Chapter 9 The Dream That Didn’t Ask Permission
By the time they stopped for the night, Blackthorn felt like something they’d dreamed instead of somewhere they’d lived.
The valley had fallen away behind them. The trees had thinned, then thickened again in strange, uneven patches, as if the forest itself hadn’t quite decided where it wanted to exist.
They chose a small shelf of rock above a shallow dip in the land. It wasn’t much, but it offered a view of white slopes and dark trunks, and—more importantly—nothing close enough to hide in.
Lucien muttered something about “romantic death vistas,” but he helped Cael clear a space for the fire, wings tucked tight against the cold.
Anil sat on a flat stone and watched the two of them move.
Cael was all quiet efficiency: building the fire, checking the wind, the way the trees leaned, the faint patterns in snow that might be tracks—or might be something else.
Lucien was restless energy: kicking at loose branches, complaining about frozen fingers, pretending to be annoyed when Cael corrected the fire’s structure and then doing exactly what Cael suggested.
Underneath all of it, the air hummed with a tension none of them named.
When the fire finally caught, thin flames licking at the dusk, Lucien dropped onto a log with a theatrical sigh and nudged a chunk of wood with his boot.
“Haunted geography,” he muttered. “Top ten reasons never to follow an ex-angel into existential wilderness.”
Cael glanced over, but didn’t rise to the bait. He adjusted a stone near the fire instead, too precise, too contained.
Too quiet.
Too controlled.
Anil studied him.
“You’ve changed since Blackthorn,” she said softly.
Lucien snorted. “We all have. That’s what happens when reality starts behaving like wet paper.”
But Cael didn’t deflect. He looked at her.
And this time, he didn’t pretend to be fine.
“I feel him,” he said quietly. “More than before. Not as a voice. Not as memory.”
He hesitated, searching.
“More like… gravity,” he finished. “Pressure. I walk into places he’s touched, and the world remembers, but doesn’t know how.”
Lucien straightened, the joke dropping from his face.
“You feel Ardan,” he said slowly, “not as the boy who fell. Not as the angel he was.”
“No,” Cael said. “Like… evolution.”
The word seemed to thin the air between them.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
But final.
Anil’s fingers tightened in the edges of her coat.
“And when you feel him,” she asked, “what does it feel like? Inside you.”
Cael turned his gaze to the fire.
“It doesn’t always hurt,” he said. “Sometimes it almost feels like clarity. Like… something in me recognizes the shape he’s taking.”
Lucien stopped fidgeting.
That—more than the strange door, more than the frozen stream, more than the bending paths—made a chill walk down Anil’s spine.
Lucien tapped his knuckles against his knee. “That’s the part I hate the most,” he said lightly. “Not the reality fractures. Not the erasure. The fact that a piece of you looks at all this and thinks: oh. That makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Cael said sharply.
But even in the protest, she could hear it.
The honesty.
“It just… fits,” he added quietly. “Structurally. Like picking up a blade you know how to wield, even if you never wanted it.”
The fire cracked, throwing up a small shower of sparks.
Night thickened around them.
They ate in relative silence—hardtack, dried fruit, something Lucien swore was meat and Anil refused to investigate too closely.
Lucien eventually lay back, hands laced behind his head, staring up through the bare branches.
“If I start talking in my sleep,” he announced, “and it sounds prophetic, please ignore me.”
“Because you’re not prophetic?” Anil asked.
“Because I might be,” he said. “And I don’t want to help him.”
Cael actually huffed out a small breath that might have been a laugh.
It faded quickly.
Later, when the fire had burned low and the cold crept in under blankets and coats, Anil lay on her side, watching embers pulse.
Sleep didn’t descend.
It… slid.
Not a fall.
Not a dream.
A step.
The ridge, the fire, the frozen air blurred out.
Something else settled in.
She knew immediately this wasn’t a normal dream. Dreams tried to form themselves around you. This felt like it had been prepared before she arrived.
The ground beneath her feet was dark, soft, not earth, not stone. It reflected light that wasn’t there, like ink catching stars.
A single feather hung in front of her.
Silver-shot shadow.
Not falling. Not rising.
Suspended.
