I raise my free hand and curl my fingers into a fist. Power gathers at my call, dark and bright all at once, threads of stolen ward-magic and repurposed sanctum spells weaving together into something new.
Something… liberated.
I reach through the puppet.
The body I’ve chosen this time is a Broken Plains Demon—Thorne’s kinsman.
Flame-marked, broad-shouldered, eyes already hollowed by grief and rage.
The perfect vessel.
He stiffens where he stands in the street below, head jerking back as I slide into place behind his eyes, beneath his skin. The mark at his throat burns my sigil bright.
“Let me in,” I whisper, and the magic obeys.
His vision roars to life in my mind.
Stone’s Edge, from the ground.
Narrow, twisting paths. Doors carved into rock. Wards like spiderwebs across thresholds, glowing faint blue where they still hold.
The Dreamwright’s sanctuary is ahead—its entrance a simple archway of etched stone, heavy with old power.
The air around it tastes like ash and sleep and a thousand unborn dreams.
“You’ve grown lazy, Masielle,” I say through my puppet’s mouth, voice warped and echoing. “You used to veil your doors better than this.”
The wards flicker.
She hears me.
“Idris.”
Her voice drifts from within like smoke—hoarse, tired, but still threaded with the same stern patience she used on me when I was a young monk at the Silver Flame.
“Who else?” I smile. We smile. This borrowed body grins, lips pulled back over teeth that have bitten through too many lies.
“You should have stayed dead,” she says. “Or stayed gone, at least.”
“Oh, Masielle.” I step closer, lay my puppet’s hand flat against the archway. The etched runes flare angry red. My power lances through them. They shriek as they fail. “You know better than anyone that nothing truly dies in Nightfall. Not dreams. Not mistakes.”
“Some mistakes should,” she snaps.
There. A spark. She isn’t all resignation and fear.
Good.
“I am not a mistake,” I reply, letting the words rumble through the stone. “I am the course correction. The answer to the question none of you had the courage to ask.”
“And what question is that?” she spits.
“Why,” I say simply, “are we doing this at all?”
Silence.
“Why,” I continue, leaning my borrowed shoulder into the door as it begins to crack under the pressure, “are we breaking ourselves to feed those who never lift a hand in return? Why does Nightfall bear the burden of the multiverse’s healing while we are denied our own?”
The last ward shatters like glass.
