The first night after the seed dissolved into the oak, sleep changed its texture.
It went on like usual—bread-heavy, fire-warm—until, just past midnight, the air thinned and turned glassy. The village dreamed in the same direction.
Lyra stood in a field that wasn’t a field. The grass was handwriting, stems curling into letters that brushed her shins. The sky was blank parchment, moonless and patient. Somewhere nearby, a river ran without sound, as if it were reading itself.
“Hello?” she called, and her breath wrote the word ahead of her in pale ink.
Footsteps answered. Eon stepped out of a grove of commas, hair damp as if sleep still clung to him. “You see it too.”
“I think it sees us,” Lyra said.
The ground rippled. Letters swarmed like minnows, gathering into a single line a few fe
