Chapter 37 The sleepless voice

Kai sat near the hearth in his own home—their home now—where the fire had burned low to embers. Outside, the street was quiet, while inside, the soft creaks of the house marked the peace of sleep. The girls were tucked in across their rooms, the kind of quiet only found in a place where they finally felt safe.

His body hurt. Not the kind of ache that slips away with rest or vanishes when the dream ends—but the kind that lingers, that sinks into bone. He’d treated the bruise on his ribs with Fara’s balm, cool and herbal and faintly glowing, but the pain remained—dull, rhythmic, slow like a second heartbeat beneath the skin. A reminder.

His journal sat at his side, closed but not silent. He could feel its weight as if the pages still whispered, still throbbed with every question he’d scratched down. Maps. Names. Patterns. Warnings. Things he could no longer dismiss as coincidence.

He told himself again that it was just a dream. That none of this mattered. That no one would remember this but him. But the words he’d written, the stitches sewn into his coat, the hand-drawn picture folded carefully between the pages—those things weren’t fragments of fantasy. They didn’t slip away when the sun came up. They stayed. They meant something.

Dreams didn’t ask you to stay safe. They didn’t press tiny vials of healing balm into your hands without asking. They didn’t tuck drawings into your lap with a grin and say you’re smiling in this one.

Dreams didn’t… linger.

But this did.

Sleep eventually took him.

---

The world shifted.

He stood alone in a field of ash. Each step stirred up fine gray dust, weightless and dry, clinging to his boots like memory. The grass beneath his feet had long since died, reduced to colorless threads. Above him, the sky stretched wide and rotting—an endless bruise of purple-black with veins of red cloud bleeding across it.

Dead trees loomed like twisted fingers, reaching toward a pale moon that oozed light rather than shone with it. The wind didn’t blow. The air didn’t hum. There was no birdsong, no distant howl, no breath but his own. The silence here wasn’t peace—it was absence. It was the sound left behind when everything else had given up.

In the distance, framed in a circle of broken mirrors, sat a woman.

She didn’t move. Her posture was regal, composed, yet there was something brittle in the way her shoulders curled inward slightly, like she’d been holding her breath for years. She wore a gown black as pitch, shifting with impossible colors—green, violet, sickly blue—like oil swirling across water. Her face was hidden behind a porcelain mask. Smooth, mouthless, save for a jagged smile painted across it in red.

Kai stopped. He knew who she was before she spoke. Maybe not by name, not by voice—but by presence.

“You dream too deeply, Dreamwalker.”

He didn’t respond. His mouth felt dry. He clenched his fists, half-expecting his baton to appear. It didn’t.

“You walk in and out of their fears,” she said, voice low and feminine, but ancient. “Their hopes. Their hearts. And still you believe you are above it all.”

His jaw tightened. “I’m not above anything. I’m just trying to survive.”

She tilted her head, as if amused. “That’s what makes you different. The others? They revel in their illusions. They drink in the delusion, beg to forget the lives they left behind. But not you.”

Her voice was familiar now. Haunting, soft like honey poured over broken glass.

“Do you know me, Kai?”

He took a slow breath. “I’ve seen you. In shadows. In places between. You watch.”

“Not quite,” she said. “I knew you before. Long before this place. I followed you in your waking life. I whispered to you when you thought you were alone. I fed on your doubt. Your self-loathing. Your disappointment.”

His eyes widened.

“You’re from my world.”

“From your hell,” she corrected. Then, with a slow movement, she reached up and removed the mask.

Her face was terrible and beautiful all at once. High cheekbones. Skin like pale marble. Eyes like ink—black, endless, yet glinting with something worse than malice.

Sorrow.

“I was a tormentor,” she said. “One of many. I gave you your worst nights. I crept into your thoughts and made you believe they were your own. And then… one night… I cried.”

Kai didn’t speak.

“I felt something,” she continued. “Regret. Pity. Love. I don’t know what to call it. But I was cast out. Demons aren’t supposed to feel.”

“You’re not supposed to exist here,” he whispered.

She smiled. Not cruelly. Not kindly. Just… broken. “No demon is.”

They stood in silence, the field stretching out around them like a graveyard of forgotten sins.

“I brought you here,” she said at last. “Not your gods. Not some spell. Not fate. Me.”

“Why?” His voice cracked.

“Because you’re the only one who could end me.”

Kai stepped back. “I’m not your hero.”

“No,” she said. “You’re my mirror. My penance. You’ve suffered without screaming. Endured without falling. But unlike me… you still believe in something.”

Her face flickered, cracking at the edges. Lines like fractures crawled down her cheeks. From her eyes, thick, dark tears welled up—tar or ink, slow and heavy.

“I just wanted the pain to stop.”

The world shivered. The wind returned in a scream. The mirrors exploded one by one, shards scattering like snowflakes into the void. The sky above them peeled open with roaring stormlight.

“I’ll find you,” Kai said. His voice was steady. “When I’m ready.”

She nodded. Already fading, body unraveling like smoke caught in a current.

“I’ll be waiting, Kai.”

---

He woke before dawn, chest heavy, face damp.

The fire had burned out.

But his journal sat open.

A single word had been scrawled across the next page in elegant, inky script.

“Malrissa.”