Dream of Prophecy
CAELIRA
Iclosed the door behind me and let my back rest against it, the wood was cool through my shirt as I tipped my head back and finally let out the breath I had been holding since leaving Joren’s office.
The corridor beyond fell away into silence, and for a moment I stood there, eyes closed, listening to the quiet settle around me.
The fire had burned low in my absence, embers shifting softly in the heart, their glow just strong enough to keep the room from slipping fully into shadow. Rain traced thing paths down the window, the room felt contained, as though the walls had agreed, for now, to hold.
I pushed away from the door and crossed the space without thinking, lowering myself onto the settee in front of the fire. Leaning back the heat slowly soaked into my spine, my thoughts still caught in the spaces between what had been said and what hadn’t.
I meant to sit there only for a moment.
Sleep took me anyway.
Rain fell, but there was no sky.
It descended in endless silver threads, stitching darkness into itself, striking stone that had learned how to endure being struck. There was no horizon, no sense of distance or direction, only the sound of water meeting ground already fractured.
Lightning answered.
It didn’t wander, it struck the same place again and again, tearing into the earth with deliberate insistence. Each bolt widened an old wound, the stone shuddering, resisting, remembering.
Ahead of me a man stood in the rain.
Or knelt.
The rain made it impossible to be certain. His posture was neither surrender nor rest, but restraint, shoulders bowed as if holding something contained within. Rain coursed down his back, clinging as though it knew him, tracing the lines of his body with unsettling familiarity.
I couldn’t see his face. Each time I tried, the world bent away from me. Rain blurred the space between us. Light fractured. The moment slipped just out of reach, as though the dream itself understood the danger of clarity.
Above him, ravens circled.
Not chaotically, but with purpose, black wings cutting slow arcs through the silver fall. They didn’t cry; they simply watched. Their attention fixed on something half buried in the mud near his feet.
A crown lay there, half sunk in the mud.
Its form was jagged and fluid all at once, as though lightning itself had been caught mid-strike and bent into a circle. Dark metal arced and split, rejoined and crossed over itself in sharp, deliberate angles, each seam glowing faintly as rain traced its path.
It didn’t look crafted so much as formed, as if the storm itself had once reached down and left a piece of its power behind.
Small ravens adorned it.
They were fashioned of crystal, perched along the rim with wings folded right, their bodies faceted to catch the light when lightning flared. Each strike ignited them for a heartbeat, white and prismatic, before they dimmed again, holding their glow as though it belonged to them.
One of the ravens above dipped low as lightning flared, its shadow skimming the crown just before the ground shuddered beneath it.
The mud loosened.
Not all at once, but enough. Rain filled the fractures the lightning had opened, and the earth began to give way in slow, heavy shifts. The crown sank deeper, dark metal disappearing inch by inch as the storm struck the ground beside it again.
The man did not move.
The rain no longer touching him, instead it bent around his shape, leaving him outlined by absence, by a space the storm refused to fill. The ravens above stilled, wings locked open, the world held in a moment too taut to breathe.
The crown vanished beneath the mud.
Lightning struck once more, and the ground split where it had been, opening into the darkness that seemed to swallow rain without sound. The man lifted his head, just enough for the motion to echo through me, a pressure behind my ribs that hurt to hold.
