For several seconds, Fiab did not move.
The entrance hall remained clear around him, and that was the first thing that frightened him. Not the darkness, not the silence, not even the fact that he had crossed a door that should have refused him. The frightening part was how complete everything was. The hall did not blur at the edges like the restaurant. It did not collapse into unfinished shapes or vague impressions. It existed with the same precision as his room, his street, the comic shop; maybe even more.
The floor was made of dark tiles arranged in a geometric pattern, polished long ago and worn dull by years of footsteps. A narrow carpet ran down the center of the entrance, faded at the edges but still elegant, with red and gold shapes that looked almost black in the dim light. Against one wall stood an umbrella stand of brass and dark wood, where several umbrellas rested with their handles curved like old fingers.
Fiab moved slowly. He could not feel the floor beneath him, but his mind still expected it to be cold. The air had no smell, yet the house seemed to suggest one: old paper, closed rooms, furniture wax, dried flowers, tea leaves kept too long in metal boxes. It was strange. He did not actually smell any of it. He only understood that the real house, the waking house, must have smelled that way.
That thought stopped him.
The real house.
He looked around again. He had never been there. He was certain of it. No memory in him matched this entrance hall: no school route, no errand, no afternoon walk, no childhood visit with his mother. Nothing. And yet the place was open to him.
The restaurant had refused him because he had never entered it. That had felt like a rule, simple and almost comforting. His room existed because he knew it. The comic shop existed because he had visited it dozens of times. The streets near his house existed because his body had crossed them every day. But this house was not his, and still it was there, clear and waiting.
A thin fascination moved through him, stronger than the fear. It spread slowly, like warmth inside something cold. If he could enter a place he had never seen, then maybe the city was not closed after all. Maybe the night was not made only of his memories. Maybe there were other maps hidden inside it, other routes folded behind ordinary doors, other rooms belonging to people whose hands had touched his for longer than a second.
He did not know why that thought came to him. He only knew that it felt true.
He passed through the entrance hall and reached a corridor. The house was old, but not poor. Everything in it belonged to another time and had been preserved with care. The wallpaper was dark green, faded in some places, with a floral pattern so delicate it seemed almost ashamed of itself. Narrow framed pictures lined the walls: formal portraits, landscapes, a black-and-white photograph of a dinner table arranged with too many glasses. A small console held porcelain figurines, a lace runner and a silver tray with nothing on it.
On the left, through an open doorway, Fiab saw a sitting room. The furniture was heavy and elegant, too large for the space, with carved wooden arms and dark fabric cushions. A glass cabinet stood against the wall, filled with porcelain cups, old keys, folded fans, small boxes and things he could not name. There was a radio on a side table, the kind with a wooden body and round knobs. Beside it, a lamp with a pleated shade cast a weak yellow light that did not seem to come from electricity.
It was not a modern house, not really. It was a house that had once been modern, once been expensive, once been admired by visitors who understood the value of polished wood and silence. Time had passed through it without destroying it. Everything had grown old without becoming cheap.
Fiab stepped closer to the sitting room and reached toward the back of a chair, more out of instinct than hope. His fingers passed through it. Nothing. Of course. Even here, he could not touch.
Still, the fact that he could see it all was enough to make him forget, for a moment, that he was afraid. The chair, the cabinet, the faded wallpaper, the brass umbrella stand near the entrance; all of it belonged to someone else's life. Someone else's memory.
Maybe not mine, he thought. Maybe hers.
The idea made the house feel suddenly less empty.
A sound came from the corridor. Not a footstep exactly, but a shift, as if someone had leaned against the silence and disturbed it. Fiab turned.
At first, he saw only the corner where the corridor bent toward the back of the house. Then a shape appeared there, half hidden by the wall: a head, a shoulder, part of a black sleeve. Someone was watching him. The figure remained still for a few seconds, showing only the upper half of the body, as if she had leaned out from another room and stopped in the middle of the movement.
Then she stepped fully into view.
It was the elderly woman.
Without the rain, without the street, without the careful distance between them, she seemed smaller than he remembered. She was short, almost compact, with a curved back that made her head lean slightly forward, giving her body the shape of someone who had spent years bending over tables, books, letters or secrets. Her white hair was arranged in tight curls, carefully kept and full, not messy, but alive around her face like a soft crown. The sunglasses were gone.
