_______
There was no point in staying here. I was as good as dead like this.
I started unbuckling the armor. One piece at a time, working methodically despite the trembling in my hands and the fog clouding my thoughts. The buckles were small and slippery with blood, designed for fingers that could actually feel what they were doing.
My dexterity was really lacking from the gloves. The fingers were stiff, unresponsive. The metal digits wouldn't bend properly at the joints, forcing me to use my whole hand like a claw rather than manipulating individual fingers. I had to wedge the buckle tongues between two fingers and pry them loose through brute force rather than finesse. Each buckle took three or four attempts, my gauntleted hands slipping off again and again before finally catching.
But how did I know this? All of this? The question gnawed at me as I worked. I was unbuckling the armor from reflex, my hands moving to the exact location of each buckle without conscious thought. Right pauldron first—release the strap at the front, then the back, then the connecting chain to the cuirass. Then left pauldron. Then the side buckles of the cuirass, four on each side, working from top to bottom.
What reflex? This could only mean that I had done this before. Hundreds of times, maybe thousands, for the movements to be this automatic. My body knew the exact sequence, the precise angle to pull each strap, which buckles were decorative and which were structural. But how? When? I couldn't remember ever wearing this armor before today—before this dream—and yet my hands moved with the certainty of years of practice.
After the armor pieces came off—pauldrons, cuirass, greaves—I peeled away the padding beneath. The gambeson, or whatever the Ventians called it, had once been white or maybe cream-colored. Now it was a mottled patchwork of dark red and brown, the fabric so saturated that it squelched when I grabbed it. It was soaked through with blood, heavy and clinging to my skin like a second layer of rot. The weight of it was surprising—easily ten or fifteen pounds of absorbed blood pulling at my shoulders and back. It was dragging me down, both literally and figuratively, making every movement require twice the effort it should.
I pulled the gambeson over my head, the wet fabric sticking to my face and hair as it came off. The smell hit me when it passed my nose—copper and iron and something sweet and sickly that made my stomach lurch. I threw it aside. It landed in the mud with a wet slap.
Eventually I was left in only a cloth tunic, also bloody. The thin linen was plastered to my torso, outlining ribs and the concave hollow of my stomach. Dark stains spread across the fabric like continents on a map—some from my own wounds, others from the spray of enemies I'd killed, still others from simply being in this charnel house. But I didn't feel like walking naked. That, and it provided some small barrier between me and the cold fog that was already seeping into my bones.
And the gloves. I couldn't take the gloves off. When I tried to unbuckle them, I realized the metal was twisted, the plates driven into the leather backing and fused together by the force of impacts. In some places, the leather had torn completely, and I could see—or thought I could see—the metal pressed directly against skin that was bruised purple-black. Maybe fused to the skin beneath, the metal and flesh welded together by heat or pressure or something I didn't want to think about. I didn't want to know. Pulling them off might take skin with them, might expose raw muscle and tendon. Better to leave them on.
I tried to rise to my feet, using my legs to push myself up from the sitting position. My thighs trembled with the effort. I got halfway up, knees straightening, weight shifting forward—and then my legs gave out immediately. The muscles simply stopped responding, as if someone had cut the strings on a puppet. I hit the ground hard, landing on my side in the mud. The impact drove the air from my lungs in a sharp gasp that was half pain, half surprise.
I lay there for a moment, gasping, tasting mud and blood. My vision swam. The nausea surged.
I glanced around, trying to orient myself. When the fight started, I had been about five rows into the formation. I remembered the aquilifer ahead of me, visible over the helmets of four rows of soldiers. But now I could see many more fallen in front of me—eight rows at least, maybe ten. Bodies stretched forward in a dense carpet of twisted metal and torn flesh.
Had I been moved? I didn't feel like it. I had no memory of being dragged or carried. My position relative to the bodies immediately around me seemed unchanged—the soldier with the caved-in helmet was still to my right, the barbarian with the crushed hand still at my feet. The bodies looked the same. The positions hadn't changed.
Which meant the formation had advanced during the fighting. We'd pushed forward—or been pushed—far deeper into enemy lines than I'd realized. Those extra rows of dead weren't behind me. They were in front, fallen during the charge I barely remembered.
