Bound by Dreams

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Eliwyne

I was dreaming.

But it didn’t feel like it usually did—hazy, slipping between thoughts like pages half-read. This dream held shape. Weight. I could feel the air against my skin, damp with mist and scented faintly of river lavender.

It was as if the dream had been waiting for me.

I stood at the edge of a glade, barefoot in soft moss. Above, the sky shimmered a pearly gray—not Aetherra’s usual pink dawn, but something dimmer, deeper. Like twilight trapped in glass. And before me, lying on the moss like it had been placed with care, was a smooth stone.

I reached down. As soon as my fingers brushed it, something shifted. Not in the dream—but in me.

A hum, like a note struck long ago still ringing. I knew this place. Not by sight. Not by name. But in my bones, I knew it.

This wasn’t Aetherra. Not truly. The colors were wrong. The air tasted heavier. But it was something older. Something I’d seen once in a book with no title, or maybe heard whispered through the walls of the academy when the moon was high.

I pressed the stone to my palm.

And the world responded.

Stone by stone, a path formed at my feet. Not erratic, but deliberate. It curved gently through the glade, arcing toward a distant rise where white towers were beginning to bloom out of the mist. A castle. Not delicate like those in fairytales, but strong—weathered like it had stood through storms and silence alike.

It wasn’t mine.

I hadn’t shaped it.

But still, it welcomed me.

My dress shifted as I walked—a lavender silk gown I didn’t remember putting on, woven with starlight and cloudlight. It whispered as I moved, sleeves trailing behind like smoke, as though it had always known this path before I did.

The castle doors were open. The air inside was still.

No guards. No footsteps. No voice calling out—but I knew someone had just passed through here.

I drifted through the hallways in silence, hand grazing the stone. It thrummed faintly beneath my fingers, like the bones of the place were remembering something. Or someone.

A corridor opened into a long gallery. Tapestries hung from the high beams, some frayed at the edges, others still glowing faintly with old magic. I recognized none of the scenes, and yet… they made my chest ache with a longing I didn’t have words for.

Then I heard it.

Not a sound. A presence.

A flicker at the edge of the gallery. A breath of movement, just beyond the archway. I stepped forward, drawn not by fear but instinct, and stopped just before the balcony threshold.

Someone had been here. Recently.

The wind still danced with their warmth.

I moved closer to the railing and looked down into the garden. Roses, pale violet, bloomed in perfect lines. Lanterns bobbed lazily in the air like fireflies too tired to rise. A figure had passed here. A shadow I couldn’t quite catch, like a dream brushing past a mirror’s edge.

He was tall. Dark. Not threatening—just… heavy, like someone who’d carried too much for too long. His presence lingered in the air, the same way thunder lingers after a storm has passed.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t dare.

Instead, I placed my hand on the railing where his might’ve rested. The stone was still warm.

And for the first time since I’d entered the dream, I realized something strange.

This wasn’t my world.

But neither was it his.

We were meeting in the seam between two places. Two lives. Aetherra and… something else. A name almost surfaced in my mind, but it slipped away like sand through fingers.

I didn’t know him.

But I felt like I’d always been waiting to.