Rocher had experienced any number of magical dispcements. This felt like none of those.

  There was no sense of motion. No up or down. Only the sudden absence of his body in the way he understood it, and the lingering warmth of Cire's and Seraphine's hands that somehow still existed in whatever he had become.

  Light blinked back on.

  He stood in a corridor that wasn't a corridor.

  The walls were smooth, painted a color he had no word for; not stone, not wood, not pster. Pale squares of light shone from the ceiling without fme or crystal. The floor was some kind of manufactured tile, glossy and cold even through his boots.

  Seraphine stood beside him, looking even more out of pce. Her Tower robes and flowing red hair stood stark against the strange backdrop.

  "It worked," she breathed. "We're inside."

  People moved past them.

  Adults in stiff, odd clothing unlike any he had seen, carrying stacks of paper and objects that glowed faintly. A woman wearing shoes that clicked like horse hooves without hooves. A man with a metal circle around his neck and an expression drawn tight with worry. None of them looked at Rocher or Seraphine. None brushed them, though they passed close enough that he should have felt their sleeves.

  "We're like ghosts," Seraphine murmured. Her fingers tightened around his. "The dream has not cast us into anything material."

  Something tugged at the edge of his awareness. Something small, sharp. He turned to find it.

  A thin, silvery note brushed his hearing and was gone. Not in this corridor, but through it, as if the sound had slipped sideways from somewhere else.

  A door opened.

  A boy stepped out.

  Twelve? Thirteen? Narrow shoulders hunched under the weight of a backpack that seemed too heavy for his frame. His clothes were strange, all harsh lines and manufactured fabrics, but the slump in his posture was universal.

  The boy paused, as if sensing a draft in a room with no windows. His eyes swept the hallway, passing over the bustling adults without interest.

  None of them so much as gnced at him. He was as much a ghost to them as they were.

  Then his eyes nded on Rocher and Seraphine.

  He froze.

  Rocher's breath caught.

  The jawline was different. The height. The gender. The entire body wrong in angles and proportion.

  But the eyes—

  The eyes were familiar in a way that felt wrong. The color was different, but the way they widened, the way they took in everything and then snapped quickly away like it hurt to be seen—

  "Cire," he said, with the same certainty he reserved for the feeling of his sword in his grip.

  He reached for the boy without thinking.

  The boy's shoulders jerked. His lips formed a word Rocher could not hear over the whir of some invisible machine. Fear rippled through his expression, white and pure.

  He turned and ran.

  "Wait!" Seraphine shouted, instinctive.

  The dream did not care.

  The boy lunged for the end of the hall. As his hand hit the door, the entire corridor shuddered, walls warping. The door swung open onto a completely different room: a cramped space with bunk-like furniture and posters pstered on the walls. The boy plunged through.

  A single, muffled chime threaded through the lurch of the world, there and gone between one room and the next.

  "That sound..." Rocher breathed. "Let's follow it."

  The world lurched.

  They stepped into a room cluttered with objects Rocher could not name: molded chairs, a box that glowed with moving images on one wall, cupboards with metal handles. A man and woman sat at a table. The man leaned forward, hands csped, voice low and sharp. The woman wrung her fingers together and tried to soften every word.

  The boy sat smaller than both of them, shoulders creeping up around his ears.

  Expectation thickened the air like smoke.

  Rocher did not understand their phrases, their nguage. But he knew the posture. He knew the heavy, invisible mantle pced on too-young shoulders.

  His jaw clenched. He remembered the king's hand on his shoulder at ten years old, the weight of a kingdom pced there like a testing stone.

  'You will be the bde we cannot show the world. You will sacrifice what your brother cannot.'

  The boy flinched at a phrase Rocher did not catch. His gaze flicked toward the corner of the room where Rocher and Seraphine stood, unseen.

  Rocher stepped forward on instinct.

  "Boy," he said, "can you hear me?"

  The boy's eyes widened further. Fear fshed across his face, sharp enough to slice. His chair scraped back.

  He bolted, and the room fractured once more.

  They chased him into a hall filled with long tables, each cluttered with parchment and gssware unlike any Rocher had seen. Strange letters and symbols scrawled across boards.

  An older man in a white coat tapped a sheet of paper with red marks. The boy stood before him, pale.

  The words were different. The weight behind them was the same.

  Rocher didn't understand the culture here, the strange priesthood of numbers and marks. But he knew what it was to have your worth questioned by someone who held your future in a penstroke.

  The boy's lips moved. Rocher couldn't hear the answer, but he saw it in the slump of his shoulders.

  The scene blurred, colors smearing. Somewhere under the chaos, the bell rang again, thin as breath against gss.

  "Stop changing," Seraphine hissed at the dream. "We can't help if you keep—"

  The world snapped into a new configuration.

  Metal chairs. The hum of a dozen voices fttened into background noise. The boy sat alone at a table with a tray of unappetizing food, a book open in front of him as flimsy armor against the ughter of groups that never invited him in.

  Rocher's chest tightened.

