Not a dream. Not a metaphor. One foot, then the other, pressing lightly against a sky made solid—an endless night spun from black silk, scattered with fire-bright jewels. Each step sends soft rings of light rippling outward beneath my boots, like echoes falling into still water.
It feels like I shouldn't be here.
The air is weightless, yet full—thick with a silence that isn't quiet, but . I draw a shallow breath. The stillness wraps tight around my chest, like velvet drawn into a knot. Expecting something. Waiting.
"Ah..."The word unfurls like smoke—soft, drawn out, too knowing."You're still here?"
That same hush tightens around me again.
The breath before a storm.The moment the world inhales and forgets to exhale.That prickling awareness, just beneath the skin, when someone watches from behind a door not yet opened.
Yes. I feel it.Too close to name. Too quiet to trust.
"Good..." he murmurs, and then—"yet not."A riddle. Spoken like a shrug dressed in silk.
Behind me, something shifts.
Not a sound. Worse—a gap. A pulling away of space itself. The kind of silence that folds in on itself and takes everything with it.
He’s here.
The man with the fishing pole. A figure woven from forgotten light and the space between stars.
His voice brushes the back of my neck like a whisper meant for someone else:
“Who are you?”
I turn too fast. Reflex, not reason. But there’s nothing. Only the great dark stage, stars looking down like judges—quiet, distant, cold.
I should be used to this.
I’m not.
“Where did you find this power?”
His voice doesn’t echo. It drifts, like smoke that curls and lingers just behind my thoughts. I feel it settle there—soft, uninvited.
I spin again. Still no one. Just me, wrapped in too much space, surrounded by too many stars.
And now the part I loathe: the riddles. The questions without anchors. The sense that I’m being edited by a hand I can’t see.
But he’s watching. I can that.
So I go on.
“I am…” My words come slow, careful. Breakable. “A Merlin. In training.”
(Yes, Merlin. Go ahead. Laugh if you must—just not too loud.)
“As for the power,” I continue, lifting my chin though my voice trembles, “it was born into me. Woven through my bones before I ever drew breath.”
The stars pulse. A shimmer, slight but certain. Approval? Expectation? Or just cosmic indifference, waiting for me to misstep?
Then—he’s .
No warning. No sound. No ripple in the dream. Just… presence.
Air one moment. Him the next.
I flinch. Stumble back. My boots skid on nothing, and I fall, landing hard in a cloud of stardust. It clings to me like ash from dead worlds.
So dignified.
He doesn’t laugh—not really. Just a faint smirk, almost hidden behind well-practiced sympathy.
“Forgive me,” he says, voice smooth as midnight wine. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He extends a hand. Pale. Polished. Perfectly still. Floating there like it belongs.
I don’t take it.
When a man shaped from riddles and moonlight offers help, it always comes with strings. Some you can see. Most you can’t.
He chuckles again. Softer this time. A private sound. Like he’s reading footnotes in a book I didn’t know I was writing.
“So,” he says, warm and curling like smoke, “you were born with the gift. A rare and wondrous thing.”
It sounds rehearsed. Polished. A phrase smoothed down by repetition.Like I’m one of many—a shadow cast across a thousand stages—mouthing borrowed lines while the dark waits, always listening.And maybe I am.
“Maybe you are?”
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My breath catches.
Did he—?No. That thought was mine. Unspoken. Unshared.Wasn’t it?
“I did,” he answers, as if plucking the truth straight from the curve of my skull.His voice is calm, but there’s something beneath it. A smile made of smoke.“After all…” A beat. The stars flicker. “Who said this power is yours?”
A sharp reply rises in my throat before I can stop it—tight, defensive, like flint striking stone.“What do you mean,” I snap, “this power isn’t mine?”
Too harsh. Too quick.I hear it in my voice. Like a cornered cat hissing at something it can’t see.
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even blink. Just tilts his head, slow and deliberate, as if gravity answers to him instead of the other way around.He moves like someone who’s danced across centuries and never stumbled once.
“Well…” His voice drapes the word in silk. “You are the conduit, yes. The stream flows through you. But were you the well it came from?”
There it is. That kind of question—the kind that unspools you, thread by careful thread.
I scoff. It slips out too fast. Crooked and hollow, like a laugh broken down the middle.“I was born with this,” I say.I pause.“Wasn’t I?”
The doubt hangs between us now, light and flickering. A paper lantern drifting into the dark, untethered.
His smile deepens, slow and certain. He’s worn it before—on other nights, with other names.“So now you wonder. Was it truly yours? Or a gift slipped into your cradle before you ever opened your eyes?”
I roll my eyes.Because it’s easier than screaming.Easier than breaking.Easier than asking if anything inside me was ever really mine.
