Later, exhaustion finally claimed us. One by one, the crew settled into sleep. Elle curled near the fire, using her pack as a pillow, her face soft in the flickering light. I took first watch, settling against a tree where I could see both the glade’s borders and her sleeping form.
The Star Veil continued its dance overhead, glittering threads weaving tighter, reality thinning with each passing hour. The boundary between waking and dreaming grew gossamer-thin. Permeable.
I should have expected what happened next.
There was no transition. No sensation of falling asleep. One moment Iwas awake, watching the fire’s embers pulse in rhythm with my marks. The next, I was standing in sunlight that felt like a memory given form.
Elle’s dream.
The garden materialized around me in layers—first the skeleton of hedge and pathway, then color filling in like stained glass catching light, each hue sharp and deliberate. Her grandmother’s garden, I realized, but wrong in ways that made my chest ache. Half the roses were skeletal, thorns black as obsidian. The other half bloomed with flowers from fever dreams—petals that opened and closed like breathing, stems that bled light when broken, leaves that sang in harmonics only dreams could hear.
Elle stood at the garden’s heart, and she was devastating.
Her marks didn’t just cover her skin—theywereher skin, glowing vines that pulsed with each heartbeat, spreading across every visible inch in patterns that hurt to look at directly. They wrapped around her throat like a lover’s hands, cascaded down her arms in spiraling fractals, disappeared beneath the white dress that seemed woven from mist and regret. Her eyes were pure light, no iris, no pupil—just radiance that saw through me, past me, into me.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, but she was smiling. That smile was wrong too—too knowing, too hungry, too much like the smile I’d imagined in a hundred moments I refused to acknowledge.
“The Veil.” My voice came out rougher than intended. “It’s making boundaries weak.”
“Or maybe you just can’t stay away.” She tilted her head, and her hair moved like it was underwater, defying physics the way everything here defied reason. “Maybe you’ve been trying so hard not to think about me that the Veil dragged you straight into my dreams.”
She moved toward me, and reality rippled with each step. Flowers bloomed where her feet touched earth, then withered, then bloomed again in an endless cycle of creation and decay. I wanted to run. Should run. In dreams, our marks couldn’t hurt each other. In dreams, we could—
“Don’t,” I said, but my voice lacked conviction. My marks were already reaching toward hers, corruption spreading across my hands like ink inwater.
“Why?” She was close now, close enough that I could smell roses and rain and something underneath that was purely her—that scent I’d been trying not to notice for weeks. Close enough that I could see myself reflected in those light-filled eyes, see how broken I looked, how desperate. “We both want this. I can feel it through the bond. Every time you look at me. Every time youdon’tlook at me because looking would mean admitting—”
“The bond isn’t real,” I said, the lie tasting like ash. “It’s just magical proximity.”
“Liar.” She reached up, her fingers stopping just shy of my face. This close, I could see her marks moving, vines shifting and growing, flowers opening and closing like breathing. “You feel it too. Have felt it since that first day when I defied you in the tent. When I looked at you like I wasn’t afraid. When you looked at me like you wanted to destroy me and save me in the same breath.”
“Elle—”
“I’m so tired of almosts,” she whispered, and there was such raw need in her voice it felt like a physical blow. “Aren’t you? Tired of stopping ourselves. Tired of pretending. Tired of all the reasons we can’t when we both know wewant.”
Her fingers made contact with my cheek, and the world exploded.
Not with pain but withrightness. Like two halves of something ancient and broken finally remembering how to fit together. The sensation crashed through me—her marks meeting mine, dream-logic allowing what reality forbade. I felt her gasp echo in my own chest, felt her surprise and relief and desperate hunger as if they were my own emotions.
I pulled her against me, and she made a sound that was part gasp, part laugh, part sob. Her body fit against mine like it had been designed for this exact purpose, every curve and hollow aligning perfectly.
“This is a dream,” I said, my voice barely recognizable. “Only a dream.”
“Then let me dream,” she whispered against my throat, and pulled my head down to hers.
The kiss detonated between us.
Desperate, hungry, tinged with the knowledge that this couldn’t be real, that reality would rip us apart the moment we woke. Her hands tangled in my hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, and I welcomed the pain. Mine spread across her back, then lower, pulling her impossibly closer. Through the dream-bond—vivid and overwhelming in ways our waking connection never was—I felt everything she felt. The want that had been building since the day we met. The frustration of every interrupted moment. The need that scared her as much as it scared me. And underneath it all, something deeper. Something that felt dangerously close to—
No. I couldn’t think that. Not even here.
“I hate you,” she gasped against my mouth, then bit my lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
“I hate you too,” I agreed, then kissed her again, deeper, trying to memorize the taste of her, the feel of her, knowing this was all we’d ever have.
The garden around us responded to our emotions like a living thing. Flowers bloomed and died in rapid succession, their petals falling like snow. Seasons changed with each heartbeat—spring’s soft green to summer’s lush abundance to autumn’s golden decay to winter’s stark beauty and back again in an endless, dizzying cycle. The hedge maze grew wild, thorns lengthening, roses opening mouths filled with teeth. The fountain at the garden’s center ran backward, water defying gravity, reaching toward the sky.
We were destroying her grandmother’s memory with our desperate need, warping this sacred space into something feral and hungry, and neither of us cared.
