The dream came for the first time a week after the harvest fair, and after that it came often enough that Kaelen stopped mentioning each occurrence to anyone, the way a person stops mentioning a familiar draft once they’ve learned which door it comes from.
There was no ground in it.
That was the first and truest thing about it — an absence so complete that his sleeping mind never once reached for the fear of falling, because falling required a floor to be missing, and there was no floor here to begin with.
Just sky, endless in every direction, cold and enormous and entirely without weather of the kind he’d spent seven years learning to read.
He was moving through it, fast, in a way his body understood without his mind supplying any memory to explain the understanding — and underneath the vastness of it, threaded all through the flying the way a single dark string runs through an otherwise plain piece of cloth, there was a loneliness so old and so total that it didn’t even announce itself as sadness anymore.
It had simply become the shape of the sky itself.
He woke from it the same way each time — chest tight, hands curled like they’d been gripping something they couldn’t identify, and a strange, specific grief for a life he had no memory of ever having lived.
“You’ve got the face again,” Wren said one morning, watching him pick at his breakfast with the particular attention of someone keeping a tally.
“The dream face.”
“It’s not a bad dream,” Kaelen said, which was true and also not the reassurance she was looking for.
“There’s nothing in it.
No monster.
It’s just — flying.
And it’s cold, and it’s lonely, and I don’t know why it’s lonely, because in the dream I’m not scared of anything.” Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Maybe it’s not your dream,” Wren said, with the blunt logic of a nine-year-old cutting straight to a question the adults around them had been too careful to ask out loud.
“Maybe it’s somebody else’s, and it’s just — in you, somehow.
Like how you feel other people’s feelings when you’re awake.”
It was, Kaelen thought, turning the idea over with real attention for the first time, not a bad guess at all, coming from a girl with no gift of her own beyond stubbornness and good instincts.
He didn’t have a better one himself.
He brought it to Yvaine on the next lesson day, described it as precisely as a seven-year-old could manage — the absence of ground, the cold, the specific, ancient loneliness that didn’t feel like it belonged to a body his own age — and watched something move behind her eyes that she worked, visibly, to smooth back into stillness before he could read too much into it.
“How long has it been recurring?” she asked, in a voice that had gone very carefully level.
“A week.
Maybe longer.”
“And it’s always the same — flying, no ground, and that particular loneliness?”
“You know something,” Kaelen said.
It wasn’t an accusation.
He’d simply gotten too good, over a year of her teaching him to read exactly this kind of thing, not to notice it in her.
Yvaine was quiet for a long moment, weighing — he could feel the weighing itself, careful and deliberate, the specific texture of a person deciding how much truth a listener could hold without it doing more harm than the silence would.
“I know that some very old magics leave an impression,” she said finally, “the way a heavy stone leaves a print in soft ground long after the stone itself is gone.
I have theories.
None of them are kind enough to hand to a seven-year-old before I’m certain, and I’d rather be slow and right than quick and cruel.
What I can tell you honestly is this: whatever that dream is, it is not a warning.
It is a memory with the details worn off — and memories like that don’t come back to hurt you.
They come back because some part of you is still, very quietly, grieving something it doesn’t have the words to name.”
“Grieving what?”
“That,” Yvaine said, “is the part I don’t know yet.
Come back in a month.
Bring the dream with you if it’s still there.
We’ll take it apart slowly, the same way we took apart everything else.”
He didn’t get more than that, and didn’t push for it — some part of him understood, in the same wordless way he understood most things about people’s careful edges, that Yvaine’s caution here wasn’t the same as the Guild’s caution, that she was protecting him from something rather than saving something up for later use.
He carried the dream home instead, the way he’d carried every other unresolved piece of himself over the years, and did the one thing he’d learned, across twelve years’ worth of chapters he had no way of counting, actually worked.
He found Wren in the stable yard that evening, sat down next to her without explaining why, and simply stayed there until the cold, ancient loneliness from the dream had somewhere real to set itself down — next to a sister who didn’t need the whole explanation to know exactly what to do with him.