Her eyes were visible now: dark, sharp and very awake.
She wore the same long black coat, though in that place it looked less like something meant for the street and more like part of her. Her hands were thin, with raised veins and polished nails. Old hands, but precise.
For a moment neither of them moved. Then her expression changed, not into fear, but into alarm.
"You," she said.
Fiab did not answer.
The woman took one step closer, slowly, as if approaching a wild animal or something fragile that might disappear.
"You are the boy from yesterday."
He knew then that she could see his face. Not a blurred shape. Not an unfinished head. Him.
Fiab swallowed, though he had no throat to feel it with.
"You can see me," he said.
"So can you," she replied.
Only then did he understand that he was seeing her clearly too. Not like the faceless figures from the street, not like the heads without eyes or mouths. Her face had every line, every wrinkle, every severe little movement around the lips.
The contact. His hand. Her hand. The wallet between them.
The woman came closer, her gaze fixed on him.
"How did you enter?"
Fiab looked back toward the entrance hall.
"Through the door."
Her mouth tightened.
"That is not what I asked."
"I don't know," he said. "I saw it from outside. The door was different from the others."
"Different how?"
Fiab hesitated. He felt suddenly foolish.
"It had color," he said. "More than the rest. Like a border around it. Or not a border exactly. It was clearer. Warmer. The other doors looked flat, but that one didn't."
The woman remained silent, and the silence made the corridor feel narrower.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"I walked through."
"You should not have been able to."
"I know."
The answer came out before he could stop it.
"You know?"
"I tried somewhere else first," Fiab said. "A restaurant. I had never been inside. I could pass through the glass, but not really enter. Everything behind it became wrong, like it didn't want me there."
The woman watched him without blinking.
"So you understood the limit."
"I thought I did."
"You understood one limit," she said. "Not this."
Fiab waited.
The woman looked past him toward the entrance door, then back at his face. She seemed to be making a decision and disliking every part of it.
"This house is not yours," she said.
"I know."
"You have never entered it while awake."
"No."
"You have never been invited."
"No."
"And yet you crossed the threshold."
Fiab said nothing.
The woman breathed in slowly through her nose. It was such a human gesture that, for a second, the whole thing became more disturbing.
"As a Dreamwalker," she said, "that should be impossible."
Fiab stared at her. The word remained in the corridor after she said it. Dreamwalker. It did not sound like an explanation. It sounded like a door opening onto something larger.
"What does that mean?" he asked.
The woman looked at him sharply, as if the question itself confirmed something she had not wanted to believe.
"You do not know."
"No."
"Who taught you to leave your body?"
"No one."
"Who brought you here?"
"No one."
"Then how long has this been happening?"
Fiab thought of the previous nights, of the heaviness before sleep, of the unclear sensations he had dismissed because they vanished by morning.
"I don't know. Not like this. Yesterday was the first time I saw myself."
The woman's face became still. Too still.
"Come," she said.
She turned and walked down the corridor. Fiab did not move immediately.
The woman stopped without looking back.
"If you could enter, then you can follow."
It was not an invitation. Not exactly. But he followed.
The corridor opened into a dining room. The room was narrow, old and elegant, with a long wooden table at its center. The table had been polished so many times that its surface looked almost black. Chairs with carved backs stood around it, more than the room needed. On one wall hung a mirror darkened by age; on another, a row of copper utensils caught the weak light with dull, reddish reflections. They were old kitchen tools, carefully cleaned and arranged as if they were decorative objects now: ladles, molds, a small pan, a curved knife with a handle of dark horn.
Nothing was new. Nothing was careless.
A cabinet held folded tablecloths, porcelain plates and glasses so thin they seemed dangerous. A lace cloth covered the sideboard, and on it sat a teapot with two cups. The teapot was white, decorated with a pattern of small blue flowers.
The woman sat at the head of the table. The chair seemed too large for her small body.
"Sit," she said.
Fiab sat across from her, though he did not know if sitting meant anything there. His body had no weight. The chair did not receive him. Still, his position changed, and he found himself seated.
The woman lifted the teapot.
Fiab watched her hand close around the handle. She could touch it. That unsettled him more than he expected.
