Where am I?
The thought arrived before anything else did — before sight, before sound, before even the simple certainty of possessing a body at all. For a long, formless moment Zelene existed only as a question, suspended in a grey and weightless nowhere, the way a person hangs for half a heartbeat between sleep and waking and cannot yet say which world they belong to.
Then, slowly, the grey began to give way.
Green came first, spilling into her vision like water poured into an empty glass — grass, endless and softly rolling, stretching out toward a horizon burnished gold with the last honeyed light of late afternoon. Then stone rose to meet it, pale towers she had never seen before and somehow already recognized, banners the color of fresh blood snapping lazily in a warm, grass-scented wind. The smell of the place reached her next: crushed clover underfoot, distant woodsmoke, something sweet baking far off where she couldn't see it. Only once all of that had settled around her did she understand, with the strange, delayed logic dreams sometimes obey, that she had a body again — that she was standing, quite solidly, at the edge of a wide training yard, watching.
A woman moved at its center.
She was beautiful in the way storms are beautiful — not gently, not softly, but with a kind of restless, barely-contained energy that made it impossible to look away. Her hair was red. Not auburn, not copper, but a deep, true red, the red of something caught mid-burn, and it tumbled loose past her shoulders and caught the dying sunlight so completely that for one disorienting moment it looked as though her whole head had simply been set alight. She moved alone through the forms of a sword drill, her bare feet pressing unhurried into grass she plainly did not mind ruining, each strike precise and yet somehow unhurried too, more like a private dance than any kind of combat.
Who is she?
A voice called out, dry and warm, from the shade of the treeline. "You are going to trip over your own robes one of these days, dancing about like that with no shoes on."
Aurelia did not break her stance. "I have never once tripped, Maren."
"You will. Someday, you will, and I intend to be there to witness it."
A woman emerged unhurried from beneath the trees — tall, sharp-boned, her hair the grey of a gathering storm cropped close and practical against her skull, a long wooden staff resting easy across one shoulder. She crossed the yard without any particular urgency and folded herself down onto a low stone bench, watching Aurelia finish her drill with the unmistakable fondness of someone who had watched this exact scene play out a hundred times before and never once tired of it.
"You are early," Aurelia said at last, lowering her sword, scarcely out of breath despite the effort.
"You are predictable," Maren returned. "I knew the moment the Council session ran long that I would find you out here instead of at supper. Food comes second with you. Rest comes third. The sword always comes first."
"It clears my head."
"It avoids the conversation you have been dodging for a week," Maren said, and though her tone remained light, something more serious moved beneath it now. "The border dispute with the Northern Clans. You still haven't given them an answer."
Aurelia's shoulders dropped. She sank down into the grass without any of her earlier grace, laying the sword flat across her knees, and for a moment the woman who had looked, only seconds before, as though she might burn the whole yard down simply by existing in it, looked instead achingly, ordinarily tired.
"I do not want another war, Maren," she said quietly. "I have spent six years ending them, one after another, and I find I am very tired of being the reason mothers bury their sons before their fathers do."
Maren was quiet a moment, considering that with the same unhurried care she seemed to give everything. "Then don't be the reason," she said finally. "Be the reason they don't have to."
Whatever answer Aurelia might have given was lost beneath a shout that came ringing bright and delighted across the yard, entirely too loud for the hush of the fading afternoon.
"There the two of you are! I have been looking absolutely everywhere!"
A broad-shouldered man came jogging toward them, gold light flickering faint and constant beneath skin browned deep by years of sun, a grin splitting his face wide enough to be genuinely infectious even from a distance. He dropped down beside Aurelia without waiting to be invited, slinging one arm loose and easy around her shoulders as though he had been doing it his whole life, which, Zelene understood distantly, he very nearly had.
"Dain." Something in Aurelia's voice softened immediately, the last of her heaviness thinning beneath the sheer, uncomplicated warmth radiating off him. "You are meant to be reviewing the eastern garrison reports this evening."
"Finished an hour ago. You ought to be terribly proud of me. I even read the boring parts about grain rationing." His grin faded by degrees as he studied her more closely, his easy manner sharpening into something gentler and more careful. "You're doing the tired eyes again."
"I am always doing the tired eyes, apparently. It seems to be my natural expression these days."
"No," Dain said, quiet now beneath the teasing. "This is the specific kind. The war kind." He squeezed her shoulder once, warm and grounding, an anchor thrown without needing to be asked for. "Whatever you decide about the Clans, Aurelia, you are not deciding it alone. You have never once had to."
A fourth figure detached himself from the shadow along the tower wall — unhurried, entirely unnoticed until the precise moment he chose to be, lean and quiet, dressed in muted grey that seemed to swallow the last of the afternoon light rather than reflect any of it back.