Thick fog surrounded me. I couldn't see more than three meters in any direction. Beyond that, the world dissolved into white nothingness. The fog had grown thicker since the battle ended, or maybe it had always been this thick and the adrenaline had let me see through it. Now it pressed in from all sides, muffling sound and erasing distance.
I tried rising again, planting my hands in the mud and pushing. My arms shook. I got my knees under me, then one foot planted flat. I pushed up—and the nausea was too much. My stomach heaved. The world tilted violently to the left. I fell to my knees, head bowing forward, bile rising in my throat. I retched, bringing up nothing but thin, acidic liquid that burned my esophagus. My body convulsed with dry heaves, muscles contracting uselessly.
I started punching my chest. A desperate, animal instinct that came from somewhere primal. My right fist slammed into my sternum, once, twice, three times. The impacts were dull thuds that echoed inside my ribcage. Pain flared with each hit, sharp and focusing. If only I could get some adrenaline going—shock my system into producing enough fight-or-flight chemicals to override the weakness and nausea—I could perhaps find enough stability to stand. The body didn't know the difference between external threat and self-inflicted violence. Pain was pain. Danger was danger.
I started screaming. Not words. Just sound. Raw, wordless noise torn from my throat, expelled with every bit of air in my lungs. I screamed until my voice cracked, until my throat burned, until I had nothing left to give.
The sound echoed back to me, hollow and mocking. The fog caught it, twisted it, threw fragments of my own voice back from different directions. For a moment it sounded like there were multiple people screaming, a chorus of the dying. Then the fog swallowed it completely, leaving only oppressive silence.
Then I started shaking. There was no wind around me—the air was perfectly still, the fog hanging motionless—but I felt cold. A deep, bone-level chill that started in my core and radiated outward. My teeth chattered. My muscles trembled in continuous, fine vibrations I couldn't control. Perhaps from the blood loss—I'd certainly lost enough to drop my core temperature. Perhaps from shock, the body's systems beginning to shut down in response to trauma. Perhaps from something else. Fear. Horror. The realization of what I'd just survived and what still waited.
I tried to rise again, scanning desperately for something to use as support. There—a few feet away. A tall mace, half-buried in the mud, its haft jutting up at an angle. Some barbarian had lost it or dropped it, and it had stuck fast in the soft ground.
I crawled toward it, dragging myself on hands and knees. The mud sucked at my limbs. When I reached the mace, I propped myself against it, wrapping both hands around the wooden haft. My hands—those female hands, soft and slender even inside the twisted metal gloves—gripped the haft tightly, knuckles white with effort. The phantom sensation was stronger than ever, as if someone else's hands were overlaid on mine, lending strength I didn't have.
Pulling me upright. I used the mace like a lever, hauling my weight up inch by inch. My legs screamed in protest. My vision grayed at the edges. But I barely managed it, finally standing upright on legs that felt like they were made of water. My feet were shaking, threatening to buckle again at any moment.
I held it like a pillar. My only anchor. Without it, I would collapse. The mace was the only thing keeping me vertical, the only barrier between standing and falling back into the mud to die with all the others.
I looked at the men around me—motionless, crumpled, dying. Some were clearly dead, their bodies already cooling, eyes glazed and empty. Others still moved weakly, fingers twitching, chests rising in shallow, irregular breaths. One soldier, three meters to my left, was trying to crawl. His legs didn't work—broken or paralyzed—so he dragged himself forward on his elbows, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Going nowhere. Just moving because the alternative was accepting death.
I wondered whether to help. The thought came automatically, some deeply buried instinct toward compassion or duty. I could try to pull some of them free of their armor. Could ease their suffering, or at least give them a chance.
I scoffed at the thought. The sound came out harsh and bitter, surprising me with its cruelty. Since when was I the kind to do such a thing? The question hung in the air, unanswered. Was I that person? Had I ever been? The very fact that I questioned it suggested I wasn't. A truly compassionate person wouldn't have to wonder. They'd already be moving, already trying to help.
And besides, I was barely standing. What could I do for them that wouldn't just kill me in the process?
With trembling legs and a world that wouldn't stop spinning, I stepped forward. I released my death grip on the mace, forcing my hands to open despite every instinct screaming to hold on. For a moment I wavered, arms windmilling, certain I would fall. But I didn't. My legs held, shaking but functional.
