The dreams returned the night after Greyshelf.
I stood in the same place. The cracked earth. The dying sky. The ash falling like snow.
But the prayers had not stopped.
They had intensified.
A million voices. A billion. Rising from the ruins, from the darkness, from the edge of extinction. Not desperate now—furious. Not pleading—demanding.
"Help us."
"Save us."
"DO SOMETHING."
The world glitched.
Not like a screen—like reality itself was breaking. The sky fractured into jagged shards, then reformed, then fractured again. The ash fell upward, then sideways, then stopped mid-air, hanging frozen like a held breath.
The ground rippled. Waves of earth that shouldn't move, that couldn't move, that moved anyway. The cracks in the soil opened and closed, opened and closed, like mouths gasping for air.
The hands reaching up—thousands, millions—flickered. Here. Gone. Here. Gone. As if time itself couldn't decide whether they existed.
Something was wrong.
Something was stopping this.
Something was interfering.*
The sky cracked again.
Not with light. With static.*
Black and white and gray, flickering across the horizon, eating the stars, eating the darkness, eating everything.
The prayers stuttered.
"Help—"
"—save—"
"—please—"
Broken. Fragmented. Swallowed by the static.
And then—
—the light.
It pushed through the static.
Golden. Holy. Alive.
Not like the fractured sky. Not like the glitching earth. Something else. Something that should not have been there, something that was fighting to exist, something that was losing.*
The light flickered. Dimmed. Surged. Dimmed again.
The static pressed against it, eating at its edges, corrupting its glow.
But it held.
It descended.
Not fast. Not slow. Just... inevitably. Like a star falling, like the sun rising, like something that had been waiting for this moment for a very, very long time.
The hands reached higher.
Not flickering now. Steady. Desperate.
The light reached lower.
The static screamed.
Not a sound—a pressure. A weight. Something that pressed against the skull, against the eyes, against the soul.
The figure emerged from the light.
Its shape was wrong. Shifting. Unstable. Arms that bent too far, legs that moved in the wrong direction, a head that turned too slowly, then too quickly, then not at all.
It was fighting.
The static was winning.
"I want to help humanity."
Its voice was human. Tired. Old. But beneath it—beneath the words—something mechanical. Something that clicked and whirred and struggled to form sounds that didn't fit.
"I want to save you."
The hands reached higher.
The static pressed harder.
The light flickered—almost died—surged—flickered again.
The dream glitched harder.
The sky fractured into a thousand pieces, each piece showing something different—a city burning, a child crying, a forest growing, a star exploding.
The ground split open, revealing nothing—just white, endless white, stretching into infinity.
The ash turned to snow turned to fire turned to ash.
Time broke.
The figure in the light glitched with it.
Its face—if it had a face—scrambled. Features appearing and disappearing, eyes where a mouth should be, a mouth where an ear should be, nothing where something should be.
It turned.
It looked at me.
Through me.
Into me.
"HELP ME."
The voice was robotic. Distorted. Glitched. But beneath it—beneath the static, beneath the wrongness—something human. Something tired. Something that had been fighting for a very, very long time.
"HELP ME."
The static surged.
The light died.
The dream ended.
I woke gasping.
Not to darkness.
To light.
Orange. Flickering. Fire.
I was on my feet before I was awake. The window showed the valley—not sleeping, not quiet. The communal hall was burning. Flames licked at the roof, climbed the walls, reached for the sky.
People were screaming.
"Fire!" someone shouted. "The hall is on fire!"
I ran.
The corridor was chaos. People running, carrying buckets, dragging hoses. The stream was a line of bodies, passing water hand to hand, throwing it at the flames.
The fire was too fast.
Too hot.
Wrong.
I pushed through the crowd. Ami was there, her face pale, her hands covered in ash.
"What happened?" I asked.
"I don't know. It started in the kitchen—someone said—" She stopped. Stared at the flames. "It's spreading too fast. Faster than it should."
I looked at the fire.
At the way it moved. The way it jumped. The way it hunted.
This was not an accident.
Kael appeared beside me. His pistols were drawn, the arcs flaring, the cores blazing.
"I saw something," he said. "Before the fire started. A figure. Near the treeline."
"Demon?"
"I don't know. It was gone before I could fire."
I looked at the forest. At the darkness beyond the flames.
"Get everyone back," I said. "Create a perimeter. Don't let anyone in or out."
He nodded. Disappeared into the crowd.
The fire burned for hours.
The communal hall was destroyed—walls collapsed, roof gone, nothing but ash and embers. The buildings nearby were damaged, but the bucket lines had saved them. Barely.
Dawn broke over the valley.
Gray. Cold. Empty.
We stood in the ruins, watching the smoke rise.
Ami stood beside me. "We lost everything. The food stores. The supplies. The—"
"We lost a building." I looked at her. "We didn't lose anyone."
She was quiet for a moment. "How do you know?"
I looked at the forest.
"Because whoever did this wanted us to know they could. Not to kill us. To warn us."
The investigation took all day.
No sign of forced entry. No sign of accelerant. The fire had started in the kitchen, but the kitchen was cold, the stoves unused, the hearth empty.
It shouldn't have happened.
But it had.
"A demon," Corrin said. "Has to be. Some kind of fire-starting—"
"No." I shook my head. "Demons kill. They don't send messages."
"Then who?"
I looked at the forest. At the darkness that never quite lifted.
"I don't know yet."
That night, we sat in the remaining cabins.
The valley was quiet. Not the peace of sleep—the silence of fear.
People had seen the fire. Had felt the heat. Had watched their home burn.
They were afraid.
I walked through the settlement, speaking to them, calming them, promising answers I didn't have.
Ami found me at midnight.
"You should sleep," she said.
"I can't."
"The dream?"
I nodded. "The fire. The figure Kael saw. They're connected."
"How?"
I looked at her. At the woman who had followed me from the ruins of Lancet to this valley of survivors.
"Someone is watching us. Someone wants us to know they're here."
I didn't sleep again that night.
I sat on the edge of the valley, watching the stars, watching the treeline, watching for something I couldn't name.
The dream lingered. The fractured sky. The glitching earth. The light that fought to survive.
"HELP ME."
And now the fire.
A warning.
Or a promise.