I was tired. Weak. Exhausted. Dizzy. And worst of all, lethargic. Every breath felt heavier than the one before. My chest burned, my arms ached, and my legs shook each time I tried to push forward. It wasn't just fatigue. It was something else, something seeping into me, draining my will with every heartbeat.

Outside, my friends—no, the things wearing their faces—were still making those sounds. Clicks and trills, strange staccato bursts that reminded me of insect wings and tapping code. It was rhythmic, purposeful. The sounds weren't random. They were speaking to each other, like a hive mind exchanging coordinates. Every click felt closer. Every pause, more deliberate.

Fallias's imitation voice broke through the noise, higher-pitched now, almost gleeful. Then came a low vibrating hum that spread through the walls, like the entire building had joined the conversation. I pressed my palm to the plaster. It was faintly warm, pulsing in short, uneven intervals.

I didn't stay long enough to figure out what it meant. What if the building was part of them? What if it could talk back? Everything here felt alive in the wrong way. The walls flexed when I blinked. The floor throbbed beneath my feet. Even the air carried a weight that pushed against me whenever I moved.

My muscles were screaming. I was barely holding myself upright. My breath came in ragged bursts, each one louder than I wanted. I was slower now, clumsier. No Arte. No Skillcubes. No Fractal. Nothing but flesh and panic.

I reached for my odachi. The hilt felt familiar, grounding, a piece of reality I could still claim. For one second I thought maybe that would be enough. Then I drew it.

The blade shimmered once before it disintegrated, scattering into a thousand motes of silver dust that dissolved before they even hit the floor. Gone. Just like everything else the dream decided I wasn't allowed to have.

My heart sank. I stared at the empty scabbard, waiting for the weight to return. It didn't. The silence pressed in until I could hear my own pulse thrumming in my ears.

Then came the sound of claws. Slow, deliberate, scraping along stone.

I turned toward the window. Below, in the flickering half-light, I saw Fallias moving across the courtyard. Her scales glowed like molten gold, reflecting off the shattered marble. Every motion was graceful, measured, controlled. Behind her floated Fractal's bismuth blades, orbiting her like moons around a dying sun.

They shouldn't have been beautiful, but they were. And that made it worse.

I crouched beneath the window, holding my breath. The sound of clicking started again, joined by a wet, humming tone that came from somewhere deep within the structure. It wasn't just them anymore. The building itself was whispering along with them, vibrating with an alien pulse that crawled up through the soles of my boots.

The world tilted slightly, the floor slanting beneath my weight. The corridor beyond the door seemed longer than before, stretching away like a tunnel. The dust in the air froze mid-float, hanging motionless. The dream was tightening its grip.

Then Cordelia's voice came through the wall. "Found you."

I didn't wait. I ran.

The door burst open, and I darted into the corridor, my boots slipping against the mirrored floor. The hallway reflected everything—the flicker of lights, the crimson glow of my own eyes, and the faint shadows moving just behind me. My reflection lagged half a second out of sync. When I turned my head, it didn't.

Something slammed against the door I'd just fled through. The impact cracked the wall. The noise came again, faster this time. Footsteps. Too many.

I forced my legs to move. Left. Then right. Another hallway, narrower this time, lined with glass panels that showed distorted versions of my friends moving through other rooms. Dozens of them, all smiling that same smile, all watching me.

"Stop running," Cordelia whispered from behind one pane. Her eyes glowed violet. Her lips didn't move, but her voice filled the air, gentle and coaxing. "You're tired, Alexander. Just stop."

I kept running. My body protested with every step. My throat was raw from breathing too hard, my lungs burning like fire. The smell of ozone and copper thickened in the air, sharp enough to taste.

Behind me, the laughter started again. Theirs, but not theirs. Too many layers, too many pitches. A hive of mirth grinding against itself. The sound tore through my focus like glass scraping metal.

"Alex…" That was Wallace's voice now. Calm, steady. Familiar. The kind of voice that always meant I wasn't alone. For a heartbeat, I wanted to believe it.

Then it split into three overlapping tones. "Aaalex… open the door…"

I didn't look back.

I pushed through another set of doors and stumbled into what looked like a courtyard. The floor was cracked marble veined with faint blue light. A fountain sat in the center, but the water didn't fall—it rose. Spiraling upward in perfect silence, every droplet hanging in place, turning lazily like stars caught mid-orbit.

