I fell asleep smiling.
The dream didn't start the way the others had.
There was no gradual descent into vision, no shifting of animal perspectives, no slow buildup of dread. One moment I was asleep. The next I was in the sky, disembodied and watching.
The clarity was staggering.
Everything was sharp, hyper-real, as if someone had polished the world until every edge gleamed and every color popped. The mountains below me were rendered with such precision that I could count individual rocks along the ridgelines. The auroras above blazed with surreal colors I'd never seen before and had no names for, pulsing with a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat.
That was Morgateth's doing.
His energy had amplified everything, just as Saphir and Nyxath had warned. My prophetic channels weren't just open, they were blown wide, and the vision that poured through them was more vivid than anything I'd experienced in real life,let alone in a dream, and that included the nightmare about Podana.
A dragonia flew below me, banking through the peaks with the typical grace of an apex predator. The man on her back was leaning into the turns and adjusting his weight, and he seemed to be a skilled rider.
Her scales caught the auroral light and shattered it into a cascade of shifting colors, silver and pale gold and turquoise and pink, rippling across her body like light refracting through crystal.
Veynathei.
There was no doubt this time. No ambiguity, no fuzzy details that I could explain away. This was Alar's dragonia, and the rider on her back was Alar, and the scene playing out before me was as clear and sharp as if I were watching it happen in real time.
They seemed to be on a training exercise, a routine flight through one of the mountain passes that the Dragon Force used for advanced maneuver practice. I'd flown the same route with Onyx during my sessions with Ravel. It was challenging but not dangerous for an experienced rider and dragon.
But Alar and Veynathei were not yet experienced. They were still learning to navigate the bond together, and she was a young and impulsive dragonia. She was practically an adolescent.
The wind pattern suddenly changed, and a violent gust caught Veynathei at the wrong angle as she banked into a narrow gap between two peaks. She corrected, but the correction was too sharp, and Alar shifted his weight at the worst possible moment.
I watched his hands scramble for the riding straps. Watched his fingers close around leather that slipped through his grip. Watched the horrible, slow-motion arc of his body separating from the saddle.
Veynathei roared, the sound tearing through the vision with a force that made the mountains tremble. She folded her wings and dove after him, her iridescent scales flattening against her body as she plummeted, desperate to reach him before the rocks did.
She wasn't fast enough.
No dragon could have been fast enough. The gap between the peaks was too narrow for her wingspan, and the wind that had dislodged Alar was now slamming her against the rock face, scraping scales from her flank as she fought to descend.
Alar fell.
I had seen him die before. Three times, in three different nightmare scenarios. But those visions had been fuzzy around the edges, sufficiently dreamlike that I could almost convince myself that they weren't real.
This vision was not fuzzy.
The lens through which I was watching this disaster zoomed in on his face, and I saw the moment when fear gave way to the realization that this was how his life was going to end. I saw his mouth form a word that might have been my name or might have been Veynathei's. I saw his arms reach upward, fingers grasping at air that offered nothing to hold.
Alar hit the rocks.
I shouldn't have been able to hear the terrible sound from this distance, but the vision delivered it directly into my mind. The crack of impact. The silence that followed. The golden thread of the bond between Alar and Veynathei snapping like a wire pulled past its breaking point.
Veynathei's anguish flooded the vision, grief so raw and enormous that it threatened to tear the mountains apart. She landed beside Alar's broken body, her own wings scraped raw and bleeding, and pressed her snout against his chest, as if her touch could restart a heart that had stopped.
It couldn't.
Some fates can't be changed.
The words echoed through the vision, the same words that had haunted me through three previous nightmares. But as in the third nightmare, the vision didn't end there.
The scene rewound.
The same mountain pass, the same wind, the same flight path. But something was different. A presence in the sky that hadn't been there before.