Waiting.
She didn’t reach for it this time.
She’d learned.
She simply acknowledged it.
“I know you,” she whispered.
The feather pulsed, the way a thought might pulse instead of light.
Her vision shifted.
The feather wasn’t in front of her anymore.
A figure was.
Not Lucien.
Not Cael.
Not exactly Ardan.
Someone turned slightly away, as if keeping part of himself out of frame. Not from shame. From deliberation.
Like seeing him fully would cost something.
When he spoke, it wasn’t quite his voice.
It was the world, briefly shaped to sound like him.
“You’re not dreaming,” it said.
“You stepped closer.”
Her throat went dry.
Anil didn’t ask the first thousand questions that wanted to come. She knew, instinctively, that questions would be answered on his terms, not hers.
So she did the only thing she had left.
She waited.
The not-him drew nearer without movement.
“The path you’re on,” it said, “wasn’t written for you.”
The words sank in like cold.
“You’re walking through space that was left blank,” it continued. “Waiting to see who would choose it.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
The feather—if it was a feather anymore—quivered in the air beside him, like punctuation.
“That’s true,” the voice said. “And untrue. Understanding isn’t always clarity, Anil. Sometimes it’s just… agreeing that something hurts and walking anyway.”
She swallowed.
“You’re still thinking like someone the world protects,” it went on. “The living ask if they have a choice. Stories ask what they’re willing to lose.”
She felt it then.
Not him.
Not his grace.
Not the boy who had shattered his own fate for her in another life.
She felt the story.
The thing underneath all of this.
The shape trying to form around them. Around him. Around her. Around Cael and Lucien and every place Ardan’s presence had brushed without fully landing.
She understood, in a faint, aching way, that it wasn’t just choosing him.
It was choosing all of them.
Even when they didn’t want it.
Especially when they didn’t want it.
Her lips moved before she could stop them.
“Ardan?”
The space between heartbeats shifted.
He didn’t answer in words.
But something acknowledged the sound of his name.
A small, almost-imperceptible softening in the air.
Almost.
Then it was gone.
The ground, the ink, the feather, the not-him—all folded away like a page closed mid-sentence.
She woke.
Not with a gasp.
Not with a scream.
She woke like someone surfacing from deep water, lungs already full, skin cold with a knowing that hadn’t had time to fade.
The fire had burned down to coals.
The sky above was thinly clouded, night almost over.
Cael sat upright on the other side of the embers, arms resting on his knees. He wasn’t blinking enough. His attention was stretched somewhere else.
Lucien was asleep—or pretending to be—with his back against a rock, arms crossed, wings loosely draped like a coat.
“Cael?” she whispered.
He turned his head slowly, like someone listening to two songs at once and forcing himself to focus on one.
“You felt him,” she said.
It wasn’t a question.
He nodded.
“Not like before,” he said. “Not as a cut. As… a question.”
She wrapped her blanket tighter around herself.
“What did he ask?” she whispered.
Cael’s gaze drifted back to the dying fire.
“Nothing,” he said. “He waited.”
She understood.
“So he’s not calling us anymore,” Anil said quietly. “He’s watching to see if we come.”
Cael’s jaw worked.
“He’s watching to see if we can,” he said. “If we still have enough of ourselves left to choose anything at all.”
Lucien’s voice drifted in from the rock, rough and drowsy.
“So he’s testing free will,” he said. “How charming. I miss the days when all he tested was my patience.”
Anil hadn’t realized he was awake.
He cracked one eye open.
“Go back to sleep,” he muttered. “If you start analyzing destiny at this hour, I’ll actually cry.”
She didn’t sleep again.
She lay there, feeling the night thin, feeling the weight of being observed by something she couldn’t see, something she had once loved in one form and was trying desperately not to fear in this one.
When morning finally came, it wasn’t dramatic.
No blood sunrise.
No ominous clouds.
Just a pale, tired light pressing through a low sky.
The world looked… normal.
Mostly.
They kicked snow over the coals, packed what little they had, and started walking.
From a distance, they would have looked like nothing more than three travelers in winter.
No storm.
No monsters.
No flare of magic.
But the lie lived in what wasn’t there.