My reflection in the suspended water looked back at me. It smiled.

I stumbled backward, colliding with a wall that rippled like liquid. My arm sank halfway through before the surface snapped back, spitting me out. The sensation was nauseating—like shoving your hand into gelatin that was somehow alive. The dream was collapsing around me. Or maybe I was collapsing inside it.

Then the ground beneath my feet softened. My vision blurred, edges smearing into colors that shouldn't exist. When I blinked again, the marble had melted away.

I was standing in a field of flowers.

Every petal shimmered faintly under a light that didn't belong to the sun or moon. Their colors shifted when I breathed, pink to blue to crimson to bone white. A scent hung thick in the air—sweet, cloying, suffocating.

"Moons damn this," I muttered under my breath. "Flowers. Of course it's flowers."

Cordelia.

Who else could twist the mind this elegantly? Who else could drape a trap in something so deceptively beautiful? The thought made my pulse quicken. If Cordelia's image was still here, then the Queen was still pulling from my memories. Using my trust, my familiarity, to break me apart piece by piece.

But the fact that I'd phased through a wall gave me an idea.

Dreams—no matter how stable they pretended to be—were layers. Overlapping illusions stacked like glass panes, each one bending light a little differently. If I could break through one, I could break through more.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I took a deep breath, centered myself, and picked a target. A tree, tall and wrong, its branches too symmetrical, too deliberate.

Then I ran.

Full speed.

The impact was brutal. My shoulder hit first, followed by my cheek. The bark didn't splinter—it rippled, and for an instant I felt weightless. Then I was somewhere else.

Another room. Another layer.

The sky above me flickered like static. The air was heavier here, the horizon lined with shelves that stretched infinitely in every direction. The scent of paper and ink stung my nose, sharp enough to burn.

A library.

Not the Library. Not yet. But close enough to make the hair on my neck rise.

"Where there's a book, there's an archive," I whispered, the old mantra spilling from memory. "And where there's an archive…"

There was a door.

I could feel it—like a pulse running through the air. The dream had rules, and if I followed them backward, I might just trick it into letting me fall out.

The field of flowers had vanished completely, replaced by walls of glass and parchment that flickered in and out of existence. Some shelves floated sideways, some upside down. Books whispered when I passed them, reciting fragments of sentences that didn't belong to any tongue I knew.

"Come on… come on…" I muttered, dragging my fingers along their spines. "One of you has to be real."

I stopped at a thick, leather-bound volume sitting alone on a pedestal. Its title burned faintly: The Law of Recursion.

That was enough.

I grabbed it and forced it open.

The pages screamed. Not metaphorically. The sound was high, metallic, like tearing metal and breaking glass. The words writhed off the parchment, floating upward in curling black ribbons. My vision went white for an instant, and when it cleared, the library around me had deepened in color.

I wasn't in the Queen's dream anymore.

Not fully.

The air here was colder, older. I could taste the scent of dust and candle soot, the same as every night I'd spent trapped in his domain.

Dantalion.

"Of all the places to end up…" I laughed once, bitter and hoarse. "Fine. I'll take it."

My knees hit the floor, the sudden weight of gravity returning all at once. My pulse steadied, though my breath was still ragged. Somewhere deep in the stacks, I heard pages turning—slow, deliberate, as if someone had been waiting.

"I hated losing a year of my life here," I said aloud, voice echoing faintly between the shelves. "Every night. Every lesson. Every deal."

A book somewhere above me snapped shut. The sound reverberated like thunder.

"But the irony," I continued, "that your twisted world might just be my salvation…"

The whisper that answered was not Dantalion's. Not yet. It was softer. Feminine. A mockery of curiosity wrapped in honey.

"Running from one prison to another," the Queen said. "How poetic."

Her tone came from everywhere—between shelves, between words. She wasn't here in body. She was bleeding through, clawing her way into a place she didn't belong.

"You don't get to follow me here," I hissed, gripping the book tighter. "This place has rules. Contracts. Names."

"Names can be rewritten."

The lights flickered. The smell of flowers crept back into the air—sweet, suffocating, invasive.

"No," I said through clenched teeth. "Not his."

The scent faded with the word, like a dying echo retreating into the spine of a closed book. The silence that followed was absolute. Not even the sound of my own breathing carried.

Then another voice spoke—quieter, smooth as the turn of a page. It came from everywhere and nowhere, brushing against the edges of my thoughts.