Slowly, I made my way toward the start of the fight. Each step was a conscious effort, a deliberate command to lift one foot, move it forward, plant it, shift weight, repeat. The bodies increased in density as I moved forward. I had to step over them, sometimes on them when there was no gap. My bare feet pressed into armor, into flesh, into things I didn't look at too closely. The mud sucked at my soles with every step.
There, I saw it. Rising from the carnage like a monument. The Aquila. The golden eagle standard, wings still spread wide despite being spattered with blood and mud. The wooden pole stood upright, somehow untouched by the chaos that had consumed everything around it. Bloody and tattered, yet still standing. It had been staked into the ground as a last effort by the aquilifer before he fell. I could see his body a few feet away, one hand still reaching toward the standard he'd died protecting.
So the spirit marches on... The phrase surfaced from somewhere deep in my memory, carrying the weight of tradition and belief I didn't fully understand. Or so they said. While the eagle stands, the legion endures. While the eagle stands, Ventia lives.
I had to quicken my pace.
But why was I even in such a haste? I wasn't sure. The compulsion was irrational, instinctive.
I let go of the mace and forced myself to keep balance, even in the spinning, tilting world. My arms extended to the sides like a tightrope walker, making constant minute adjustments to keep my center of gravity stable. The ground seemed to tilt and heave beneath my feet like the deck of a ship, but I stayed upright.
One step. The mud squelched beneath my bare sole, cold and slick.
Then another. My foot came down on something hard—a piece of armor—but I didn't fall.
Move.
I weakly reached for one of the shut-off torches lying among the debris. My hand closed around a wooden shaft, longer than the mace, wrapped in oil-soaked cloth at one end. The fabric was stiff and cold, crusted with dried pitch that flaked off when I touched it. It had been dropped or discarded during the retreat, one of dozens scattered across the battlefield like fallen stars.
I lit it on fire by striking two rocks from the ground together. My hands moved automatically, selecting stones with the right composition—flint, or something similar, and a harder stone to strike it against. I held the torch head between my knees to keep it steady, then struck the stones together above it. Once. Twice. Nothing. Third time, sparks flew—tiny orange pinpricks that died instantly. Fourth strike produced more sparks. One landed on the oiled fabric and caught, a single point of red that began to spread.
I coaxed the flame, blowing gently, feeding it oxygen until the oil-soaked fabric caught properly. The flame sputtered, smoking heavily at first, black and acrid. Then it roared to life, expanding from a timid flicker into a proper blaze that pushed back the darkness and fog in a rough sphere around me.
I could now see more—perhaps fifteen meters in every direction. The light didn't penetrate the fog beyond that; it simply carved out a bubble of visibility that moved with me. But fifteen meters was infinitely better than three. I could see shapes now. Context. The full scope of the carnage spread out in all directions.
I looked back at my trail of bloody footprints winding between the corpses. They formed a dark, meandering path through the pale mud, each print perfectly distinct—heel, arch, five toes. The blood was still fresh enough to glisten in the torchlight, not yet fully absorbed into the earth. The trail marked every stumble, every sidestep to avoid a body, every moment I'd nearly fallen.
I wondered how I hadn't hurt my feet on all those jagged rocks. The ground was littered with debris—shattered weapons, sharp fragments of armor, stones and gravel churned up by the fighting. I'd walked through all of it barefoot, and there should have been cuts, punctures, at least scrapes. I flexed my toes experimentally, wiggling them inside the mud. No pain. No cuts. No sensation of injury at all. When I lifted my foot to look at the sole, I saw only blood—but it wasn't coming from my feet. The skin was intact. Unmarked.
Whatever. I didn't have time to puzzle over impossible things. The list was growing too long. Phantom hands. Feet that bled but weren't injured. Muscle memory for skills I couldn't remember learning. One more mystery wouldn't change anything.
I should probably march in the direction the legion had been moving. The logic was simple—if Emily was the Princess they'd been fighting for, she was probably wherever the legion had been trying to go. Or fleeing from. The causality was unclear, but the correlation seemed solid.
With the torch raised high in my right hand and my legs still trembling beneath me, threatening to give out with every step, I stepped further into the nothingness. The fog swallowed me immediately, the battlefield disappearing behind me as if it had never existed. Only the circle of torchlight remained, a fragile island of visibility in an ocean of white.
