49. Wren
The nursery walls begin to weep. Paint peels in long, curling strips, revealing not stone beneath but charred wood, blistered and split. The bright little animals painted along the walls—foxes and rabbits and prancing deer—warp and melt, their painted eyes running like ink.
“Wren,” Cassiel says quietly, reaching for my hand.
“I didn’t—” My voice cracks. “This isn’t me.”
The temperature drops so sharply it burns. Frost creeps across the cradle. The soft blankets inside it blacken at the edges, curling in on themselves like dying leaves.
Evander is on his feet instantly.
“They found us,” he says.
The door bursts open. Wood splinters inward as something presses against it from the other side—not a single shape, but many, writhing together. Faces force through the cracks like they’re made of smoke.
A woman with hollowed eyes, a serving boy with blistered skin, a knight whose armor has fused to what remains of his body.
My stomach lurches.
“No, no, no—”
“They’re not real,” Cassiel says quickly, stepping in front of me. “They can’t hurt you.”
“I’m not entirely sure that’s true,” Evander says, voice sharp. “I think they’re as real as we are.”
He doesn’t explain further. We tumble backwards into the garden. The room is unravelling entirely. Threads of wood peel away, dissolving into ash before they even hit the ground, and the creatures spill through the opening like a flood breaching a dam.
Hands stretch toward us, grasping, clawing, skin sloughing off bone. Their mouths open, but the sound that comes out isn’t speech.
It’s screaming.
Endless, overlapping screaming.
“MOVE,” Evander snaps.
He grabs my hand, clutching Cassiel’s with too—
The nursery rips away like torn fabric. For a split second, we are nowhere, caught in a rushing void of fractured memories. I glimpse corridors, staircases, a sunlit balcony, a training yard slick with rain—
—and then we slam into place, back in the main hall.
Golden light pours through the high windows. The long table gleams. Tapestries hang pristine and proud along the walls. Everything is perfect, as long as you don’t look at the details or stare too long. The courtiers are faceless, the tapestry details warped, the textures wrong.
Alessandra notices none of it, of course. She sits at the table next to her husband, serene and radiant, as though nothing in the world has ever gone wrong. Her parents still laugh on one side of her, and Leonitus sits on her other, one hand resting lightly on the back of her chair.
His other cradles baby Runara. She giggles softly as she bats at a curl of her father’s hair.
For one horrible, disorienting moment, I almost accept the image too. We’ve stepped into a memory so perfect it could convince you the world beyond it never existed.
Evander lets go of us.
“They won’t be far behind,” he says, breath quick, eyes darting toward the distant corridors.
“Then we run again,” Cassiel insists, reaching for his hand again. “We keep running until—”
“Until what, Cass?” Evander carries on. “Until we can’t run any more? Until you’re trapped here too? Until your bodies fail in the real world?”
Cassiel swallows, eyes lined with silver. He knows we can’t stay here forever, but if we leave this place…
“Cass,” Evander says, clutching his arms, urgency cutting through every syllable. “You have to talk to her.”
Cassiel doesn’t move. His gaze is locked on his mother, on the life she has built here.
On the illusion she is clinging to.
“If she wakes—” Cassiel begins.
“I know,” Evander says.
If she wakes… what happens to him? What happens to Evander’s soul in here, when in the waking world his body is gone?
Evander steps closer.
“You have to do it,” he says, quieter. “We don’t have another choice.”
Cassiel’s jaw tightens. He looks all at once the boy I saw earlier, smaller than the child in front of him.
“I’m not trading you for her,” he says.
“This isn’t a trade,” Evander replies. “This is… letting things be what they are.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
A flicker of something crosses Evander’s face. He looks almost as pained as he did as he lay dying in my arms.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
A scraping sound grows nearby, like the growl of encroaching wolves. The walls shiver faintly, as though the dream itself is beginning to strain under the weight of what’s coming.
Evander grips Cassiel’s shoulder.
“Please.”
Cassiel closes his eyes. “I’m not ready,” he whispers.
“Neither am I.”
I stand within arm’s reach of them both, wanting to unmake this moment, to unravel the universe and create a reality where Evander gets to be Cassiel’s big brother again.
He’ll always be his big brother, says a kinder, softer voice, that doesn’t sound a bit like mine.
But what does that matter when he won’t be there to hold him and laugh with him and tease him and be there for him and shoulder the responsibility that Cassiel should never have been left with?
My parents are no less my parents because we no longer breathe the same air, but it doesn’t make them any less gone.
