Zibrion gripped the blue shimmering bars of his aerial prison, a cage hanging in the middle of a stone and marble room, every inch covered in protective runes. The yellow banners of the Liberty

  Empire were stuck to the walls, not by nails or enchantments, but simply due to the stillness inside Zibrion's prison.

  Guards rotated every few hours, the air too suffocating for them to stay any longer than that without significant discomfort. The head guard had deemed that standing vigil over Zibrion for any longer would be... inhumane. His sharp ears pretended not to hear the guards drawing lots to determine which wretch would stand watch, or how the losers walked towards his cage as if they, themselves, had been condemned.

  He sighed, lying on his back, thinking how ironic it was that an empire which promised freedom and had a flock of fluttering birds for a symbol would lock him up in a device fashioned after a bird cage.

  He wished that he could blame his imprisonment on his dark skin, or on his silvery hair, on his lineage, or on his fallen king. He wished he could lie to himself and deem his fate unjust, and that the world was as a swamp and he like a flower, but his mind was still sharp, and displacement of guilt wasn't something he could do.

  He held his hands up, contemplating the dark tone. He once heard in a tavern that it was the result of dry bloodstains layered over others, passing through generations like a curse, spreading like necrosis.

  The cries of the men he'd killed, the sobbing of their widows, the growling stomachs of their orphans—all circled in Zibrion's head. Maybe the keeper had been right, even if uttering that truth had cost him his life.

  Zibrion wasn't a good person. He wasn't righteous, nor a patriot. No loving wife awaited him at home, as his partner was assigned to him by his parents during a hastily arranged marriage. He wasn't a gold-loving mercenary, nor a dutiful person.

  The cold, impenetrable silver eyes of his wife came to mind, cold as the winter's gale that whipped the dead trees around them. He didn't recall the words that slowly crept out of her mouth; only a needle-pinch of pain lingered.

  They lived as strangers sharing a roof for many years. She bore him no children. He gave her no love. When he left for his final campaign, she had not asked if he would return. Perhaps it was better not to be tormented by illusions of a house that, surely now, had burnt to ash.

  Zibrion felt like his life had been just going through the motions, a salmon that, having given up on fighting the current, avoided being caught by the bears. Likewise, he didn't fight his guilt or his current predicament, as they were just inevitable consequences.

  His compatriots had deemed him a determinist. Others called him an absurdist or a nihilist. To him, those words held no meaning. He was a wanderer, searching for his place in life. Perhaps even the word "searching" would be a stretch, because to Zibrion, life was as a dream, wild and unruly: a magic school on the top of the mountains, where everyone learned with no words, and no teacher, and if a single child rose to his feet screaming "It's holiday, we don't have classes today!" the entire mountain-top crumbles, destroying everything in its path.

  The humans had stories where immortality was a manner of curse, and he hadn't understood them until this very moment. He closed his eyes, thinking of the eternity that awaited him locked up.

  He felt disappointed that the sum of his decisions had amounted to so little, barely a larger tomb born of caution rather than love. He was like an emperor who fears the disease of a peasant who rots alive before his very eyes, and with the help of a thousand men fits his rotten body into three caskets of different metals before shipping it to the farthest ocean and tossing him to the raging waters.

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  In one of those twists of fate, Zibrion remembered that his dream of youth was to have an island to call his own. If he focused, he could even hear the crashing waves against his stone prison.

  He dozed off under the compass of the crashing waves—a lullaby of imprisonment—and, perhaps like every imprisoned man, he dreamt himself free.

  Running on all fours, Zibrion chased after a small mammal through an open plain. The sunbathed grass tickled his skin through the fur as he dashed towards his prey.

  The fresh wind reminded him of his ancestral home, a place where alien flowers fed off the stars, big as the moons in the night sky. Seers from his race taught the little children that is was the stars themselves who, in a dream, had created the flowers that now gave them sustenance. That this was the first and purest magic, the art of creation.

  But the stars died along with the king and his court, the magic keeping their shine alive, long lost. Zibrion thought that it wasn't a dream that had created this world, but a nightmare. One born of a lonely and miserable creature, an ancient evil perhaps, wallowing in others' misery, nourishing himself like a demonic leech.

  But Zibrion didn't care about such things. He returned to the present, but in the lapse of focus while remembering, his prey had sneaked into a burrow. He sank his claws—long, twice or thrice the reach he had as a humanoid. But not enough.

  He woke up; the guards were gone. At his feet, a plate of gross goo had been placed. As some kind of joke, a dead rat lay on top as decoration. Zibrion had tasted the most exquisite plates at the royal palace, bittersweet meats of animals carefully bred, fed, and slaughtered in rituals that would ensure their quality. But today, he fancied rat meat. Something about the cold, thick blood running through the corners of his mouth, or the organs—liver, entrails. He ate with voracity, almost feral. This time around, the prey had nowhere to escape.

  He dreamt again. In a fishing hut, a fat human stocked fish in a bucket. With silent steps, Zibrion closed in, step by step, as the fat man, unaware, kept casting his line. Then, in a decisive move, he snatched a fish from the bucket and dragged it to a corner, feasting on its white meat.

  The man seemed unaware, or uncaring. His newfound keen senses warned him of something else the man wasn't aware of: a salty smell, strong humidity, and still wind. A storm was brewing!

  Zibrion found himself again in the cage, the line between what was dream and what was not subtly but constantly thinning. He gripped the bars of his prison and felt his cat-self hissing indignantly and the flavor of raw fish still lingering in his mouth.

  And as the line of reality blurred, Zibrion could feel the power of the stars of yore come back afloat, as if he was summoning them, empowering the ancient magic with his dreams.

  The storm came crashing into the man's boat, who realized too late and failed to safely return ashore. The waves crashed the boat into a sharp rock, turning it to wreckage, and the fat man's dying screams joined the chorus of Zibrion's victims. As his cat self walked through the shores of an unknown island, his imprisoned self wondered if he could've done something to save the man.

  But fate is as such. He, like the man, played with the hand life had given. For some, the dice are loaded, and the winning coefficient is always negative.

  Zibrion stared at the sky through the cat's eyes. The myriad stars on the night sky had enervated the storm a hundredfold, and the guards that had left their post to confront the unidentified boat were washed away by the fury of the sea.

  Zibrion felt his paws shuffling through the stone keep's hallways, walking alongside his feet inside the cage. Time stopped as his cat-self confronted him in his cage, and an ineffable feeling circled him, much like the dreamscape.

  Neither spoke, but both understood. The cage lowered, but what came out wasn't Zibrion the man, nor Zibrion the cat— he was both and neither, a being made anew by his own dreams, swimming unopposed by the current that had turned to mist

  The stars above the island shone brighter than anywhere else in the world, feeding on dreams and forgotten magic. The creature, sitting on its legs, stares at its reflection on the ocean's water, wondering what it was.

  But the waves wash the reflection away, over and over, until even thought stops.

  The current flows on, and the creature that was once Zibrion hunts, dreams, and slowly forgets that it ever had a name.