By my counting, I walked for three and a half hours. I kept time by counting my breaths—roughly fifteen per minute when walking, so nine hundred breaths per hour. I counted to three thousand one hundred and fifty before I saw anything other than fog and occasional corpses half-buried in mud. My legs had gone from trembling to numb, operating on autopilot. The nausea had settled into a dull, constant presence. The world still spun occasionally, but I'd learned to anticipate the vertigo and compensate for it.
Then I met a stone wall. Massive. The structure materialized from the fog like a ship emerging from mist, sudden and imposing. The wall rose at least ten meters high, maybe more—the top disappeared into the fog above the reach of my torchlight. The stones were huge, each block the size of a horse, fitted together with such precision that I couldn't slide a knife blade between them. Cold to the touch when I pressed my palm against it. Ancient. The stone was weathered and pitted, stained with lichen and moss in places, marked by centuries of wind and rain.
I followed the wall, trailing my free hand along the rough surface. The texture changed as I walked—smooth in some sections, rough in others, occasionally interrupted by deep gouges that might have been battle damage from some long-ago siege. The stone was cold enough to leech heat from my palm even through the twisted metal of my glove. My footsteps echoed strangely against the wall, bouncing back in odd patterns that suggested architectural complexity I couldn't see.
I walked for perhaps ten minutes before I reached a gate. It was broken—no, shattered was more accurate. Shattered inward, the massive wooden doors torn from their hinges and thrown backward into the passage beyond. The iron bars that had reinforced the doors were twisted like they'd been struck by something impossibly strong. Not bent—twisted, the metal spiral like rope, the molecular structure warped beyond any force that should have been possible with medieval siege equipment. Some of the bars had snapped entirely, the fractured ends blooming outward in razor-sharp petals of metal.
There were signs of fighting. Bodies littered the entrance—barbarians mostly, their hide armor and crude weapons identifying them even in the uncertain torchlight. But there were also blue-armored soldiers, Ventians who'd made it this far before falling. Their weapons were scattered across the blood-slicked stone—swords, spears, a broken shield split cleanly down the middle. Blood pooled in the cracks between the stones, filling the shallow depressions and mortar lines with dark liquid that reflected my torchlight like black mirrors.
I couldn't smell anything. The realization struck me suddenly. I should be able to smell blood—copper and iron, thick and cloying. Should smell the opened bowels of the dead, the acrid stench of voided bladders and loosened bowels. Should smell smoke from my torch, oil and burning pitch. But there was nothing. My sense of smell had been completely severed, leaving only sight and sound and touch.
Strange. But I added it to the growing list of impossibilities and moved forward.
The hallway beyond the gate led deeper into the structure. The passage was wide enough for three men to walk abreast, the walls carved from the same massive stones as the outer fortification. More bodies here—the fighting had been intense. Barbarians and Ventians locked together in final embraces, frozen in the moment of mutual destruction.
After perhaps fifty meters, the hallway opened into a central plaza paved in worn stone. The space was circular, maybe thirty meters across, ringed by walls on all sides. The stones beneath my feet were smooth, polished by centuries of footsteps into a surface that was almost glassy. In the center, barely visible in the flickering torchlight, was the tip of a tower. No—not the tip. The base. Tall. Narrow. The structure rose straight up, a perfect cylinder of stone that disappeared into the fog and darkness above. The walls were smooth, featureless except for a single narrow door at ground level. Like something out of a fairy tale.
Aren't princesses held in towers like this? The thought came with a strange mixture of cynicism and hope. Every story I'd ever heard—fairy tales whose titles I couldn't remember but whose shapes I knew—featured towers. Rapunzel. Sleeping Beauty. Names that felt both familiar and foreign. Princesses locked away, waiting for rescue or doom.
I felt a chill crawl up my spine. Not from the cold, though the air here was noticeably colder than the battlefield, carrying a damp that seeped into bones and settled there. This was different. From the sensation of being watched. Eyes on the back of my neck. Attention focused on me from somewhere I couldn't see, couldn't identify. The weight of observation, malevolent or merely curious, I couldn't tell.
