The dream that becomes reality

by Elizabeth19Parker

Summary:

In the plane that exists before all form,
Night and Time contemplate the dissolution of their son’s body — Dream. He has died by his own choice, after renouncing his place in the cosmic order. Then Night proposes the unthinkable: to let him return, not as an Endless, but as a man.
Not to restore his power, but to grant him, for the first time, freedom.

@alternate universe
@all rights reserved
@fanfic

Notes:

Disclaimer:
This work is a fanfiction created for transformative and non-commercial purposes. All characters, settings, and original concepts belong to their respective copyright holders. I do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material or characters from The Sandman universe (created by Neil Gaiman and DC Comics) or any related works.

This story is a derivative, alternate-universe interpretation, written out of admiration for the source material.
No profit is being made, and no infringement is intended.

Chapter 1: Just in time

Chapter 1: Just in Time

The body of Dream had fallen without weight, without sound, as if not even death could touch him. His form slowly dissolved into the void, becoming a star that did not burn, but remembered.

High above the plane where names no longer exist, two presences watched him. They had no face, no outline, but the universe recognized their existence. The space around them had no up or down, only layers of twilight softly vibrating, as if the echo of ancient clocks breathed between the fibers of a motionless fabric.

Night and Time.

He, ancient as the movement that gives shape to chaos. She, older even than the need to name.
The funeral of Dream had ended. The Endless had departed. But memories still floated like white lights over a sea that did not exist.

 
The memories flickered like fireflies trapped in liquid spheres, imprisoned between dimensions that no longer were. In the distance, a stemless flower crossed the motionless air.
Both contemplated the exact absence of their son.

—It is over. As it was written —said Time, his voice like a bell sunken in stone.
—Yes… —whispered Night, a shadow dressed in tenderness— But… not entirely.
—The cycle does not repeat forms. You know that.
—And yet… some things persist. Echoes. Cracks.

Pause. The silence stretches like an invisible root between them.

—He came to visit me, you know? —said Night, almost with restrained melancholy.
—He did the same with me. —replied Time—. As they all do when they want something from me.
—And what did you tell him?
—I gave him the only thing I could give.

Certainty. That his choices led him to the present result.

—I asked him to live with me again. To come home, but he refused. You know how stubborn he could be.

Night looked at Time, as if probing for something she could not reach. Just as she once had, though never said until now.

—You were always jealous of him —said Night suddenly, without judgment, without bitterness—. I wonder why. He was your son, after all.
—He was yours too —replied Time—. Tragically, far too much like you.
—He said you had asked about me.
—I assume you are not here because of that.
—Our son has just died. I thought we should be together.
—And do what?
—Mourn him? —she answered, uncertain.
—You want to bring him back, don’t you? Do what he wanted. As always.
—He deserves it. —she protested.
—Deserve? Weren’t you the one who said he was the most self-centered and obstinate of all?
—He chose to die for love… for his own son. Isn’t that something noble?
—We are not mortals, my love. Do not forget that. We do not have feelings like theirs. We serve them. Dream died because his actions led him to die. It should not have been so, but he wanted it that way.
—That is precisely why, perhaps we should…
—We should? —interrupted Time—. Weren’t you the one who told him he was a fool for believing that if he reunited us, we would give him what he wanted? Why do it now, when you would not do it then?
—It is the first time one of our children…
—What? Defies the order itself?
—Changes.

A long pause suddenly invades them. A white flower floats over what once was the Dreaming.

—He was the quietest of our children, and the most bound to the rules —said Night, stepping closer, though distance did not exist—. And the one who most wished to be heard… loved by us.
—And yet he chose the end —replied Time— That was his final act: to break the cycle instead of inhabiting it. It was his choice. Do you now want to strip him of his heroism?
—Perhaps he no longer wished to remain function —murmured Night—. Perhaps he simply wanted to be… man.

A swirl of blue ashes passed between them like a disintegrated memory. It left neither heat nor shadow, only a brief tremor in the fabric of the eternal.

—I can already see it in you —said Time, hardening his voice—. That doubt. That whisper of denial.

He made a tense pause.

—You wouldn’t dare to break what he respected. Please, do not do it out of tenderness, much less out of weakness.
—And if it is not weakness? —she said firmly, her voice deep as a contained abyss—. What if it is… mercy?
—Mercy for him? Or for you?

He questioned after a longer pause. The flower burned faintly in the distance. A glimmer recalled Nada’s kiss with her former king.

—You know what it means to bring him back —continued Time—. Fragmented. Human. Forgetful. Incomplete. He would not be your son, not our son. He would be anything but him.
—Perhaps you are right, but at least he would be… free —declared Night—. For the first time.
—I am the cycle. You are the abyss. If you step outside of both… my love. There will be no balance, and you know it.
—There will be no oblivion either.

Both remain looking at each other, without looking.

—He died never knowing he was truly loved —said Night— I only want that, one night… he may breathe without weight.
—And if he does not recognize her? —asked Time, showing deep concern— And if he does not remember? And if he returns, only to fail again?
—Then he will fail. As a man. And not as punishment.
 

They look at each other without eyes.

—He… did not want to die —says Night, like a late confession.
—He chose to —replies Time, dry—. And by choice, he became complete.
—Do you believe that choice was freedom… or fatigue?
—It was exact. It was worthy. But also… it was loneliness. —he finally conceded.
—All who bear names that are not their own end alone.
 

Time grew even heavier for them both.

—And if he could breathe… once… as himself? Not as an archetype. Not as a symbol. Only… as a man.

Time offered only silence.

—I know what you want to do —said Time.
—I have not done it.
—But you will think of it. And because you will think of it… it has already happened. That’s how this works. That’s how you work.
—Those laws took him from me before he was born —murmured Night— He was the quietest. The most faithful to form. The one who never asked to be. Are parents not meant for that?
—And for that you will offer him return? Because you feel guilty for not helping him when he asked? I do not see motherhood in what you plan, my love. I see only your egocentrism in action.
—Not to him… —confessed Night, with the shadow of a heartbeat older still— I will offer it to her.
—What? And what makes you think she wants him back? He condemned her to ten thousand years in hell, only because she chose the same as he would have chosen had he been in her place. She would not want him back. She is human now. Free from Dream’s cursed love. Why would she cage herself again?
—You are right about one thing. She does not want him as king or as sign.
—She did not forgive him. She saw him as a mistake. One that cost her too dearly. —asserted Time, stepping away.
—You are wrong… She saw him as possibility. —corrected Night.
—And if he breaks? And if he is lost? And worst of all, if he fails again at being simple? —insisted the father from the distant twilight.
—Then it will not be punishment. It will be human.

The void is no longer void. It has weight. It has cracks. A faint white glow begins to encircle the edges of what once was only shadow.

—If you do this… —said Time, measuring what he had just witnessed— I will not come to stop it, but make no mistake, I will not come to protect it either.
—I will make no promises. —insisted Night, convinced she was doing right.
—You do not make promises like his. They are only dreams that do not know if they are beginning or end. —he corrected, unable to avoid irony.
—Then let him dream once more. Without me. Without you. Alone.

A gentle current moves through the nothingness, as if something breathed for the first time between matter and name.
In the final silence. A star is born in the distance without exploding. A name is written without sound, and somewhere in the world… someone breathes for the first time with the soul of one who had already been.

Chapter 2: The Concession

It was a night without moon. No stars, no breeze. A night stopped in an instant without time. It did not happen in the physical world, but in that other plane where memory, longing and dream intertwine. A corner of the subconscious where hours nor distances exist, only the permanence of what is unresolved.

Nada’s body lay stretched on a bed that did not exist anywhere physical, but her soul floated between two planes: one where the body breathed, and another where the memories had not yet finished saying goodbye.
There slept Nada, without resting completely. Her breathing was light like a secret, and on her forehead there was no peace, only waiting. Sometimes, in dreams, her body turned slightly, as if looking for an answer between the sheets of mist, but there was no way to escape that rest without rest. As if even in sleep, her soul did not finish surrendering.

The sheets —woven not of fabric, but of a soft and warm mist— barely brushed her skin. Around her, the room was impossible to pinpoint: it had no walls, no ceiling, no floor, but it did have the sensation of having been built with ancient thoughts.

A slight tremor ran through the edges of that space without edges. It was not a sound nor an image: it was the awareness that something else was about to enter. The dream ceased to be refuge and became threshold.

Then, the darkness took form. Not as a threat, nor as enemy shadow. It was older than fear, and at the same time vaster than time. It did not walk, but floated. It did not speak, but resonated. However, upon appearing, the air changed. The dream became deeper. The temperature descended slightly, as if the universe held its breath.

The darkness curved in spiral, as if the night itself bowed in respect. “You still dream of him” said a voice that was not a voice, but echo of an origin without beginning.

Nada half opened her eyes. There was no light, and yet she saw. There was no face, but she recognized the presence: immense, serene, uncontainable.

The darkness had a texture. A pulse. As if it breathed around her without invading her. A slight mist, of worthy blackness, oscillated in the air like a curtain that never fell. It was not a shadow. Nor was it blackness. It was a vibration without color, perceived more with the chest than with the eyes. A nostalgia without object. As if the night itself had also been waiting for her.

“Who are you?” she asked, without fear, only with tiredness. “And why am I dreaming of you?”

The darkness did not answer immediately. It only slid around her, without touching her. A dense calm enveloped her, almost maternal.

Then, the voice spoke again. “Because you are still dreaming of him.”

Nada lowered her gaze ashamed. Her throat closed, she had not pronounced that name, and yet… it was true.

“How could I not?” she whispered. Her voice broke like thin glass. Then it recomposed, dignified. “I loved him when he was fire, and I mourned him when he was shadow.” She paused. “But… I expect nothing now.”

It was not a bitter renunciation, but rather the most painful acceptance: that time does not return what has been eternal. That even the vastest love must release sometime.

The darkness, which was Night, seemed to tighten the air, as if wrapping a promise.

“Precisely because of that… you deserve something.”

Nada looked at her intently, from that corner of the soul where doubt still lived. Night’s voice descended deeper still.

“Listen to me well.” She paused. “I cannot return him as an Endless. That aspect died, as it had to.” She drew breath without needing to. “But I can allow him to return… as a man.”

The dream trembled under her skin. The echo of her veins seemed to respond with a forgotten pulse. It was not fear, but the memory of having felt something so deeply that even now, without having asked for it, it returned.

Nada barely sat up in the bed of dream. The dreamlike background vibrated, as if a crack had opened in the very texture of the real. Her face did not show fear, but a deeper unease: hope without permission.

“Why do you think I want him to return?”

Night did not respond with judgment nor certainty, but with something deeper, more ancient:

“Because loving is not always desiring.” She came closer to her. “Sometimes, it is allowing.”

Nada did not respond immediately. There was something in that proposal that hurt more than absence. What happens when someone returns, but is no longer who they were? Can love survive oblivion? Anger? Pain? Desire?

Nada recoiled slightly, her whole soul shaken by the impossible.

“And he… will he know who he was?” she whispered, as if saying it could break her.

“Not entirely” said Night, with a tenderness that hurt. “But there will be something in him that will seek you. Like a forgotten note in a song that still moves him, and if someday that melody dreams again, like in a crossing of glances, in the brush of a casual word, he would feel a shiver without cause. He would not know why. He would only know that there was something there that he cannot ignore.” Night sentenced.

Nada pressed her lips, containing an echo she did not want to say aloud, and then asked, barely audible:

“Will he look for me?”

The night became denser, but not heavy. Only intimate.

“Only if you allow it.”

“I allowed so much once” thought Nada. “I allowed him to love me. To punish me. To forget me. Could I allow now that he find me… without knowing who I am?”

Between them, Silence filled. Not of absence, but of threshold.

“And if I do not want him to?” asked Nada.

Night smiled without answering immediately. She only let something white fall onto her open palm. A petal. Or a beginning.

“Then he will not.” she assured her.

Nada exhaled, not out of resignation, nor out of desire, but out of something new.

Then, from the suspended air, a white petal descended. It was simple, but it was everything at once. It fell onto Nada’s open palm, who held it as if it were destiny.

“But… if you consent to it. This time… love will not be debt” said Night, taking her hand to close it with the petal inside. “It will be choice.”

The petal had no scent, nor had it weight, but closing her hand over it, Nada felt something move inside her. Not a certainty, but a permission, and then, everything faded, as fade the dreams that do not ask to be understood, only felt.

Beyond the recognized. In the library of the All, in that one that has no doors. Only paths that arrive when one is already inside.

Destiny walked without steps.

The book chained to his left wrist remained open, although his eyes did not read it. He did not need to. What he must know was already in it from before language.

But that morning —if it could be called that in a plane where light is decision and not phenomenon— a page had changed.

Or worse still: it had flickered. As if it wanted to be something different. As if a very ancient voice had whispered to him: “this time, do not read… feel.”

Destiny had no emotions, but he had memory of everyone’s emotions. And that was, sometimes, more unbearable than feeling them in flesh himself.

He did not call. He did not announce his arrival. He only stopped at the edge of the threshold where the Night was not figure, but origin. Where time had not yet learned to count.

There she was.

Night. His mother.

Not as shadow, but as fullness. Not as loving mother, nor as feared force. Only as what she was: the one who precedes everything that can be named.

Destiny bowed, not in gesture of submission, but of recognition.

“You have touched a line” he said. His voice did not accuse. It only stated.

Night did not turn to him. She remained suspended in her silent spiral, weaving with threads that no eye could translate.

“It was not a line” she replied “It was a seed.”

Destiny narrowed his eyes. His book trembled slightly.

“Sowing in unauthorized ground has consequences. Even for you.”

“Authorized by whom?” asked Night, without altering her tone.

There was silence. Because that was a question not even the book could answer.

“He had to die as he was” continued Destiny “Be Dream. Fall, and let another take his place. That was written. It happened as it should happen.”

Night turned slightly. Not her body, for she had none, but the universe around her seemed to lean. She materialized before her son.

“And what is not written yet?” she whispered.

There was a pause. Destiny lowered his gaze, for the first time in millennia, he did not find the answer in the page that corresponded to him.

“There is a new name” he said at last “One that does not come from me.”

“Darian” replied Night, as if savoring the word.

“That name… is not in the book.” pointed Destiny surprised.

“I know. That is why I chose it.” she exclaimed playing with the leaves of her plants. She approached the table and offered him a cup of tea.

Destiny closed the volume. The chains did not break, but they stopped tightening him.

“And what do you expect to happen now, Mother?”

Night turned completely toward him. The plane trembled. The stars from before time blinked.

“Nothing.”

She kept silent, but then added.

“And everything.”

“He has returned without his aspect. Without his history.” said Destiny “What remains of an Endless when he no longer is?”

“What he chose to be when no one watched” replied Night in a whisper “What he loved, even when it was unthinkable.”

Destiny did not respond, he neither assented nor dissented. He only listened.

“And you… will you keep reading him?” she asked.

“Always. Even if I do not know what ending it will bring this time.”

“Then, my son” concluded the Night, enveloping him in a warm and worthy dusk “Watch over him. Not to correct him, but to remember that even destiny needs witnesses when it dares to break its form.”

Destiny moved away, the book opened again, but on the page that had been erased, now there was a new line. Barely a trace. A word.

Darian.

And beneath it, one more.

“He is not yet Dream. But he is… possibility.”

Chapter 3: Encounter in the Waking World

The world had not yet decided whether it was day or night. The threshold between what was and what could be opened in silence. Nada slept, but did not rest. Several months had passed since that moonless night when the darkness took form and offered her the unthinkable. Since then, every day she had awakened wondering whether it had all been just another dream—or a farewell. With each week that passed without a sign, she learned to reinterpret silence as an answer.

It was early. The city awoke wrapped in a thin rain, the kind that barely touches the ground but insists on being noticed. The sky was gray, without storm or light. Only gray. The morning moved slowly, as if time itself had no hurry to begin.
The scent of wet earth mingled with that of toasted bread, and the sound of a teaspoon against a cup was the closest thing to a heartbeat.

On an ordinary corner of an unremarkable street stood a small, warm café, with wooden tables and fogged windows. There, sitting beside one of the panes, was she—
Nada.
She dressed without pretension, with the quiet dignity of one who has lost everything and still decides to inhabit the world. As if that corner of the café had been created to receive a waiting that had never been named. No longer the queen who defied the heavens. Nor the shadow who waited centuries in hell. Now she was only a woman.
Human. Real.

She was a doctor of psychiatry. She worked in a public hospital, where broken dreams arrived stripped of metaphor, only as symptoms. Every day she listened to voices that were not visions, traumas that were not prophecies, and tears that no longer knew where they came from. There, among diagnoses and clinical silences, she learned not to speak of what she had lost. At times, she even managed not to think of it. Her name appeared on the small plaque of a modest office on the second floor of an old building: Dr. Nada Elmasri, psychiatrist.

She listened to others, day after day, searching within their pain for a way to understand her own. She had chosen that path without knowing whether it was redemption or punishment, but in every story that was not hers, something within her rearranged itself. And something else broke.

She held a closed book in her hands, but did not read it. She held it as one holds a memory without opening it. Several months had passed since that night; at first, she had waited for him every day. She used to watch passersby, searching for an impossible presence, but as time went by, the waiting began to hurt more than the absence. Today, as she held that nameless book, she began to wonder whether her decision had been a mistake.

Why wait for something she herself had let go? she thought. Maybe I don’t want it anymore. Not like before. Not like a god who encompasses everything.
Perhaps she only wished that someone—anyone—would remember that she too had loved. And if it wasn’t him she longed for, but the possibility of having once been chosen by something eternal? What if her waiting wasn’t love, but pride disguised as loyalty? Or worse still—vengeance?

Outside, the city carried on. Cars idled at traffic lights without urgency. Umbrellas clumsily dodged puddles. Inside the café, however, everything was suspended. Just when she was about to surrender—not completely, only enough to stop thinking of him every morning—a sound interrupted her thoughts.
It wasn’t loud, nor urgent, but it was real. The chime of the door, like a finger tapping the rim of a glass at the precise moment, unnoticed by anyone else.

Then she saw him. It was him.
Not because she knew, nor because she could name him—but because his eyes—gray-blue, vast, as if the night itself had learned to see—were still the same. The dark hair, slightly shorter than she remembered, fell over a high forehead, and his coat—long, black, unbranded—seemed not to get wet, even though it was still raining outside.

He looked younger. Or perhaps only lighter. As if the weight of worlds no longer followed him. And though his clothes were simple, without symbols or markings, the air seemed to curve around him, as if the world, upon noticing him, startled without knowing why.

She kept watching, studying him, captivated by something she couldn’t decipher or define. He, unaware of any of it, ordered coffee. His voice was calm yet deep, just as she remembered—though almost emptied of emphasis. As he spoke, a raindrop trembled on the window. It did not fall. It simply stayed.

Then, turning, he saw her.
He froze. It wasn’t a conscious recognition—no memories, no names, no images—only the absence of air. Only the inner tremor of what had once been sacred and no longer knew why. The morning light seemed to twist slightly, as if recognizing an old melody resuming its course.

He approached, breaking the spell of the first glance. Stepping as if walking along the edge of a dream. As if something were pushing him and he were powerless to resist.

Nada noticed.
For a moment, she wanted to stay still and run away at once. Pretend she hadn’t seen him. That the bell hadn’t chimed. That her heartbeat hadn’t changed when she saw him. She lowered her gaze, as if the cup in her hands could hide her. But then… she recognized him by his shoes. Black. Slightly worn. Silent. Exactly like the ones he’d worn the last time he crossed her path—in another plane, another century. He was already beside her.

“Excuse me…” he said.
She lifted her gaze—not in surprise, but in calm. As if she had awaited that moment without truly expecting it.
Their eyes met. There was no lightning, no music, no revelation. Only a silent shiver, as if the air between them held a sigh that had been waiting centuries to be exhaled. He frowned slightly, like one trying to recall the name of a perfume from a forgotten dream. She held his gaze a moment longer… and only then allowed the word stranger to make sense.

“This is going to sound strange, but…” he hesitated. “Do we know each other?”

She smiled faintly. As one who has rebuilt her soul just enough to hold tenderness without breaking.
“No,” she said.
A pause formed, and then, with a voice like a breeze passing once more through the same tree, she added:

“But once… we dreamed the same dream.”

The man looked at her as if those words matched an echo rising from his chest. His stern expression softened, and he smiled—not with certainty, but with a bewildered sweetness. As if suddenly, in the middle of that gray morning, something whispered: Here it is.

