I ran.

  Not through halls or memories I recognized, but through a fever-dream stitched from fear. Doors smmed open on rooms I had forgotten, rooms I wished I had. Each time I crossed a threshold, new figures awaited:

  My parents.My instructors.My doctors.Jae.

  Each frozen in some moment I had tried not to think about. Their faces blurred, edges wavering like painted portraits dipped in water.

  And behind me, the monsters.

  They did not walk. They did not run. They filled the space, a smear of shadow and light and teeth, dragging themselves through the dream in shapes that broke when I looked at them directly. Every time they lunged for someone I loved, the memory splintered like gss.

  One snapped around my father's arm and he disintegrated into ash.Another dragged its cws through my mother's silhouette and she vanished mid-breath.My instructors blurred, then ceased, erased cleanly by the darkness as if they had never stood there at all.

  I kept running.

  The more I fled, the clearer the monsters became: first just outlines, then limbs, then the faint impression of bodies sharpening with each new terror. They were feeding on the dream, on my fear, gaining weight and form.

  Only one pce ever stopped the chase. Only one memory where the monsters disappeared completely, where even the dream seemed to let me breathe.

  Jae.

  If I could just get back there—if I could just stay—none of this would hurt.

  But the moment never sted long. Every time his scene fell through, and the clinic appeared in his pce, the monsters went back to hunting. To being amorphous shadows. As if the dream refused to let them solidify completely.

  I ran harder.

  I couldn't let them catch me.

  The monsters surged again, closing in, their edges sharpening into the hint of hands, shoulders, limbs. Too defined now. Too tall. I dared one terrified gnce over my shoulder—

  And the dream tore away before I could see what they were becoming.

  Rocher and Seraphine followed the boy through the twisting corridors, breathless not from exertion but from the constant shifting of reality around them. Every door was a trapdoor. Every hallway folded into something new.

  Each time Rocher called, each time Seraphine tried to capture him with a spell, the boy only looked more terrified. To him, they were not saviors. They were the specters of expectation and failure.

  Seraphine's frustration crackled. "We're wasting time," she snapped, when another attempt at catching him caused the walls to fold in at the st second. "Every loop is a wound. We are watching her bleed and doing nothing."

  "We can't force her," Rocher said quietly, watching the boy's hunched back as he vanished through yet another door. "You've seen what happens when we try."

  Seraphine pressed her lips together. Her hands shook.

  "What do you propose, then?" she demanded. "We follow until we grow old?"

  Rocher inhaled, but he didn't have an answer.

  Every scene they stepped into buckled the moment they got close.

  Except one.

  The memory of the young man—the one with the gentle smile and the easy touch—remained stable. Rocher did not dare disturb it. Seraphine understood without words; each time the world funneled them back to that room, they stood at the threshold and let the moment py out.

  But every other attempt failed.

  The boy ran.They called after him.The dream remade itself, clean and merciless, every time.

  Seraphine grew more agitated, her hands trembling as another spell fizzled when she lost sight of him.

  "This is pointless," she snapped when yet again the boy slipped through Rocher's fingers. "The dream is rigged to keep us from catching her. Every shift erases progress."

  Rocher said nothing. Not yet.

  But something was bothering him.

  The next time the dream dropped them into the room with the young man, Rocher hesitated. The mp cast warm gold across their faces, the boy ughing into the older one's shoulder, everything soft and tidy.

  Too soft.Too tidy.

  Rocher watched the young man more closely.

  His smile held steady. Too steady. He blinked at odd intervals, expressions looping like scenes repeated by a faulty illusion. The hand on the boy's back always nded in the same pce, same angle, same rhythm.

  Rocher felt a chill.

  "This is not a memory," he murmured.

  Seraphine looked at him sharply. "Then what is it?"

  "A story. One she keeps telling herself."

  And as he watched, for the briefest instant, the young man's face flickered—not glitching, not dissolving—but bnk, as if something was missing behind the expression.

  Rocher's stomach dropped.

  This wasn't real.Or rather—it was real enough to Cire, but the dream was filling in the parts she refused to remember. Smoothing it over. It was a portrait painted over a wound.

  Before he could think better of it, Rocher stepped into the room. Some part of him knew he was about to break whatever fragile shelter Cire had built for herself.

  The illusion shattered like gss hit by a hammer.

  The boy gasped—not with the innocence of a startled child, but with the dread of someone remembering something they did not want to know. He scrambled backward, eyes wide with betrayal, and sprinted through the nearest wall as it opened into another corridor.

  Seraphine rounded on Rocher. "What are you doing?"

  Rocher barely heard her. His attention was on the remains of the scene, the fading imprint of the young man's arm around the boy's shoulders.

  "That memory was wrong," he whispered. Too perfect. No cracks. No fading. No strain.

  "Nightmares do not preserve the things that keep you whole. Not unless hiding them is part of the wound."

  Seraphine's breath hitched. "You think it was fake?"

  "Not fake." Rocher closed his eyes. "Incomplete."