Still, the presence of corpses was suspicious. How had they reached this point before me when they'd been retreating backwards? The timeline didn't make sense. The legion had broken and run backward, away from the enemy, away from wherever they'd been advancing. I'd walked for hours in the direction of their advance, following what should have been the path forward into enemy territory. And yet here were Ventian bodies, suggesting they'd somehow gotten here first.
I hadn't even heard fighting. No sounds of battle had echoed through the fog during my long walk. No clash of weapons, no screams. Just silence and the sound of my own footsteps. Had they all perished in the brief window between the main battle and my arrival? Or had they run away in the time it took me to regain focus, fled deeper into the structure or back out through some other exit?
It didn't make sense. The spatial logic was wrong. The temporal sequence broken.
Why were the barbarians even protecting a walled tower in the middle of nowhere? This wasn't a strategic position. There was nothing here worth defending—no water source, no fertile land, no crossroads or trade route. Just a tower in the fog, isolated and ancient. What did they gain by holding it? What did the Ventians gain by attacking it?
Unless the tower itself was the objective. Unless something—or someone—inside was valuable enough to justify this slaughter.
What was stranger was that each of the fallen was missing an eye, the left eye, as if a beast roughly cut it out. Or perhaps they were collected for compensation. I hear ancient soldiers used to do that. But why not an ear? They didn't rot as fast…
I suppose I just had to figure that out. The thought came with grim determination. I'd walked three and a half hours through a nightmare. I'd survived a battle that should have killed me. I'd dragged myself out of my armor with a cracked skull and blood loss that would have felled anyone else. I wasn't stopping now.
I approached the tower cautiously, keeping the torch low enough that it wouldn't silhouette me against the light. My footsteps were silent on the stone, the bare soles of my feet making no sound even though they left bloody prints behind me. The door was closer now—five meters, four, three. It was wooden, reinforced with iron bands, slightly ajar. Darkness beyond, absolute and waiting.
The sensation of being watched intensified. The skin between my shoulder blades itched. My hand tightened on the torch.
I reached the door and paused, listening. Nothing. Just silence so complete it seemed to have physical weight.
I pushed the door open with my free hand, the twisted metal glove scraping against the wood.
The corpses in the tower were different.
These were not the shattered blue-marine plate of the warriors outside, but something older, actually real, cleaner in design, almost ceremonial. Gold-plated cuirasses gleamed dully in the torchlight, fixed forever in rigid poses over white robes that had once been pristine but were now stiff with brown, dried blood. Their feet were clad in sandals instead of bare skin or enclosed sabatons, leather straps crisscrossing up their calves in the old style of warfare from a different age. Each of them clutched a gladius and scutum, the classic pairing—short stabbing sword and large rectangular shield—held in death as if still braced against impact.
They were actual Legionaires.
I found their corpses, but none of their opponents. No barbarians with crude hides and clubs. No Ventians in blue plate. Just these ancient legionaries, all facing upward along the spiral of the tower, as if they had been cut down while advancing, not retreating. The absence of their killers felt louder than any battlefield noise. Whatever had done this to them had left no trace of itself except the bodies and the blood.
What was stranger was that each of them was missing one eye just like the warriors outside.
Then I heard a girl crying in the distance. The sound floated down the stairwell, thin and brittle, like glass about to crack. It echoed strangely off the stone—sometimes close, sometimes far—never settling into a single direction. The same cry as in the last dream. The one in the darkness. The same voice that had called out before, from somewhere I couldn't reach. Was it Emily?
The stairs spiraled upward, tightening around a hollow core of darkness that my torchlight could not fully pierce. I climbed slowly, step by step, counting the legionaries as I went. One, leaning back against the wall, shield still raised as if to block a blow that had already killed him. Two, sprawled face-down, gladius extended toward an enemy that was no longer there. Three, kneeling, head twisted at an impossible angle. Seventeen in total. It couldn't have been a coincidence.
17 Was the number of death. Rearranged in the Ventian letters it meant "I lived".
The last one had died trying to hold onto the door handle at the very top. His fingers were still locked around it in rigor mortis, the knuckles pale and bone-like beneath parchment-thin skin.
I pushed him away. The contact was light, but his body responded like a toppled statue. He tipped backward and tumbled down the stairs, rolling with a series of dull, wet thuds that echoed down into the darkness below. The sound faded slowly, each impact more distant than the last, until there was only silence again.
So this was it.