“May I sit?” he asked.
“Only if you tell me your name,” she replied, half her smile still intact.

The man hesitated. Not because he didn’t want to answer, but because he didn’t know what to say. He looked at his cup, then at something deeper—something formless—and finally murmured:

“I don’t have one yet.”

Nada looked at him, uncomprehending. He grimaced, coughed awkwardly, and corrected himself:

“I suppose it’s Darian,” he said, hesitant, as if the name didn’t quite convince him. “At least that’s what my documents say,” he confessed, drawing a breath and, without knowing why, continued aloud. “But sometimes I feel it doesn’t belong to me,” he lowered his gaze. “As if I’d inherited it from someone who’s no longer here… even though I never knew them.”

She didn’t answer immediately. She just observed him. Because she understood. Because she, too, had inhabited names that didn’t entirely contain her.

“Aren’t you a little too old to not know your own name?” she asked at last, with a soft spark in her voice.
He smiled.

“It’s a long story, but if you give me time… maybe I can tell it to you.”

She nodded slowly.
“And if you do,” she added, without looking away, “are you ready for the possibility that what you find… you might not like?”

He looked at her, surprised by his own certainty, and nodded.

“I think I always was,” he replied, confused.

“I suppose it’s not who you were that matters,” she said, “but who you choose to be now.”

He sat across from her. Lifted the cup and took a sip as if it were nothing, as if he weren’t trembling inside—but Nada noticed.
She knew him.
Even in his new form, even without shared names, she could recognize the way he held silence. It wasn’t an empty silence. It was the one he used when he didn’t know what to do with what he felt.

“It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of you,” he said suddenly, almost without realizing it.
“You’ve dreamed of me?” she asked, unmoving.
He looked back at her for a few seconds, as if trying to recognize her.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was just a voice. Or a feeling. But every time I woke up, I had the same word on my lips.”
“Which one?” she interrupted.
“Your name… Nada.”

For the first time, she trembled—not visibly, but in that part of the soul where names turn into wounds.
“And how do you know that’s my name?” she whispered, barely audible, as if fearing the answer.

He suddenly extended his hand, not to touch her, but to point—delicately, almost childlike—at the badge hanging from her chest. He said nothing more, because there was no need. She exhaled a sigh she didn’t know whether was relief or sorrow.

“There’s something about you that… makes me want to remember you,” he said softly. Without understanding what he was doing, or saying.
“And what do you feel when you try?” she asked.
“That it hurts—but not like a wound. More like… an absence.”

He took a long breath, as if air were the only thing that still truly belonged to him.
“I’m not crazy,” he murmured, unsure whether it was statement or question. “I bet I’m a lunatic,” he added, running a nervous hand through his hair. “You must think I’m insane… right?” he asked, shifting in his seat.
“No,” she answered, without hesitation but with tenderness. “I don’t think that.”

A brief, suspended silence followed—almost kind. He broke it with a question that sought not answers, but shelter:
“Do you always come here?” he asked, as one searching for an anchor point, changing the subject.

Nada smiled.
“No. Only on the days I try to forget something I’m not sure I want to forget.”

He nodded, as if understanding more than he knew.
Then, for a moment, their gazes met with the intensity of all that remained unsaid, and though neither knew it, that was the instant when time—the one that neither forgets nor repeats—breathed slower.

The rain stopped. No one noticed, but the barista paused for a second before serving. A fly ceased its flight. Something had changed.
In the nearest flowerpot, a white flower bloomed.
No one had planted it. No one seemed to notice. And yet, there it was.

It was a small flower, unpretentious. With soft petals and a pale heart. As it opened, it seemed to remember something neither earth nor air had managed to keep. As if it responded not to the season, but to the reunion. As if it whispered, without words: This moment… had already been dreamed.

As promise. As beginning.
As if the world remembered, at last, that some stories do not end—they only learn to begin again.

And somewhere beyond this plane, Night smiled.

While the world continued its course, noticing nothing special, Nada held her cup as if still afraid to let go of the memory.

“And if I’m not who I was?” he asked, breaking the silence that enveloped them—surprising her.
“Then it will be the first time I meet you,” she answered.

And for the first time in many lives, they were not what they had been—neither queen and condemned—
but simply two people, trying, perhaps, to remember how to begin again.

He, without knowing why, began to speak of simple things: the rain, the coffee, the strange feeling of being home.

Chapter 4: The Echo of Those Who Do Not Know How to Die

The rain had ceased, but the ground still smelled of return. Darian left the café with his heart beating at a frequency he did not know how to name. Nada had looked at him as if she knew something he did not yet remember. He did not understand why that woman—her name, her smile, the contained tremor in her eyes—had seemed so… inevitable. He walked through narrow streets, lined with low buildings and poorly kept gardens. It was an old residential area, where the sidewalks seemed to forget their edges and the lampposts crackled without haste. A neglected park, barely lit, received him as if it knew him.

He crossed a street without looking. The traffic light blinked without urgency. Everything seemed real, and at the same time, false. As if his body knew it was on loan. As if the world around him had not yet decided whether it should accept him.
However, a block from the café, someone had been watching him. She did not walk. She did not breathe, nor cast a shadow, but she was there.

Death.

Leaning against a lamppost that did not light, with her dark jacket covering her shoulders like folded wings. Her gaze was neither severe nor sad. Only deep. As if she looked beyond bones, beyond history, beyond even time.
She had seen him in the café window. She had seen the flower, and she had seen—she knew without knowing how—the Dream that should not be there.
He did not notice her. Not at first, but something in his back tensed, as if a presence brushed him without touching him. He turned a corner. Walked half a block more. Stopped by a closed shop window. He looked at his reflection in the glass. It was him, but not entirely. There was an echo behind his gaze. Something that did not match.
There, under the awning of an old bus stop with broken glass and a rusty sign, Darian stopped. Not because he was waiting for transport. But because something inside him had told him he should go there.
Then he felt it. Not the sound, nor the step, but the certainty. He turned abruptly.

“Are you following me?” he asked, without disguising his nervousness.

Death did not answer. She only observed him, with an ancient sadness that seemed to have no cause, only consequence.

“Do I know you?” he insisted.

She only tilted her head slightly.

“Perhaps. In another form. In another time.”

He took a step back. He looked around. There was no one else on the street. The wind blew lightly, as if it too held its breath.

“What do you want from me?”

She did not lie, but neither did she explain.

“To see you,” she said simply.

Darian frowned. He did not know why, but his pulse quickened. He took a step back. He looked around again: only an old bench, a schedule sign worn away, and a wildflower growing between the cobblestones.

“Who are you?” He asked, but only got silence in response. She stepped forward a little, crossing the distance, but without invading him.

Then, in a clumsy and sudden defensive gesture, he put his hand in his pocket and took out a key. It was the only thing he had. He held it as if he could use it as a weapon. A shapeless threat. His eyes searched everywhere for something else that could serve him.

“Don’t take another step,” he warned, trembling. He shouted to the wind, but without violence. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he murmured, as he bent down to pick up a piece of rusty pipe that lay right by a leaning post.
Death lowered her gaze, but did not retreat; she only tilted her head with compassion, then looked back into his eyes. She did not laugh, nor mock. She only spoke with immense calm:

“You cannot hurt me with that.”

The statement was not arrogant. It was… inevitable. Like a law of nature. Like saying that night follows day. Darian held his hands in the same position a few seconds longer, then without knowing why he slowly lowered them both, dropped the pipe; the hollow sound as it hit the ground was like an echo of something that had not begun. His breathing was erratic. Not from fear, but from confusion.

“Why are you following me?” he murmured, this time without anger, only with an ancient weariness that he did not know where it came from. “Did you also know me before the accident?” he asked.

She took a step, not toward him, but toward the exact spot where he had been seconds before.

“Because you should not exist,” she said.

Her words were not a threat. They were lament. Darian felt something quiver deep in his chest. A formless memory. An echo of a fall.

“What? Why do you say that?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

Death did not answer. She only looked at him. Then, in an unexpected gesture, she sat on the stone bench by the empty bus stop, but before she could answer, the night grew thicker—not from lack of light, but from a presence.
A soft shadow spread from the edge of the park. It did not cast darkness, but silence. The air changed.

Time seemed to fold. Not like a cosmic slip, but as if the world made space for an apparition that should not, but could not, be avoided.
From the edge of the side street, a black car, old, with soft velvet-like lines, stopped without a sound. The lights were not on, but they shone just enough to be recognized by the one who should see them.

The passenger window slid down with a barely audible mechanical sigh. From inside, an enveloping voice spoke, without urgency.

“Darling,” she called, interrupting. “What are you still doing here?”

Darian turned. He recognized her without surprise, with a stillness that only dreams permit.

“Mother?” he whispered. “I was walking home… What are you doing here?” he asked, somewhat embarrassed.

“I went out to buy something,” Night replied, as if that were natural, though the air knew it wasn’t. “I thought I saw you. Get in, I’ll take you.”

The door lock released with a soft click.

Darian nodded without thinking too much. He approached the car and took the handle with the same hand with which, just a few minutes earlier, he had held a rusty pipe, and Death understood. She understood more than she wished. More than was allowed. Darian looked back at her, still confused, when he heard her voice.

“Walk with me tomorrow,” she said quickly in a low voice, looking at the car. “I will do nothing but watch, and if you still want answers…

…then I will give them to you.”

He looked at her a moment more. Then, without knowing why, he turned and walked away, opened the car door and got in, his body still in the city, but his soul already on its way to something else.
Death did not follow him this time.

She only closed her eyes, and in her mind, for the first time since the funeral, the name that should not be remembered appeared: Dream.
The inside of the car smelled of old paper and lavender. The radio was off, but a faint melody seemed to hang in the air, as if it came from somewhere else. Night drove slowly, unhurriedly, as if the journey were more important than the destination.
Darian looked out the window, the buildings passing like shadows. He had his hands clasped on his lap, in silence, until at last he spoke.

“You don’t need to keep doing this, you know?”

Night turned her face slightly, without letting go of the wheel.

“Doing what, darling?”
“This. Coming for me. Watching over me. Accompanying me everywhere… I know it was hard at first. That I barely spoke. That everything was a fog. But I’m not that guy anymore,” he said, in a voice that tried to sound firm, though it trembled slightly at the end.

She did not respond immediately. She only slowed down as she turned onto a dimly lit corner.

“And how do you know you’re not that guy?” she whispered.

Darian averted his gaze.

“I don’t know, but I want to find out on my own.”

Night was silent. Her profile was serene, but her eyes seemed to contain centuries.

“I was in a coma, I lost my memory, I understand. You were scared, but I also left the hospital. I’m fine now,” Darian added. “Or I will be. I just need space.”

“And what if what you need is not space, but time?” she countered.

He sighed. It was not the first time they had had this conversation.

“Mother…”

The word fell between them with a mix of tenderness and habit, as if it belonged to him and didn’t at the same time.

“…I’m grateful for everything. Truly. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. However, now it’s my turn. I don’t want you to keep taking care of me as if I were a child. Because I am not a child.”

Night nodded slowly, as if her thoughts were slower than the world.

“No, you’re not anymore. You’re right, but to a mother a child is always her little boy,” she confessed.

For a few seconds, only the soft engine and the muffled echo of the sleeping city could be heard.

"Promise me one thing,” she said finally. “If ever… you feel that something in you doesn’t fit, that there is something you don’t remember but that still hurts… promise me you won’t keep silent, and that you’ll tell me.”

Darian did not answer immediately. Then he nodded without looking at her.

“Alright.”

She stopped in front of the building where he lived. He unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the door, and before getting out, murmured:

“Thank you for coming for me tonight.”
“I would always come. You know that, don’t you?” Night said, like someone who casts a truth without date.

He barely nodded. When he closed the door and walked toward the entrance, she did not drive off immediately. She stayed a moment watching his figure move away. Then, and only then, did she allow her form to begin to blur slowly into the mist of dawn.
The street was empty now. The echo of the tires had faded like a note held too long, but not everything had ended.

Death stood on the opposite sidewalk, waiting, under a lamppost that illuminated nothing. Her closed umbrella dripped with the drizzle that had stopped minutes ago, as if she too refused to accept that everything had changed.
Night appeared at her side without footsteps or sound. She was simply there. Darkness did not arrive with her; it had already been waiting.

“You followed him,” Death said, without looking at her. “And you helped him.”
“I accompanied him,” Night replied. “As one accompanies a son… even if he does not know he is one.”

Death pressed her lips together. Her expression was not judgment, but warning.

“What are you doing, Mother? How much longer are you going to accompany him? Until he remembers? Until he calls you ‘mother’ with the weight of what that implies?”
“I don’t need him to say it,” Night answered, serene. “For him, I already am.”

Death took a deep breath. Her breath was white, but not from cold. From all that was not being said.

“I don’t understand. Why bring him back? Is this a twisted form of grief?” she asked, bewildered. “Or is it your attempt to redeem yourself for what you were not with him? With us, through this?”
Night did not respond.

“You know this is not part of the cycle,” Death insisted.
“Yes, darling. I know,” Night affirmed. “But that is not why it is wrong.”

Death stood in front of her. Her shadow did not tremble, but her voice did.

“Is it not wrong? And what if he remembers who he is? And if he remembers who you really were?”
“How could he remember?” Night replied, exhaling as if it pained her that her daughter did not see what she already understood. “You worry too much,” she added, softening her expression as she adjusted the collar of her coat with a maternal gesture, so improper for her, so intimate.

“But if that moment comes…” she continued, without looking at her. “Then he will have to choose. Like everyone.”

The silence that followed was not human; it was the kind of pause that only occurs when two aspects of the cosmos observe each other without need of language.

“Then… I have to assume that we are not unnecessary consequences of love, after all,” Death murmured, with irony.

“Oh, dear. That… is what your father thinks. Not I,” Night corrected. “You are my children. Perhaps I have not been a mother in the sense you expected… but tell me, is there a school for that?”
Death did not respond.

“I love you,” Night said, with a conviction that seldom sprang from her mouth. “All of you, my children. At my rhythm, in my way. Not in the form you wish, certainly not as you would long for, nor as he longed for before he died, but I love you as one loves the inevitable. That which you cannot hold, yet still name. Because I held you when the universe did not yet know how to pronounce you.”
Death closed her eyes; for an instant, her figure seemed older. More vulnerable.

“He should not be here, Mother. That is the point of his death; it was his will,” she whispered. “He could have left, avoided his functions, his obligations, but if he had done so, he would not have been himself. With this, you are making his sacrifice in vain,” she asserted.

“Perhaps you are right about something—or perhaps not,” Night smiled, approaching her with tenderness. She stroked a lock of her hair, as if that fragility also belonged to her. “Darian is not your brother, but he is still my son. He is a seed, and what sprouts from it belongs only to him. Not to us. He is not an Endless; he is human.
He is only a man.”

She paused briefly.

“But do not forget that there are forces that move… even when they are not named,” Death replied.

“Then… if you are worried about him, watch over him, but do not break him before his time.”

“I would never do that, and you know it.”

“You two were always the closest. He was your favorite. I know it; that is why it hurts you to see him like this…”
Death nodded in silence, with a tinge of nostalgia.

“You see, darling, at last we agree on something. We both love him.”
And with nothing more, the darkness dissolved into itself.

Death remained alone a moment longer, listening to how the world resumed its course.

She looked into nothingness, as if someone were watching her from the other side of the veil.

“Darian,” she murmured, like a prayer. “May the name not wake you… yet.”

 

 

 

Chapter 5: The Unspoken

The clock read 9:26 when Nada arrived at the building where she worked. The rain from the night before had left the sidewalks damp and the windows on the fourteenth floor fogged from the inside. She went up in silence, without looking at her mobile phone. She wore the same coat as the day before, the one that still kept a faint smell of coffee, of waiting.
She opened the office door. Julia, her secretary, was already seated in front of the computer, with a cup of tea in her hands.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she greeted. “You have a full schedule today, but I left the first half hour free in case you wanted to catch up on Mrs. Orsini’s report. After that, it’s Mr. Peña, and at noon… the new case.”
Nada hung her coat on the rack and approached the desk.

“What new case?”

Julia looked through some papers and pulled out an ivory-colored folder, with the name printed in black ink: Darian Endlesson

Nada stopped, not because she expected it, but because something in the sound of the name seemed to precede it.

“Endlesson?” she repeated.

“Yes,” Julia confirmed. “He was admitted by referral from San Gabriel Hospital. They’re sending him for post-trauma psychiatric evaluation. He’s young, in his thirties. Says he was in a coma for several weeks after an overdose episode. They found him alone, at an overlook, without identification, without documents, without witnesses. He remembers nothing prior to the incident.”

“No family?” asked Nada, although she already knew part of the answer.

“Only a woman who says she’s his mother—she’s the one who handled the referral. She’s been living with him since he was discharged.”

Julia leafed through the clinical report and lowered her tone a little.

“His prior history… is unclear. There are no official records from before the admission, but the psychiatrists who saw him in the ER describe a complex personality. Persistent melancholy, subtle narcissistic traits, emotional hypersensitivity concealed by distant language. A tendency toward obsessive self-observation, and a pattern of idealizing pain as a path to meaning.”

Nada slowly raised her gaze.

“Suicide attempt?”

Julia hesitated for a second.

“It can’t be proven, but… it’s suggested. The self-denial pattern, the choice of place, the total absence of connections or letters. Everything suggests more a surrender than an accident.”
Nada took the folder. The paper felt heavier than usual.

“Any history of substance use?”

“Not in his records. The toxicology showed traces of opiates and benzodiazepines—it could have been episodic use… or the first documented attempt at something larger.”

“And what did they say about his post-coma behavior?”

“That he’s functional, but disconnected. He speaks clearly, but without roots. He doesn’t remember names, or places. He has recurring dreams, but he can’t translate them. He suffers from insomnia, and has had at least one episode of sleep paralysis.”

Nada felt that every word was constructing a face she already knew. Not from the reports, but from what she had felt when she saw him.

“Did he request the appointment?”

“No, his mother did. He agreed to come, but not enthusiastically. He told me, verbatim: ‘I don’t know if I want to remember, but I know that something in me wants to know why not knowing hurts.’”

The phrase hit her hard. Nada fell silent for a few seconds, as if the air had thickened.

“Do you want me to reschedule him?” asked Julia, noticing the tension. “I can transfer him to another doctor if you’d like…”

Nada shook her head.

“No. Have him come. I’ll see him myself.”

Julia nodded and stepped out.

The office fell silent again. Only the sound of the clock, distant footsteps in the hallway, and a soft breeze entering through the crack of the window composed the scene.

Nada opened the folder. She looked at the printed name. Darian Endlesson. And she knew, without knowing how, that it hadn’t been him who fell that night… but something else.

Something she still did not know how to name.

A white petal fell on the edge of the desk, as if brought by a wind that did not come from this world. It made no sound when it touched the surface. It only left a faint scent, like a memory freshly remembered. In the silence of the room, a whisper with no mouth was heard:

If you consent… then this time it will not be debt. It will be choice.

Darian’s apartment was modest, newly lived-in. Open boxes and half-empty suitcases shared space with borrowed furniture and walls still without decorations. The morning light came in warm through the living room window, casting soft lines on the wooden floor.

In the kitchen, a note written in firm handwriting was stuck to the refrigerator:

“Darling: remember your medical appointment at 12:00 p.m. Don’t be late, please. The path toward what you are is not walked if one doesn’t show up. —M.”

He barely smiled. He bent down, opened a box, and pulled out an old, worn book with a titleless cover. He leafed through it, as if searching for something that was no longer there. Then he went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and looked at

himself in the mirror.

“Today we’re going to talk,” he told himself.

Already dressed, in a dark jacket and clean shoes, he crossed the room to close the window before leaving, but then he saw her.

A slender figure, with a closed umbrella, walking along the opposite sidewalk.

Death

She did not look at him directly. She walked calmly, as if she were only crossing the world. However, just before turning the corner, she turned her face and smiled at him. It was an invitation.

Darian froze. Then, as if propelled by something he could not name, he ran down the stairs, crossed the doorway, and went out into the street. The woman he had seen was no longer there. There was no one.

Desperate, without knowing why he looked both ways, he searched the corners. Only ordinary people, cars stopped at the traffic light, a woman walking her dog.

When he thought he would no longer be able to follow her, then… he felt her.

