ALCYDE
The dreams start innocent enough—Allura at fourteen, braiding cornflowers into her white hair while Anson and I sparred in the training yard. Her laugh carrying on summer wind, eyes blue as chicory blooms, calling us inside for the lunch Nana Maggie prepared. Memory disguised as nostalgia, harmless as childhood itself.
Then her dress slides off one pale shoulder. Then both.
But it's not the nakedness that disturbs me most. It's how the dream-light catches her skin, making it luminescent like something that lives in deep caves, something that's never seen real sun. Her white hair spreads around us like a living thing, each strand cool against my overheated skin, wrapping around my wrists with gentle insistence that feels nothing like gentleness. Those blue eyes shift purple at the