“I don’t know,” I say. The words come out sharper than I meant. Realer. Too loud in the quiet.“For all I know, I was dropped off at an orphanage with nothing but a name scratched on a—”
Stop.
Too far.The words tumble like loose stones from a wall I didn’t mean to tear down.I said too much. Gave too much.Like he was someone worth saying it to. Like he was... real.
Maybe I wasn’t just talking to him.
Maybe I was talking to the part of me that’s tired of not knowing.
Because if I’ve walked on stars, bled inside dreams, torn through memory like pages—Don’t I deserve something more than riddles?
His expression shifts—barely. A flicker, quick as a blink behind those starlit eyes. If I hadn’t been watching, I’d have missed it.
“Elara.”He says it like a thought spoken into stillness.Soft. Intentional. A breath folded into my name.
Silence settles. Dense. Waiting.
Then, he turns.His gaze sweeps the sky like he’s listening. Like the constellations have started whispering things only he can hear.
Strange.
“Interesting…” he murmurs again.
And I feel it.
Not in the stars.In me.A subtle tremor—like a thread pulled tight behind my ribs. A heartbeat skipped sideways.
“Do you?” I ask.
His eyes slide back to mine.And there’s something different now.Not colder. Not warmer.Just… deeper. Like the question was never mine alone.
“And somehow…” he says, almost to himself, “I think someone, not something.”
His words land quiet. Careful.Like footsteps in fresh snow—gentle, but impossible to erase.
“How…”The word slips out before I can stop it, bitter at the edges—twisted with disbelief and something sharper, something hot coiled beneath my ribs.I narrow my gaze at him.“How do you do that?”
He only smiles—calm and curved, like the moon resting on still water.“Do what, exactly, fair traveler?”
I fold my arms tight across my chest.It’s not real protection. Not from the way my thoughts slam into each other, or how his gaze slips right through them like water through cracks.“Read my mind.”
His eyes catch the faint starlight, shifting like shadows on glass. There’s knowing there—too much of it.“That, dear Elara,” he says gently, “is my nature. Woven into me like breath and bone.”
A spark flares in me, quick and bright.“So… wait. My power. It didn’t come from you?”
He laughs—a low, musical sound that seems to echo even though there are no walls to hold it.“Did I ever say it did?”
I frown. He hadn’t. Not exactly.But he’d danced around it, let me think it. Or maybe I to think it—wanted someone else to hold the answer I couldn’t find.
“Then…”
He raises a hand, and the rest of the question slips from my lips like breath escaping glass.“Then how is it I can shape dreams? Pull threads like thread through a loom?”
He nods once, as if this question was always waiting to be asked.And my thoughts begin to spiral—logic fighting instinct. None of it makes sense.And yet... part of me aches with how familiar it feels. As if I’ve lived this answer before.
His smile softens, touched by something more than memory.“Elaine,” he says, voice wrapped in dusk, “my wife—she could walk through dreams. Not just see them, but live in them. She stepped into the truths people buried even from themselves.”
The name strikes something in me.Elaine.It stirs a memory I don’t quite have—a flicker in the dark, like a name I once dreamed but forgot upon waking.
“You’re…” The rest catches in my throat. A name, a story, a myth barely remembered.
He bows. Graceful. Familiar. As if this greeting is ritual.“I am Sir Lancelot du Lac.”
The name thuds in my chest. Heavy with meaning. As old as the bones of legends.
But before I can respond—before I can ask or or —A sound cuts through the air.
A trumpet.Low. Deep. Like the earth groaning under its own weight. It cracks the silence like lightning through stone.Loud. Startling. Real.
Lancelot’s smile vanishes. His expression shifts—tense now, alert. He looks past me, to where the sky folds in on itself, and the stars twist like oil across dark water.
“Elara,” he says, so softly it barely reaches me. “It was good seeing you…”
“What?”The word bursts from my lips. I lunge forward.“Wait—what’s happening?”
But he’s already fading.
The colors around him blur—pulled into streaks of light. The stars collapse inward, one by one, like dominos falling into nothing.
Then—
Just silver.Blinding.And then—Nothing.
Elara stumbles back into the waking world—damp forest air clinging to her skin like mist. Grant’s rough hand coils tightly around hers, though it’s the sword she holds he grips, not her. His shotgun rises fast, barrel aimed squarely at her chest.
“Who the fuck are you?”
His voice is raw, cracked open. Elara flinches—not from fear, but from the weight behind the words. She can see it all. The war. The heartbreak. The loneliness he won’t name.
She doesn’t know if it’s the dream’s magic, or something older, deeper. But she knows him. Even if he doesn’t know her.