That sensation. That slight pressure behind the sternum. As if his shadow remembered something his mind did not.

He turned toward the side alley. There she was: Her.

Death.

She advanced slowly, with soundless steps, waiting for him. He followed her, without calling out to her, without running. He only walked after her, crossing the passage until it opened into a small park, one of those forgotten by the maps, where the trees

seemed older than the city.

Chess players occupied the nearby benches. Older men, with weathered faces and meticulous movements. A child threw a ball against a fence. Everything seemed suspended in denser air.

His right leg tensed as if to flee, but the rest of his body remained still. Something deeper held him in place, and it was there. At that precise instant, seeing the board, the black piece capturing the white, that something clicked inside him.

Not a memory, nor a recollection. It was an echo. He felt he had already been there, in that same corner, with that same woman before him, but it was not a memory, it was an echo.

As if he had once done that. Or said something about it. Or… been there with her.

He approached the bench where she was seated. Death did not look at him; she only waited, as if she knew he would come and sit beside her.

“Why do I feel this is not the first time the two of us have done this?” Darian asked, taking a seat next to her.

Death barely turned her head and smiled at him, without mockery, but she could not avoid compassion.

“Because sometimes the soul remembers what the body does not know it has lived.”

He fell silent, lowered his gaze and focused it on his hands.

“I don’t understand.”

"That’s alright, because you don’t need to yet,” she assured him.

“Yet?”

She looked at him tenderly, unhurried.

“Answers aren’t always what you need. Sometimes only the weight of the question is enough to change you.”

An old man in the back dropped a chess piece to the ground. The dry clack echoed louder than usual. Darian shuddered.

“Am I crazy?”

“No.” she let out with a laugh she couldn’t help.

“Then why do I feel like I am?”

Death lowered her gaze, thoughtful.

“Because you are what remains when someone decides not to take with them everything they were.”
Darian frowned.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Not now,” she said, and extended her hand. Not to touch him. Only to point to a white butterfly that had just perched on the railing in front of them. “But it will. I promise.”

Darian looked at her. Then he looked at the butterfly. Then at the sky, which was clearer than he remembered.

“Will I see you again?”

Death nodded, smiling.

“Whenever you start to forget what you didn’t know you remembered.”

She stood up. She took a few steps, and before disappearing among the trees, she turned back: “Go to your appointment, Darian. She also keeps a part of your story. Even if she doesn’t yet know which.”

Then, when he blinked, she was no longer there. Darian remained on the bench, looking at the empty board someone had left behind.

A white piece rolled to his feet. He picked it up and smiled.

Later.

He stopped when he was in front of his destination. The building was old, with a yellow façade and white moldings that had once been an architectural pride. He went up the two entrance steps and pushed the glass door, where a faded sticker read

“Integrated Psychological Center.” Just as he entered, the interior door that led to the waiting room opened, and three people came out.

Two were chatting naturally, but the third walked a few steps behind, without looking at anyone.

A young woman, with multicolored hair tangled in itself, eyes wide open, as if they saw landscapes the rest could not. She wore a red scarf in the middle of summer and muttered phrases without sequence, as if she were carrying on a conversation with the air.

“Fish sing, but only when the water sleeps,” she whispered as she passed by Darian, without looking at him directly.

He turned, uneasy.

When he refocused his attention on the entrance, just before the glass door closed behind him, he came face-to-face with her. Delirium.

She was on the other side. Barely separated by the transparency of the glass.

A young girl, barefoot, with the same tousled rainbow hair he had seen just seconds earlier, but with eyes that shone like storms that do not know whether to laugh or cry. She looked at him fixedly. Like someone who finds someone they did not expect to see so soon.

She smiled as if she were going to shout his name, although she did not know if she remembered it.

“Drea…!” she managed to say, but she stopped. Something held her back from within.

Darian held the door open, without knowing why. As if he were waiting for something. As if a part of him recognized that gaze at the bottom of the chaos. He said nothing. He only waited.

Then, in the distance, he saw another figure advancing along the opposite sidewalk. One he already knew.

Death.

Dressed just as he had seen her before. The same deep gaze, the same gravity without violence. She approached Delirium with a serene step and touched her gently on the shoulder. No words were needed. The younger one lowered her gaze. Her body

shrank a little, like a flower that remembers it cannot yet bloom.

took a step forward, with the door still in his hand, but just then, a bus passed between them.

Not fast, nor loud. Only… punctual. When it finished passing, the sidewalk was empty. The sidewalk. The fence. The wall. There was nothing.

No one.

Darian blinked, not knowing what he had seen. Or whom. Confused, he closed the door slowly. The sound of the glass fitting into place was clearer than usual. Like a seal. Without understanding why, he felt a slight tremor at his fingertips.

As if reality had tried to tell him something, and had been interrupted.

He went in.

The hallway smelled of old wood and cheap disinfectant. The sound of his steps on the floating floor resonated more than it should have, as if the place amplified what had not yet been said.

In the small reception, a woman with an angular face and a kind expression looked up from her computer.

“Darian Endlesson?” she asked, without stopping typing.

He nodded, still a little absent.

“You can go in. The doctor is ready for you.”

He crossed the room without a word. A white door, with the name “Dr. Nada Elmasri.” engraved on a metal plaque, awaited him at the end of the hallway. He gave a couple of gentle knocks and pushed timidly.

The office was warm, with cream-colored walls, shelves full of books, and a window that let in soft light despite the cloudy sky. In the center, two facing armchairs. On a small side table, an hourglass, a bowl with smooth stones, and a white flower in a slender vase.

He took a few more steps… and stopped.

She was there.

Nada.

Seated in a low armchair, reviewing a folder.

When she looked up, their eyes met; it was not a casual greeting, it was something denser. More improbable.

“You…?” he murmured, unable to help it.

She held his gaze for an instant. Then she slowly closed the folder, as if she knew that revelation had its own rhythm.

“Hello, Darian,” she said in a serene voice.

He didn’t know whether to sit or leave, but his legs did not obey him. He closed the door behind him slowly.

“Are you the doctor…?” he asked.

She nodded calmly.

“Nada,” she confirmed. “Nada Elmasri.”

There was a suspended second between them, of indecision. Then, without understanding why, Darian felt… less lost, for the first time.

He approached and sat down across from her.

Nada looked over his file a few seconds more. Then she spoke, almost to herself:

“Your history is… complex.”

“Is it?”

She nodded subtly.

Darian watched her in silence while she briefly leafed through a notebook on the desk. Then, without raising her eyes, she spoke:

“I read your clinical history before you arrived. Not everything makes sense yet… but there is a pattern.”

He frowned, folding his hands over his knees.

“And what does that pattern say?”

Nada lifted her gaze. There was no judgment in her eyes. Only a kind of contained curiosity, as if she were looking for a crack through which to peek at a story that does not easily let itself be told.

It says you were introspective. Reserved. Intelligent, but isolated. That you spoke little. That your colleagues thought you were brilliant, but sometimes… absent. That your mother was worried about your silence. That there was an attempt.”

Darian lowered his gaze. He did not seem surprised, but neither comfortable.

“An attempt?”

“That’s what the hospital report says. A mix of medications and alcohol. It wasn’t fatal, but it wasn’t an accident either. The medical report recorded it as a ‘dissociative episode with a self-destructive component.’”
He nodded slowly, without raising his eyes.

“I don’t remember wanting to die,” he finally said. “But I don’t remember wanting to live either.”

Nada leaned forward slightly, with her hands clasped.

“And now?”

Darian took a deep breath. He took his time to answer.

“Now… I don’t know if I’m living. I think I’m only… existing.”

Nada did not respond immediately. She only looked at him. The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was like an open field where something could grow. Right at that moment, from the window, a white petal drifted down. It fell slowly, floating as

if the air knew it shouldn’t hurry.

Darian saw it, but said nothing. Still, something in his breathing changed. As if, deep within, an unknown note had resonated for the first time. Then, an imperceptible whisper, more vibration than sound, seemed to cross the room, only for whoever could

feel it: “If you consent… then this time it will not be debt. It will be choice.”

His breathing altered slightly; he said nothing. He only took the petal between his fingers and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket without her seeing.

Nada didn’t take her eyes off Darian’s face. She saw him look at the window as if something still floated there, as if the whisper that had not been spoken had left him an unerasable trace.

“Darian,” she said softly. “Do you know why you’re here?”

He hesitated for a second. Then he lifted his eyes, as if searching for the answer in his own reflection in the pane of the large window.

“My mother… the woman who says she’s my mother,” he corrected, “thinks I need help. That I’m not… entirely well.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that… I’m incomplete. As if someone had built me from the fragments of another person,” he explained, without irony. “I look at myself in the mirror and I recognize myself, but I don’t belong to myself.”

Nada jotted something down in silence, though she wasn’t looking at the paper.

“Does that scare you?”

“No. Yes… I don’t know. It intrigues me. Sometimes it hurts, but it’s a strange pain… like the one you feel when you hear a song you know you know, but you can’t remember where you heard it.”

Nada watched him more intently. Her hands were folded over the notebook, but her fingers gripped the edge more tightly than usual.

“Have you dreamed lately?”

Darian nodded slowly.

“I don’t dream… I mean, I don’t think I do,” he corrected himself. “But I do have memories that aren’t dreams… or maybe they are, only not normal ones. They’re… ancient. As if they weren’t mine.”

“Do you remember any?”

“Last night I remembered or dreamed of a tower that had no doors, but all the windows were open. In a time that is not time. In a place that is nowhere. I heard voices calling me from inside, but I couldn’t go up. I had no body. I only floated, and someone was looking at me from the roof, but I couldn’t see their face.”

Nada felt a slight, barely perceptible shiver. She closed the notebook.

“I want to try something—if you’ll allow me?”

Darian nodded.

“Close your eyes.”

Nada tilted her body gently, leaning toward him.

"What do you feel, or what do you imagine, when you feel this name: Kai’ckul,” she whispered softly.

For an instant, he felt a sharp throb in his temple. It was not pain, but a strange pressure. As if the word had struck something he did not know he had. An unspoken word vibrated in his throat, formless and senseless. He swallowed, uncomfortable.

No… it doesn’t ring a bell,” he lied. “Should it?” he asked, opening his eyes abruptly; she returned to her original position, resting her back against the armchair where she sat.

“Do you know what stands out to me, Darian?”

“What?”

“You never speak of hope. Not even when you speak of pain.”

He frowned.

“And is that bad?… I mean. Is that something one wouldn’t expect from someone like me?”

“That is exactly what I want to find out,” said Nada, leaning forward slightly. “What—or whom—are you waiting for?”

Darian fell silent.

After a moment that seemed much longer than the clock showed, he raised his gaze.

“The truth, I suppose,” he replied. “I don’t know which. I don’t know from whom. But I think I’ll know it when I hear it.”

Nada nodded. In her eyes, something ancient stirred, but she did not speak.

She only looked at the clock on the wall and said:

“That’s enough for today.”

Darian rose slowly. He walked to the door, but before leaving, he turned.

“Thank you.”
“For what?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I have a feeling you’re not here only for work, either.”

Nada did not answer.
She only smiled with a sadness that did not weigh. It was a sadness that knew how to remain without taking up space. When the door closed, she was left alone, and there was a white petal on the windowsill; now, even though no one was blowing, it moved.

It was not a place.

It was not an hour.

It was that interstice that occurs when the clock has not yet struck the next second, but has already left the previous one behind.
There, the atmosphere was neither matter nor idea, but waiting.

Time appeared first. He did not walk, he did not emerge. He simply was, as if the eternal now demanded presence.

His garments hung like the last breath of a forgotten calendar. His face, partially covered by a bronze mask, showed only half an expression: judgment or compassion. No one knew.

In front of him, slowly, the silhouette of Night took shape. Not as mother, nor as goddess. As the shadow that precedes every irreversible act.

“I thought you were going to give him a new beginning without us?” said Time, without a voice, but with all the accumulated hours in his tone.

He looked at her. Not with reproach, but with the kind of disappointment only those who have seen all endings can afford.

“Yet here you are… with him, and what’s worse,” he continued, “not only you, but all of us. Do you know what that means?”
Night did not respond immediately. She let the silence fall between them like ash that floats without burning.

“It means that, contrary to what you yourself told him, we love him. All of us,” she said at last.
Time tilted his head slightly.

“It is not love that reverses a cosmic death. It is fear or guilt. You chose to act as if the cycle had no memory. As if time could stop recording. As if it were not inevitable. As if his choices were not responsible. As if he had not chosen it.”

“He is not him, he is a seed that must bloom. If that’s what you mean by your paranoia of the inevitable,” said Night. “He came for my help. This is the only help I can give him. An existence in freedom.”

“Free?” Time repeated, and the word shattered like a mirror. “There is no freedom in a broken line. Even less for our kind, and you know it. For us there are only detours that lead to no end, and Dream knew it; that is why he chose to die.”
He stepped closer, and the space between them crumpled like a sheet of paper already written on.

“You have crossed a threshold, darling. Not only for him, but for yourself too, and now for Death, for Destiny, for all who once said his name.”

“Darian is not Dream,” she replied. “He did not choose just any death. He chose a death with humanity. He changed, and that change is what I took. Darian is not an echo, and certainly not a substitute either. He is… a seed.”
Time looked at her with a slowness that hurt.

Seeds germinate—you’re right about that, my love,” he said. “But don’t forget that not all of them blossom without dragging old roots. You have opened a space without time, and you know the consequences that brings, even for us. We are not all-powerful.

There are laws that must be respected; that is how this works.”
Night lowered her gaze for a moment. Her voice became more intimate.

“What I did… I did not do out of vanity, as you suggest. I did it because something of him asked for another chance. Not as Endless, nor as King, but as a man.”

“Do you think he—the son you say you love, who gave up his existence—would forgive you this?” asked Time, with a gravity that seemed to drag centuries.

lifted her gaze, serene.

“Isn’t this… what he asked me for?” she replied, not with defiance, but with gentle certainty. “He wanted to be free. To feel. To stop being inevitable. To stop being function; he wanted to leave his cage, he came to see me, he asked for it, and I granted it.”

“And if, upon remembering, he breaks what cannot be put back together?” Time insisted. “Are you willing to hold him… when he no longer recognizes himself?”

Night moved closer. Her form was not entirely solid, but her resolve was.

“I am willing to stay until the end,” she said. “Even if that end erases me too.”

Time closed his eyes; for an eternal second, everything seemed to pause.

Then he opened his palm. In it, an hourglass without sand, a stopped pendulum, a second without a figure.

“Then take care of him, but remember: the clocks that break… also sound different when they run again.”

Without waiting for an answer, Time vanished in a flash that was not light, but memory.
Night remained alone, but not motionless. Because even darkness… needs to learn when to stop.

The office’s silence was not emptiness.
It was resonance.

As soon as Darian closed the door behind him, Nada did not move. Not a gesture. Not a blink. Only the total stillness of someone who has been pierced without a visible wound.
Her eyes remained fixed on the space where he had been.
The chair in front of her still held his shape. As if his body had not entirely left.
As if the soul… had never gone out.

She breathed in deeply. Very deeply. Like someone who needs to reinhabit her body after a slow fall.

“He didn’t recognize me. Of course he wouldn’t.”

Clinical logic told her she should expect nothing else. That trauma, amnesia, post-coma cognitive reconstruction were complex processes, but her heart…
That accursed organ that still responded to an ancient vibration, to an echo of another eternity… That heart did not understand diagnoses.

“He looked at me the way you look at a familiar shadow.
And then… he walked away as if nothing in me hurt him.”

She stood up slowly, walked to the office window.

The sun did not come in directly, but the afternoon light made specks of dust dance in the air.

They were soft. And sad. As she was now.

“And what if it wasn’t only he who decided to die?

And what if I also decided to forget… to survive myself?”

She remembered the first time she saw him in his human form.

The confused expression. The contained pain.

That gaze that did not know who he was, yet still seemed to ask for forgiveness.

“Can a soul recognize what the mind denies?
Can love be reborn without cause, without history, without promise?”

She sat down again. Not in her chair, but in the one Darian had occupied.
She closed her eyes. Rested her hands on her knees. Then she felt it.
Not him.
But what remained of him.

A faint current. A vibration that did not come from outside nor from inside, but from that place where they had once called each other by their true name.

And her soul answered. Not with jubilation. Nor with sadness. But with a mute question:

“And if this time… I don’t let him go without a fight?”

She opened her eyes.

There was a white petal on her desk. She hadn’t seen it before.
Nor did she know how it got there. But she understood it. Not with her mind, but with the memory that still bled.
In the air—or perhaps in her chest—a voice that did not come from her whispered:

If you consent… then this time it will not be debt. It will be choice.

Nada did not smile, but something in her stopped hurting. Only for an instant. Just when that instant seemed to dissipate, an invisible gust crossed the room. It was not wind. It was a touch without a source, a pressure that spread from the nape to the chest. As if someone—or something—were looking at her from within. As if there were a crack in her soul through which the echo of surrender wanted to slip.
She did not name it.
She did not understand it.
But she felt it.
Despair’s shadow did not need presence to sow doubt.
Only a fissure in desire. A hesitation in love.
And she… resisted it.
She closed her eyes. Breathed deeply. When she opened them again, the white petal was still there. She… still wanted to choose.

In the chamber without walls where time is not counted, Despair writhed among her own echoes. The hooks hanging from the air brushed her skin without causing her pain—for in her, pain was a language, not a wound. Every mortal’s complaint, every contained sob, every scream thrown into a pillow… everything vibrated in her realm, but that night, there was something that did not fit.
A sigh.
Not of surrender, but of doubt.
Despair stopped. Not because it hurt her, but because she did not recognize the tone.
It did not come from the abandoned. Nor from the suicidal. Nor from those drowning in their own decisions. It was a sigh of loss… without known cause.
She approached one of her mirrors. They did not reflect images, but sensations. Tears without faces, voids with erased names, and there she felt it:
A woman.
Human.
Tied to an echo she did not know whether to hate or keep.
“What is this…?” Despair whispered, licking a finger anxiously.
The mirror did not show an image, but it throbbed with an ancient vibration.
One she had not felt since…
No.
It could not be.
The woman—Nada—held a crack.
Not from abandonment, nor from trauma, nor from loss.
But from… inexact memory.
Next to that hollow, something else. A veiled presence. A trace without inscription.
It was not from her Realm. Nor from her sister Death.

“Who are you…?” murmured Despair, leaning toward the void.

The mirror vibrated. For a second, it did not return desolation to her, but unauthorized hope.
Despair recoiled as if she had touched fire. She did not understand, and that enraged her.

“This is not mine!” she said, with a torn voice. “…But it will be.”

She approached again. Her finger left a groove in the moist glass of the reflection.

“I will love her as one loves the inevitable, and when she remembers why she cried… she will return to me.”
But she did not yet know that those tears would not be for her. Nor for the living, but for something deeper. For an echo that refused to die, and in some corner, where neither the mirror nor Despair reached, a white petal fell.

Without sound.

Without a destination yet.

Chapter 6: What Should Not Have Been Dreamed

The throne was empty.
But for an instant, it wasn’t.

Darian found himself standing in the middle of a vast, silent hall, surrounded by stained glass windows that projected no light yet seemed to watch him. The columns curved like ancient bones, and every shadow breathed a story he didn’t know. The architecture belonged to no era, to no realm he could name. It was solemn, impossible… and yet familiar.

He turned slowly. At the far end of the hall, a figure emerged from the penumbra: a woman of upright bearing, stern gaze, and faithful heart. Lucienne.

“My Lord…” she whispered, and the echo of those two words shook the foundations of the place.

Darian stepped back instinctively—not out of fear, but something deeper: confusion. The way she looked at him, with reverence and hope, unsettled him. He parted his lips but couldn’t speak. Lucienne extended a hand toward him, like someone trying to confirm a miracle.

And just as her fingers were about to touch him, everything vanished.

Darian opened his eyes in his room, gasping. Sweat covered his forehead, though the air was cold. The light of dawn barely filtered through the blinds. The sound of the city—engines, footsteps, a distant siren—was so real it hurt.

He closed his eyes for a moment, still trembling. Then, with a mechanical gesture, he opened the drawer beside his bed and took out a white pill. He swallowed it dry, as if it weren’t the first time. As if he did it to stay sane… or to return.

In the Dreaming, meanwhile, Lucienne slowly lowered her hand.
“He’s gone,” she whispered, not fully understanding how his presence had even been possible.

