Long hair. Black clothing. A face I knew too well. There was a small light in the space, faint but enough to make me see exactly who it was.
Thrax.
My heart kicked against my ribs, words jamming in my throat as I stumbled forward and dropped to my knees beside him. I pressed my hands to his chest, desperate to shake him awake—
And fell right through.
My heart stopped beating when my palms landed on cold stone, passing through him as though I were nothing.
My hand had just vanished into him like mist.
Tears pricked and spilled as I tried again, slower this time, my trembling fingers hovering over his body before pressing down. But again, there was no resistance. My hands slipped through his solid form, as if my body was air and I was the ghost haunting his past.
“No,” I choked, shaking my head. “No, no, no.”
Sobs clawed up my chest as I tried again and again—shoving, pressing, anything—but I couldn’t touch him. He was whole and real, but I couldn’t feel him because I was the one who didn’t belong here. I tried again and again, but my hands only kept disappearing inside. I’d seen this scene before, too many times in movies. I knew what it meant, where I was. Yet still I refused to believe Thrax had ever been this helpless in the past.
After too many fruitless attempts, I finally staggered back to my feet, nearly tripping on loose stones as I wiped at the hot tears streaking my cheeks.
I had to find her.
Where was she?
I thought they were always together.
Stumbling out of the cave, the outside light hit me like a slap. I spun around, chest heaving, panic clawing up my throat as if thiswasn’t all something that had already happened a millennium ago. As if I didn’t know he was going to survive.
But even with that knowledge—even knowing this was just a reality-dream I’d been dragged into again—I couldn’t stop the fear.
When I caught sight of white garments and silver hair to the left, my heart kicked hard, and I ran.
Her expression of horror was a mirror of mine.
“Hey—” I called, but she didn’t even pause.
She walked straight through me.
Biting my lip, I turned and followed her. She rushed into the cave where Thrax lay, but instead of collapsing at his side as I had, she stepped over him, bent, picked up a stone, and started dragging it across the wall.
I stared, torn between watching Thrax’s lifeless body, and her, the moon’s offspring, drawing strange lines instead of helping him.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t hear me. Couldn’t. I wasn’t meant to be here. Thrax had said it was only because he was around me and that was why I was dreaming of his past. But I couldn’t shake the feeling he wasn’t telling me everything.
I wanted to shout, to shake her until she noticed me, but the cavern pressed in harder with the impossible knowledge that I was an intruder in a recollection not meant for me. I could not touch. I could not be heard.
When she finished, I leaned closer, squinting at the wall, and all I could see that she had drawn was...nothing. I couldn’t see a single trace. Either the light was too dim to show her markings, or I wasn’t meant to see them.
“Yes, just do it!”
I recoiled at the scream that ripped out of her throat, stumbling back a step as my gaze darted around the cave, searching for anyoneshe might be shouting at. But there was no one. Just her, the wall, and the body lying unconsciously on the ground.
She still hadn’t looked at Thrax, hadn’t looked at anything but the wall.
The words she had shouted were in a language I didn’t recognise. Yet, somehow, impossibly, I understood them. My mind seized on the meaning instantly, as if it had been translated inside me before I even had the chance to question it.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said next, quieter, but her voice shook with impatience.
