He calls out.
"Father?"
Nothing. The hall stretches. The wreckage multiplies.
"Mother?"
Nothing. His voice cracks on the word.
"Mithri?"
The silence after her name is the one that breaks him. Not his father, who was never coming. Not his mother, who stopped seeing him years ago. Mithri. The only person who has ever come when he called, and in this place, even she does not answer.
He stops cleaning.
He sits on the floor of the ruined hall with glass in his palms and blood on his hands and understands, with the clarity that only dreams provide, what this place is. Not a memory. The truth beneath all his memories. The vast, empty architecturewhere he has lived his entire life, surrounded by wreckage that is never his fault and always his responsibility, calling out for someone to help and hearing only his own voice returned to him.
The loneliness is not an emotion. It is a geography. The height of the ceiling, the distance between the walls, the specific, measurable space between him and every person who was supposed to love him and didn't. He has furnished this geography with competence and sarcasm and the grim satisfaction of being needed, if not wanted. He has made it habitable. But it is still empty.
He feels Ithyris before he sees him.
Not the bond. Something different. A presence at the edge of the dream, vast and warm, pressing against the walls of his fear. The hall shudders. The tapestries ripple. And then the prince is there, standing at the far end of the room, and he is not the prince. He is not the dragon. He is a man looking at a hall full of wreckage and a boy bleeding on the floor and his face is an open wound.
He sees everything.
Bryn knows this the way he knows things in dreams, with a certainty that bypasses logic. Ithyris sees the hall, the wreckage, the child with glass in his palms and no one coming. He sees the years of it, the way Bryn built his armor plate by plate from the raw material of being left alone, and the expression on his face is not pity. It is rage. It is grief. The particular, devastating fury of a man who loves someone and is being shown, in precise detail, exactly how that someone was broken.
Ithyris takes a step toward him.
The hall resists. The wreckage shifts and rearranges, blocking his path, because this is Bryn's fear and his fear does not want to be witnessed. His fear wants to stay hidden, managed, locked away. Opening it now, with the prince watching, is unbearable.
Ithyris takes another step. The glass crunches under his boots and the wreckage parts and he walks through Bryn's fear because he is not afraid of it. He has seen centuries and he does not flinch.
He kneels in front of Bryn.
Bryn is a child and Ithyris is a man and the prince is kneeling on the glass-strewn floor and takes Bryn's bleeding hands in his and his hands are warm and large and they close around Bryn's with a gentleness that makes the dream shake.
Bryn looks at him and is himself again, eighteen and sharp-boned and afraid, and the hall is still there but smaller now, the walls closer, because Ithyris is in it and he fills the emptiness with his presence and the solid, undeniable fact of his body.
He doesn't speak. His face says everything. I see you. I'm here. The glass dissolves in Bryn's palms. The blood dries. The wreckage stills. And the silence, for the first time, is not empty.
***
The dream shifts.
It pulls Bryn out of his own fear and into the prince's, and the transition is violent. The hall of Everen dissolves and he is falling through dark space and then he lands, hard, on warm ground, and the air smells of cedar and smoke.
A chamber. Built for ceremony, not emptiness. High ceilings carved with Drekian script. Columns of dark volcanic stone veined with crystal. Tiered benches rising on all sides, filled with figures blurred at the edges, more impression than detail. The elder council. The court. The assembled weight of a kingdom's judgment.
Ithyris is in the center.
He is on his knees.
The shock of it stops Bryn's breath. He has seen this man command a room by entering it. He has seen him face Syreth's cruelty with a jaw set in granite. He has seen him in his true form, vast and ancient and terrifying. He has never seen him kneel.
The prince is stripped. Not of clothes. Of everything. The violet scales have receded, pulled back, leaving bare skin exposed. His crown is gone. His title is gone. The composure he wears is gone. He is a man on his knees on a stone floor, and he is asking if he is enough.
The words don't come from his mouth. They come from everywhere, from the walls and the crystal veins, his fear given voice by the dream. Am I enough? Without the scales, without the crown, without the power, is there anything beneath the prince worth loving? If you stripped away everything I was born into, would there be a man underneath worth staying for, or would there be nothing?