I gripped the handle and cautiously pushed the door outward. The hinges groaned softly, but the door swung open without much resistance, as if it had been waiting a long time for someone to come.
I was met with a noble lady's room. The air felt different here—still, undisturbed, as if time itself had stopped. A delicate writing desk sat against one wall, its surface neat and orderly, quills arranged in a fan beside sealed inkwells, sheets of blank parchment stacked with almost obsessive precision. A canopy bed draped in silk curtains occupied the center of the room. The fabric shimmered faintly in the torchlight, a pale, ghostly color that might once have been pink or ivory. Pillows were arranged perfectly. The blankets were smooth and unwrinkled. Everything was pristine, untouched. No dust. No signs of struggle.
If only there was also a lady here to fill it.
Right by the window—or was it a balcony?—was something that most definitely did not belong. A pile of eyes connected by mangled flesh. It slumped against the low stone parapet like a grotesque parody of a person at rest. Each eye had a different hue, as if torn from different people. Blue. Brown. Green. Hazel. Some were bloodshot, others disturbingly clear. They blinked independently, rolling in their sockets, never quite aligning to form a single gaze. Strands of sinew and muscle connected the eyes to each other, pulsing faintly, as if something like a heart beat somewhere deep within the mass. It wept with the same voice of the girl from before.
A trail of blood followed from the door toward it. Thick, dark red, not yet fully dried. The line traced the floor in a lurching, uneven path that suggested something had dragged itself from the threshold to the window and then simply stopped. I supposed this was the thing that killed the legionaries. Nothing else fit. No swords or clubs or arrows. Just this…aberration.
Were the eyes from the soldiers?
But… weren't they fighting for the princess? The thought landed with a cold, heavy weight. The men outside, the ones in blue plate screaming "For the Princess!" The ancient legionaries on the stairs, guarding this tower with their lives. All of them had died trying to reach—or protect—whatever was in this room. If there had ever been a princess here, she was gone now.
Or… There was never a princess. This was her…
The thing started screaming upon seeing me.
The mouths were absent, but the sound came all the same—from deep within the meat, from behind the eyes, from the air itself. A wave of sound hit me like a physical wall, shoving me backward. My ears popped violently. My ear canals ruptured instantly. I felt the tearing, a sharp, hot pain deep inside my skull, followed by a sudden, horrifying warmth as blood ran down my inner ear canals and spilled out along my jaw and neck.
I went deaf.
The scream continued, but now it was only a vibration in the air, a pressure more felt than heard. The world went silent in an instant—no crackle of the torch, no creak of the floorboards, no rasp of my own panicked breathing. Just the memory of sound and the echo of pain.
But…unlike the last time I'd seen this malformation, I wasn't vibrating inside. My bones weren't shaking. My organs weren't liquefying. My teeth didn't feel like they were about to shatter from resonance. My body wasn't tearing itself apart under the assault.
Instead, my eyes hurt. A sharp, stabbing pain that felt like needles being pushed through the pupils straight into the brain. They burned. Like staring directly into the sun, but worse. The light wasn't coming from outside—it was coming from within the thing. From behind the eyes. From the spaces between them.
As I squinted, trying instinctively to shield my gaze, I realized the mass was glowing faintly. Not a visible, ordinary light, but something deeper, something that pressed against my vision from the inside out. Every time one of the eyes blinked, a painful flash rippled through my skull, leaving behind streaks and afterimages that crawled across my field of view.
I staggered backward, raising an arm to shield my face. The torch wavered in my other hand, casting wild shadows across the room—shadows that made the silk curtains look like reaching fingers and the writing desk like an altar.
The thing screamed again, and the glow intensified.
It walked toward me on eight human feet strung together by lines of thin flesh, as if they had been sewn edge to edge. The ankles were fused, skin pulled tight where tendons and veins crossed from one limb into the next. Stitched. Surgical. Each foot moved a fraction of a second after the previous one, creating a horrible, rippling gait that was neither crawl nor stride.
My shaky feet instinctively plastered me against the wall. My back hit cold stone, and I began tracing it backward, sliding along it toward the opposite corner, next to the balcony door. My fingers scraped over smooth plaster and carved wood, searching blindly for an exit, an angle, anything that wasn't those eyes.