The record book floated beside her. Its open pages said nothing. There was no name, no ∞, no history.
Only a crack that hadn’t been there before.

Hours later, in the hall of stellar maps, Lucienne stood before Lady Nuala.
“Are you sure?” Nuala asked, her voice as serene as the edge of a blade.
“I saw him with my own eyes,” Lucienne said. “He was here, but… he wasn’t him. Not completely. He was different… he was human.”
“And what makes you think it wasn’t just a dream within another? A reflection of the old master in some errant vision?”
Lucienne shook her head.
“It wasn’t a projection. The Hall recognized him. The throne reacted. And when he woke, the bond was severed abruptly. As if… something had ripped him from the plane.”

Nuala turned toward the celestial map, where the network of dreams pulsed like an ancient organism.
“If there’s a fragment of Dream wandering the waking world, then the Dreaming itself could fracture from within,” Lucienne concluded.

“Is that even possible? How could Dream have become human?” Nuala asked after a brief silence. “If this is real… why hasn’t he—Daniel—noticed? Why hasn’t he come to speak with you, or with me? After all, he is Him… he should know.”

Lucienne lowered her eyes, caught between sorrow and caution.
“Because he’s still young. He’s learning. The consciousness of the Realm recognizes him, but his connection to the deeper folds of the Dreaming… it isn’t complete yet. This kind of fracture—the kind involving echoes of the former master—could easily go unnoticed.”

“And if the fracture grows?”
“Then Daniel might not survive it,” Lucienne said again. “Not because he lacks power… but because he doesn’t yet know how to contain the parts of Dream that were never his.”

A long silence.

Finally, Nuala nodded. Her decision was as inevitable as her duty.
“Then we must find the truth. I’ll go after him—before reality and dream stop recognizing each other.”

From the top of the arch, a raspy voice interrupted without courtesy:
“Going without me? Really?”

Matthew descended from a stone beam, flapping his wings with swagger.
“If there’s a fragment of our old boss wandering around, I want to see it with my own eyes. Besides, someone’s going to need help with the awkward questions, right?”

Nuala exchanged a look with Lucienne. No one objected.

The main lecture hall of the Faculty of Philosophy was on the second floor of an old building whose stone still remembered winters that the heating had never quite managed to chase away. At that hour, the hallway smelled of old chalk, dry ink, and a faint dampness that didn’t fully belong to the physical world.

Darian walked down the corridor as if doing it for the first time—and for the hundredth—at once. In his left hand, a black leather folder he didn’t need to open. In his right, a pen turning between his fingers as though it measured time. The first days are always the hardest, he thought.

“Room 202. Philosophy of the Immanent. Metaphysics and Limit,” he read softly, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

When he opened the door, the murmur died. Twenty-five students turned their heads. Some looked at him with curiosity; others, indifference. Only one had already been smiling.

Him.

Shining hair, ambiguous face, perfect smile—cruel as a polished mirror. He sat in the back row, legs crossed, with a crimson notebook that didn’t seem to contain a single word.

Desire.

“Professor Endlesson,” someone in the first row said, breaking the awkward silence. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you,” Darian replied, placing the folder on the desk and taking a breath, as if even the air could betray his rhythm.

“Today we’ll talk about origin,” he began. “Or rather, about that crack where the need to ask begins.”

He wrote on the board, his handwriting steady:
‘The memory of Being and the weight of not remembering it.’

“Metaphysics doesn’t seek answers. It seeks the crack in the answer—the space left when everything has been said, and we still feel something’s missing. That space between truth and echo.”

“And what if the echo were truer than the original voice?” Desire interrupted from the back.

The class turned their heads.

Darian didn’t respond immediately. His hand hovered in front of the chalk.
“Then one would have to ask,” he said at last, “if there ever was an original voice at all—or if we’ve only been dreaming the sound of our own absence.”

Desire laughed softly, not hiding the edge.
“Interesting. And have you dreamed it, professor? That echo? Or have you been dreamed by it?”

Darian looked at him, and for a brief instant, something trembled in his expression—something that didn’t belong to that plane.
“My life isn’t part of the syllabus,” he answered evenly, though his hand gripped the pen as if it were an ancient weapon.

“But your absence is,” Desire whispered, too low for anyone else to hear.

A drop of sweat slid down Darian’s temple. Something cracked inside—an inner fracture that felt too familiar.

“Let’s return to the point,” he said, his voice tighter now but still precise. “When being cannot name itself, language creates myths. And when myths are not enough… we create gods. Or destroy them.”

“And what if one of those gods returned, not knowing what he was?” Desire pressed, feigning innocence.

Darian slammed the folder on the desk.
It wasn’t anger. It was something deeper. Something like vertigo.

“Enough!” he burst out, without realizing it. “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know. What matters is what we choose to be now. With or without memory. With or without myths. What we choose to be!”

The silence that followed was heavier than before. Desire smiled, satisfied. He had found the crack—and touched it.

Darian breathed deeply. Closed his eyes. Regained control. His voice softened again, just as the bell rang.
“All right. We’ll continue next Monday. You may go.”

The students began to leave. Only Desire lingered a second longer, watching him with that mix of tenderness and mockery only he could master.

“Good class, little brother,” he murmured, and disappeared down the hallway.

Darian was alone. He looked at the sentence on the board. Then he slowly erased it.

And for an instant, the chalk left behind a shape he hadn’t drawn.
A symbol of sand. An echo of a throne.
A dream that does not yet know it dreams.

The Hall of Silent Encounters did not belong to any plane. It existed between thoughts, between futures that never were and memories that have yet to occur. Its ceiling was a motionless sky. Its table, an ellipse of obsidian suspended over nothingness.

Destiny arrived first. He ran his fingers across the pages of the Book chained to his left arm. He didn’t need to read it, but he did so anyway—perhaps out of habit, or respect.

One by one, the others appeared.
Death, with her closed umbrella and a gaze that contained centuries.
Despair, biting the rusted ring between her teeth.
Delirium, spinning in zigzags, surrounded by a cloud of floating fish.
And Desire, perfumed, ambiguous, precise as a clean wound.

Only one was missing.

“And Dream?” Desire asked with a sharp smile. “Tell me, brother, are family meetings by invitation now?”

Despair tilted her head, confused.
“Shouldn’t he be here? He always comes… even when he doesn’t want to.”

Destiny didn’t lift his eyes.
“He wasn’t summoned this time.”

The silence thickened. Desire let out a low chuckle.
“Well, this feels familiar,” he said, leaning an elbow on the table. “Last time we were all here, one of us ended up dead—your fault, if I recall. So I hope you’ve brought more than riddles today, dear brother.”

Destiny closed the book calmly.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he replied flatly. “Nor was it a warning. It was a fact.”
“And today?” Death asked.
“Today is a transition,” Destiny said. “Before, I was a witness. Today… I am part of it.”

Death stepped forward.
“So everyone already knows,” she said quietly but firmly. “What our mother has done… what she’s doing with him. With Darian. The consequences—we still can’t measure them.”

Despair blinked, lost.
“Who’s Darian?” she asked. “A new avatar? A confused mortal? Or just a way to replace what was lost?”

“He’s not a replacement,” Death replied. “He’s what remains. What the old Dream chose to leave behind when he died… as a human.”

Despair stared, mouth agape.
“As a human? I thought he died as an Endless…”

Desire silenced her with an elegant gesture. Delirium spun once, clapped her hands, and the fish scattered like fleeing ideas.
“I like him!” she exclaimed. “He’s got the same eyes, just sadder… and he walks as if he’s hearing music no one else can. He’s beautiful. In fact… I like him better now. He’s no longer scary to look at.”

Desire slowly turned an empty wine glass that existed only because he wished it so.
“Then his existence is a problem,” he said softly, dangerously. “One that breathes, teaches, and feels. If we don’t control it, he could break more than the old Dream ever built. Do we all agree?”

“No,” Destiny said quietly. “You can’t control something that doesn’t yet recognize itself.”

Death frowned.
“So what do we do, then? Just watch while Mother pushes him toward a memory that will tear him apart?”

Destiny met her eyes calmly.
“She doesn’t push,” he said. “She simply remains. Like the night. Like the silence between two notes.”

Desire raised an eyebrow.
“And Daniel? Where’s the new bearer of the Dreaming? Why isn’t he doing anything? If anyone should intervene, it’s him. After all, we’re talking about himself, aren’t we?”

“He can’t,” Death answered. “He’s too young. He doesn’t yet perceive the fracture… and honestly, maybe that’s for the best. If he ever felt it, he wouldn’t survive.”

Delirium sighed, and butterflies of ink fluttered from her mouth.
“We can play with him,” she said brightly. “Not everything has to break. Some things just need to bend a little… like balloons.”

Despair shuddered.
“This isn’t a game.”

“But it isn’t a trial either,” Destiny added. “Not yet.”

Another pause. An invisible crack ran across the table. It was the kind of tension only known to those who have seen every possible ending… and still fear some more than others.

Death broke the silence.
“So… what do we do?”

Destiny turned another page. It was blank. He said nothing.

Desire watched him, then let the empty glass fall on the table. It made no sound.
“I say we leave it to the elders,” he said with mild sarcasm. “Let’s call Mom and Dad. After all… this mess is theirs, isn’t it?”

The remark fell like a stone.
Death looked at him, then at Destiny.
And for the first time, Destiny didn’t know what to say.

The music in the pub was soft—a mix of jazz and fog. Warm lights hung like tamed fireflies over old wooden tables. The murmur of conversations and clinking glasses barely brushed the edge of silence.

Darian sat alone at the bar, a half-empty glass of whiskey before him, shoulders slightly slumped toward the reflection he no longer fully recognized in the mirror. His shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled up, the watch on his wrist marking an hour with no intention of moving forward.

It wasn’t sadness he carried. It was something denser. Something like… displacement.

“Dream?”

The voice was low—not incredulous, but reverent, like someone seeing a man return from across the centuries.

Darian looked up at the sound of the name. For a brief second, something in him almost recognized it—but the doubt faded.

A man with a kind face and eyes that seemed to have seen more years than his age allowed looked at him with a mix of suspicion and hope.
“Sorry?” Darian said, turning slightly on his stool.

“Oh—my apologies.” The man scratched the back of his neck, seeing the confusion in Darian’s face. “You just reminded me of someone I knew a long, long time ago.”

Darian studied him a moment longer. Something inside him stirred—not sharply, but with an old curiosity.
“Do we know each other?” he finally asked.

The man hesitated. Same face, different eyes. A strange shift. Then he gestured with a smile toward the empty seat beside him.
“Mind if I sit? You can buy the first round if it turns out we do know each other. Deal?”

Darian nodded, unsure why.

The man sat and extended his hand.
“Hob Gadling.”

Darian hesitated a fraction of a second before shaking it.
“Darian. Just Darian.”

“Well,” Hob murmured, watching him like someone gazing at a fire he’d thought long extinguished, “you owe me a drink since 1889.”

Darian laughed for the first time in days. He didn’t know why. But it sounded like something that could be true.
“What were you doing in 1889?” he asked, more amused than skeptical.

“Waiting for you,” Hob said—and though he smiled, his eyes dimmed for just a heartbeat. “But it’s fine. I’m used to it. To waiting… and to you coming back.”

A brief silence settled between them—but it wasn’t awkward. It felt like a suspended appointment in time, unhurried.

“What do you do, Hob?”
“Ah, those modern questions,” he chuckled. “History professor. One of those who still believe telling it right might save us from repeating it.”
“I teach too,” Darian admitted, as if the coincidence were somehow logical.
“Of course you do,” Hob murmured, raising his glass in a toast.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Darian asked, without hostility.
“Because part of me recognizes you. And another part… doesn’t want to break whatever’s starting again.”

Darian didn’t answer.
But he didn’t look away.

Chapter 7: A Toast Every Hundred Years

It was midnight, though no bell had said so.
The sky over the city was dull, starless, as if the firmament had exhaled all its breath and then forgotten to breathe again.

On a high rooftop, covered in moss and rusty antennas, Nuala and Matthew waited. She, with a tense face beneath her hood; he, turning in short circles, restless, pecking now and then at the concrete railing.

“Are you sure he’s here?” the raven asked. “I haven’t seen him, but something… something doesn’t fit.”

“He is,” Nuala replied. “His vibration… isn’t the same, but it isn’t entirely different either. As if he were carrying the melody without the instrument. As if he were… a living echo.”

Matthew fluttered, as if trying to shake off a dark thought.

“That can’t be. If he really is… then we’re screwed. If Daniel hasn’t felt it, it’s because he’s busy trying to hold the Realm together. But if this guy starts dreaming like the old one…”

“Then the Dreaming could fracture,” Nuala concluded, grim.

Matthew lowered his head. His voice was a whisper.
“And what if something has to be done? What if we have to… stop him?”

The answer did not come from Nuala. It came from the darkness itself.
A serene, deep voice that didn’t need to rise to become absolute.

“You won’t.”

Both turned in unison.

A veiled figure had appeared without sound or light. Her mantle cast no shadow, yet it darkened even intention.

“Who…?” Nuala whispered, stepping back, hand on the hilt of her weapon.

“Easy,” said the figure. “I didn’t come to harm. Only to keep others from doing so.”

“Who are you?” Matthew asked, not bothering to hide his distrust. “Because if you came to protect him, you’d better tell us why.”

The woman lowered her hood just a little. Her face was indistinct, as if time couldn’t decide in which moment to hold her.

“I am Night,” she replied. “And I don’t expect you to recognize me… because I’ve never been named justly.”

A chill crossed Nuala’s back.
“You are… the mother?”

“Not in the human sense,” Night corrected. “But yes. I am the one who held him… when he chose to die.”

Matthew gave a low screech.
“And you still let him be born?”

Night kept silent for a few seconds. Then she answered:
“I didn’t let him. I only held him. When the cosmos had nowhere to place what had been… human. I kept him in the fold between the last dream and the first.”

“And now what?” Nuala asked, tension rising. “Are you going to let him wander until Daniel collapses?”

“Watch,” said Night. “If you cross a line, you’ll answer to me. And believe me… I also have a Realm to protect.”

The breeze shifted. And when they looked again, Night was gone.

Matthew raised his gaze toward the street.
“He’s in the bar,” he said, lowering his voice. “Sitting with someone.”

“Hob Gadling,” Nuala murmured, with a shiver. “Of course.”

And without another word, they descended toward the alley, where the start of the inevitable awaited them.

Rain fell unhurriedly on the gleaming sidewalk. The bar’s lights spilled like aged gold through the fogged windows, blurring the silhouettes inside into trembling patches of light and shadow.

Matthew fluttered once more, shaking the water from his wings as he looked inside from the brick cornice. The bar sign—an inverted glass with stars falling into it—flickered with an electric buzz.

“He’s there,” the raven said. “Sitting with a guy who looks like he walked out of a painting of Shakespeare drunk. We have to go in!”

Inside the bar, the jazz still floated like warm mist.

Darian held his glass with the slowness of someone unsure he deserves it. The man across from him—checkered shirt, sparse beard, ancient gaze—drank like someone who knows time isn’t linear.

“Are you sure we don’t know each other?” Hob insisted, with a crooked smile.

“I don’t know,” Darian answered honestly. “But there’s something about you… that isn’t entirely unfamiliar.”

Hob set his glass on the table, slowly.
“You remind me of someone. Someone I knew for a long time… in many times.”

“A friend?”

“Something like that,” Hob said, lowering his gaze. “Maybe the only one who stayed with me long enough to be called that.”

Darian nodded, not knowing why it hurt.
“And what happened to him?” he asked.

“He died. But before he did… he left a promise. The kind that is kept even when no one remembers having made it.”

Silence settled between them like a habitual guest. Hob broke it calmly.
“You don’t have to remember me. Or him. But sometimes the soul… keeps echoes the mind can’t name.”

Darian tightened his hold on the glass slightly. Something in that phrase resonated like a reflection he didn’t know to whom it belonged.
“Do you believe in second chances?” he asked.

Hob looked at him with a tenderness that came from centuries.
“No. I believe in choices. And when one chooses with one’s whole being… even forgetting can be an act of love.”

A faint smile trembled on Darian’s face, but never fully formed. The echo of the jazz shifted key, as if it too had heard something.

“And you, Hob?” he asked suddenly. “Why did you come?”

“Because I always wait in the places where I was once happy. And because someone had to be here in case you decided to come back… even if you didn’t know you were.”

Darian lowered his gaze. The rain beat against the glass as if trying to get in.

On the other side of the window, without his knowing, two shadows watched him.

“No,” Nuala said, without raising her voice, but with a firmness that stilled even the wind. Her eyes were fixed on Darian through the glass, as if every gesture, every stifled laugh, told her a story more dangerous than any battle.

Matthew turned his head toward her, perplexed.
“Aren’t we supposed to be observing? Keeping him safe? He’s with a mortal who calls him by his old name, even if he doesn’t remember it! And you’re just going to stand here and watch?”

“He isn’t just a mortal,” Nuala said, like someone recalling an old wound. “He’s Hob Gadling. One of the few the old master called ‘friend.’ And that makes him… delicate.”

“Delicate? He’s a walking bomb!”

Nuala finally looked at him.
“And what will you do if you go in, Matthew? Caw in his face that he’s the forgotten echo of Dream? That his shadow could fracture the Dreaming and drag Daniel down with it, when he’s just barely managing to hold the realm?”

Matthew opened his beak to answer, then closed it with a dry click.
“I thought you’d be more direct,” he said, lowering his tone. “After all, you were summoned. You heard what Destiny said.”

“Precisely why I mustn’t intervene,” Nuala replied, with a hint of sadness. “There are moments that must not be touched. Even if they hurt. This is one of them.”

Matthew lowered his gaze to the window. Inside, Darian raised a glass to Hob. He didn’t seem to remember anything. He didn’t seem to carry any weight of the past they both knew.

“He looks happy,” the raven murmured.

“For now,” Nuala whispered.

And with that, the rain wrapped them again.

The ice melted with an almost reverent slowness in their glasses, and between each sip, the silence weighed more than the words.

“I never imagined seeing you here,” Hob said at last, almost in a whisper. “Much less like this, with another name. In another skin.”

Darian smiled, but without joy.
“It’s not that strange for a man to want to start over. What’s strange is someone insisting on reminding him he can’t.”

Hob nodded with an expression that mixed compassion and resignation.
“And do you want to start over? Truly?”

Darian looked down at his glass. He turned it between his fingers, as if searching for answers in the liquid spiral.
“Sometimes I think I do. Other times… I feel like I already started, but I forgot where the beginning was.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter how it starts,” Hob said. “Maybe only how you decide to continue matters. Even if you don’t remember.”

“And what if there are things I shouldn’t remember?” Darian asked, lifting his eyes with a shadow of fear. “What if there’s something that… breaks me?”

Hob leaned toward him a little. His voice was a gentle anchor.
“Then, when the time comes, you won’t be alone.”

A tremor crossed Darian’s jaw. Emotion caught in his throat. It wasn’t sadness. It was something more primitive. Like the panic of a child who doesn’t know why he dreams of a house he never lived in.

“Do we… actually know each other?” he asked, voice frayed.

“Yes,” Hob answered without hesitation. “But I won’t force you to remember it. Only to trust… even a little.”

Darian gave the slightest nod, lowering his face. The weight of something invisible began to bend his shoulders. Then he drank the last sip like someone saying goodbye to something he didn’t understand.

That was when Hob took the glass from his hand, just in time.

The half-empty glass trembled faintly on the bar, reflecting the warm lights of the place as if it contained a trapped sunrise.
“That’s enough, my friend,” Hob said firmly, taking the glass before he could bring it to his lips again.

Darian blinked, as if the voice were coming from behind a fogged mirror.
“Eh? I was still talking,” he protested, but without real force.

“We’re three rounds past the limit. I’ve never seen you like this… and yet I can’t help being glad to see you,” Hob smiled, with that tenderness—part paternal, part conspiratorial—that only immortals know how to dose. “But that’s enough. Come on, I’ll take you.”

“Have you ever seen me like this… before?” Darian mumbled, bracing himself on the bar as he stood. “Did you ever… see me fall?”

“Only once,” Hob replied, lowering his voice. “But it was enough for me to promise not to leave you alone again.”

Hob stood at his side, took him gently by the shoulder, and guided him to the door.

The night was warmer than it seemed. Or perhaps Darian no longer felt the cold.