She poured tea into one cup, then the other. Pale steam rose from both, curling upward in slow threads. There was no smell, and no heat reached him.
She pushed one cup toward him. It moved across the table.
Fiab stared at it, then at her hand.
"How can you do that?" he asked.
"Do what?"
"Use the teapot. Touch the cup. Drink."
The woman looked at the teapot, then back at him, as if the answer were obvious.
"Because these objects were prepared."
Fiab looked again. The teapot was ordinary porcelain, delicate and old, with its small blue flowers and thin handle. Nothing about it seemed powerful.
"Prepared how?"
"With patience," she said. "And with a kind of enchantment."
The word made him uncomfortable. It sounded too much like stories, too much like books, games, impossible things that belonged somewhere else. Not to a dining room with old copper utensils on the wall and rain sliding down dark windows.
"An enchantment?" he repeated.
The woman gave him a dry look.
"Do not make that face. It is not fireworks, not a trick, not something done with a wand in the air."
"I didn't say that."
"You thought it."
Fiab said nothing.
She lifted the cup again, slowly, allowing him to watch the movement. Her fingers closed around the handle. The porcelain did not resist her, did not blur, did not let her pass through. It remained there, held between her fingers like any normal object in the waking world.
"Most things here are only images," she said. "Copies. Impressions. Memory wearing the shape of matter. You pass through them because they are not truly solid for you."
"And this?"
"This has been anchored."
Fiab looked at the cup in front of him.
"Anchored to what?"
"To the house. To me. To the layer I use when I walk."
She set her cup down with great care.
"There are objects that can be taught to remain. Not many, and not easily. They must belong somewhere first. They must have a history, a place, repeated use. A cup touched every evening. A table where the same hands have rested for years. A knife kept in the same drawer. A key carried by the same person until it remembers the weight of being held."
Fiab listened, fascinated despite himself.
"So objects can remember?"
The woman's eyes narrowed slightly.
"Everything remembers. Most things simply do not know what to do with the memory."
He looked around the room again. The dark table, the porcelain cups, the copper utensils on the wall, the old cabinet, the lace cloth. Suddenly none of it seemed decorative anymore. It seemed arranged, chosen, kept.
"And the enchantment makes them usable?" he asked.
"For those who know how to use them, yes."
"Could I learn?"
The woman did not answer immediately, and that silence was answer enough.
"Not yet," she said at last.
"But maybe?"
"Curiosity is not permission."
Fiab looked down at the cup she had placed before him. Pale steam rose from it, though he could not feel heat and could not smell tea.
"Can I drink it?"
"No."
"Then why give it to me?"
"Because one should offer tea to a guest," she said, "even an impossible one."
She watched him for a moment, and her expression became more severe.
"And because I wanted to see whether you would try to touch it."
Fiab looked up.
"Why?"
"To understand how much you know."
"I don't know anything."
"Yes," she said softly. "That is becoming clear."
She took another small sip of tea, then set the cup down with great precision.
"What is your name?"
His first instinct was to answer. Fiab. The word nearly left him. Then he remembered the way she had reacted the first time, how she had nodded as if his name meant something. He remembered that this was her house, her corridor, her table, and that she had already said he should not have been able to enter.
"Marco," he said.
The lie sounded weak even to him.
The woman watched him over the rim of the cup.
"Marco."
"Yes."
She did not say she believed him. That was worse.
"Very well, Marco," she said. "Which family do you belong to?"
"My family?"
"Do not play stupid."
"I'm not."
The woman's fingers rested lightly around the cup.
"Which house? Which line? Whose blood?"
Fiab frowned.
"I don't belong to any noble family."
The woman did not move.
"None?"
"No."
"Your mother?"
"She works."
"That is not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
"And your father?"
Fiab looked down at the cup of tea he could not touch.
"I don't know him."
The woman leaned back slightly. For the first time, something like uncertainty crossed her face.
"Were you adopted?"
"No."
"You are certain?"
"Yes."
"Families lie," she said.
"My mother doesn't."
The answer came too quickly, and the woman noticed. She looked at him for a long moment, and the room seemed to grow quieter around them. Outside the windows there was no real view, only the suggestion of rain on glass, silver lines sliding down a darkness that did not belong to evening or morning.
Then she said, very softly, "That is almost worse."
