-Ruik-

  The dream began in light.

  I stood beneath a sky of molten gold, the sun blazing overhead like an open wound. Heat poured down in waves, but it did not burn me. My parents’ voices echoed around me—soft, warm, threaded with reverence.

  A soul will rise from the sun…

  …born of fire…

  …to end the night.

  Their silhouettes hovered just beyond the glare, unreachable, their faces swallowed by brilliance. As they spoke, the light trembled. It cracked—

  —darkness bled in at the edges—

  —and the sun split open like the eye of a dragon.

  Red.

  Burning.

  Watching me.

  I reached for my parents, but their forms dissolved into ash. Cold, clawed hands rose from the darkness and closed around my wrists, dragging me down into night.

  I fell—

  —and jerked awake, breath tearing sharp into the back of my throat.

  The world was still dark. The fire had burned low, survivors curled around its dying embers. Tom’s soft snore drifted across the clearing. Jarold lay with a hand on his blade, half-alert even in sleep.

  Sleep would not return to me. The dream—the prophecy—clung to my thoughts like soot.

  Quietly, I rose and walked away from camp.

  The forest thinned into a hollow where moonlight spilled over a small pond. The water was dark and still. I knelt at its edge and stared at my reflection.

  My eyes looked normal again. Human.

  I didn’t trust the calm beneath my skin.

  “What am I becoming…” I whispered.

  The surface of the pond rippled—not from wind.

  From a presence behind me.

  Another reflection appeared beside my own. Pale skin. Dark hair loose over her shoulders. Eyes like amethyst flame, flickering beneath the moon.

  I shot to my feet, hand instinctively reaching for my sword—only to remember I had left it behind where I’d laid.

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  She didn’t move.

  “You’re loud when you dream,” she murmured.

  The moonlight caught her face, and something pulsed behind my ribs—fear, fascination, something dangerously close to understanding.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “To warn you.”

  Her gaze slid toward the distant camp. “You’re going to Torrain. But what waits for you there isn’t what you think.”

  Distrust warred with the echo of her presence still humming in my blood. “Why should I believe anything you say?”

  She didn’t lie. She didn’t soften.

  “I won’t deny that since I tasted your blood,” she said evenly, “all I’ve wanted is to taste it again.”

  There was something almost ashamed in her voice. Almost yearning.

  The air tightened between us—a pull neither of us understood yet, rooted in hunger and something deeper.

  “Then why aren’t you attacking me now?” I asked.

  Her expression flickered—hurt, maybe—before it hardened.

  “I’m not here for your blood tonight. Only your truth.”

  I stepped back, jaw setting. “My truth is simple. My people need me. Torrain is their only hope.”

  Her eyes darkened—but not with malice.

  “It may be their hope,” she said softly.

  “But it is not yours.”

  Silence settled around us, heavy as the night. My reflection wavered in the pond. Hers did not.

  She stepped backward into the treeline, dissolving into shadow.

  “When Torrain takes everything from you,” she whispered, “remember that I tried to warn you.”

  And then she was gone.

  She vanished so completely that for a moment I almost believed she had been another dream—another illusion sent by the night to unmake me.

  But the water still trembled where she had stood.

  The air still carried the faintest trace of her scent—rain on stone, the metallic edge of hunger.

  And my pulse still beat too fast. Too warm.

  I stared at the place she had disappeared until the forest swallowed the last hint of her.

  “Why warn me?” I whispered.

  Only the distant chirr of insects answered.

  I sank to one knee at the pond’s edge, fists pressing into damp earth. Moonlight fractured my reflection, ripples refusing to settle.

  My eyes—

  human, tired, afraid—

  blinked back at me.

  Then the reflection shifted.

  A flicker of red.

  A glow beneath the iris, faint but undeniable.

  Heat curled beneath my skin like smoke.

  I shut my eyes.

  I didn’t want it.

  I didn’t choose it.

  But the night kept choosing me.

  Slowly, I drew in a breath, forcing the heat down. My body obeyed—barely.

  The water calmed.

  The red faded.

  My reflection returned to human once more.

  For now.

  A twig snapped behind me.

  I spun, half-expecting her again. Some part of me hoped for it. Another recoiled.

  It was Tom—hair wild, cloak askew, eyes half-lidded with sleep.

  “You alright?” He rubbed his face. “Jarold thought he heard something. Then I woke up and you were missing. Thought maybe the night swallowed you.”

  “Just needed air,” I said, forcing steadiness into my voice.

  Tom studied me in the moonlight, seeing more than I wanted him to. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  I thought about telling him—about the dream, about her, about the warning—but the words lodged in my throat.

  Not from distrust.

  From fear of being believed.

  “Just a nightmare,” I said.

  He didn’t press. Only nodded and stepped closer to the pond. “Come back to camp. Dawn’s not far.”

  I rose, brushing mud from my hands. As I turned away, the pond caught the moonlight at just the wrong angle and rippled once more—

  —and for a heartbeat, my reflection flashed red again.

  I ignored it.

  I followed Tom back toward the dying fire.

  But her words trailed behind me like a shadow:

  It may be their hope. But it is not yours.

  The forest seemed to hold its breath as we walked away, as if it already knew—

  how much I would lose in Torrain.

  And how much I would become.