"It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not." - Gandalf
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The dreams started three weeks after Johan found the wand.
At first, they were fragments. Disjointed images that made no sense. A castle perched on a cliff, impossibly large, with towers that seemed to pierce the clouds. Staircases that moved on their own, shifting and reconfiguring like living things. Portraits that watched him with painted eyes that were far too aware.
Johan would wake from these dreams sweating, his heart racing, the images already starting to fade. He'd lie in the dark trying to hold onto them, to understand what they meant, but they slipped away like water through his fingers.
Then the dreams got worse.
A woman appeared. Wild black hair that moved like smoke, pale skin, eyes that burned with madness and glee. She laughed as green light exploded from her hands, and wherever the light touched, people fell. Didn't stumble or collapse. Just fell, instantly, like someone had cut their strings.
Dead. The light killed them.
Johan knew it with the same certainty he knew his own name. That green light was death given form, and the woman wielded it like an artist with a paintbrush.
He started waking up screaming.
Greta would come running, still in her nightgown, worry etched deep in the lines around her eyes. She'd sit on the edge of his bed and stroke his hair the way she had when he was smaller, back when she still thought he was just a normal boy with normal problems.
"Shh, Liebling. It's just a dream. Just a dream."
But it didn't feel like just a dream. It felt like memory. Like prophecy. Like looking through a window into a future that hadn't happened yet but would, inevitable as gravity.
The worst dreams were the ones where he saw his own death.
The trench. The cold that seeped into your bones and never left. The sky the color of old concrete, flat and endless. The sound of shelling in the distance, a drumbeat counting down the seconds until the next barrage.
And the shrapnel. Always the shrapnel. He felt it tear through him every time, felt the hot punch of impact, the confusion as his body stopped responding to commands, the slow creeping cold as blood leaked into Ukrainian mud.
He died in those dreams. Really died. Felt the exact moment when he stopped being a person and became a thing, a body, meat cooling in the dirt.
Then he'd wake up gasping, ten years old in Sheffield, and the disconnect was so severe it felt like being split in half.
I died. I died and I came back. Why did I come back?
No answers. Just Greta with warm milk and honey, worrying about stress at school. Just Thomas installing a heavier lock on his bedroom door because Johan asked him to, not questioning why his ten-year-old son needed to lock out the world.
The nights bled together. Dream after dream after dream. The castle. The woman with green death in her hands. A man with a face like a snake and eyes the color of blood, speaking in a voice that made Johan's magic recoil in horror. Battles. Screaming. The smell of smoke and copper.
And woven through it all, his death. The trench. The cold. The absolute certainty that he'd failed everyone, including himself.
....
...
..
It happened on a Tuesday night in late November.
Johan went to bed exhausted. He'd been up until two the previous night, jerked awake by a dream of green light and laughter. The day at school had been a blur of trying to stay awake through lessons he'd mastered years ago. By the time dinner rolled around, he could barely keep his eyes open.
Greta felt his forehead. "No fever. You look terrible though. Straight to bed after you eat."
He didn't argue. Managed half his dinner before shuffling upstairs, changing into pajamas, crawling under the covers. Sleep pulled him down immediately, sudden and absolute.
The dream started differently this time.
He was standing in the back garden, but it wasn't quite right. The colors were too vivid. The air hummed with something he couldn't name. Magic, maybe. The whole world saturated with it.
Symbols appeared in the air around him. The same geometric shapes from his earlier dreams, but clearer now. More defined. They pulsed with orange light, his color, his magic. And they were trying to tell him something.
Learn, they seemed to say. Remember. This is who you were. Who you are. Who you will be.
More symbols. Runes, he realized. Ancient letters that predated modern alphabets. Each one carried weight, meaning, power compressed into a single mark. They orbited him like planets around a sun, faster and faster until they blurred together into a ring of burning light.
Words spilled from his mouth. Not English. Not German. Not Russian or any other language he'd learned in either life. Something older. Something that tasted of copper and smoke and ancient stone.
The magic in him responded, surging up from that deep place where it lived. His eyes burned. The world tinted orange. And the frost that had been gathering at the edges of the garden began to spread, crystallizing outward in fractal patterns that matched the runes still orbiting his head.
You are owed, the ancient voice whispered. The debt comes due. Accept your inheritance, child of two lives. Accept what you are.
"What am I?" Johan asked, or tried to ask, but the old language continued to pour from his lips, words he didn't know but somehow understood. Words of binding and unbinding. Creation and destruction. Life and death.
The frost spread faster. The runes burned brighter. And Johan stood at the center of it all, speaking in tongues, calling to a power that answered with terrible eagerness.
Greta woke to use the bathroom at half past five. The sky was just starting to lighten, that gray pre-dawn glow that came before the sun. She passed Johan's room on the way back, noticed his door was open.
Odd. He always closed it. Always locked it lately.
She looked inside. Empty bed. Covers thrown back.
Her heart clenched. "Johan?"
No answer.