Fiab looked up.
"What is?"
"If you are not from a house, and not adopted into one, then you should not be able to do what you just did."
"I didn't do anything."
"You entered a place that was not in your memory."
"I saw the door."
"That is not enough."
"For me it was."
The woman's expression hardened.
"No. For anyone else, it would not be."
The words made something inside him tighten. Not fear. Something close to pride, but not pleasant. He did not understand what he was. He did not understand the room, the woman, the word Dreamwalker, or the objects that could be anchored until they remembered the weight of being held. But he had entered. The house had allowed him in. The impossible had happened through him, and for one brief moment the strangeness of it was not only terrifying. It was beautiful.
A secret architecture under the city. Doors inside sleep. Places that belonged to other people but could still open, if he knew how to see them. He felt himself leaning toward the thought.
The woman noticed that too.
"Do not look pleased."
Fiab blinked.
"I'm not."
"Yes, you are. You are fascinated."
He said nothing.
"That is dangerous."
"Why?"
"Because fascination makes boys careless."
"I'm not careless."
"You walked into a stranger's house while outside your body."
Fiab had no answer to that.
The woman drank another small sip of tea, then set the cup down with great precision.
"What you described," she said, "is not normal for a Dreamwalker. We move through the layer of places we know, or through places prepared for us, opened to us, inherited by us. A room, a street, a house, a family path. Memory and permission. Those are the usual doors."
Fiab listened without breathing.
"But you," she continued, "seem to have followed a trace that was not yours."
"The trace from touching you?"
Her eyes sharpened. So he had guessed too much.
"I don't know," he said quickly. "I just thought--after yesterday, after the wallet--"
"Stop."
He stopped.
The woman looked toward the corridor, as if afraid someone might be listening from the empty house. Then she leaned forward.
"You must not say this to anyone."
"I don't even know what this is."
"That makes it more important that you say nothing."
"Why?"
"Because if what you are saying is true, then you are a very rare mutation."
The word struck him harder than he expected. Mutation. Not gift. Not talent. Not power.
Mutation.
The woman seemed to regret the word, but she did not take it back.
"Rare enough," she continued, "that some would want to study you, some would want to use you, and some would prefer you not to exist at all."
Fiab sat very still. The fascination did not disappear; it changed shape.
"What can I do?" he asked.
"For now? Nothing."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the safest one."
"I entered your house."
"Yes," she said. "And that is exactly why you will do nothing."
She stood. The chair moved back without sound. Her small, curved figure seemed older now, but not weaker. If anything, the room bent around her more than around him. The house belonged to her. Every cup, every drawer, every old utensil on the wall seemed to know her better than it knew itself.
She came around the table and stopped beside him, close enough for him to see the fine lines around her eyes, the careful arrangement of her white curls, the severity of her mouth.
"What did you say your name was?"
Fiab looked at her.
"Marco."
The woman gave him a small, dry smile.
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
His stomach tightened, though his body was lying somewhere else.
She bent slightly closer.
"Listen to me, boy. Whatever name you choose to use in this place, keep the rest of yourself hidden. Do not tell your friend. Do not tell your mother. Do not tell the children at school, especially not the polished ones who arrive in silent cars."
Fiab stared at her. She knew. Or she knew enough.
"Gianni and Elena?" he asked before he could stop himself.
The woman's expression closed. That was answer enough.
The rain beyond the windows became louder, though perhaps it had never made sound at all.
"You have already seen too much for someone who knows nothing," she said.
"I didn't ask for this."
"No one believes that for long."
The woman did not let the sentence dissolve. She returned to her chair, sat with the same careful precision with which she poured tea, and for a while only the house seemed to speak: the almost-sound of rain against old windows, the imagined weight of utensils on the wall, the slow breath of rooms that had been kept closed for too many years. When she finally spoke again, her voice was lower, less impatient, as if she had decided that warning him without giving him a map would only make him walk into the dark faster.
"You need to understand the world you have touched," she said. "Not the world in your schoolbooks, not the world the television explains at breakfast. That world exists, of course, and people suffer inside it, work inside it, vote inside it, become proud of it. But it is recent. It is a surface laid over older arrangements. Beneath it there are dynasties that have survived for more than a thousand years, though very few have survived with their original names intact. Some ruled openly once. Some learned early that open rule attracts knives, taxes and revolutions. The clever ones became invisible when invisibility was useful."