No birds.
No tracks.
No distant curls of smoke from farmhouses or villages.
The wilderness felt untouched.
Not in a wild way.
In a curated way.
Like a painting someone hadn’t quite finished.
Lucien walked with his hands tucked into his coat, wings hidden, eyes constantly scanning.
“On a scale of one to ten,” he said eventually, “how likely is it that we’re walking through somewhere he’s already rearranged for us?”
Cael studied the tree line.
The slope. The pattern of snow.
“Eight,” he said.
“Eight?” Anil asked. “Not seven? Not nine?”
A faint, brief smile tugged at his mouth.
“If I say nine, you’ll start looking for monsters,” he said. “If I say seven, you’ll pretend you’re not scared.”
“And eight?” Lucien asked.
“Eight means I think this is deliberate,” Cael said. “But not finished.”
They continued.
The land rolled gently, rising and falling in slow, tired waves. Rocks pushed through the snow like knuckles. The trees grew sparser, then gathered again in clumps, as if someone had been moving forests around on a map and stopped halfway.
Ahead, the valley began to narrow between two low ridges.
Nothing alarming.
Nothing obviously wrong.
Just a natural corridor, cut by long-ago water and time.
Anil found herself staring at that gap more than anything else.
She couldn’t say why.
It wasn’t the darkest place in sight. It didn’t glow. It didn’t lean toward them like a threat.
It simply felt… expectant.
Like a question mark laid sideways across the land.
Lucien must have felt it too, because his wings shifted uneasily under his coat.
“I don’t like choke points,” he muttered. “Too many stories begin or end in places like that.”
“Maybe this is the middle,” Anil said.
Her voice sounded small against all that white.
Lucien glanced at her, no humor in his eyes.
“Optimistic,” he said.
“Realistic,” she replied. “The beginning was Blackthorn. This—”
She gestured at the narrowing land, at the quiet sky, at the absence of life.
“—this feels like the part where something decides whether we’re worth finishing.”
Cael had gone very still.
He wasn’t looking at the ridges.
He was… listening to them.
“What is it?” she asked quietly.
He hesitated.
“The rock ahead,” he said. “It’s just stone. But the space between? It’s been… adjusted.”
“By him?” Lucien asked.
“By what he’s becoming,” Cael answered.
The wind eased for a moment, as if it, too, wanted to hear the answer.
“Do we go around?” Anil whispered.
Lucien snorted. “You see a carefully prepared narrative bottleneck and your first instinct is to obey the horror rules and avoid it. I’m so proud.”
Cael didn’t smile.
“If we go around,” he said, “he’ll pull harder. That means more bending. More people caught in whatever he’s trying to learn.”
Anil looked back the way they’d come.
At the untouched snow.
At the empty sky.
At the absence of any world that wasn’t watching this.
“So if we avoid him,” she said, “someone else pays.”
Cael nodded once.
“Then we walk through,” she said.
It wasn’t courage.
Not really.
It was the simplest terrible logic she’d ever followed.
Lucien gave a low whistle.
“Spoken like someone the story is very fond of,” he said.
He turned back toward the narrowing gap between ridges.
“Fine,” he added. “Let’s go see what kind of trap free will looks like today.”
They walked toward the corridor.
Step after step, boots crunching in shallow snow, breath clouding the air.
The land funneled them closer and closer, the ridges rising on either side like the sides of a throat.
Anil’s pulse tripped faster the nearer they got.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere—far off, or everywhere—something was leaning forward.
Watching.
Measuring.
Not their power.
Not their fear.
Their choices.
Cael’s fingers briefly brushed hers, a quiet, wordless contact.
We are still deciding, that touch said.
Us. Not him.
She held on for three steps, then let go, because if she didn’t, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to release him later when it mattered.
The shadow of the ridges fell over them.
Sound dulled.
The open world narrowed.
The corridor waited.
And somewhere between the last wide breath of sky and the first step into stone-framed silence, Anil understood:
This wasn’t just where the world tested them.
This was where Ardan would find out whether they were still capable of refusing him at all.
She stepped forward anyway.
Into the choke point.
Into the waiting.
Into whatever the story would dare to do next.
