Chapter 8 – Dream of Lilies
639 Words
The night was kind to Elias for once. The storm had quieted to a soft drizzle, and the forest, for all its strange murmurs, seemed to breathe in rhythm with his weary heart. He had made camp beneath the twisted limbs of an elder willow, where moonlight pooled silver across the moss.
Exhaustion claimed him quickly. But sleep, for Elias, was never mercy—it was a door to things unseen.
He found himself walking through a field of lilies. Endless, pale, and luminous, they swayed without wind, their petals glowing faintly as though lit by stars beneath the earth. The air smelled of rain and something softer—something like sorrow made fragrant.
In the distance, he saw her.
A woman stood barefoot among the lilies, her long black hair drifting behind her as if the night itself had woven through it. Her back was turned to him, her white gown rippling with a light that seemed both holy and haunted.
“Mira,” he whispered, though he did not know how he knew her name.
She turned.
Her face—gods, her face—was both beautiful and unbearably sad. Her eyes were not the frozen ponds the stories had promised, but deep, infinite wells of shadow rimmed with faint light, as if the stars had drowned there and learned to live in darkness.
When she spoke, her voice brushed against his soul like silk torn at the edges.
“You should not walk here, hunter. The lilies grow only for the lost.”
“I’ve been lost a long time,” he answered.
She smiled faintly, a curve of lips that held no joy. “Then you belong among them.”
He stepped closer, the flowers bending under his boots without sound. “Are you the witch they fear? The one they curse and whisper of?”
She looked past him, to the horizon where no dawn rose. “They fear what they made of me. They whisper because they cannot bear silence.”
Elias wanted to reach for her, but something unseen kept him still—the sense that to touch her would be to drown in centuries of grief. “Why show yourself to me?”
“Because you dream of lilies,” she said. “And only those who carry sorrow that matches mine can find this place.”
A wind rose, carrying the scent of the flowers into the night. The petals began to lift, swirling around her like pale ghosts. “When you wake,” she said, “follow where the lilies grow. They will lead you to me.”
He tried to speak again, but the dream began to unravel. The field dimmed, the light bleeding away. Her eyes were the last to fade—eyes that held both doom and deliverance.
“Do not fear what you will find, Elias,” her voice whispered as the world dissolved. “Fear what you will give.”
He woke with a start. The fire had gone out. Dawn bled pale gold through the trees, and on the damp ground beside him, where no flowers had been before, three white lilies lay in bloom.
He touched one gently. It was real—cold with dew, soft as breath.
Elias looked toward the northern ridge, where mist curled like fingers calling him onward. His heartbeat matched the rhythm of the forest again—slow, steady, inevitable.
Somewhere ahead, the witch waited. And in the scent of lilies lingering in the morning air, he swore he could still hear her voice.
“Follow where the lilies grow.”
He gathered his pack, placed the lilies carefully within it, and set out into the mist. The world behind him faded; the one ahead whispered his name.
The dream had ended. The hunt had truly begun.
- Writer