“Before… when we met… what did I say to you?” he asked, as if the past were whistling to him from far away. “Was I kind to you? Or was I a bastard?”

“You were both,” Hob laughed, without judgment. “But above all… you were my friend. On your own terms, but a friend—very dear to me.”

They crossed the street slowly, Darian’s steps uneven, his gaze lost among lampposts and shop windows that curved as if part of a liquid nightmare. That was when he saw them.
Or thought he did.

Two figures under a leaning post. A tall woman, fair hair, steady eyes. And a raven perched on her shoulder.

Darian stopped. Blinked.
“Is that a… bird?”

“What are you talking about, Darian?” Hob asked, glancing sidelong at him. “There’s nothing…”

But then, as if passing through a membrane, the figures sharpened into clarity.

“It can’t be,” Matthew murmured. “Is he drunk?”

“He’s… fractured,” Nuala replied, worried. Hob looked at them, confused.

“Are you going to take him from me too?” Darian muttered, more to himself than to them. “Do you know me as well? Does all of London know me? Are you going to take me away, like my mother does?”

“My l— Darian,” Nuala corrected herself, now closer. “Don’t worry. We’re just taking you home. No one is going to hurt you.”

“Are you sure about that?” asked the raven.

“Shut up, Matthew,” she snapped.

To Darian, everything sounded as if it were coming through water. The words mixed with the distant sound of a passing bus, with the blurred lights. The world seemed like a half-dried painting.

Hob looked at the newcomers with suspicion but said nothing. He only adjusted his grip on Darian’s shoulder.
“All right. Let’s all go,” he murmured softly. “I have no idea who these people are, but they seem to know what they’re doing. And you… you, my dear friend, need sleep.”

Darian nodded, or he thought he did. He wasn’t sure. He could barely hold the line of his own thoughts.

“I dreamed… that I was a god,” he murmured, after a few steps.

Nuala and Matthew exchanged a look. They said nothing.

They all helped him. And as the group moved away along the poorly lit sidewalk, the echo of their footsteps seemed to follow a rhythm only Darian could hear.

A distant drum. A forgotten song.
Dream—the true one—was already drawing near.

The buzzer sounded as if trying to pierce time. First once. Then again. Persistent. Pitiless.

Darian tossed among tangled sheets. The room smelled of damp cloth and dried lavender. Light slipped barely through the half-drawn curtains, but his head felt wrapped in hot cotton. The metallic pounding of the buzzer thudded in his skull as if someone were knocking directly on his consciousness.

“I’m coming…” he mumbled, voice dry, dragging himself out of bed like someone fleeing a shipwreck.

The floor felt more slanted than usual. He tripped over a jacket, kicked an empty glass, and braced himself on the doorway as he crossed the small hall to the entrance.

The buzzer sounded again just as his trembling hand turned the lock.

The door opened.
And there she was.

Nada.
Standing. Impeccable. Her expression wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either. It was the look of someone who had seen the edge of something—a ledge, an abyss, a memory—and who had decided not to step back.

“What… what are you doing here?” Darian asked, blinking. “How… how did you know where I lived?” he asked as he watched Nada walk in without permission.

“We had an appointment at 10:00 a.m.,” she said, without altering her tone. “You didn’t show. I checked your record. And I got worried.”

He looked at her, confused, his breathing still uneven. The T-shirt he wore was wrinkled and his hair, mussed. Perhaps not just his hair.

Nada looked around.
“You got worried? Do you do that for all your patients?” he asked, picking up—or trying to pick up—what was strewn everywhere, but it was impossible.

She didn’t answer immediately. She took a step toward him when she saw his body sway. A reflex. Their hands found each other. Then, in a fraction of suspended time. He also moved closer, as if pushed by something beyond himself that guided him. They were closer than professionally advisable. When Nada read his intention, she spoke to break whatever was forming between them.

“Only when patients, with charts scribbled over with reports of abandonment, overdoses, and a list of doctors who no longer see them, disappear,” she replied firmly.

Ouch, he thought. Darian lowered his gaze. A stab of lucidity cut through the alcohol still clouding his blood.

“Don’t… worry. I’m fine,” he said, attempting a smile.

Nada inhaled lightly, as if to hold back a word she shouldn’t say. Then she could smell it without needing to come any closer.
“You are certainly fine… drunk, but you’re right. Physically unharmed.”

Her tone was sharper now. More clinical.
“I’m leaving the prescription here,” she took a small white envelope and set it on the table near the hall. “It’s important that, if you really want to get better, you commit to your treatment.”

Darian took it without a word. He gripped the paper tighter than necessary.
“You forgot it the last time you were in my office,” she added.

He nodded.
“And please…” she went on, fixing her gaze on him. “Don’t drink—you cannot drink alcohol with these medications.”

She turned to leave.

He wanted to stop her, to say something more. But the door closed.

And for a moment, it felt as if the world had lost an axis, though he didn’t even know which one.

Chapter 8: Fragments of What We Were

The bathroom was dim. The only light came from a slit between the curtains, enough to give shape to the outlines. Darian leaned on the sink, hands wet, face dripping more with cold sweat than water.
He lifted his gaze to the mirror.
And he saw himself.
But it wasn’t only him.

The figure on the other side didn’t mimic his stance. It wasn’t a reflection. It was… someone else.

The other had his eyes, but didn’t use them like he did. They weren’t tired, but infinite. They didn’t seek meaning; they imposed it. They didn’t blink.

The hair was darker, softer. The skin paler. He wore black, but not like someone who chooses a color—like someone who belongs to its absence.

It was Dream. Or what was left of him.

Darian took a step back, but the reflection didn’t. And then, against every instinct, he lifted a hand and touched the glass.

The surface vibrated… then cracked. Fine lines spread from his finger like a map of fractures until the mirror burst into a thousand fragments, as if it had never been one.

The pieces floated for a second in the air. Suspended. Illogical. Then they began to fall.

And in the instant of silence between the breaking and the sound of glass hitting the floor, she appeared.

“Normally I’d be glad you decided to visit me,” said a voice behind him, as soft as it was erratic. “Before, I always wanted you to… but you never did. You were always too busy with your… responsibilities.”

Darian turned slowly.

A girl with mismatched eyes, multicolored hair, and a jacket made of patches of realities watched him, sitting on the edge of the tub as if it were the throne of a fallen king. She held a fish in a pocket fishbowl.

“But though I’m glad,” she went on, “I think it’s not good for you to be here. Because if you’re here, and not there, then you’re delirious… and that, for a human, is not good. Not good at all.”

Darian blinked. The cut on his finger was barely bleeding.
“Who… who are you?” he murmured.

“Sometimes I’m a sugar storm. Other times, I’m the only string left when everything is tuned to chaos. But you know who I am. Or you did. Or you will be the one who knows.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying…”

Delirium tilted her head, as if the lack of understanding were a language that didn’t bother her.
“Typical of you, big brother. Always so literal at the beginning. Always denying you dreamed… until everything was already a dream.”

Darian swayed. He didn’t know if the cut hurt or if the pain came from somewhere else.
“Am I asleep?”

“Not entirely. But not awake either. You’re… in-between. And you shouldn’t be. Because you’re no longer sand, you’re skin. And those of skin, when they step into the in-between, usually don’t come back whole.”

Darian closed his eyes. He wanted to open them somewhere else. He couldn’t.
“So… is this real?”

Delirium walked toward him. Her steps didn’t sound the same each time. One was metal, another leaves, another bubbles. She set a hand on his chest.
“What you feel is real. But what you are… is still choosing.”

Then she kissed his forehead. And the world unraveled like ink in the rain.

Darian fell backward… but he didn’t fall.
He opened his eyes in his bed.

Morning sun touched the wall. The bathroom mirror, intact, returned only his reflection. The cut on his finger… didn’t exist.

But in his pocket, he found a blue flower petal and a note written in crayons:
Don’t forget that sometimes broken things can still reflect you.
With love, D.

The library was alive. Not like a forest or like a beast. It was alive like a memory that doesn’t want to die. Each tome murmured in its closed spine, waiting for someone to dare pronounce it.

Lucienne walked down the central aisle with precise steps, but not sure ones. In her hands she carried a book that belonged to no shelf. It had no title. Only a pale velvet cover that seemed stained with ancient dew.

Nuala stood near the window that looked out toward the gardens of thought. At her side, Matthew beat his wings restlessly.
“Is that… his?” Nuala asked, seeing the book.

Lucienne nodded.
“It was. But now it’s something more… or something less. It doesn’t appear in Daniel’s records. But it vibrates with the same ink with which Morpheus’s annals were written.”

Matthew cawed.
“So it’s here… but not here. Is it like an echo?”

Lucienne glanced at him.
“Not an echo. It’s a vibrating residue. An unbound essence. It shouldn’t have remained… but it did. And now it wanders the mortal plane. Not as a dream, nor as a nightmare. But as something that doesn’t know it was a dream.”

Nuala turned toward them, her face split between doubt and obedience.
“And should we help him? That human who doesn’t know who he was? Or just observe?”

Lucienne set the book on a lectern. The cover opened on its own, and a blank page began to fill slowly with letters that recognized no language.
“That’s what I don’t know,” she answered softly. “Daniel doesn’t perceive it. Not yet. But if he does—if his consciousness touches that of this… Darian—the Dreaming will fracture. Two axes, one root.”

“And what if it’s already fracturing?” Matthew insisted. “Nuala and I saw him. He’s… hurt. Lost. As if he knew something in him is missing, but he can’t name it. He reminds me of him… before Orpheus.”

Nuala folded her arms.
“Maybe we shouldn’t save him for him. Maybe we should do it for the Dream. For what it represents.”

Lucienne looked at her.
“And would you do it? Even if it means defying the structure? Even if you must lie to Daniel?”

There was silence. A long one.
“It’s not a lie if he still doesn’t know what he should ask,” Nuala said.

“I’m just saying,” Matthew added, perching on the book’s spine, “that if something of our old boss remained out there, I wouldn’t like to see it destroyed without knowing why. And I wouldn’t like that to destroy us.”

Lucienne snapped the book shut. The air changed temperature.
“Then we’ll do the only thing we can do.”

“Watch over him?” Nuala said.

Lucienne shook her head.
“Take care of him. Even if he doesn’t know we’re doing it.”

Matthew lowered his head.
“As we always did.”

From above, the shelves trembled, as if a gust of wind—made of forgotten names—had run through the aisles.

And in a corner of the lectern, without anyone writing it, a single word appeared:
Darian.

The elevator descended with the same routine rhythm as every morning, but Darian didn’t feel that routine as his. He wore a simple black shirt and a book under his arm, one of those texts that spoke more of questions than answers. He opened the building door and, for the first time in days, felt the air offer him more than cold.

And there she was.

Sitting on the wall of the low fence, with a cup of coffee in her hands and a beige jacket that gave her a scholarly air, Nuala.

Not as a guardian. Not as an emissary of the Dream. But as a young woman, hair tied back and thin glasses she didn’t need but that were part of her glamor.

A blackbird—Matthew, disguised—perched listlessly on the metal railing, pecking crumbs from a paper bag.
“Ah, professor, right on time,” she said, smiling as if she weren’t an interdimensional ambassador. “I thought you wouldn’t come out.”

Darian blinked, surprised.
“Do we know each other?”

“Something like that,” she answered with a lopsided smile. “Don’t you remember me? You were… a bit distracted last night. Alcohol does its thing, even in brilliant minds.”

Darian narrowed his eyes, observing her. Then he let out a low laugh.
“You were with the bird. On the street. Right when I left the bar.”

“Correct. The one who caws more than he should.” —Matthew made a little sound as if coughing up crumbs.

“I didn’t know you were a friend of Hob’s,” Darian remarked, testing a connection.

“I’m not. But I was there when your friend tried to take you home like a Greek hero. With less muscle and more resignation.”

“Wow… so I didn’t dream all that.”

“Would it seem more logical to you to have dreamed it?”

Darian didn’t answer immediately. Then he smiled.
“It’s strange. I didn’t know I liked drinking that much… I always thought myself quite sober.”

“You were,” Nuala said, lowering her gaze to the coffee. “Or so you seemed. You were the serious professor. The one who always arrived ten minutes early. The one who spoke of metaphysics as if he were describing a love story.”

“How do you know that?”

She looked at him, this time without a smile.
“Because I was your student.”

He looked at her more closely. Searched his memory. Nothing.
“And were you good?”

“Too good,” she replied, raising an eyebrow.

Darian tilted his head, curious, half skeptical.
“And what are you doing here now, conveniently outside my building?”

“I was in the neighborhood. Cheap coffee, mild sun, good memories,” she answered with perfect nonchalance.

Darian lowered his gaze for a second, then looked back at her.
“You’re the only one who seems willing to talk to me about my past without treating me like I’m crazy or too fragile to hear it. Would you like to… have another coffee? Maybe tell me a bit more about what I used to be. Because I get the feeling no one else is going to.”

Nuala pretended to hesitate for a second. Then she nodded lightly, as if she had no greater mission than that gesture.
“I warn you, nostalgia isn’t my strong suit. But I could try.”

“Perfect,” Darian said, turning toward the avenue.

As they walked, the blackbird followed them flying low, without cawing. Nuala glanced at him from the corner of her eye. Time was pressing. But for now, a conversation wasn’t a rupture. It was only a possibility.

And possibilities dream too, if you let them.

The place was small, smelling of freshly ground coffee and old wood. A radio played somewhere, a soft instrumental jazz melody that seemed to float without intruding. The fogged windows let in the light of a pale sun, and the steam from the cups seemed part of the décor.

Nuala ordered green tea. Darian, black coffee, no sugar.

They sat by one of the windows. The blackbird—Matthew—stayed outside, perched on a lamppost, patient.
“So I was your professor,” Darian said, breaking the silence. “What class?”

“Applied Ontology and Symbolic Transfiguration,” she replied, stirring the tea slowly. “Though the official syllabus only said ‘Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics.’”

“Sounds like something I would say.”

“You used to say many things. Some very wise. Some that made me think you understood too much of what you shouldn’t.”

Darian leaned back a little.
“Was that good or bad?”

“Depends on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

Nuala looked at him. For an instant, she seemed to see the Endless behind human eyes. Not Morpheus, not Dream… but what remained. The sensitive residue. The walking echo.
“It was beautiful,” she answered honestly. “But it hurt.”

He didn’t know what to say.
“Did it hurt because of me?”

“It hurt because of you. Because you were alone… even surrounded. Because you were what no one understood, not even you. And sometimes, when you talked about the nature of desire, or the boundary between will and creation… it sounded like you were asking for help without knowing it.”

Darian looked away. His finger traced invisible circles on the hot cup.
“And did you like me?” he asked—not provocatively, but with the vulnerability of someone seeking anchors.

Nuala smiled but didn’t answer directly.
“Did you always ask your former students questions like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s as if I wanted to know who I was… to understand why I am like this now.”

“You’re not going to find that answer the way one searches for data in a database. It isn’t a report. There’s no clinical biography that tells you who you were. Only traces. Echoes. Gazes that give back something you don’t see.”

“And you? What do you see when you look at me?”

She stayed silent for a few seconds.
“I see someone who lost something so great… he doesn’t even know he’s looking for it.”

Darian swallowed.
“Do you think that…?”

“What?”

“That before this accident… or coma… or whatever it was… I already wanted to die?”

Nuala leaned toward him.
“No. I think you wanted to stop being something you could no longer bear. And that sometimes looks like wanting to die. But it’s not the same.”

“And now?”

“Now you’re here. With a name, a body, a story… even if you don’t know whether it belongs to you.”

Darian looked at her intently.
“And why are you here, really?”

She sighed. She didn’t lie.
“Because someone has to watch the edges. Because things are moving. And you… you’re not just anything.”

Darian lowered his gaze, murmured barely:
“I don’t want to break anything.”

“Then don’t,” Nuala said gently. “But remember this, Darian: sometimes what you touch doesn’t break… what was already broken breaks when you touch it.”

The radio changed songs. The steam kept dancing between them.

And though neither said it aloud, both knew that conversation was a threshold.
One from which no one returns intact.

Chapter 9: Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

The light hadn’t fully entered yet. The sun had barely brushed the cornices of the buildings when the buzzer rang.

Nada, already dressed—though without makeup, without coffee, without defenses—opened the door thinking it was the cleaning lady who always arrived early.

It wasn’t her.

A woman with dark hair, a serene face, and eyes impossible to forget was standing on the threshold. She didn’t bring an umbrella this time, nor her coat from another age. Only a simple black blouse and an ancient gaze that seemed to encompass centuries.

“May I come in?”

Nada didn’t know why, but her body answered before her mind. She nodded. She let her in.

Both sat on the couch in the waiting room. The coffeemaker wasn’t on yet. The clock on the wall marked no urgency. Only silence.

The visitor watched her calmly, unhurried. And then she said, in a low voice, without drama:

“My name is Death.”

Nada blinked. Not like someone who doubts, but like someone who recognizes without ever having known.

“I knew it,” she murmured. “I don’t know how… but I knew.”

Death nodded, without pride. Like someone confirming an echo.

“I’ve come for Darian,” she said.

Nada straightened, just slightly.

“Is he in danger?”

“Everyone is, Nada. But he… he must not repeat himself.”

Nada didn’t yet fully understand. But something in her chest vibrated with that word: repeat.

“What do you mean?”

Death looked at an invisible point beyond the window. Then she looked back at her.

“Darian is not my brother. He is not a reincarnation. He is not anyone’s continuation. He is what remained… when Dream chose to die with humanity. He is what Night… my mother took and deposited as a free seed, without history, without design. He doesn’t remember. He mustn’t. Because there is no memory, only essence.”

“Then… why are all of you following him?”

“Because he carries the echo of a structure that could rebuild itself if he falls into the same steps.”

“I need to know—why did he choose to die?”

The question wasn’t defiant. It was honest. Raw.

Death lowered her gaze. Her voice was so low it seemed more thought than sound.

“Because he was tired of holding a realm that could no longer hold itself… Tired of being what everyone needed him to be, without ever being able to choose what he needed to be. It wasn’t because of you or because of his son. It was for not allowing himself to flourish. For forgetting he could be… free.”

Nada lowered her eyes. The weight of a nonhuman truth touched her closely.

“And could Darian choose differently?”

“Only if someone shows him that being human is not a punishment. That being a fragment is not being broken. That he doesn’t need to be Endless again… to deserve to remain.”

“And why are you telling me?” she finally asked, softly.

Death regarded her with silent tenderness.

“Because you saw the man in my brother. Because you loved him without needing to fully understand him. And now, you can help Darian choose to flourish. To be. To not destroy what he could unwittingly awaken. The Dreaming is still young… and fragile.”

Nada shivered. But she didn’t step back.

“I didn’t choose any of this. How did I become someone so important?”

“He chose you. Again.”

“And if I fail…”

“You didn’t fail the first time. You loved him. That was enough to change a cycle. This time… you may need to guide. Only that. Show him he can take root. That he is not a debt. That he can be a choice.”

Death stood. She walked to the door. But before opening it, she stopped.

“If he flourishes, the Dreaming will live. If he falls… there will be no seed left to sow.”

And with nothing more, she said farewell with a barely visible inclination. The door closed without a sound.

Nada stayed there, alone. But not empty.

She now knew that the soul that had loved her in another time had not returned, but the possibility of something new… still breathed.

The space where they gathered was not a place. It was an ancient intention, beyond the plane. The table had no edges, because disputes among the Endless recognize no boundaries.

Destiny was the first to manifest. He did so without announcing himself. His book already contained what was to come, and yet he waited.

Death arrived with a serene gait, though her pulse had an urgency only she knew.

Desire appeared with perfume, a knife, and a smile.

Despair dragged herself from her corner.

Delirium floated like the foam of thought.

And then they called.

Darkness grew dense. Time contracted.

Time appeared like a blink that carried centuries.

Night did not arrive. She was. As if she had been there from before.

No one spoke for a moment. Not even the air.

Until Desire raised his voice, chewing sarcasm:

“Well, this is what mortals would call familiar. All the siblings gathered, two uncomfortable parents, and the absence of one of ours. Anyone else missing, or can we serve dessert now?”

Destiny closed the book without closing it.

Death looked at Night, not hiding what she felt:

“This time it isn’t a minor mistake. He is here. And he shouldn’t be.”

“And he isn’t the same,” added Despair. “But he is. And we don’t understand what we are in the face of that.”