She checked the bathroom. Empty. Downstairs. Nothing. The kitchen. Vacant.
Rising panic now, sharp and acidic in her throat. She threw open the back door and there he was.
Standing in the middle of the garden. Barefoot. Eyes open but seeing nothing, staring at something far beyond the here and now. And he was speaking. A constant stream of words in a language she'd never heard, guttural and flowing at the same time, each syllable seeming to carry weight.
Frost covered the ground around him. Not just frost. Ice. Intricate crystalline patterns spreading outward in a perfect circle, steam rising where the ice met the relatively warmer air.
It was November. Not that cold. Certainly not cold enough for this.
"Johan!" Greta ran toward him, her breath misting in air that shouldn't be this frigid. "Johan, wake up!"
He didn't respond. Just kept speaking in that impossible language, eyes fixed on nothing.
She reached him, grabbed his shoulder. "Aufwachen! Wake up!"
Johan gasped. His eyes snapped into focus, seeing her suddenly, seeing where he was. The words cut off mid-syllable.
The frost melted.
Not gradually. Instantly. Like someone had flipped a switch. The ice vanished, sublimating directly to steam that rose in thick white clouds around them. The temperature jumped back to normal so fast Greta felt dizzy from the shift.
Johan stared at her, then down at his bare feet on the now-wet grass, then at the dissipating steam. His face went white.
"Mum, I... what..."
"You were in the garden." Greta's voice shook. She couldn't stop it from shaking. "Speaking. You were speaking in... I don't know what language. And the frost. There was ice, Johan. Everywhere. And when I touched you it just... melted."
Thomas burst through the back door, still pulling on his shirt. "What's wrong? I heard shouting."
"It's Johan." Greta's eyes were wet. When had she started crying? "He was out here, verschlafen, sleepwalking, and he was speaking. Thomas, what language was that?"
"What are you talking about?"
"He was speaking something. Not English. Not German. Something else. Something old."
Thomas looked at Johan, who stood there shivering in his pajamas, looking lost and scared and far too young to be dealing with any of this. Some unspoken communication passed between father and son. Johan's eyes pleaded. Thomas's jaw tightened.
"He was sleepwalking," Thomas said firmly. "That's all. Kids sleepwalk sometimes. He probably wasn't even fully conscious."
"But the frost..."
"What frost?"
"There was frost everywhere! Ice! In patterns, perfect patterns, and when I touched him it melted, all of it, instantly. You must have seen the steam!"
Thomas looked at the garden. Normal grass, wet with morning dew. No ice. No frost. No evidence.
"I don't see anything, love."
"Because it melted!" Greta's voice climbed toward hysteria. "When I touched him it just... Thomas, something is wrong. Something is wrong with our son."
"Nothing is wrong with him." Thomas's voice went hard. The voice he used when a decision was final and not up for discussion. "He's just a boy who had nightmares and sleepwalked into the garden. That's all. That's all it is."
"But..."
"Greta." He stepped closer, lowered his voice. "Listen to me. Nothing. Is. Wrong. Do you understand?"
She stared at him, then at Johan, then back at Thomas. Johan could see her trying to make sense of it, trying to reconcile what she'd seen with what Thomas was telling her. Trying to fit the impossible into a framework of possible.
She crossed herself. The gesture was automatic, instinctive. Protection against something she couldn't name.
"We should take him to a doctor," she said finally, but there was no strength behind it. "If he's sleepwalking, if he's having episodes..."
"No doctors." Thomas's voice was iron. "No hospitals. No one outside this family. We handle this ourselves."
"Thomas..."
"No one."
Greta looked at Johan again. He saw fear in her eyes. Not fear of him, exactly. Fear for him. Fear of what he might be. What he was becoming.
"Go inside, Liebling," she said softly. "Get warm. I'll make breakfast."
Johan fled. Through the back door, up the stairs, into his room where he locked the door with shaking hands and slid down to sit on the floor.
He'd been sleepwalking. Speaking in a language he didn't know. Creating frost in November. And he couldn't remember any of it. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep in his bed.
What was happening to him?
You are owed, the voice had said in his dreams. Accept your inheritance.
But Johan hadn't accepted anything. Hadn't chosen this. He'd just been living his life, trying to survive, and power kept forcing itself on him whether he wanted it or not.
Downstairs, he could hear his parents arguing in hushed voices. Couldn't make out the words, but he knew what they were about. Him. What to do about him. How to handle a son who was becoming something neither of them understood.
Things changed after that night.
Greta prayed more. Johan would come downstairs in the morning to find her at the kitchen table with her rosary, lips moving silently. She'd look up when he entered, and he'd see the question in her eyes. What are you?
She never asked it out loud. Just looked at him with that mixture of love and fear and desperate hope that maybe she was imagining things.
Thomas drank more. The whiskey bottle that had been half-empty became a routine. Home from work, shower, dinner, then out to the garage with the bottle. He'd come back inside hours later, smelling of smoke and alcohol, and go straight to bed without speaking.
The distance between them grew.