More threads follow, wrapping around my wrist, my forearm, curling up toward my chest like they’re searching for something. The black is there too, woven through the silver, but it doesn’t feel malicious. Just… lost. Confused.
Like her.
The Ether tightens slightly, and for the first time in years—longer than years—I don’t feel alone.
I don’t know what this means. Don’t understand why her magic would reach for someone like me—powerless, trapped, insignificant.
But it does.
And I can’t make myself pull away.
“No…”
Her voice is barely a whisper, but it makes me jerk backward anyway.
Her eyes flutter open for just a moment, unfocused and glassy, and they land somewhere near where I’m kneeling.
She’s looking at me.
Or through me.
I can’t tell which.
“It can’t be him,” she breathes. “I killed him.”
The words don’t make sense, but before I can try to understand them, her eyes are already closing again.
She thinks I’m someone else.
Someone she killed.
For a moment, her face twists with something that looks like grief. Like guilt.
Then it smooths.
The dream takes her again—I can see it happen. The way her expression shifts from pain to something else entirely. Her lips part. Her breathing changes, deepening.
She’s not here anymore. Not seeing me or remembering whoever she thought I was.
She’s back in whatever Ethos showed her. Whatever he made her feel.
I stay frozen, barely breathing, as she twists onto her side. Her body reacts to memories I can’t see. Her breath catches. Her hips tilt. A soft sound escapes her throat that has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with want.
The Ether wraps tighter around me, and I let it.
Because even lost in dreams, even broken and corrupted and bleeding magic like an open wound, she’s reaching for me.
Or her magic is, at least.
She comes apart right there in front of me.
Her back arches, lips parting on a moan, and her Ether floods outward in a wave of black-rimmed light that washes over me.
For one impossible moment, I feel everything.
Her pleasure. Her confusion. Her want all tangled up with shame and surrender.
And underneath it all—buried so deep she probably doesn’t even know it’s there—terror.