"You say that," the man observed, his voice low and dry as old parchment, "and yet somehow she still manages every difficult decision of consequence sitting alone in a garden at midnight, where none of us can offer her anything at all."
"Ashan." Aurelia did not sound surprised. She never did, Zelene realized, when he simply appeared this way, out of some corner no one could ever quite pinpoint afterward. "How long have you been standing there listening to all of this?"
"Long enough to hear Maren tell you the truth plainly, and long enough to hear Dain attempt, valiantly, to soften it," Ashan said, lowering himself onto the grass across from her with the deliberate economy of a man who had spent a lifetime training himself to occupy as little space as possible. "For whatever it is worth to you, I agree with Maren. Do not wage the war they are hoping to provoke from you. Wage the peace they are far more afraid of instead."
"That is not actually advice, Ashan. That is simply a very clever-sounding sentence."
"It rarely is advice, when it comes from me," he admitted, something almost like warmth threading through the dry humor. "I have always preferred to let people arrive at their own answers. I only ever offer the occasional nudge toward a more useful direction."
The fifth figure arrived last, moving slower than the rest, picking his way with evident care across the uneven grass of the yard, a satchel of herbs slung heavy over one shoulder. His hair was green, unruly, falling loose about a face that struck something deep and sudden in Zelene's borrowed chest — recognition, sharp and immediate, arriving before she had even consciously placed why.
Is that… Nico? That is Nico's face. That is exactly, precisely Nico's face.
"You have all gathered again without me," the young man said, though there was no true complaint in it, only a soft, easy affection that seemed to belong to all five of them equally. He knelt beside Aurelia and pressed the back of his hand briefly, gently, to her forehead — an old, habitual gesture that plainly needed no explanation between them. "You have been out here since before midday. You ought to eat something before the sun goes down entirely."
"I am fine, Nico."
"You always say precisely that, directly before you are not." He did not push the matter further. He simply settled beside her instead, close enough that his shoulder pressed warm against hers, and for a long, unhurried stretch none of the five of them said anything else at all. They only sat together in the fading gold light, comfortable in a way that asked nothing of any of them, needing no performance and no urgency, only each other's quiet presence to fill the whole evening completely.
Zelene watched from wherever it is a dreamer watches from, and felt something ache, deep and entirely unfamiliar, low in her own chest.
Just… Where am I? she thought. What is this dream about?
The dream did not let her linger there.
The gold light shifted too quickly, bleeding all at once into something darker, and the peaceful training yard dissolved beneath her feet into a battlefield instead — smoke thick and choking, screaming from every direction, the relentless clash of steel against steel far too close and far too loud. Aurelia stood now at the very center of it, her robes torn ragged at the hem, blood streaked dark and wet across one side of her face. Not her own blood, Zelene understood with a distant, sickening certainty, though the knowledge offered her no comfort whatsoever.
"AURELIA!"
Maren's voice, raw and cracking with panic, tore through the surrounding chaos.
Aurelia turned toward the sound, and Zelene felt her own borrowed heart stutter and seize with sudden, dawning horror at whatever waited for her across that ruined field.
The dream blurred there, deliberately, almost mercifully, the way nightmares occasionally spare a dreamer the very worst of the image itself. But the sound remained perfectly, unbearably clear — one single, final cry that Zelene understood, with a certainty that settled cold and permanent into her bones, she would carry with her for the rest of her natural life.
Then silence.
Then, after the silence, nothing at all.
Zelene woke gasping, drenched through with sweat despite the cool night air pressing gentle against her skin, her heart slamming so hard against her ribs that it physically ached with every beat. She sat bolt upright, pressing both hands flat into the damp grass beneath her, gulping down air in ragged, desperate pulls, as though she had genuinely been drowning rather than merely dreaming.
Across the dying embers of the fire, Ray was on his feet in an instant, alert even torn straight from sleep. "Zelene—"
She could not answer him right away. The image would not release her — red hair, and blood, and a single scream cut short — burning behind her eyes with a vividness no ordinary dream had any right to possess, refusing to fade the way dreams were supposed to fade the moment a person opened their eyes.
Her gaze found Nico next, still deeply asleep on the far side of the fire, green hair fallen loose and unruly across his face. Exactly, impossibly the same face she had just watched kneel beside a dying woman in a dream that had no earthly business feeling as real as it did.
He was there, she thought, chest still heaving, cold sweat tracing a slow, uneasy path down the length of her spine. I don't know how, and I don't understand why, but he looks just like him, standing in that yard, sitting in that grass, close enough to touch her. And I think — God help me, I think I just watched her die.