.
The pillars lean at angles that shouldn’t hold.
Light pours in from windows that don’t exist in the waking world.
And the music is coming from nowhere. There’s no players, no quartet. It’s everywhere at once, feeling the space.
Wren glances at me.
“It’s a dream,” she reminds me gently. “It doesn’t have to make sense.”
“Right,” I say. “Of course it doesn’t.”
Perhaps it’s less strange for her because this isn’t her home, but I know every stone and every rafter, and seeing it so distorted is like rubbing a splinter.
Wren’s grip on my hand tightens slightly, as if she knows my thoughts.
How can my mother stand this place?
My mother…
A long table stretches the length of the room, heavy with food that gleams too richly beneath the strange, golden light—bowls of fruit split open at their ripest point, roasted meats lacquered in glaze, goblets brimming with dark wine that never quite stills.
The air hums with warmth, with laughter, with the rise and fall of voices layered over the clear, strange music.
Dancers move in the open space before the table, turning and weaving through one another with impossible grace. Their clothes catch the light, trailing silk and shimmer, every motion precise and fluid, like they’ve practised this for a lifetime.
My stomach drops.
They don’t have faces.
Where there should be eyes and mouths and expressions, there’s only smooth, shifting nothing, like the dream couldn’t be bothered to finish them. And yet they laugh. They turn. They dance as if they are whole.
My grip tightens unconsciously around Wren’s hand.
“Cass—” Wren starts. “Look.”
She points to the head of the table. These figures, at least, are fully formed.
My mother sits at the centre.
She’s younger than she is in the real world, though I can’t place her age precisely. The lines of worry I’ve always known are gone. Her posture is lighter, her expression unguarded, her smile—
I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile like that, or if I have, I’ve long forgotten it.
On her left sit my grandparents.
I know them immediately, though I’ve only ever seen my grandmother’s likeness. She died before I was born, and my grandfather when I was very young. They’re younger than they should be, too, looking more like parents than grandparents, far away from the age they were when death claimed them.
My grandmother gestures as she talks, my grandfather laughing at something just out of earshot. They look so carefree and happy that it takes me a while to notice who’s seated on my mother’s right.
It’s my father.
He looks exactly as I remember him, his hair golden, brushing his shoulders, his beard neatly trimmed. His eyes are bright, and he’s smiling ear to ear, the same way he did when he read us bedtime stories.
And in his arms—
In his arms is Runara as a baby, pink-cheeked, dark-haired, the picture of the infant I held the day she was born.
The baby my father never got to hold.
The world narrows to that image, and I understand for a moment exactly why my mother stays here, why she’s constructed this world. Who wouldn’t want to conjure a moment like this and stay in it forever?
It’s not real, I remind myself. This isn’t real, and it isn’t right—
My breathing increases.
“Are you all right?” asks Wren.
“No,” I tell her, because it’s the truth, and I don’t know what I am, but it isn’t all right, whatever it is.
The doors at the far end of the hall burst open. A child runs in, breathless and laughing. For a second, my mind refuses to understand what I’m seeing. It’s too much already, too many impossibilities layered on top of one another.
But the child turns… and it’s me.
Younger and smaller, overflowing with bright, unfiltered joy. Younger than I was when Runara was born, I think, but I’m not sure.
“Wait!” another voice calls.
Evander follows a second later, grinning in that easy, familiar way that twists something sharp in my chest. He’s laughing as he chases after the younger version of me, reaching out like he’s about to catch him, like—
Like nothing has ever gone wrong. Like our lives never evolved past this point. There’s no dead father, no war with the fey, no mother lying lifelessly, no Evander in the vault—
A pressure squeezes my hand.
No Wren, either.
Not real, I remind myself. Not real, not real, not real—
Everything inside me locks in place.
“Cass.” Wren’s voice is urgent now, low and close to my ear.
I don’t remember her moving, but suddenly she’s pulling me back, dragging me toward the edge of the hall and stuffing me into an alcove.
“Breathe,” she says. “This isn’t real, and we need a way to prove that to your mother.”
She holds me in her arms until my breathing steadies. I cling to the floral scent of her hair, the warmth of her skin.
Real, real, real.
The light shifts here, dimmer and thinner, like the dream doesn’t pay as much attention to the edges of things. From here, we can still see everything.
“I don’t think they can see us,” Wren whispers, more to herself than to me. “Or—maybe they can, I don’t know. I don’t know the rules.”
Her grip on my hand tightens.
“We shouldn’t risk it,” she goes on. “Not yet. If we startle her, if we do something wrong—what if it traps her deeper? Or breaks something?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. My eyes are fixed on the table, on my father, shifting Runara slightly in his arms as she stirs. My mother leans closer to say something to him, her expression soft, and suddenly I feel awful at the idea of taking her from this place. She deserves this. Let her be happy.
But I want to be happy, too, I realise. And I’m not ready to lose her.