I couldn't even number the eyes. There were too many. Dozens, at least. Maybe hundreds. Scattered across what should have been a face but wasn't—embedded in slabs of meat, in folds of skin, even along the length of the connecting tendrils. Some were half-lidded, others stretched wide, veins standing out red against their whites. And by the way its mouth—or mouths—were gaping open, twisted and wet, it must have been screaming. Jagged holes lined with rows of teeth opened and closed randomly across its surface, stretching flesh and then snapping shut like traps.
But I heard nothing. No sound. Not even the crackle of my torch or the rasp of my breathing. Deaf. And I couldn't smell either. The room might have reeked of blood and rot, but as far as my senses were concerned, it was a sterile void. Only sight and touch remained, narrowed and sharpened by terror.
Eventually, as I traced the wall in blind panic, my feet found the edge. I ended up at the ledge—the same spot where the creature had been observing me earlier, perched like some grotesque gargoyle, watching the battlefield through a lattice of eyes. The balcony stones were cool beneath my heels, the drop beyond lost in fog and darkness.
I looked down. The traces of my bloody steps were still there, outside on the balcony. They looked like black dots painted on an empty canvas, dried and darkened in the faint light. A dotted line leading from the tower's interior to this very edge—and ending nowhere.
A woman's voice cut through the silence.
"Jump."
It was crystal clear, untouched by the distortion that had taken my hearing. It didn't vibrate the air; it resonated somewhere inside my skull, as if spoken directly into my thoughts. It wasn't from the creature. Its mouths still gaped and contorted soundlessly. This voice was calm. Firm. Familiar.
The woman holding onto me?
I didn't have time to think. The creature was still advancing, its eight human feet slapping wetly against the floor in a rhythm I could not hear but could feel through the stone. It wasn't like I was going to fight that thing. A gladius wasn't going to fix this. No formation. No tactics. Just a choice.
I took a deep breath, braced myself, and jumped over the ledge just as the creature lunged forward, its limbs brushing the air where I'd been standing a heartbeat earlier. Its mass surged toward me, eyes widening, mouths tearing open wider—but gravity had already claimed me.
It didn't take more than a second to hit the ground. There was no sensation of falling, no rushing wind, no spreading impact. Just a blink.
____
At waking, the armor and tower vanished, but the sense of constriction didn't. Something warm and heavy pinned my back to the mattress, soft pressure molding to my spine and shoulders. For a split second, the mind insisted it was still plate pressing me down—until the texture registered. Yielding. Smooth. A large pair of breasts?
Breath brushed my ear. Hot. Rhythmic. The kind of steady exhale that only came from deep, untroubled sleep.
Pamela?
She was behind me, her arms looped around my neck, clinging to me like a barnacle that had claimed a rock and refused to let go. Her grip was firm, possessive in a way that made the back of my neck prickle. For a moment it mirrored the phantom woman's embrace from the dream, except there the hold had felt protective. Here, it felt invasive.
"What the—"
Adrenaline overrode grogginess. I wrenched myself free, shoving her away harder than intended. Her body rolled with the momentum, bouncing once on the mattress before settling. I scrambled out of the bed, bare feet gliding on the polished stone.
"What are you doing?!" The words tore out sharper than planned, raw with the leftover panic from the tower.
Pamela mumbled something incoherent in response, a string of sounds that never quite became words. She rolled onto her side, facing away, one cheek squashed into the pillow. Her eyes didn't even open. Whatever she'd been doing, she wasn't fully there for it now.
Jaw tight, I stumbled toward the light switch and slammed it on. The room flooded with harsh white light, bleaching the walls and making the cheap curtains look almost translucent. The TV in the corner lost its dominance, the flickering screen now an anemic glow compared to the overhead bulb.
Pamela groaned, throwing an arm over her face to shield her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed a deep crimson that climbed all the way to her ears. Her gaze, when it cracked through the crook of her elbow, was glassy, pupils not quite tracking. Her eyes were only half-open, glazed and unfocused. She was clearly drunk—no coordination, no coherent speech, barely conscious.
I looked toward the coffee table.
The wine bottle sat there, listing slightly in its own little ring of condensation. Half empty. The glass beside it held a dried red ring at the bottom, the residue clinging to the sides in streaks.