It doesn’t make me any less alone.
Something slams far down the corridor.
With a jolt, Cassiel turns away from Evander, away from me, and starts walking toward his mother.
“Mother,” Cassiel begins, keeping his voice steady, though the tension in his shoulders betrays how tightly he’s holding himself together, how carefully he’s shaping the words to be gentle instead of desperate.
For a moment, I consider the dreadful possibility that she won’t recognise him as a man, or that she will confuse him for his father, and I don’t know what he’ll do if that happens, but thankfully, the minute she sees him, her face breaks into a wide smile—too bright, too easy, like nothing has ever been wrong.
“Cassiel!” she beams, already shifting Runara in her arms, angling the baby toward him with effortless ease. “Have you come to hold the baby?”
His voice tightens. “I’ve come to take you home.”
“Home, dear? We are home!” She lets out a soft, lilting laugh, as though he’s said something charmingly absurd.
“We aren’t,” he says. “This is just a memory, Mother. A dream of how things might have been if…” His eyes flick, brief and involuntary, to his father—to the man standing whole and untouched and so painfully alive.
“It’s not real,” he carries on. “We need you back in the real world, Mother. Me and… Runara.”
There’s the smallest pause before Runara’s name, and Alessandra stills, just slightly. Her smile doesn’t fade, but something beneath it flickers—a faint crease forming between her brows as she registers that he hasn’t mentioned Evander.
“My children are here,” she says, and clutches Runara tightly to her chest. “Look, Cass. Isn’t she beautiful?” She lifts the baby higher between them, like a shield made of softness.
Cassiel’s eyes brim with tears, but he doesn’t wipe them away. “She’s beautiful, Mama, and she needs you—” His voice catches, roughening.
“I was hoping for another one that looked like your father, but she’s perfect, don’t you think?” Alessandra smooths a hand over the baby’s hair, her attention drifting, already slipping from him.
“She’s nine years old and she’s waiting for you.” The words come out sharper now, urgency breaking through the careful gentleness.
“Perhaps I’ll have another one. Would you like that, Cass? Where’s your brother? Let’s ask him—” She looks around lightly, expectant, as though this is all a game and he’s simply stepped out of sight.
“Evander isn’t here, Mama.”
“Yes he is, he’s right there—” She turns, smiling, ready to point, to prove him wrong, to keep the illusion intact.
And she’s right, because Evander is there. Whole and unharmed but half the years he knew in life.
Cassiel’s breath catches, like something in him has just given way.
“Evander,” Alessandra says warmly, “Come here, darling.”
Evander doesn’t move. He stands very still, watching her, something tight and aching in his expression, like he almost wants to go to her, but knows that can’t cooperate with her illusion.
He’s been here for so long. How many times has he given in, gone along with it, pretended to be a child again?
How many times has he begged her to stop?
Cassiel takes a step forward. Something in his expression has changed. He looks down at baby Runara and smiles.
No, I think, fiercely, desperately. No, Cass. Don’t—
“Cass—” I start. “Cass, stop—”
He doesn’t hear me. It’s like I’ve ceased to exist.
I should never have let go of his hand.
“Cassiel,” Alessandra says, softer now, coaxing. “Come and sit with us.”
I move towards him. If I can just touch him again, I can reach him. I can bring him back—
But a small shape darts in front of me and grabs his sleeve.
The little girl from earlier, with the brown skin and the dark-hair and the green-gold eyes, his and mine, perfectly twinned. She stares up at him with absolute delight.
“Come play with me, Daddy,” she says, beaming.
Cassiel goes still.
My heart shatters.
“No,” I whisper, this time out loud. “She’s not real, Cass—”
He doesn’t hear. He doesn’t even look at me.
He’s looking at the other me, standing a few paces behind him, one child on her hip, another clinging to her hand. There’s laughter in her eyes, softness in the way she looks at him.
I could never look at him like that. I don’t have the freedom to.
This vision isn’t ours to have.
The baby is suddenly back in his arms.
Cassiel looks down. His entire face changes. All the tension drains out of him, replaced by something fragile and aching and hopeful.
“Come, Cassiel,” Alessandra says. “Sit with your family.”
“No, play, Daddy, play!” the little girl chirps, tugging harder at his sleeve.
The other one—her sister—latches onto his other arm. “Play with us!”
Her sweet little voice plunges into my chest, cold as iron. Is that what our daughter would sound like?
Our daughters. Our children. Our family.