Time folded his hands. His voice was like the edge of a bell:

“And yet, you called me only to accuse me, as always? I wasn’t part of that decision.”

“Isn’t omission also will?” replied Desire, with an almost elegant inclination. “You hid behind your immutability while Mother… planted things without consulting.”

Night looked at them. One by one. Not with defiance. With recognition.

“We gave you existence, not obedience. We are not judges of what you do. And we are not here to correct the map when you don’t like the path.”

Delirium approached the table, spinning with hands full of invisible butterflies.

“But this isn’t just a path. It’s a return without return. He is… singing with a borrowed voice.”

Desire struck the table that was not a table.

“And why him?! I don’t recall you doing it for her! Is it because he’s your favorite, Mother? Why take what was left of him and dress it in human form? It’s always for him!”

Night raised her voice only a little. But it was enough.

“It wasn’t favoritism. It was… destiny without decree. Something that wasn’t erased entirely. Something no one wrote, yet remained. Not because of me—because of him. Because of what still desires to flourish.”

Time looked away. For the first time, he didn’t seem eternal. He seemed tired.

“And if he flourishes where he shouldn’t, what breaks? The Dreaming? Daniel? All of us?”

Death stepped forward. Not with accusation, but with warning.

“He is beginning to cross. To remember without remembering. Not as a return. As an expanding dissonance. If this continues, not only will he break. The fabric he himself wove will break… believing he would not return.”

Desire looked at their parents, hard:

“And now what? Will you wash your hands again? Watch from the shadows, as if this were one more lesson in inevitability?”

Time lowered his gaze. Not from defeat. From truth.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do something. It’s that we already did, by allowing him to exist. Everything else… is choice.”

Destiny spoke at last:

“He is not Dream. But he carries a fragment that should not have been seeded.”

Night merely answered:

“Again. He does not answer to you, but what did you want me to do? Let it go out completely? Allow the last trace of what he was to simply dissolve without memory, without seed, without echo?”

Desire laughed, acidic:

“Are you saying that not even you, together, will be able to stop what will happen because of your existential sentimentalism, Mother?”

Delirium looked at him, smiling but sad:

“Perhaps no one can fix it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be close… for when the mirror breaks again.”

Time sighed. Not with air, but with cycle.

“You will do nothing to stop him. Nor will you push him. This time, you will decide. As you have always wanted.”

Night turned her back on them, but before vanishing, she said:

“If you were ever children, then be more than that now. Be siblings. Be conscience.”

And they faded.

The hall was empty.

Or full of something that still has no name.

The hallway was empty, lit by a white light that couldn’t quite erase the morning’s weariness. Outside, the city still yawned between hurried coffees and ambulances without urgency.

Nada was walking down the corridor with the first patient’s report in her hand when she saw him.

Darian was sitting by the closed door of her office. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just there. As if he had been waiting since before she arrived.

“Darian?” she asked cautiously, not yet fully approaching.

He lifted his gaze. His eyes had that fog that appears only when one has been awake too long… or dreaming too deeply.

“I don’t have an appointment,” he said before she could add anything else. “But I needed to talk to you… to someone,” he corrected himself.

She hesitated. She looked at the clock. Then at his expression. And she knew that time, that day, could wait.

She opened the door and motioned him in.

Inside, the office was the same. The plants, the couch, the desk with the same pencils arranged symmetrically. But something in the atmosphere changed when he walked in. As if the space recognized that conversation wasn’t recorded.

He didn’t sit on the couch. He remained standing, as if he needed to feel that he could leave if he wished.

“I had a dream last night,” he said, in a low voice that wasn’t seeking drama, but redemption. “In it… I took my own life. Not out of sadness. Not out of hopelessness. I did it because I felt in a cage. Imprisoned, because I couldn’t bear any longer a feeling I shouldn’t have… I think I killed myself because I couldn’t hold the love I felt inside. It was too much. As if my body were too small to contain it.” He explained it without believing it himself.

She looked at him without speaking. She just listened. But her hands were tense on the back of the chair.

“It wasn’t a specific love,” he continued. “It was everything at once. A father’s love, a brother’s love… but above all, a lover’s love. It was so deep… so burning… it split me. I had no one to give it to, and that destroyed me more than any hatred.”

He sat then. Not on the couch, but on the very edge of the rug. As if he needed to touch real ground.

“And the worst was remembering… the rage I felt when someone rejected me. When I dared to confess what I felt and that person told me no. That they couldn’t. That they shouldn’t.”

He raised his eyes to her.

“I don’t know why, but when I woke up… I felt… I know it was you, and I’m not crazy,” he added, with an awkward smile, as if to defuse the tension. “I just… feel broken. As if someone had parceled me out into different lives and now they were all trying to speak at the same time.”

Nada said nothing. She couldn’t. Her eyes, without permission, began to fill with tears. Not because of what he said… but because of how he said it. Because of how something he couldn’t know became the exact echo of what had been.

Her silent crying had no sound, but it had weight.

He stood, confused. He approached carefully. Not with desire. With necessity. Like someone who intuits, without logical reason, that the only way not to break is to touch something that has held him before.

“We know each other from before, don’t we?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. Unable to deny or affirm.

“That’s why you’re crying,” he went on. Trying to thread together what was happening. To give sense to the senseless. “My dream… is really history, isn’t it?”

He lifted his hand and, as if the whole world bent toward that instant, he tried to kiss her. Not impulsively, but with reverence. But just as he was about to, she moved away.

Hurt. Broken. Silent.

She didn’t reject him with words. She did it with a look that said “no, not yet.”

She turned. Walked to her desk. Took a prescription.

“I can’t keep treating you,” she said, not harshly, but with determination. “I can’t help you. There are too many crossed lines, too much history untold. I’m going to refer you to another therapist.”

He didn’t understand.

“Why? Why can’t you tell me? Why can’t you be the one?”

“Because to help you… I would have to separate myself from what this does to me. And I can’t.” She confessed it. She handed him the paper. When he took it, their fingers barely brushed. She drew a deep breath.

“Darian… please don’t come back,” she pleaded, in a sob.

He nodded. Without fully understanding. But knowing that moment wasn’t professional. It was something more. Something suspended. She didn’t walk him to the door, but she watched him leave without saying goodbye.

The air outside the clinic had that lukewarm chill of midafternoon, when the sun resigns itself and the city hasn’t yet decided whether it will fall asleep or pretend it’s still awake.

Darian went out, still with the prescription in his hand, not really knowing whether what he carried was medicine or a sentence. He closed the door with a softer impulse than he intended. But Nada didn’t follow.

And then he saw her.

Nuala.

She was sitting on a bench across the street, as if she had been there long before he arrived. As if she always knew where to be when something was about to break.

When she noticed him, she stood and crossed to him without hurry. Her steps were light; they almost sounded as if she were stepping on something that shouldn’t be disturbed.

“You asked me if I liked you,” she said abruptly, without a greeting.

Darian looked at her, surprised, as if her words reached him from another sound plane. He nodded, wordless.

She stopped right in front of him. She didn’t look at him directly.

“I like you, and I think I also used to like you,” she said.

He blinked. He hadn’t expected it. Not now. Not like this.

“She said there were too many stories untold… Were she and I a couple? Did I cheat on her with you?” he asked then, with brutal honesty, barely gesturing with his head toward the door he had just closed.

Nuala lowered her gaze to the ground.

She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no.

She just stayed in silence. The kind of silence that is already an answer.

A car passed, and the wind left a loose leaf in the air that fell between them.

He sighed. The world seemed smaller and smaller, more complex, disordered, unrecognizable.

“And now what?” he asked, without anger, only with the weight of not knowing what to do with what remained.

Nuala finally raised her eyes. She had no answers. But she looked at him like someone who knows that pain is not the end of anything. Only the reminder that what was lived matters.

“Now… you walk,” she said. “And I, if you let me, will walk with you for a while.”

He nodded.

And they walked. Not as destiny. Just as passage.

The Library of Dream had no clocks, but it knew time. It didn’t measure it—it remembered it. And that hourless afternoon, a slight tremor ran through its shelves as if an unwritten truth were beginning to be pronounced.

Lucienne looked up. She had been reorganizing a passage that shouldn’t exist: a record that spoke of a being with no name yet, a fragment not entirely human, but not Endless either. The book barely vibrated in her hands, as if it wanted to open by itself.

At that moment, Matthew came in, gliding in a clumsy spiral.

“Did you feel that?” he asked, perching on the back of a chair. “I thought it was a rebellious nightmare… but the pillars shuddered.”

Lucienne nodded, without closing the book.

“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was something deeper.”

“So it wasn’t my imagination? I thought a part of the Realm was splitting…”

Lucienne slowly closed the volume. The cover gave a whisper, as if it resisted stopping its speech.

“It wasn’t splitting. It was an inner vibration. Like when a dream touches something that was hidden from it for too long.”

Matthew tilted his head.

“You mean Darian?”

Lucienne turned and, for the first time since she had been watching him, spoke without technicalities.

“I think… he is beginning to remember. Not with the mind, but with the soul.”

“And what part is he remembering?”

Lucienne looked at the shelf where the oldest volume ever recorded slept, one with no title.

“The part that cannot be narrated without consequences. The core. What was the origin of his fall… and perhaps of ours.”

Matthew lowered his voice.

“Is that good… or bad?”

Lucienne didn’t answer at once. She walked to the window, from where the distorted contours of the dream realm could be seen. Some towers flickered, as if doubting their own structure.

“I don’t know,” she answered at last. “But the Realm… is feeling it. The loom is moving. The thread that Darian represents is beginning to twist within the tapestry.”

Matthew took one step closer.

“Should we prepare?”

Lucienne took a deep breath. The book in her hand trembled again, as if it sensed its fate.

“We should be alert. If he remembers who he was… and even more, if he understands who he could become, there will be no return possible.”

Matthew beat his wings, restless.

“Then, what do we do?”

Lucienne looked again at the closed volume, as if she expected it to speak on its own.

“Wait. And pray, if dreams have gods.”

Lucienne lost herself in her reading again. The tremors had calmed, but the air was still heavy.

Matthew gave a couple of flaps and perched on the edge of the window. He waited for Lucienne to step away and then turned to Nuala, who had arrived a short while ago, lowering his voice, with that tone halfway between curious and accusatory that was natural to him.

“Nuala… are you sure about what you did?”

She didn’t move at first. She just kept her eyes on the trembling horizon of the Realm. Finally, she answered without looking away:

“Sure? No. But necessary… yes.”

Matthew snorted.

“To mix up the story like that… to tell Darian of a love that wasn’t exactly as he remembers, to turn punishments into deceptions, to rewrite what Nada and Morpheus lived… I don’t know, it sounds more like one of Desire’s works than yours.”

Nuala turned, her eyes shining with the shadow of responsibility.

“I didn’t do it to seduce him, nor to manipulate him. I did it to protect him. To protect all of them.”

“And what if that breaks him more?” the raven pressed. “What if, when he discovers the truth, he feels betrayed? Do you think he’ll withstand a second fall?”

Nuala lowered her gaze. Her voice became a barely audible whisper:

“Sometimes… it’s more dangerous to live without meaning than with a wrong one.”

Matthew moved a little closer.

“And if Nada remembers too?”

“She already remembers,” Nuala replied, almost like a secret. “Not everything. But enough to hurt.”

“Then, desperate times, desperate measures?” Matthew said with bitter irony.

Nuala nodded.

“And I’m not proud of it. But if there is the slightest chance that Darian can flourish… even from a clumsy, incomplete, or mistaken story… then I prefer that chance to watching him go out completely.”

Matthew lowered his head. A moment later, he murmured:

“I don’t know if what you’re doing is brave or cruel.”

Nuala looked at him with sadness.

“Maybe both. Maybe that’s what we are now… in his absence.”

The raven fell silent.

Without intervening again, Lucienne marked a page and left it open on the oldest lectern in the library.

The page trembled. The name still didn’t appear in full. But it was no longer blank.

Chapter 10: The Promise That Still Burns

Nada had not slept.

The office was silent, save for the mechanical tick of the wall clock and the slow sway of the curtains. The world carried on. Unreturned calls, emails to review, patients who would wait for a rescheduled appointment.

But she was still there. Sitting on the edge of the empty examination couch. The sun didn’t enter, nor did the rain beat against the glass. Only a hollow. One that wasn’t physical.

“I promised you,” she whispered into the air, as if someone were listening.

She closed her eyes and Death’s face appeared in her memory. Her warning had not been a threat. It had been a prayer.
“Bloom, or the world he left behind will break.”

Nada had not known how to hold him. She rejected him. Pushed him away. Not because she didn’t want him, but because it still hurt. The memory still burned of a promise without an altar, of a ring made of words and farewells.

“I am not a seed waiting to germinate.” That’s what she had told him in another time. What if now he was?

She covered her face with her hands. Her whole body ached with a fatigue that wasn’t physical.

“He went back to the spiral,” she murmured. “And I… I didn’t hold him.”

•

On another plane, not so distant, not so visible.

Despair opened her eyes.

Her nails slowly scored the frame of her own mirror. The room was full of steam, as if all the moisture in the universe breathed from that cubicle. A single name flickered on the surface of the fogged glass: Nada.

She watched.

Not with judgment. Not with hatred. With hunger.

She didn’t fully understand what she felt when she saw her like that. A broken woman was no novelty. A wounded love was not new territory. But there was something different this time. Something that unsettled her more than usual. Something she didn’t know how to name… and she knew how to name every pain.

•

Nada had stood up. She walked around the room as if searching for a center that no longer existed.

She opened the drawer where she kept the files, but her fingers trembled. Darian’s was there. Closed. Sealed.

But it wasn’t the file she wanted to open.

It was something else.

“How do I help him now?” she said in a low voice.

•

“You can’t,” said Despair from her cubicle, but her voice was not heard. “That’s the point.”

•

Nada pressed her forehead to the window glass. From there, the city looked asleep. But she wasn’t. She could no longer sleep peacefully.

Death had asked her for something she might not know how to give.

What if she wasn’t meant to hold him? What if she was only there to witness his fall?

•

Despair ran a finger across her own chest, leaving a barely visible mark. She was not pleased. Not as before. Because something in Nada resisted.

And when someone resists… despair feeds on the crack, but it is also unsettled by it.

•

Nada turned. She took her coat. She closed the folder without reading it.

“I’m not going to lose him again,” she said, not knowing exactly to whom.

And she walked toward the door.

•

Despair smiled.

But only a little.

Nada closed the door with a soft click that seemed more definitive than she intended. The hallway was empty. Only the echo of her steps, and the distant murmur of the city beating like a heart that no longer belonged to her.

But she wasn’t alone.

When she reached the elevator and pressed the button without conviction, a figure slid behind her without sound. No shadow, no perfume. Only presence.

“Knock, knock,” whispered a voice that was a smile, desire, and poison.

Nada turned slowly. Her eyes met Desire’s.

Impeccable. Ambiguous. Perfect in that unsettling androgyny, like an answer no one had asked for.

She said nothing. She only watched, alert, as if her soul remembered something her body still didn’t know how to name.

Desire tilted their head, like someone playing with a butterfly that had already lost a wing.

“What a… resilient gaze. Regret looks good on you, did you know?”

She frowned, confused.

“Do I know you?”

Desire didn’t respond immediately. They took a step forward, invading the space as if it belonged to them.

“It doesn’t matter if you know me. It matters that he does. That even without knowing who he is… you remain his blind spot.”

Nada drew a careful, deep breath.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, darling,” said he, or she, or both, with a sigh laden with centuries. “I am what kept him walking when he no longer wanted to. I am the fire he mistook for love. I am the caress that hurt and was still sought. I am Desire.”

She did not step back. But she did not approach either.

“Why are you here?”

Desire smiled, but their eyes were ice.

“To tell you I’m sorry, little sister.”

Nada furrowed her brow. But Desire wasn’t speaking to her.

“I’m sorry,” they repeated, looking beyond time, as if speaking to the memory of an absence. “But I will not spend another millennium fulfilling Dream’s fantasies. He preferred to wallow in his pathetic self-pity… I prefer that, this time, he get what he always wanted.”

They came even closer, breath almost on her cheek.

“You.”

Nada opened her mouth, but no word came out.

Desire winked.

“Now that he is no longer Endless… there are no rules to forbid it. No one can intervene. No one can judge. He is human. So are you. So let’s give the King what he wants.”

Without waiting for an answer, they vanished like a perfume at war with memory.

Nada was left there, alone once more, but different. As if a new kind of unrest had invaded her. Not fear. Something worse.

Doubt.

Nada stood before the door, hand raised inches from the buzzer. She hadn’t pressed it yet. Her breathing was slow, contained, as if the mere idea of the sound could unleash something she wouldn’t know how to stop. The corridor’s silence seemed to watch her, expectant.

Then, the elevator opened behind her.

Footsteps. A familiar figure. A vibrational echo her skin recognized even before she saw him.

“I thought you never wanted to see me again?” Darian said, stopping behind her.

Nada turned, surprised. He came with a paper bag in one hand—possibly something to eat—and keys dangling from the other. He wasn’t dressed with his usual care. Wrinkled shirt, collar barely open, a poorly concealed shadow under his eyes, but there was something in his gaze… something contained, like a wound that no longer bleeds but still hurts.

She didn’t answer. She only lowered her hand slowly, as if what she wanted to say had been caught between the gesture and the silence.

Darian didn’t wait.

He passed by her. Very close. So close his arm just brushed her side, with the naturalness of the inevitable. It wasn’t a caress. It was a casual brush… but tangible enough that her skin felt it with an echo.

He pulled the keys from his pocket and slid them into the lock with slight clumsiness.

“Are you here to remind me I’m your worst professional and personal mistake?” he said without turning, with barely disguised sarcasm.

Nada closed her eyes for a moment. What she wanted to say had no shape yet.

He opened the door, but didn’t go in. He stopped on the threshold, body half turned, as if—despite everything—he still left an open space.

“Are you coming in?” he asked.

She didn’t know if she should, yet one step brought her closer to him.

She didn’t respond immediately. She only looked at him.

The same body.
Another shadow in the gaze.
The same echo.
Another absence in the tone.

And yet, there he was.

Their bodies ended up almost touching. Nada drew breath, but didn’t move; he did: he lifted his hand, and she did not retreat from the gesture, not even when her breathing began to hitch. Darian’s fingers, trembling, stopped by her cheek, and it was she who, in the end, closed the distance… a step that changed everything.

It was not a planned kiss; it was inevitable.

Their lips met as if they had been searching for each other across every plane of time. It was not a chaste brush nor a carnal urgency. It was something deeper. A shared memory that, without knowing itself spoken, dared to repeat itself.

And then, in a single instant…

The universe shattered in his gaze.

**

It wasn’t a vision. It was everything.

Darian saw the red desert of Hell. He felt the shackles he had once forged with words of renunciation. He saw himself—not as now, but dressed in darkness—pleading with a woman under a starless sky. He heard his own voice say “I love you” in every forgotten tongue. He saw the betrayal. The sentence. The punishment. He saw the crown fall from his hands. The door close. The empty tower. The raven that did not return. The sister who wept. The mirror that broke.

But above all, he saw her.

Nada.
Always Nada.
In all her forms.
In all her names.

Screaming his name—the one he no longer had—while he fell.

**

The kiss broke on its own.

Darian gasped, took a step back, and his eyes opened as if they had just been born. His whole body trembled.

“No…” he managed to say, bringing both hands to his head. “No… I shouldn’t be here…”

Then he fell.

His body collapsed with a dull thud onto the carpet.

Nada ran to his side, held him in her arms.

“Darian!” she cried, shaking him hard, terrified. “Darian!”

But he didn’t respond.

His eyes were closed.

On his face… a tear.

A single one.

As if what he had just seen was not only a memory, but also… a wound.

Saint Albans Hospital. Two hours later.

The lights were white, but not warm. The room smelled of disinfectant and imposed stillness. Nada sat on the edge of the bed, Darian’s hand between hers. He was still unconscious. The doctors said his collapse had no clear organic cause: stable vital signs, unusually intense brain activity… as if he were dreaming beyond the threshold.

Nada hadn’t let go of his hand since they arrived.

Then the door opened. A woman in black entered.

But she did not seem out of place. In fact, the silence seemed to make room for her.

“What are you doing here?” Nada asked, low but firm. She recognized her without an introduction.