"Alexander Duarte," it said. "You were not expected."

Relief and unease hit me in the same heartbeat. I let out a slow exhale, my knuckles still white against the book's leather cover.

"Forgive me," I said, forcing my tone steady. "Basaroiel is doing well, as you might know. Hungry, but loving. Affectionate. Loyal. All the traits a griffin has in every story with every knight."

The library sighed, as though it were breathing with him. The shelves rearranged themselves in quiet rhythm.

"I find it odd," the voice continued. "You took the path of the Walker, but dreamt of being a Knight. Yet your friend—Caroline, I believe her name was?—dreamt of the freedom of being a Walker, and is now a Knight."

I shook my head, exhaustion creeping back into my limbs. "I don't find it odd at all." My eyes flicked toward the far end of the hall, where the faint outline of the Queen's shape shimmered like a reflection on oil. "Can you do something about her?"

The shadow twitched. Her form solidified for just an instant—a mockery of grace, her body draped in the remnants of petals, her face a tangle of human and insect. The Queen smiled, slow and deliberate, as if testing how far she could intrude into Dantalion's space.

There was a sound. Not loud, not dramatic—just one sharp, bone-deep snap.

The air cracked open. The Queen shattered.

Fragments of her fell like shards of glass dissolving into smoke, the scent of flowers replaced by dust and ozone.

Dantalion's tone was faintly amused. "No. Not fully. I have only broken one image of her—the shell that followed you through the threshold. You still have to kill her at the source. Which you already know."

The sound of pages turning followed his words, deliberate and methodical, like a clock measuring out seconds that didn't exist. I didn't see him yet, but I could feel him—the weight of attention that made the air vibrate, the sense that I was being read as much as I was listening.

"I wasn't planning on visiting," I said. "The dream forced my hand."

"Dreams always do," he replied. "That is their nature. They demand trespass, and they punish curiosity. Yours has become… elaborate."

I looked around. The shelves were bending in gentle arcs, books reshaping themselves to new subjects. One title caught my eye—The Anatomy of Regret. Another, The Unwritten Futures of Knights. Both dissolved before I could reach them.

Dantalion's voice carried a faint smile. "Tell me, Alexander. How long do you intend to keep running from every story you're written into?"

I hesitated. "I'm not running."

"Ah. Then what do you call this?"

He gestured without form, and the world obeyed. The air shimmered. The flower field reappeared beside us, ghostlike, overlaid upon the library's marble floor. I saw my own footprints still fresh in the grass, the distant mirages of my twisted companions hunting the version of me that had fled moments before.

A perfect, looping illusion of my own fear.

I felt my jaw tighten. "You're showing me nothing new."

"I'm showing you where your mind still bleeds," he said softly. "You cannot fight the Queen while she draws power from your memories. She is not real—she is reflection. Parasite of self-perception."

"And you?" I asked. "What are you?"

"Archivist. Judge. Mirror." A pause. "And, when invited, teacher."

The shelves shifted again, forming a spiral staircase that led upward into a void lit by violet light. His tone grew more precise, almost human.

"I think it's time we had a long chat about your future, Alexander."

The temperature in the room dropped. My breath came out as mist.

His voice lost its composure then—curling, stretching, turning into something colder and older than any language should bear.

"After all," Dantalion continued, each word thick as ink, "you brought a seed of infestation into my domain. A Queen who dares to rewrite the laws of narrative and name. And you, my dear uninvited guest, carry the contract that makes her intrusion possible."

My stomach turned. "You're saying she's using me as a door."

"Not using. Borrowing. Until you learn to close it."

The sound of quills scratching filled the air. Ink bled from the floor upward, forming runic circles beneath my feet. The words rearranged themselves in a language I almost recognized.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"To see whether you still deserve to leave."

The staircase ahead lit with a slow-burning light, and his voice shifted again—no longer shrill, no longer distant, but intimate.

"Climb, Walker. Each step is a question. Each answer decides whether I send you back to the Queen… or to waking."

I swallowed, tightening my grip on the book.

Behind me, I could still smell the faint trace of flowers. The Queen wasn't gone. Just waiting.

I took the first step. The air vibrated with laughter—hers or his, I couldn't tell.

And then Dantalion whispered, voice like a blade cutting parchment:

"Let us see which of your truths survives the climb."

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