  The dream hadn't shown them abandonment or rejection—because Cire had buried those parts so deeply the dream had nothing to work with. All it could do was repy an idealized fragment, a warm room with no ending.

  It was not a kindness. It was a scar the dream could only circle, never touch.

  Which meant—

  He must have hurt her in a way she never understood.Or never let herself understand.So the dream could not show the moment.It could only show the before and the aftermath.

  Rocher felt his whole understanding twist inside him.

  She had loved someone once—openly, freely.And then one day, he was gone.

  Without warning. Without care.

  Whether it was cruelty or circumstance, she had been abandoned all the same.

  No wonder she built a perfect memory to hide whatever came after.No wonder she never let anyone close enough to lose again.

  As the scene dissolved, Rocher felt the dream tighten, as though he had pulled away the only thread holding it steady.

  A sterile waiting room. Posters on the walls warning about dangers that meant nothing to Rocher. The boy sat hunched, coughing into a tissue. His skin had gone sallow. The air hummed with dread.

  Rocher swallowed hard. His pulse stuttered, reacting to a fear that wasn't technically his.

  But this time the fear wasn't abstract.It had a shape.A memory.A loss.

  He could still feel the echo of the young man's arm around the boy's shoulders—the way the boy leaned into him like it was the first pce he'd ever been allowed to rest. A ugh too bright, too unguarded to belong to the Cire he knew.

  And now here was the aftermath—this room without warmth, without that presence, without anything but the weight of waiting and dread.

  Burden. Loneliness. A grief with no edges and no outlet.

  They rolled off the boy with each flicker of the dream, so thick Rocher could almost taste the bitterness of it.

  He thought of his own childhood then—not to compare wounds, but because he recognized the shape of this emptiness. The way expectation repced affection. The way isotion wasn't born from hatred, but from being required to stand alone.

  But his next thought wasn't of his past.It was of Cire.

  Of her too-bright ughter that hid fear more than it revealed joy.Of how she stepped into danger first because she refused to let anyone else bleed.Of how she carried every wound quietly, as if silence were armor.Of how she never reached for help—not because she didn't need it, but because she had learned far too young that help disappears.

  He had never understood the origin of that instinct until now.

  Rocher's chest pulled tight with a new, sharper ache.

  He didn't just want to save her.He wanted her to let him in.To trust him with what she had never trusted anyone with since that boy.To know her—not just her strength, but the soft, terrified heart she protected so fiercely.

  He was not prepared to lose that.Not to this dream.Not to anything.

  He chased her again, calling her name.

  Hospital bed. Beeping machines. The boy thinner than seemed survivable.

  "What now?" Seraphine said in exasperation. "It's still the same loop."

  The ghost of the boy ran past them, bare feet padding on the tiles. For a second, he turned around to behold them, just as he did before. Except now, there was the flicker of something behind his eyes.

  Recognition. Almost. He wasn't seeing monsters this time. Not fully. Their edges were softening.

  "No. It's different. Something's starting to stick."

  Rocher inhaled slowly.

  He thought of himself, younger, standing in a courtyard with wooden practice sword in hand, desperately hoping someone would choose to stand at his side without being ordered to. How he'd learned to charm and ftter, to get people to like him, if only superficially.

  Cire had been the first to see past that. To stay after he'd given up the pretense.

  Now it was the reverse. They'd have to be patient while she worked her way through the fa?ade.

  "For now, we keep following," he said. "We keep calling. We give her what you and I never had."

  Seraphine blinked, anger stuttering. "Which is?"

  "Someone who doesn't leave when it's inconvenient," he said simply. "Someone who doesn't look away when it hurts. Someone who sees the worst of you and keeps their hand out anyway."

  He gnced at her.

  "It's what I wished for, growing up. I suspect I'm not alone in this."

  Seraphine's throat worked. She looked away quickly, as if the dream might notice the shine in her eyes and punish her for it.

  Another door smmed ahead. Another scene flickered, half-formed.

  Rocher tightened his grip on her fingers.

  He took a breath and raised his voice, not as a hero shouting orders on a battlefield, but as a man calling into a storm.

  "Cire, I'm here," he called. Not boy. Not stranger. The name he knew, anchored in every sylble. "We're here. And we're not leaving."

  The dream shuddered. A clear, impossible note answered him. It rang once, twice, as if struck from very far away and very close at the same time.

  Far ahead, the running figure stumbled.

  For the first time, the boy's steps faltered—not from fear but from a name half-forgotten. Confusion, maybe. Recognition buried deep.

  Seraphine squeezed Rocher's hand hard enough to hurt.

  "Again," she whispered.

  Rocher smiled despite himself, grim and determined.

  He had spent his life being what others needed him to be. A sword, a shield, a second son in the shadows.

  For once, he knew exactly who he wanted to be.

  He drew another breath and stepped into the next sliding scene, never loosening his grip.

  "Cire," he said into the shifting world. "I am not giving up. Do you hear me? We'll keep finding you, for as long as it takes."

  The chime was softer this time, but steady. Not a crack of light yet, but the promise of one.