Night did not answer right away. She looked at Darian with a mixture of ancient compassion and contained mourning. Then she looked at Nada.

“Watching over him. As always. Even if he doesn’t know it.”

Nada pressed her lips together.

“This isn’t just watching. You knew this could happen. You saw it before anyone.”

“I saw it,” Night admitted, “and I let it happen. Because he is no longer Dream… but he still carries his wound.”

Nada stood, without releasing Darian’s hand.

“You expect me to hold him alone?”

“No,” Night said. “But perhaps… you are the one who can guide him without breaking him.”

Before she could respond, a new presence filled the hallway.

Cold.

Immutable.

Time.

He entered without opening the door, as if it folded back in fear. His gaze did not go to Darian, but directly to Night.

“So this is where your ‘inevitable freedom’ ends?” he asked, without a gram of courtesy. “You brought back the son you never should have touched… only to watch him break again?”

“He is not Dream, how many more times must I repeat it,” Night replied, facing him. “He is what remained when he renounced. He is human.”

“And what will happen when he stops being human?”

“We don’t know yet,” Night said, folding her arms. “And if you’re here, it’s because you care more than you admit.”

Time frowned.

“I am here because every fracture you cause… ends up falling on me.”

“It is not a fracture,” Night countered. “It is a flowering. You don’t understand that.”

“No,” he said. “I understand cycles that must not repeat.”

At that instant, a voice rose from the bed.

Still weak. Barely audible But clear.

“…I know you.”

They both turned.

Darian was awake.

His eyes barely open.

He looked at Time as if he remembered him from a dream he had never dreamed.

Time stood still. His eternity seemed to shrink in a single exhalation.

“Father…” Darian whispered, still sedated. “He begs you…”

Nada moved quickly to him.

“Darian, easy… you’re in the hospital, you’re safe.”

But he didn’t take his eyes off Time.

“Like last time. Please.”

Time lowered his gaze slightly.

Night watched it all without intervening. With sadness, yes. But also with an unshakable determination.

And in the air… something changed.

As if the clock of the universe, for just one second, had lost its beat.

Time took a step toward Night. His voice was dry, without melody, but definitive: “Are you satisfied?”

“I don’t raise children to satisfy myself".

She turned; her eyes are not eyes. They are what remains when there is no more light.

“This is the reason why everything has an order. Why we are what we are. Do not be confused. What you resurrected does not have the strength to blossom the way you think. You know that, inevitably, something will break.”

“Perhaps.” Her voice was like mist. “Or perhaps something will finally be woven.”

Time approached her dangerously, taking hold of her.

“That child should not have continued. His story had an ending. What you brought back was a dead decision. A renunciation. What remains after the end—and that, my love, should not be out there growing.”

“And why not?” Her voice now had an edge. “Why may pain repeat without limit, but love must have an expiration date?”

Time stopped. He looked at Darian and then at Nada, who watched the scene without interrupting.

“Because equilibrium does not survive what does not forget its origin. That’s why!”

“What if you and your inevitable certainty are wrong this time? Could this thing that is happening not be more stable than your eternal cycles?”

Night drew near. She looked at him directly. Time did not answer.

“You measure equilibrium. I cover it when it falls. And that son—yes, mine—is not a mistake. He is what happens when we stop repeating ourselves.”

“And if the Realm of Dream resonates with him again?” Time asked, more softly.

“Then so be it. Let it resonate differently. Perhaps it is time the eternal learned to dream like mortals.”

Time looked at the horizon that does not exist. A barely visible crack crossed the center of the circle.

“Do you think he will choose well… without knowing?”

“I don’t know. But the possibility of doing so—that is already a miracle.” Night answered with an invisible smile.

Time did not respond. But his gaze did not retreat; he turned toward the bed and extended a hand without touching Darian. The air seemed to invert for an instant. The heart monitor flickered with a faint hum. Then Night stopped him.

“Don’t you dare,” she threatened, stepping between Time and Darian. “You refused to help him when he asked you; you will not do so now, when he hasn’t.”

“As you wish, but do not ask me when you can no longer pay the price.”

A flash. A sustained tone.

The universe turned once, in silence.

Darian opened his eyes, again, still drowsy; Nada, with a hesitant gesture, looked at him as if his soul had returned from a place he wasn’t sure he had left, and for the first time in a long time, everything began to weigh differently.

Chapter 11: The Dream That Becomes a Choice

The night in the hospital was thick, as if wakefulness itself had folded in to make room for the dream.
Lucienne arrived without warning.
No doors creaked, no logs recorded her entry. She walked through the corridors with the ease of one who had been there before, even if in another time. Her presence disturbed neither guards nor nurses nor the air itself.

She carried in her hands a small jar. It bore no label. It was not sealed with wax, but with a ribbon of forgotten words.
When she reached the hallway of the room she sought, she saw Nada step out. Lucienne did not hesitate.

When she entered, the monitor displayed a deep yet restless sleep. She looked at him with tenderness and nostalgia.
She walked to the foot of the bed and opened the jar.
A thread of bluish smoke rose, undulating, as if searching for its destiny. It shimmered like liquid music. No one else perceived it. But Darian, asleep, breathed it in without knowing.

Then the dream began.
There was no landscape, no walls. Only a vast black sky without stars. A sea suspended above another sea, and in the center of it all… a man standing.
It was him.
But not him now. The face was the same, yes, yet something in his bearing, in his stillness, in his unblinking gaze made him seem carved from eternity.

Darian recognized him without logic or memory.
“You know me,” said the other—no smile, no reproach.
“No…” Darian murmured. “I shouldn’t…”
“And yet, you know that you do.”

Darian tried to step back, but the ground was not ground. It was thought. And thought held him fast.
“What is this?”
“A final inheritance,” replied Morpheus. “Not in gold, nor in throne. In memory.”

Silence fell with a weight that was more than sound. Silence itself hurt.
“Are you me?”
“I was. And if you are here, it is because part of you is ready to remember why I am not anymore.”
“I don’t understand… I didn’t ask for this.”
“No one asks to be born twice. And yet, here you are. Alive. Mortal. With lips warm from a kiss and skin marked by choices you do not yet know you’ve made.”

Darian swallowed hard. The emptiness around offered no echo—only truth.
“And what did I decide?”
“To die,” said Morpheus. “Not as punishment. As choice. I chose to cease being Dream of the Endless so I would no longer carry what love had turned into debt. I chose to silence the Realm so that silence itself could speak for me.”
“For… her?”
“For her. For my son. For you. For the child yet unborn, for the story that was never meant to repeat, and for myself.”
“But… why?”
“Because for too long I was the keeper of all others wished to dream. And I forgot that even we—the Endless—can also desire.”

Morpheus stepped closer. It was not threat—it was compassion.
“And now what am I supposed to do?”
“I cannot tell you. That was the covenant. To live is not to repeat—it is to choose.”
“And you… what do you want me to choose?”
Morpheus closed his eyes. An invisible crack crossed the sky.
“What I never knew how to choose myself.”
“And if I fail?”
“Then I will have failed with you. But at least this time, the mistake will be human.”

The dream began to tremble, as if the structure containing it could no longer bear such revelation.
“Darian,” said Morpheus one last time, with a voice that was not voice but pure vibration. “You are not me. But you carry my shadow, my pulse, my legacy. I do not ask you to be Dream, for another already is. Only that you not flee from what may be born if you stop fearing.”

And the world broke.

Darian awoke—sweat on his brow, breath uneven.
Lucienne watched from the corner, serene.
“Did you see it?” she asked.
Darian did not answer.
He only placed a hand on his chest.
And knew that the weight he felt was not fever, nor anguish.
It was memory.

Morning light barely slipped through the slats of the blinds. A gentle brightness, one that did not demand presence but invited waking without alarm.
Darian opened his eyes, still lying in the hospital bed. His body, stiff, protested the movement. He sat up slowly. He didn’t know if it was the few hours of sleep or the invisible weight that had become habit. He rubbed his eyes and looked up.

She was still there.
Nada slept beside him—or as much as one could sleep sitting—wrapped in a white blanket some nurse must have brought her. Her breathing was calm, her face more peaceful than he remembered, as if for a moment the past had stopped chasing her.

Darian watched her in silence. Then he rose, crossed the room quietly, stepped into the dim hallway, and walked to an empty waiting area in the other wing. The corridor clock read 5:17. Outside, the city was beginning to wake, but on that floor reigned only the low hum of machines monitoring others’ dreams.

He dropped into a plastic chair, elbows on knees, head in hands.
Then he felt it.
A presence unlike the others.
Not shadow.
Not dream.
Not… normal.

“I had to see it with my own eyes,” said a voice behind him—familiar, yet out of place.
Darian lifted his head. And there she was.

Lucifer.
A woman with defined features and an ambiguous expression, her smile poised somewhere between mockery and nostalgia. Hair tied back with deliberate carelessness, dark glasses she didn’t need, a coat that defied the hospital’s temperature. She stood beside a broken coffee machine, as if she’d been waiting there for centuries—or had just decided to appear.

Something about her felt vaguely familiar. Not her face. An echo. He frowned.
“Do we know each other?” he asked cautiously. His voice did not sound disbelieving—just tired.
“Not directly,” she replied, tilting her head. “But a version of you knew me very well. Though that version swore he’d never become like me.” Her half-smile was wry.
“Who are you?”
“Don’t you recognize me?” she smiled, not waiting for an answer. “No matter. What matters is that you are recognizing yourself—bit by bit.”

Darian said nothing. Lucifer stepped closer, studying him like one examines a mirror showing new cracks. She moved out of the shadow; the morning light barely touched the edge of her coat.
“So you too,” she said. “Mortal? With dreams, hunger, gastritis, headaches? With memories that don’t fit and guilt that isn’t quite yours?”
“It wasn’t my choice,” Darian murmured.
“Of course it was,” Lucifer arched a brow. “Maybe you don’t remember. Maybe it was another you. But there is always a choice—even in the fall.”

Darian looked down at his hands. The weight of her words pressed heavier than fatigue.
“What are you doing here?”
“Curiosity, I suppose,” Lucifer twirled lightly. “I was the first to do it—to grow weary, break the rules, burn the book, and write in the margins. Do you remember what you said?”
“No.”
‘“I’ll never be like you,”’ Lucifer recited, her tone theatrically restrained. “Your exact words. And look at you now. No crown, no power. No name.”
“And yet… I still seem to be me.”
“Are you sure?” Lucifer stepped closer. “Are you sure the one who woke beside that woman is the same one who dreamed? The one who ruled the sleep of men? Or are you the echo of an echo?”

Darian held her gaze, silent.
Lucifer sighed. For a moment, her irony cracked.
“Mortality is an elegant sentence. I won’t call it punishment—it isn’t. It’s a mirror. One that keeps reflecting everything you did, everything you couldn’t name, everything you lost believing love could wait.”
“Are you here to warn me?”
“No,” she smiled tiredly. “To say goodbye.”
“To me? Why?”
“Not to you— to what you were. What remains now is your choice. You can live as a shadow… or remember as a man. But my friend, be careful…”

Lucifer lowered her glasses, letting her eyes—human yet infinitely lucid—meet his.
“Sometimes, when a god loves as a man… he bleeds for everything he failed to protect.”

Darian froze.
Lucifer turned toward the door. For a second, no one saw her pass. Only the motion sensor light flickered for no visible reason.
“Good luck with her,” she murmured before vanishing past the frame. “Some of us never had any.”

Darian remained seated, alone, surrounded by the hum of breathing machines—and a single name caught in his throat: Nada.

When he returned to the room, she was no longer asleep. The door closed softly behind him. He leaned against it for a moment, uncertain he’d returned to the right place. The hospital corridor had felt endless, more for what weighed inside him than for its length. Outside, Lucifer was gone, but the conversation pulsed in his chest—an echo impossible to silence.

When he turned, he saw her.
Nada stood by the window, blanket still over her shoulders. She didn’t look at him yet, but she knew he was there. It wasn’t just presence—it was something more. As if what she had read hours earlier now stood embodied before her, watching her with eyes that sought not forgiveness but truth. She didn’t ask where he’d been. She didn’t need to. In Darian’s eyes there was one shadow less… and another, different.

“You came back,” she said, not turning fully.
“I didn’t know if I should,” Darian’s voice was hoarse, as if still carrying part of the dream. “But I couldn’t not.”

She looked at him then. There was no reproach in her eyes—only recognition, and a doubt suspended.
“Are you all right?”
He barely nodded, walked to the bed, remained standing—as if the air between them were more fragile than glass.
“I met someone,” he said. “Someone who once chose as I did—to give up everything.”
She said nothing, only stepped closer.
“He told me this isn’t punishment—it’s a mirror. That what I was still follows me, even if I don’t fully remember. That to love as a man hurts more, but it’s real.”

She didn’t answer. She walked until they were face to face, their foreheads almost touching.
“And you?” she asked. “Did you choose it?”

Darian drew a deep breath. The kiss was inevitable—and they did not break it by will. Reality did.
The faint beep of a monitor, a nurse moving down the hall, the uneven breath of someone in another room.

When their lips parted, Darian didn’t know if seconds or centuries had passed.
“I didn’t remember—not yet—but now, for some strange reason… I know I did. I wanted to die, but not out of weakness. Rather because I could no longer hold a Realm—my Realm—without love.”

Nada didn’t move away. She stayed there, eyes open, still feeling the faint tremor in her chest. Darian looked at her with a mixture of vertigo and certainty, like one who has just leapt and, midair, realizes he might not fall. Nada closed her eyes for a heartbeat. When she opened them again, they held not tears but history—and, above all… the future.

“So you’re not here for me to forgive you,” she whispered. “You’re here because you want to try not to break us again.”
Darian nodded.
“Not from the same place, certainly not from what we were. Only… from what we might be, without repeating what already destroyed us.”

There was silence—long, heavy with all that needed no words. It was she who finally moved closer. Not urgently, but with clarity—like someone who seeks not redemption but a new attempt.

This time, it was Nada who kissed him. And though the memories surged again, the same vision as before—nothing shattered. When their lips parted, she couldn’t help but whisper,
“We’re not exactly who we were. Not you… nor I.”

He nodded slowly, still in place. His gaze drifted beyond the glass, into the pale gray of morning. He could still feel the vibration in his blood. Not from the kiss itself, but from what had happened.
“And yet, what we felt… still exists,” said Darian.
Her gaze wasn’t an answer but a search.
“I’m not afraid that it exists—only that what you were… broke me. And I know it broke you too.”

Darian lowered his eyes. There was no apology on his lips, only a voice more human than ever.
“I’m not here for forgiveness—I know that. I’m here because if I don’t try to mend this, I’ll keep carrying pieces that no longer belong to me. And strangely… I want freedom. Not from you—but from what I was.”

Nada listened without moving. Her hands trembled slightly.
“And do you know what it means to help someone who once destroyed you?”

Between them, silence stretched taut.
“No. I don’t,” he said. “And maybe who I was didn’t either. But I think you do.”
“We can’t turn back time, erase what happened,” she said at last. “You know that.”
“I do,” Darian nodded sadly. “But still, here we are. You and I. Again. Not as punishment… but as chance. Someone—or something—is giving us a ‘try again, but with truth.’”

“And what is your truth, Darian?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“That I can’t keep running from what I was, and I don’t want you to either. That even if you don’t love me, even if we’re nothing—or everything—there’s something in us that never entirely broke. Nada, if there’s still a thread, I want to hold it—this time by choice. Because maybe that thread isn’t from the past, but the only thing that can lead us to a different future—together.”

She watched him for a long time. Then she took a step toward him. She didn’t touch or embrace him. She only let a single word fall, soft as a petal.
“All right.”
“All right… what?”
“Let’s try. Not from the love we had before. Certainly not from guilt—but from the attempt not to repeat what already destroyed us.”

He nodded, moved. He asked for nothing more.
She drew a deep breath—in that sigh was a surrender, not to him, but to herself.
“But what if this breaks us again?” she asked, almost a whisper.
“Then this time,” Darian said, “we’ll do it awake.”

From the window, a flowering tree barely visible let fall a single white petal onto the sill. In the air, without voice, an ancient echo spoke:
If conscious… then this time it will not be debt. It will be choice.

Nada heard it. She knew it.
This time… she was ready.

Chapter 12: A Tear in the Dreaming

The heart monitor emitted soft, steady beeps. The evening light filtered timidly through the vertical blinds. It wasn’t a private room, but in that moment, it seemed suspended in its own time.
Darian opened his eyes.
He felt the stiffness of the mattress beneath his back, the dry crust of the IV on his arm, the sterile air that smelled of plastic and chlorine. He shifted a little, blinking, expecting to find Nada in the chair beside the bed; however, the one he found was not her.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.”
The voice was gentle. Familiar, though he didn’t know from where. The woman sitting beside him had her hair gathered in a low bun, a dark coat hanging on the back of the chair, and a thermos of coffee on the side table. She smiled at him as if she’d known him forever.
“Mom…?” Darian murmured, his throat rough.
“Present,” she said, lifting the water glass to him just a little. “How do you feel?”
He sat up slowly. His body ached, but it wasn’t a physical pain. It was something else… internal. As if he had stretched too far during the night.
“Weird,” he admitted. “As if I hadn’t slept, but had dreamed something… too big to remember.”
Night nodded, as if speaking of dreams were as common as speaking of the weather.
“That happens sometimes. Dreams don’t always fit back into the body when we return.”
Darian looked at her more closely. She had soft under-eye circles, the kind that don’t betray exhaustion but time. Her hands were slender yet steady. There was nothing supernatural about her. Only a certain pause in her gestures. Like someone who has lived slow enough not to forget something important.
“And Nada?” he asked.
“She went home for a while. She didn’t want to leave, but I insisted. She needs to rest. You do too,” she added, as if the change of subject might protect him.
Darian sipped some water. Then, in a low voice:
“Were you here all afternoon?”
“Not from the beginning. I came when they told me. They gave you something to sleep. They said it was… a nervous collapse. Do you want to talk about it?”
Darian shook his head.
They were silent for a few seconds. Then he asked:
“What was I like… when I was a child?”
Night looked at him.
She didn’t blink. She didn’t change her expression, but she took just a second longer than usual to answer.
“You were curious. You liked to take clocks apart. Hide things in your pockets. Your shoes were always dirty.” She smiled. “Not from playing, but from walking more than was expected of you.”
Darian watched her intently.
“And did I cry a lot?”
“Sometimes,” she said, looking at the glass. “But you learned to do it in silence. Not out of fear, but out of… modesty.”
“And was I… afraid of the dark?”
Night took her time again. Not enough to sound deceitful. Only just enough to sound like someone choosing her words very carefully.
“No,” she said at last. “Not of the dark. Of what came when you closed your eyes… perhaps.”
Darian nodded, as if that confirmed everything. He lowered his gaze. He gripped the blanket between his fingers.
“And what did you tell me to calm me down?”
Night parted her lips. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have that scene. She didn’t have those words. She had never said them. Nothing she had said, she had ever done.
“Mom?” he pressed, without raising his voice. “You… who are you, really?”
The woman set the glass down carefully on the side table. She didn’t look at him immediately. Then, with an unfeigned calm, she replied:
“I am the one who waited for you before you arrived. The one who believed that even something broken could blossom if offered enough love. I am the one who stayed when the others left.”
“That’s not an answer,” said Darian, without anger. “That’s… a poetic definition.”
Night smiled, sad.
“It’s the only thing I can give you… for now. Because the full answer… still doesn’t fit in your body.”
Darian closed his eyes. For an instant, he didn’t need to know more.
He only felt that, even if just for a moment, he wasn’t alone.