I walked over, picked it up, and sniffed the opening. The scent hit immediately—fermented grapes, yes, but wrong somehow. The sweetness was muted under something acrid and alien. It smelled... strange. Not quite like wine. There was something else underneath. Chemical. Bitter. A note that didn't belong in something meant to be enjoyed.
Poison?
The word rose unbidden, absurd yet disturbingly plausible. My brain supplied possibilities unasked: adulterants, drugs, things that knocked people out without leaving obvious traces.
But why was she fine?
Was her fat storing the toxin? Absorbing it before it reached her vital organs? It was an ugly thought, but the body did use fat as a shield. Maybe whatever was in the wine diluted itself in the soft, abundant padding she carried, delaying the worst effects.
I looked back at her. She had already curled into a ball on the bed, knees drawn up, one hand clutching the blanket. She mumbled again, a soft, slurred sound that might have been my name, might have been a protest, or might just have been nonsense. Either way, she wasn't exactly in a place to answer questions.
I set the bottle down, the glass clinking dully against the tabletop, and rubbed my face with both hands, trying to scrub away the lingering feel of the dream and the too-real warmth of her body against mine.
"Unbelievable," I muttered.
Or no, it was actually entirely believable. I should have expected it. This was Pamela. This was exactly the kind of line she would cross without even admitting to herself that it was a line.
Who knew that not being in the mood to drink would save my life...
Still, was Pamela the woman in the nightmare? The thought circled back, insistent. I'm not sure that I heard her voice back then.
How could she have even done something like that unconscious? There was no way she'd been lucid enough to manifest in someone else's dream—if that was even possible.
I picked up her phone from the nightstand. The screen lit up, casting a harsh blue glow across her flushed face. Four in the morning.
Should I just sleep some more?
Naah.
I didn't really feel like returning to the tower.
I glanced back at Pamela. What kind of reaction even was it to get drunk from poison? Her body should have rejected it violently—vomiting, convulsions, organ failure.
Why did she even drink that to begin with? Wasn't it "my" gift? The bottle had been addressed to me. Left at my table. Sealed and ribboned like a present from someone who knew exactly where I'd be sitting.
She had moved and was currently spread all over the bed, mouth hanging open, breathing heavily through her nose. One arm dangled off the side, the other tangled in the sheets. Drool had begun to pool on the pillow beneath her cheek.
So unsightly.
I walked to the side of the bed and gently closed her mouth with my fingers, pressing her jaw upward until her lips met. Her skin was hot to the touch, feverish.
I hadn't picked up on it earlier, but on closer inspection, she really was something. Pamela had very large breasts for such a slender figure. The fabric of her shirt stretched tight across them, rising and falling with each breath. How come the fat hadn't disappeared from that area when her power reset her body? Everything else about her seemed to fluctuate—her weight, her muscle tone, even the clarity of her skin—but those remained constant.
What kind of power even was this?
And thinking back... did she really go to the restaurant with no bra? What a harlot.
No. It was stranger that I hadn't noticed. Did I care so little about her presence? She'd been sitting across from me for hours, talking, eating, and I'd barely registered her as a person rather than an obstacle.
I stared at her for a moment longer. I wanted to experiment with her power—test the limits, see how it reacted to external stimuli. Cuts, burns, pressure. Whether it made her skin any tougher even in this thin form. Whether pain registered before the damage disappeared. It wasn't like she was going to resist in this state.
But I didn't really feel like it.
My skin was itchy. Crawling. Like something was trying to push its way out from underneath. The sensation started at my wrists and spread upward, tiny pinpricks of wrongness that made me want to claw at my own arms.
Instead, I walked to the bathroom, grabbed a few aspirin from the bottle I'd left by the sink, and swallowed them dry. The pills scraped down my throat, bitter and chalky.
I turned to leave, catching my reflection in the mirror.
My palm was covered in blood.
I stared at it. Fresh, dark red, pooled in the creases of my lifeline and heartline. I didn't remember cutting myself. There was no pain. No wound. Just blood, as if it had appeared from nowhere—or everywhere.
I turned my hand over. The back was clean. Only the palm.
Some time outside should clear my thoughts.
I headed out just like that, leaving Pamela sprawling unconscious across the bed. The poisoned wine bottle still sitting on the table, and the blood on my palm drying slowly in the cold hotel air.