I should have gone inside then, shut the door, doused the lamps, forced my thoughts back into order. But I stayed, because for the first time in longer than I could remember, I did not feel alone. And that frightened me more than the thunder ever had.
The storm knew me.
The thought lodged, impossible — and still it would not leave.
Even as exhaustion claimed me, even as I leaned further into the mighty oak and let my eyes slip shut, the storm followed me down into sleep.
And in that sleep, I dreamt.
The world was ash and ruin, a broken court swallowed by shadow. Stones were split and smoking, banners ripped loose and plastered against the stone, their colors running like open wounds in the rain.
In the center stood a throne cracked down its spine, and beside it, perched high above on a splintering pillar, waited a raven, its eyes twin embers.
It tilted its head at me once and the ground shook. The storm whispering a single word through the wreckage.
Come.
I obeyed, my feet moving as if they had found their own path. My steps echoed too loudly against the broken stone, though the ruins seemed built from silence.
The air was thick with salt and ash and something older.
The walls slumped inward, carved once with forms and wings and crowns. Now moss devoured their faces. Vines wound through shattered archways, the forest itself had claimed what men and Gods had lost.
Broken statues stared sightless, their features half-eaten, their hands still reached for weapons that were no longer there.
The deeper I walked the stranger the air became, lightning hummed through it, unseen but felt, each step sparking across my skin as though I passed into the memory of something sacred.
The storm overhead didn’t roar, it whispered.
Low, patient, endless.
The raven followed, always just above me, its wings silent, its gold eyes a brand against the dark. When I slowed, it circled closer, driving me forward, guiding me.
The courtyard at the heart of the ruins was split open — a deep, jagged cut through stone, rainwater collecting in its wound.
At the far side stood a gate of twisted iron, its bars bent like ribs.
I crossed the courtyard without remembering deciding to. Broken stone shifted beneath my boots.
Something in me leaned toward it long before I reached it. By the time I stood before the iron, my hands were already there, gripping the bars even as my stomach
Lightning cracked above my head, sudden and furious, tearing the sky apart. My vision splintered with it, the world collapsing into shards of light.
I tore awake with a gasp, my back striking rough bark. Rain hit my face. My hands were still lifted, fingers curled, palms burning as though iron had only just left them.
Chapter 4
Embers in the Grain
CAELIRA
The next few days passed like any other, but the ruins of the dream clung to me anyway. Shards of stone. The taste of ash. The raven’s eyes, ember bright and impossible to forget. Dreams should fade, but this one sharpened the more I tried to let it go.
Inside, the air was heavy with the scents of sage and damp moss, and earthy sweetness of crushed herbs lingering on the air. The cabin’s stillness weighed on me. Shadows stretched long across the walls, and each one looked like it wanted to lean in and whisper secrets I wasn’t ready to hear.
Sleep would not come, not with the storm prowling the skies above and the memory of the council gnawing at me.
So, I did what I always did when the world pressed too close, I reached for my ledgers, but not the ones I kept for the Verdant court. Not the tidy columns of trade, or the inventories of herbs and roots that marked me as useful enough to be tolerated.
