The connection between us is full, and she settles into sleep by degrees.
The tension in her shoulders releasing.
I feel a pull coming from her to me. It’s calling for me.
I reach for her through the bond. With intention.
Not as I’ve reached a thousand times, the ambient connection, the passive awareness of her location and emotional state.
This time. I push. Follow the thread inward, past the surface, into the place where the bond lives at its deepest.
The dark shifts. Moonlight.
A clearing. Different from the field I was pulled into at the compound.
Silver-washed grass, a sky full of stars I don’t recognize, and a stillness that runs deeper than silence.
The air here hums at a frequency I can feel in my chest.
The bond made this space.
Celeste is standing in the grass. Barefoot.
Her hair is down and the moonlight turns it silver at the edges.
She meets my eyes. No confusion this time.
“You’re in my dream again,” she says.
“I deliberately followed you.”
“Or the mountain is helping.”
She tilts her head. The moonlight catches the ring on her finger.
“It’s different here at night.”
“The bond seems to be building what we bring to it.”
She walks toward me. The grass bends under her feet.
She stops a few feet away.
She just stands there, face tilted up, and waits.
I reach for her.
My hand settles against her cheek, and the contact is vivid in a way that the waking world can’t match.
No barriers. No skin temperature.
Just sensation, and the sound she makes when my thumb traces her lower lip lands behind my sternum and stays there.
“Something happened today,” I say.
“I know. I felt it. A spike.”
“Veyran confronted me in the corridor. The floor between us buckled. Half an inch of stone, displaced in a line from where I was standing to where he was standing.”
