Do Not Open Your Eyes

The carriage moved slowly along the coastal road.

The coachman said nothing, and the hooves marked a steady rhythm on the packed dirt. Inside, Alana watched her breath fog the window. She had slept little the night before, and now the regular sway of the vehicle threatened to pull her into sleep.

The eclipse still cast its pale, heatless light, and the ceaseless sound of the wheels soon invited memories that turned quickly into dreams.

A melody played in the church atrium, right when the inquisitor had announced Arcius’ arrest. The same sequence of broken notes she later heard in her mother’s house. In the dream, the screech of gears was louder than the music itself. Dissonant whispers scratched through the metal sounds, nothing like childhood.

Suddenly, she was lying in bed in the old house in Lys, before her father had finished building the big manor with the money he brought back from Castra Devana. The heavy blanket smelled of soap; her mother had always insisted on keeping the bedding clean.

Alana was small again, feet curled up, knees pulled close. The music came from the hallway and crept through the doorway. Each pause seemed longer than it should.

Do not open your eyes, her father’s voice whispered, low and rough. He was close, but she couldn’t see him. The weight of a cold hand pressed down on the blanket.

“Father?” she asked softly, eyes closed.

The melody faltered for a moment, then resumed, strangely slower.

Do not open your eyes, her father repeated, now right beside her ear.

The air turned cold, even under the blanket. The music shifted. The notes dropped a semitone, then another, until they became something completely broken. The pauses filled with a low buzzing sound, like a fly trapped against glass.

Alana took a deep breath. Her father’s hand pressed harder on the blanket.

Do not open!

She opened.

The ceiling vanished. The whole room vanished. There was only an eye, and it did not belong to any human face. It had grown until it filled the entire space. The iris was a ring of pale light, cut by fissures like thin cracks in ice. It did not blink, not once. It only stared.

The Eye of Ereth.

The music continued, coming from inside the eyeball itself, as though the melody vibrated through its layers. When the eye moved, the sound changed.

She tried to move and couldn’t. Her father was gone. The blanket was gone.

The eye moved closer until it filled everything, and the fissures in the pale ring opened wider, revealing smaller lines beneath, like shapes hidden below the surface. The pupil widened again, swallowing the last rim of light.

Something lived there. Something inside those cracks, stripping her not only of clothes but of flesh itself, to see her soul.

They are coming, her father whispered. And the darkness in the sky is only the prelude…

N’halr…

N’halr…

N’HALR!

Alana woke with a jolt.

The carriage moved on, undisturbed, the fogged glass still reflecting her pale face and the dark shape of the eclipse. Her heart pounded wildly, and her hand went straight to the inside lining of her cloak.

The music box was there. The Eye’s case too.

“Everything all right, ma’am?” the coachman asked, noticing her agitated movements without turning around.

“Just keep going, please” Alana answered.

She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, breathed three times, slowly, and tried to hear nothing but the horses’ hooves.

The road sloped gently downward toward the bay, and by late afternoon Onórion appeared with its low rooftops, its flags dimmed by the sunless sky, and its fishermen hauling in their nets, turned to silhouettes by the darkness.

The smell was salt, tar, and old fish.

Gas lamps gave the port a look of restrained activity, and Alana asked the coachman to stop at a small square of damp cobblestones, not far from the docks. She climbed down, paid the man, and left in search of the pier.

A young man pointed her toward the farthest row of boats, and she walked there unhurriedly. She read the schedules, heard the prices, and finally chose a boat that would leave at dawn.

She paid half in advance, and the captain — a short man, clearly accustomed to the Inner Sea routes — said the crossing depended on the wind, but that he would sail in the morning regardless.

Castra Devana was the destination.

Alana found a simple room in an inn by the pier, and when she lay down, she placed the music box and the Eye beneath the pillow, like a frightened child might. Then she rested her head and closed her eyes to the wooden ceiling, determined not to dream.

The eclipse lasted another day.