The Vow She Swore to Break

Chapter 3

Hallway Scene

Rune: “Only Oneirokinesis can counter this — the power to step into another’s dreams and rewrite them. If a dream-walker enters and bends the nightmare’s structure, the madness twisting around Orlo might start to unravel.”

“Entering into dreams you say – wait a minute, I have an idea! “

I pull out my arcane pen, the one with blue core, from my pocket.

“Rune, do you have a notebook or any paper at all in which I can draw?”

Rune: “Yeah, I think I do – “,

Rune pulls out his small, weathered pocket diary — pages filled with magical symbols, sketches, spell margins, and pressed petals.

I take it carefully, flipping to a blank page. My fingers move on instinct.

The first line I draw curves into the familiar shape of my favorite flower — the Ghost Flame Lily.

Each petal glows with pale, moonlit hues, the way real Ghost Flame Lilies do — soft lavender and cold silvers that burn without heat. Long filaments trail from the bloom like shimmering threads of starlight, dripping ember-like sparks that float instead of falling. The flower looks almost as though it's made from light instead of matter, as if plucked from the night sky and rooted in dreams.

As I finish the final stroke of its stem, the ink trembles — then rises.

A faint blue flame blossoms from the drawing, tracing the paper but never burning it. The petals peel upward, growing beyond two dimensions, unfurling into reality like a creature waking.

The Ghost Flame Lily lifts from the diary — weightless, spectral — and blooms in midair. Its glow softens the chaos of the hallway around us. Shadows bend. The air hums.

Rune whispers, eyes wide,

“A Dream Avatar… you’re conjuring one.”

Ghostly petals swirl, gathering into a shape —a figure made of starlit petals and blue flame, softly pulsing like a heartbeat. Its form is temporary, fragile, but alive enough to walk through dreams.

Rune continues, voice low so only I can hear:

“With enough focus, it can enter Orlo’s mindscape — guide him through the nightmare Sylas trapped him in.”

A shiver races through me.

This is risky.

But Orlo doesn’t have much time.

The Ghost Flame Lily avatar flickers — soft and spectral.

I close my eyes, guiding it into the dreamscape. The ink I used to draw this flower is bound to me; creations made from it answer my call. Through it, I can weave matter from thought — shaping ink into presence, presence into power.

It channels energy from my subconscious, a conduit where imagination becomes form, a craft of binding thought into reality. Right now, Orlo is slipping deeper into REM sleep — the stage where memory and emotion twist together, where the mind surrenders to its rawest truths. A place where fear doesn’t hide. It hunts.

[Orlo’s dream world]

It's dark. Not nighttime-dark — void dark.

I'm standing in a forest where the trees rise like silhouettes, tall and thin, stretching into the sky like blackened ribs. The ground is cold beneath my feet. The air tastes damp, heavy. I can barely make out shapes through the mist.

Then I see it — something standing about ten meters ahead.

A figure.

It doesn’t move at first. Just stands there… watching.

As it begins walking toward me, slow and soundless, a faint light sways in its hand — a lantern. The glow barely reaches its body, only enough to reveal that it isn’t human. Not fully.

Its head is round and pitch-black, like a hollow void with two pale, glowing eyes floating inside it like moons.

From its skull branch out antler-like horns, twisted and uneven, like bone grown wrong. Its cloak hangs ragged around its frame, torn at the edges, brushing the ground as it moves.

It steps closer.

The lantern light flickers against the trees, and for a moment, the shadows look like they’re breathing.

My heartbeat drowns in the silence.

“Lily, lily, come back to life

Whisper the truth and destroy the lie,

Perish the thought of swinging in dark

Bring the soul back to light”

Ghost flame lily has started burning the whole forest with its pale moonlit flames, slowly the whole dreamland is turning into a garden of blue flame lilies. It will calm and please the mind with its alluring impact of magical flames, slowly the mind will escape the void darkness and leap into the Ethereal realm, and slowly his subconscious mind will wake up his sense of reality. That will bring him alive from the edge of death eventually.

A few moments later –

Orlo blinks awake, stretching as though nothing strange has happened at all. Like he just took a short nap.

Good for him, maybe… but I have a feeling that won’t be good for me.

Rune glances around nervously.

Rune: "We should get out of here before anyone notices. Let’s go."

"Yeah…"

I turn my head to follow him—but then I feel it.

A pair of eyes locks onto me, cold and unblinking.

Watching.

Waiting.

Like a predator that just spotted its next prey… and it’s me.

Ivara



My grandmother taught me to fight before she taught me almost anything else, on the theory that a girl who’d already lost her mother to the Order’s work deserved to know how to protect whatever was left of herself.

“Not for glory,” she’d say, correcting my stance in the cold training yard behind the Warden hall, years before Osint, before any of this. “Not for anger, either, though you’re welcome to feel plenty of that along the way. You learn this so nobody ever gets to decide, on your behalf, that you’re helpless. That decision belongs to you and no one else.”

I was seven, the same year I recited the oath unprompted, and I remember being more interested in the bow than the blade — something about the distance of it, the control, the way an arrow let you decide exactly how close you needed to let danger come before you answered it. My grandmother noticed, and adjusted her teaching accordingly, though she made sure I learned the blade too, patient with my clumsy early attempts in a way she rarely was about anything else.

“Your mother preferred the blade,” she told me once, watching me finally land a clean shot against the yard’s worn target. “Said the bow felt like keeping people at a distance she didn’t want to keep them at. I always thought that was rather the point of the bow, myself, but she had her own ideas about closeness.”

“Did she ever regret it? Choosing closeness?”

My grandmother had gone quiet for a long moment, the particular quiet of someone deciding how much truth a child could actually carry. “I don’t think she regretted the closeness,” she said finally. “I think she regretted that the Order taught her to be ashamed of needing it in the first place. That’s different.”

I didn’t understand the distinction then. I’ve had considerably longer to sit with it since.

* * *

I think about that conversation often, these past months — more than I have in years, if I’m honest about it, turning it over the way you turn over an old coin, checking whether it’s worth what you remember it being worth.

I choose the bow, every year, at every assessment, every drill. I’ve told myself it’s simply what I’m best at, the truest expression of skill rather than temperament. I understand now, watching myself fall for someone I’ve spent two years cataloguing as a threat, that my grandmother might have seen something in me even then that I’ve only recently found a language for.

I keep people at a distance because closeness cost my mother everything she had left to lose. I learned that lesson so early I mistook it for instinct rather than inheritance.

Sylas doesn’t let me keep my distance. That’s the terrifying, unmanageable truth of it — every time I’ve tried, these past months, to retreat back into the careful, professional removal of five years of training built into me, he’s simply waited, patient, until I ran out of reasons to stay away.

I don’t know yet whether that makes him dangerous in exactly the way my training warned me about, or whether it makes him the first person since my grandmother died who’s ever actually asked me to be close to something instead of teaching me to survive at a careful remove from everything that might eventually leave.

I suspect, given how this term has gone so far, that it might be both at once. Most of the important things in my life have turned out to be both at once, eventually. I’ve stopped expecting anything different.