I lifted my arm in the dim light.
The shadow-marks had spread.
They climbed past my shoulders now, crawling across my collarbones in delicate fractal patterns. Deep purple and black, pulsing gently with inner light, claiming more and more of my skin with each passing hour. The transformation was accelerating.
And beneath my own thoughts, I felt something else stirring.
Evara's memories moving in the depths of my consciousness like something waking from a long sleep. Not taking over—not yet—but pressing against the boundaries of my mind. Asking to be remembered. Demanding to be understood.
I stared at the shadow-marks climbing my skin and felt the weight of ten thousand years settling onto my shoulders.
Chapter 7
Thedreamclungtome like wet silk—violet sky, extinct flowers, a love so vast it had felt like drowning. I lay in Morgrith's arms with tears cooling on my cheeks and the shape of that ancient choice pressing against my ribs. His heartbeat echoed mine through the bond, steady and questioning, and I knew he'd felt some echo of what I'd dreamed.
I didn't want to move. Didn't want to break the cocoon of shadow and warmth that held us both, didn't want to face what the dream meant or what the spreading marks on my skin were turning me into. But the memories pressed against the inside of my skull like something demanding to be released, and I'd spent too many years swallowing hard truths to start lying now.
"Morgrith."
I needed to tell him. Needed to confess everything I'd been holding back, everything the archives had revealed, everything that had been stirring in my dreams.
"The portrait in the archives," I said. "The woman. Evara."
His hand stilled in my hair for just a moment. Then continued stroking, steady as before.
"I’m worried I am her," I whispered.
His eyes widened.
"I dreamed of her."
My voice came out rough. Scraped raw by last night's screaming, by the pleasure that had broken me open, by all the sounds I'd made as I shattered across his lap and found myself remade. Morgrith's arms tightened around me—not restraining, just holding. Present.
"Tell me," he said.
So I did.
The words spilled out in fragments at first, then in a flood. The violet sky with its two moons hanging heavy. The flowers at my feet in colors that didn't exist anymore, their scent overwhelming and sweet, extinct for ten thousand years but alive in that impossible moment. The way the air had tasted like ozone and possibility.
And the dragon.
I felt Morgrith go still behind me as I described it—him. The creature who had been too vast for language, too beautiful for comprehension. A being made of power and starlight and something that felt like the birth of universes.
"He loved me," I whispered. The words felt strange in my mouth. Wrong, somehow—because it hadn't been me, not really. But also right. Also true in ways I couldn't explain. "He loved me so much it felt like standing at the edge of an ocean. Like the tide pulling at my feet, and knowing—knowing—if I stepped forward, it would sweep me away forever."
Morgrith's breath stirred my hair. Through the bond, I felt his attention sharpen into something crystalline and focused.
"I was terrified." My voice cracked on the word. "Not of him. Of the love itself. Of what it would mean to be consumed by something that vast. I could feel the choice pressing down on me—accept and be transformed, or run and break everything."
Silence stretched between us.
"I ran," I said. "Even in the dream, I felt myself making the choice. My legs carrying me away from him while his anguish crashed against my back like waves. And then—"
My throat closed around the memory.
"The world started to break."
Morgrith pulled back. His hands found my shoulders, turning me until I faced him. In the dim light of his chamber, his starlight eyes searched my face with an intensity that made my breath catch. I saw him cataloging every detail—the tear tracks on my cheeks, the shadow-marks climbing my throat, the ancient grief that had borrowed my face while I slept.