Fiab listened without interrupting. The word dynasties sounded absurd in that dining room, yet the old porcelain, the dark table and the woman herself made absurd things feel administrative rather than impossible.
"There were many houses," she continued. "Too many. They married, betrayed, bought, poisoned, protected and erased one another for centuries. Wars destroyed most of them, and I do not mean only the wars printed in books. There were inheritance wars dressed as politics, banking wars disguised as crashes, religious wars used to settle blood debts, and private wars that ended with a family name removed from every door in a single night. What remains now is smaller, but not weaker. Three powers still matter above the others: the Thor, the Nafthia and the Borghesi."
Fiab repeated the names in his mind, afraid that saying them aloud would make them heavier. The woman seemed to notice and approved of the silence.
"The Thor are possession," she said. "Land first, then law, then the institutions that make possession look natural. The Nafthia are movement: trade routes, information, loans, newspapers, insurance, the passage between one place and another. The Borghesi learned people. Reputation, desire, shame, ambition. They understood that money can be repaid, but a secret properly held may feed a family for generations."
There was a faint hardness in the last sentence. Fiab did not understand it, but he felt enough not to ask.
"They control the banks?" he said instead.
"Control is a vulgar word. They steer. They influence. They preserve, and when preservation fails, they remove. Banks, courts, ministries, schools, charitable boards, newspapers, hospital wings, foundations with clean names and dirty purposes. Not all of everything, never so crudely. Enough of what matters, enough of the rooms in which decisions become inevitable before anyone outside is allowed to call them decisions."
Fiab thought of the minister on television, of the cars in front of the school, of teachers pronouncing certain surnames more carefully. "And they are at peace?"
"For almost a hundred years," she said. "The last conflict cost too much. Too many heirs died, too many servants talked, too many records burned in places where records were supposed to be immortal. After that, the houses understood that silence was more profitable than victory. They divided borders of influence, made rules, and agreed that the world above should never clearly see the world below."
"Where do the Rosha fit?" Fiab asked before he could stop himself.
The old woman's eyes sharpened. "Rosha is not one of the three. Some names exist close enough to power for long enough that they begin to look like power themselves. That is all you need to know for now, and more than you should know in a school corridor."
Fiab looked down at the cup of tea he could not drink. The city outside his ordinary window already felt far away, although his body was still lying somewhere inside it.
"Why tell me this?"
"Because you entered a house you had no memory of entering," she said. "Because you have no noble line, no adopted name that explains you, and possibly an ability that should not exist outside the old circles. You have stepped into a game whose rules were written long before you were born, and the first mercy I can offer is to tell you that the board exists. Do not mistake that for protection."
The warning did not calm him. It made the fascination worse because it gave shape to the darkness without giving him a way out of it.
The room seemed to tilt slightly. Fiab felt the first thread of pull: distant, but present. Home. His body. Fear had found its way back, thin and patient.
The woman looked toward the corridor again.
"You are waking."
"I don't want to."
"Yes," she said. "You do."
He felt it then: the weight waiting for him, the mattress, the closed room, the wet city outside the window. His body was calling him back, and the call was stronger now that he was afraid.
The edges of the dining room softened. The copper utensils became reddish streaks on the wall. The table stretched longer than it should have been. The teacup in front of him blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again.
The woman remained clear longer than everything else.
"Remember," she said. "No one."
Fiab tried to answer, but the room folded inward. The last thing he saw was the old woman standing beside the dark table, small and bent and perfectly composed, watching him with an expression that was not fear anymore.
It was calculation.
Then the house vanished.
His room returned all at once.
Weight. Breath. Rain against the window.
Fiab opened his eyes on the bed, heart beating fast, one hand clenched around the sheet. For a few seconds he could not move. Then he turned his head toward the ceiling.
The crack was still there. Real. Thin. Familiar.
But somewhere in the city, behind a door he had never crossed while awake, there was an old house with a dark table, blue flowers on a teapot, copper utensils on the wall, and a woman who knew that what he had done should have been impossible.
Fiab stared upward.
He was afraid. But beneath the fear, deep and quiet, the fascination remained.