  He remembered meals at court where nobles argued policy over his head as if he had no ears. He remembered eating in antechambers because he made the true heir uncomfortable simply by existing. He remembered pretending to be engrossed in a sword manual so he would not have to watch his brother ughing with the friends he would never have.

  He had sat exactly like this—small in a room that pretended not to see him.

  "We aren't here to empathize," Seraphine said under her breath, though her own eyes glistened. "We're here to find where Cire has lodged herself and cut her out before the dream consumes her."

  "I'm aware," Rocher said. His gaze never left the boy. "But understanding the lock helps in finding the key."

  "Then, you see it too, don't you?" she murmured. "Every shift resets her. Each one wipes the ste—she forgets, starts again, accepts everything around her as real."

  Rocher inhaled slowly, nodding. If they stayed back, the memory unfolded cleanly. If they stepped forward—

  The boy's head jerked up again, sensing their approach. This time Rocher saw what the boy saw reflected briefly in the mirrored surface of a metal panel on the wall.

  Not Rocher and Seraphine as they knew themselves.

  One figure limned in cold, green light, eyes burning like cage-bars. Another with hair bzing red, edges dripping into the air like poison.

  Monsters.

  No wonder he runs, Rocher thought. Seeing them was like seeing his worst fears given shape.

  "Stop!" Seraphine called again. "We aren't here to hurt you!"

  The boy shoved away from the table. The cafeteria buckled, floor tilting.

  A new room snapped into pce—smaller than the others, cluttered, lived-in. A single mp cast a soft, amber cone of light over two figures on the floor.

  The boy sat cross-legged beside a young man.

  Older by a few years, maybe. Broad-shouldered. Easy-smiled. His hair was tied up haphazardly as if he'd pushed his hands through it too many times while ughing.

  He wasn't family. That much Rocher understood immediately. There was no blood in the way the boy looked at him—only something gentler, more fragile.

  A kind of trust that had no training, no duty, no weight. Something chosen.

  The young man nudged the boy's shoulder with his own, grinning at something on a tiny glowing screen between them. The boy's ugh broke open the room like a ntern—bright, unguarded, startling in its softness.

  Rocher stopped in his tracks.

  He had never heard a ugh like that from Cire.

  "Wait, Sera." His hand shot out to block her path. "Let's try to understand first this time."

  He had charged into every vision so far, desperate to pull Cire free the moment he saw her pain.But this—this softness—was something he did not want to break.Understanding her meant witnessing what she had loved, not only what had wounded her.

  The boy leaned closer, head dropping briefly against the young man's arm. The fondness in the gesture was unmistakable—quiet, natural, the kind of touch that came from hours and hours of being allowed to exist without judgment.

  The young man said something—gentle, teasing. The boy went scarlet, swatted at him, then dissolved into ughter again, hands covering his face like he didn't know where to put his joy.

  Rocher felt it like a bde pressed to his breastbone.

  This was what Cire had been, before the weight, before the silence. A child who could ugh into someone else's shoulder without flinching. Someone loved enough that the room itself felt warm.

  Seraphine's breath hitched beside him. "This... this is her?"

  Rocher couldn't answer.

  The boy tipped sideways until his temple brushed the young man's shoulder. The young man wrapped an arm around him without thinking, pulling him closer, grounding him in a way that said: you are wanted here.

  Rocher watched that arm. The ease of it. The thoughtlessness of gentleness. A warmth offered without price.

  He had wanted something like that once. A hand on his shoulder that meant comfort, not correction. Laughter shared without calcution. Someone who chose him because they liked him, not because they needed a bde at their side.

  The boy said something Rocher couldn't hear. The young man's smile softened—real, unguarded, full of affection so bright it almost hurt to look at.

  It struck through him with a crity as sharp as a vow. This was the person Cire had let past every wall. The one who made her ugh too loudly and forget to hide her joy. The one she had lost so young that the dream could barely hold his shape.

  A chime sounded—small, thin, like something fragile cracking.

  The light flickered.

  The young man's ugh wavered, glitched, then cut short.

  "No," Seraphine whispered, stepping forward. "Let her have this. Just a moment more—"

  But the dream was tightening.

  The man's hand reached for the boy's shoulder—and passed through him, fingers scattering into static.

  The boy's smile faltered.

  The room folded inward, edges melting. The man's shape stretched, blurred, dissolved like ink pulled under water.

  But it did not feel like fear.Or pain.Or rejection.

  It felt like a candle being blown out from far away—sudden, quiet, inexplicable.

  The boy—Cire—reached for him.

  His lips formed a silent word, soft as a goodbye.And then he was gone.

  The room folded inward, colors dripping off the walls.

  Rocher took a step forward, instinct torn between helping and respecting the strange tenderness of the moment.

  He had never seen Cire reach for anyone like that—never seen her desperation, her need, id bare and unguarded.

  Losing the moment felt like sand slipping through his fingers.

  The scene colpsed before he could learn more.

  As the colors washed away, Rocher felt the faintest tug—as if a thread he hadn't meant to sever had been rewoven behind him. A sense of recognition, thin as smoke, slipped out of reach.