Vampher slept uneasily.
Though the hill was quiet and the ash-smoke flowers no longer pulsed, sleep did not bring rest. It brought her.
The dream opened like a wound.
He stood in a room of mirrors, none of which showed his reflection. The floor was made of pages, thousands of them—scratched-over prophecies, riddles burned at the edges, ink that bled backward into the parchment.
And at the center of it all, Myla knelt.
She was not glitching this time.
She was crying.
Not silent, not staticky—real tears, dripping onto the mirrored floor, each drop echoing like a bell in a hollow world.
She looked up.
Her eyes were ruined stars.
"Vampher," she whispered. "You weren't meant to dream this yet."
He stepped forward. "What's happening? What are you trying to tell us?"
Her voice cracked. Not with distortion—but grief.
"A new prophecy has been written. Over the bones of the old one. It came the moment Dee burned the thread."
Vampher's hands trembled. "What kind of prophecy?"
Myla blinked slowly. Her tears fell faster. And then she began to speak—not plainly, but in the tongue of riddles the echoes could never escape:
"When the thread is scorched, the story turns,
But broken tales will still try to burn.
The weaver weeps, the watcher feeds,
And fate forgets what memory needs.
The seal that bleeds is not the second—
It is the heart that truth has reckoned.
Find the child who walks with none,
Born of dusk but crowned by sun.
A lie will live and call itself name,
And bleed a lock that plays the same.
But if it sings before it screams,
You'll lose the key inside your dreams."
Myla gripped her chest as if something inside her was unraveling.
Vampher tried to reach for her—but his hands passed through.
"Myla! What does it mean?"
But she only looked at him sadly. "You won't remember all of this. The dream will blur when you wake. That's the curse of echoes—we're clearest when we're furthest from waking."
Her form flickered, beginning to fade.
"But remember this, Vampher," she said, voice now trembling with urgency. "The prophecy is not a guide. It's a lure."
And then:
"You are not characters.
You are knives.
And someone is sharpening you."
The mirrors cracked.
The pages curled inward.
And Myla's echo shattered in a silence louder than any scream.
Vampher woke with tears in his own eyes.
The ash flowers had turned white around him.
He didn't speak for a long time.
But in his fist, clenched without realizing, was a torn piece of dream-paper.
On it, only a line had stayed intact:
"You are already too late."