While Eryx and Theon were away at their council meeting, the house felt like it was drowning in a silence so thick it was almost audible. I spent most of the second day wandering aimlessly from room to room, unable to sit still or find any peace. My skin felt too tight for my bones, and that strange, foggy sensation in my head had returned with a vengeance. This time, however, it brought friends. Flashes of sharp, alien imagery flickered behind my eyelids, making no sense but feeling dangerously familiar.
By the second night, the dreams started.
I wasn't in my cozy bedroom anymore. In my sleep, I was standing on a vast plain of cracked, obsidian earth under a sky the color of an eerie, bruised purple. The air didn't smell like the pine forest or the rain; it smelled like something burnin