Suddenly the hospital room fell back into silence after the conversation. The echo of the unsaid still floated among the sheets. Darian, still lying down, felt something begin to move inside—not in the body, but in a deeper place that had no name.
Then it happened. It wasn’t a jolt. Nor a summons. It was a sudden shudder, as if someone on another plane had spoken his name too loudly.
Darian closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to contain—and instead of darkness, the void opened.
And on the other side…

The Dreaming trembled. Not with an earthquake. Not with collapse. With something graver: a silence that didn’t belong in the Realm of Dream. Lucienne’s shelves were slightly hunched, as if the books did not wish to be read. The doors opened onto no new dream. The Orb… was opaque.
Lucienne was the first to feel it. Just then, Delirium appeared.
“Dani is not okay!” she cried, more desperate than confused. “I knew it before I thought it! Before I dreamed it! Before! He’s unraveling inside as if the threads that held him… got bored.”
She ran to the throne room, where Daniel sat… but was absent. He was not sleeping. He was not speaking. He only was, and yet not entirely.
“He hasn’t gone!” Delirium shrieked, tears falling like confetti in reverse. “But he isn’t here either. He’s… suspended.”
Lucienne tried to draw near. The Orb vibrated with an erratic note. The throne itself seemed misaligned with the plane on which it rested.
Then Desire appeared, wrapped in silk and danger. “What a spectacle,” they said, but without mockery. “It wasn’t me this time. I swear it by my mirror. This… does not bear my signature.”
“Then whose?” Lucienne asked, her tone more pleading than defiant.
Destiny arrived unannounced. His book opened itself as he walked. Though he read, uncertainty marked his face.
“This was not written.”
Death came next. She entered without casting a shadow. She approached the throne. Daniel remained motionless, but his skin seemed to absorb light.
“He’s not on my list,” Death said, low but firm. “Yet… he is dimming. Something inside him is failing to hold.”
She looked at her siblings. “This is more than a crisis. More than a waning dream. It is… a fissure in the vibration that binds us.”
“What do you propose?” asked Destiny, though he already knew the answer.
Then Time came—but not as salvation. As debt. His presence weighed on every corner. He was not loved, but he was necessary.
“What is happening?” Death asked, almost like a child again. “What’s wrong with our brother?”
Time approached Daniel. He observed him like one remembers a newborn… or someone who never should have died.
“It’s not his body that is tiring,” he said. “It’s his center. His pulse. Not Daniel’s… but that of the fragment that inhabits him. A part that never should have fully been born. An echo…”
Desire stepped back. Delirium covered her ears. Destiny simply closed his book.
“So Darian is Morpheus?” Desire asked—curious, and serious for the first time.
“No,” Time replied. “But he is what Morpheus did not allow himself to be. What he hid, what he denied, what he destroyed before allowing it to blossom. He is a vibrational echo born of unexpressed love. Of sacrifice. Of what he never wanted others to see.”
Death whispered: “And is that why Daniel is dying?”
“Because that echo… is remembering, and it does not know whether it wants to live as a man… or die as a fragment.”
Time lowered his gaze and added: “What comes cannot be predicted, because it will be his choice. It is not in the books, nor on the maps…”
In that instant, the Orb flickered. Like a heart still unsure whether to beat or stop.
Daniel’s body arched upon itself as if something invisible were tearing him from within. The tremor of his vibration was not physical, yet books fell from the shelves. The walls of the Dreaming rippled, like a reflection on water about to break. Lucienne ran to him, but could not touch him: his skin burned with a dull light, a kind of inverse echo.
Delirium stepped back, for the first time with no laughter in her eyes.
“He isn’t dreaming—he is being dreamed,” she said with a trembling voice. “He’s feeling something that doesn’t come from him… but that is his.”
Then Desire stood, pale even beneath their gilded presence. Their voice carried none of its usual playfulness, but a serene, dark edge:
“This shouldn’t come from me, but… we must intervene. Whatever Darian is doing, or desiring, or dreaming cannot go on like this. Not if it keeps rending the one left with the realm. Not if it drags Daniel toward an abyss he did not ask for.”
Death looked at them in surprise, but said nothing. Destiny narrowed his eyes, as if every word sketched a new thread in his book.
“Daniel is not on my list, because he never could be; however, Darian… he will be, if this is not balanced.”
Lucienne closed her eyes. She felt the weight of centuries fold upon the word “if.”
At that moment, Daniel’s body arched once more… and went still.
“Did it stop?” Delirium asked, as if afraid of having lost the only one who understood her dreams.
“No,” Time whispered. “Now it is Darian who dreams, and Daniel… is only feeling it.”
A long silence imposed itself at the heart of the Dreaming. Then, in the densest half-light, a faint murmur began to be heard.
As if a human’s dream were writing a new story… one no Endless could anticipate.

Night had fallen without ceremony. From the hospital window, the city seemed asleep but not at peace. Outside, sounds were muffled. Inside, everything was pause.
Darian still hovered between here and elsewhere. Something in his chest—not the heart, something deeper—beat with a rhythm he didn’t recognize.
First, a slight chill, like when someone walks over your memory. Then came the hum. Not in his ears, but in the marrow. A dull tremor, a sustained note that did not cease. His vision fogged for a second, and then… something tore.
Not outside.
Inside.
Darian brought a hand to his chest. A growing pressure, as if a nameless memory were trying to emerge.
He half closed his eyes.
He did not see darkness, but sand.
A windless, endless desert, where the sky was a motionless mantle. In the center, a figure—neither him, nor another—sat upon a floating rock. It did not speak. It did not breathe—yet he felt it. He felt it with every cell, as if a part of himself were trapped there… dreaming him from the other side.
“Daniel?” he whispered, not knowing why he said that name.
The figure did not answer, but the echo did.
A word crossed him like a vibrating thorn: balance.
Darian gasped. He opened his eyes. He was back in the hospital, but the world was not the same. The walls beat faintly. The objects seemed to breathe with a rhythm that did not belong to time.
The woman who said she was his mother was not there; she was. Nada slept, in the same position as the night before, but her brow was furrowed, as if she were dreaming something he, too, was seeing.
“What are you asking of me?” he murmured to the air, not knowing to whom he spoke.
Then, the memory of the letter. Not the text, but the tremor it had left in her.
“If what should never have throbbed begins to do so again…”
Darian leaned back against the headboard. He was not ill. He was not weak, but something inside him had awakened and was not asking permission. He was not Morpheus. Not entirely. But he was not only Darian either.
He was the bridge.
For the first time he understood what had been sown in him: not a destiny, but a heartbeat that had to decide itself.
He brought a hand to his face. His eyes were wet, but not from sadness.
It was vertigo.
He stood on the threshold of something he did not understand, but which recognized him from within.
Then he felt it again: a slight tug, as if someone—far away, on another plane—were dreaming him or needing him.
Daniel.
He couldn’t explain it. He only knew that if he didn’t find a way to hold himself, they would both fall.
Not as punishment. As warning.
Darian looked at Nada.
Then at the window, and understood he could not wait any longer. If that crack opened fully, if the Realm he remembered split… there would be no choice left to make, and he, for the first time, wanted to choose.

Hours later, with discharge papers still warm in the cardboard folder, they crossed the threshold into the apartment together. The door closed with a barely audible click. They hadn’t brought much. Only the medical discharge, a prescription, and a silence that seemed to have settled between them as a third presence.
Nada set her bag on the chair. Darian walked straight to the kitchen, without asking. He took off his jacket, hung it clumsily, and opened the fridge with the resignation of someone who already knows there isn’t much, but wants to try anyway.
“May I…?” she began, voice low.
“Of course. The bathroom’s free,” he replied without looking at her, as if he knew what she was going to ask.
Nada nodded and disappeared down the hall.
Darian was left alone. He put water to boil. He chopped an onion, not very skillfully, but with focus. He moved like someone who had lived alone for a long time, unused to cooking for another. Every movement was an act of reconciliation with routine, as if saying “we are here” were easier with a pan than with words.
He lit the burner. The sound of hot oil was almost a relief. As if something real were finally happening.
Nada returned minutes later. Her expression was serene, but her eyes were still searching for something beyond objects. She sat at the table. She said nothing at first.
She watched him as he cooked. There was something almost beautiful in his functional clumsiness. As if each chopped onion were a way not to disappear.
“Darian…” she began, softly.
He didn’t turn. He just kept stirring whatever it was he was making.
“Mhm.”
“I want to talk about what’s happening.”
Silence.
Only the crackle of the oil. Steam rising as if it, too, avoided looking.
“Do you mean what happened to me at the hospital… or the other thing?” he finally asked, without sarcasm or hardness.
“You. Me. The… tremor I feel when you’re near.”
Darian turned off the heat. He set the wooden spoon down slowly. Then he turned to her.
“I feel it too. I don’t know its name. I don’t know if I want to name it yet. But… it isn’t a lie. That I know.”
Nada took a deep breath.
“And what do we do with something we don’t understand?”
He thought for a moment. Then he served two plates. He set one in front of her, without ceremony.
“We eat it hot, before it gets cold. And then, if we’re still here, we talk about it.”
She laughed—barely.
Not out of mockery.
But out of relief.
“Do you know that’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me today?”
Darian shrugged.
“I’m not good with speeches. But if this is real… if this us can exist in some way… I want to start it here. With what I can do. Cook. Stay. Not run.”
Nada looked at him for a long time.
Not for what he said.
But for how he said it.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s start here.”
They ate in silence.
As if those mouthfuls were somehow sacred.
As if, between the plates and the stillness, the world stopped trembling… for an instant.

The dishes were washed. Steam from the warm water still rose from the sink. Nada dried her hands with a linen towel while the faucet ran, but Darian wasn’t using it. He gripped the edge of the bathroom sink with both hands, his knuckles white with pressure. He had shut himself in without warning after clearing the plates. Nada hadn’t followed. She sensed this battle wasn’t with her.
The mirror before him didn’t reflect his face clearly. It wasn’t steam. It was something else. A tremor in the image, as if the surface resisted returning the same face.
“I am not him,” Darian whispered—more to himself than as any real assertion.
But the phrase had no echo. As if it were not spoken aloud, but absorbed inward.
A stab crossed his chest. Not physical pain. Something deeper. An emotional fissure. An ancient weariness that could not be explained with dreams or stories.
Then he felt it.
A presence.
It didn’t enter the bathroom. It didn’t touch him. It had no face. Only a pressure behind his eyes, a dense damp in his lungs, a formless anguish.
Despair.
There was no sound.
Only a dull murmur, like nails raking at a fabric too thin to hold a soul.
Darian closed his eyes. But that did not stop her.
He didn’t want to break.
Not again.

Eternal Plane · Outside of Time

Night stood in a space without shape or measure, wrapped in shadows that did not cast darkness, but origin.
Time arrived unannounced. Wherever he stepped, seconds bent.
“You knew this would happen,” he said, needing no greeting.
“I sensed it,” Night replied, without looking. “It isn’t the same.”
“Despair has already crossed. Her vibration forced its way into the human plane. He is near the limit.”
“He is being human, as he should be. Only from there can he choose without mirages.”
Time walked in invisible circles, as if trying to measure the imbalance with his feet.
“You cannot protect him forever. Not with shadows, not with love. The echo you gave him… is rending Daniel from within.”
“And what do you propose? Cut it out? Empty him? Take away the little that connects him to what he was?”
“I propose balance,” Time said, hard. “Not nostalgia, and even less indulgence.”
Night looked at last.
“Balance like the one that made him die the first time?”
A dense silence rose between them.
Time lowered his gaze just a little.
“Darian is not Dream, but if he continues to embody Dream’s wound, the cycle will not close. And you know this.”
“I don’t want it to close,” Night replied. “I want it to blossom. Even if it hurts.”
“Despair can smell him, Night. She feels him. If he breaks… if he falls… not only Daniel will fall after him.”
“Then let them not break him,” she whispered. “Let someone choose him. Not as a god. Not as a dream. As a man.”
Time stepped back.
“That does not depend on us.”
“No,” said Night, with millennial sorrow. “It depends on him.”

Human Plane · Back to the Bathroom

Darian turned the tap hard. He splashed water on his face. Once, twice, three times.
Despair hadn’t touched him, but he had felt her. Darian knew she would return if he didn’t soon choose who he was.
He opened the door. Darian stepped out of the bathroom, paler than before.
Nada sat on the sofa. She didn’t look at him with judgment. Only with a calm that suddenly seemed stronger than all the shadows in the universe.
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice trembling.
Nada asked nothing. She only nodded and shifted a little to make room for him at her side.
The lamp cast soft shadows on the walls, barely grazed by the murmur of the night city. There was silence, but not the calm kind: a dense one, as if something still unsaid hovered between them.
Darian simply sat beside her, with that mechanical gesture of one who needs to feel weight in his feet not to dissolve into thought.
Minutes passed without words. They only breathed in a faint synchrony.
Nada turned her face slightly toward him. She looked at him. The sweat on his neck wasn’t from heat. The slight tremor in his fingers wasn’t from fatigue.
“Are you all right?” she asked, without urgency.
Darian nodded, though not fully. He stared ahead. As if he still saw something beyond the wall.
“I was in the bathroom… and I felt someone watching me. Not from outside, but from inside. As if something… something broken were waiting for me on the other side of the mirror.”
Nada didn’t answer right away. She only set a hand on his leg, without pressure, a silent anchor.
“It’s over,” she said at last. “You’re here. With me.”
Darian turned to her. His eyes were reddened. Not from weeping, but from wear.
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” he murmured. “I feel that if I fall asleep again… I’ll open a door I won’t be able to close.”
She slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder.
“Then don’t sleep alone,” she whispered. “Not this time.”
They lay down together, with no words agreed upon. Only with a need older than both of them.
Nada settled onto his chest, feeling his heartbeat—fast, but real. Darian let an arm fall across her back, like someone holding what he doesn’t want to lose again.
She felt him tense for a moment. He was murmuring something, almost inaudible. They weren’t names. They were fragments. Echoes. As if his body were trying to explain what his mind still couldn’t translate.
“Darian,” she whispered, raising her face to see him.
He opened his eyes abruptly. There was sweat on his brow. His breath was uneven.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Did I wake you?”
“You weren’t asleep,” she said. “You were… crossing something.”
He stayed silent. Then he admitted it:
“I was dreaming of you.”
Nada looked at him without judgment. Only with a tenderness born of a certainty beyond time.
“You don’t need to dream me… if you can love me awake.”
Then the gesture happened.
She drew near, unhurried. Rested her forehead against his. Felt his breath, ragged but alive. Their lips sought each other. Found each other.
It was a kiss without fractures. Without visions. Without cosmic rupture.
It was human.
It was present.
It was choice.
In that choice—quiet, warm, sustained by night and imperfection—they knew something had been restored.
Not because the past had been corrected, but because, for the first time, it didn’t matter.
What was coming would no longer be a repetition.
It would be another story.
Perhaps incomplete.
But chosen.

Chapter 13: The Charge

Nada watched him in silence.
Darian slept deeply, his face finally at peace after the turbulence of the previous days. There were still traces of weariness between his brows, but his breathing was serene. Over his chest, his hand rested open, as if offering something he himself didn’t know he carried.
Nada did not sleep.
She only looked at him, with that mix of tenderness and vertigo one feels upon waking in a new world that has yet to dare to name itself.
There were no words.
But there was love.
And that was enough.

(In the Library of the Dreaming)

The library’s half-light had not changed. Not because time had not passed, but because there, time had no power.
Lucienne set the book on the table, fingers trembling slightly. Not from fear, but from certainty. That volume—the one Dream had entrusted to her before disappearing—had just vibrated. A sealed order. A fragment of will that was only to be activated if “the residue of a decision” began to dream on its own.
She allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment. She remembered not the delivery of the protocol, but the silence with which he did it. Not out of foresight, nor hope, but because Morpheus intuited, at the edge of the end, that not everything is extinguished when an Endless dies: the fragments of unspoken love, the poorly closed renunciations, what one never allowed oneself to name… persists. He did not expect blossoming. He did not believe he deserved it, but just in case, he left a rope tied to the shore. “In case something in me doesn’t know how to die.”
Then Lucienne understood. Morpheus left it out of guilt. It was a guilt encapsulated.
The dream does not die with the one who dreams it… but with the one who decides to forget it.
In case something of him—not his realm, not his title, not his duty—something broken, incomplete… decided to dream with a life of its own, then Lucienne was to intervene.
Not to guide.
Not to stop.
But to remind what remained of what it had not yet forgotten.
She opened her eyes.
The light of the Orb flickered, as if the echo of that residue were reaching beyond its body.
Matthew, perched on the back of the armchair, tilted his head.
“What is it, Lucienne?”
She looked at him over her glasses.
“It’s the inverse resonance protocol…” she answered without turning. “I never thought it would activate. I never thought there would be a Darian.”
Matthew fluttered, uneasy.
“What did that protocol say?”
Lucienne touched the edge of the book as if it were a reliquary.
“That if ever what was left of him dreamed again… and if that dream touched more than memories…”
Then I was to remind it.
Not him.
But what remains.
Remind it that it is not condemned to repeat itself.”
Just then, Nuala entered the room, solemn.
“Does that mean we need to act?”
Lucienne gave a slight nod.
“Yes, but not to protect the Dreaming.”
“Then for what?” Nuala asked in a low voice.
Lucienne drew a deep breath and replied without ambiguity:
“To protect him… from himself.”

They walked downward. Lucienne led the way, without torch or lantern.
In the Dreaming, the light is not switched on: it happens. The corridor narrowed as if the place wished to dissuade them. The walls lost maps and shelves; they became smooth, with no visible memory. Here the historical is not stored: it is invoked.
Behind her, Nuala kept silent, but not indifferent.
This was not an ordinary archive.
“How long has it been since you came here?” Nuala whispered, lowering her voice without meaning to, as if the air demanded respect.
“Since he sealed the chamber,” Lucienne replied without stopping. “Only the protocol could open it. Not by key… but by vibration.”
“And Darian… activated it?”
“No. He dreamed it.”

When they reached the last stretch, Lucienne extended her hand. She did not touch the door. She merely stopped before it.
The wall bore no visible inscriptions, but something in the stone seemed… to breathe.
The volume that had vibrated hours earlier—the one Dream left her “in case something in him didn’t know how to die”—still hung from her forearm. It was beating.
Lucienne closed her eyes.
“Will you do it now?” Nuala asked.
She nodded.
In a barely audible voice, she murmured a phrase in a language that belonged neither to the Endless nor to humans.
A language of transition.
A language of bridges.
The same one Morpheus used when he sealed this place, not as King… but as a man who feared the echo of his own tenderness.
The stone answered with a muffled crack. It did not open. It yielded.
The air that flowed inward did not smell of confinement. It smelled of threshold.
The room was not large, nor was it sacred.
It was a space of recollection. Of warning.
There were no columns, no stained glass, no thrones.
Only a table of black stone in the center.
And upon it, three sealed objects:
— A parchment folded so many times it seemed to enclose a secret in a spiral.
— A white wooden box, with no visible lock, but surrounded by fine golden threads, floating in vibration.
— An opaque mirror, covered by a gray veil, which did not reflect… but remembered.

Lucienne approached. She did not touch, not yet. She only spoke.
“This is the archive he called Fractured Essence,” she explained. “It was only to be opened if what he left behind… began to bloom without structure.”
Nuala frowned.
“To bloom… or to overflow?”
Lucienne did not waver.
“For this, there is no difference,” her fingers barely brushed the parchment’s edge. “Because what Dream left… was not a copy.
It was not a child.
It was not an heir.
It was a decision without denouement.
An echo that did not want to die, but did not know how to live either.”
“And Darian?”
Lucienne raised her gaze and held it.
Emotion did not tremble; her voice did.
“Darian… is the question he never dared to write.
The one that now… is seeking its answer.”

The white wooden box quivered slightly. As if, upon hearing its name, something inside had remembered it had not yet been fully loved.
Lucienne drew a deep breath.
“We won’t open this yet,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “Not until he is ready. Until he can bear what it contains. Otherwise, it will break it—or break him.”
“And if he never is?” Nuala asked, with no drama beyond the truth.
Lucienne looked at her with the tenderness only centuries allow.
“Then the Realm of Dream will have to decide…
Whether to hold him…
Or fall with him.”

(In a dream, after the funeral)

Night brought an unbidden dream.
Johanna Constantine walked across an island scoured by wind and salt. A path led her to a timeless graveyard. She read a headstone bearing her surname—genealogical irony drew no smile. Beyond, a vacant shrine where once lay a head that sang.
The stone sweated moonlight, and in that light he appeared.
He did not wear absolutes; he wore grays, like one who shuns certainty. He stood in the Chamber of the Broken Moon, but Johanna entered anyway, because Constantines always enter.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” she said, dry.
“Certainly, but not completely,” Dream answered.
Johanna regarded him in silence, weighing him.
“Oh, I see… So is this a trick of my subconscious, or are you here to haunt me even after you’re dead?”
“I’ve come to give you something,” he indicated the box, “Inside is a fragment that must not be opened… unless a certain essence germinates where no one was ever meant to dream.”
“Even dead, you keep your bloody riddles,” Johanna grumbled. “What’s inside?”

On a cracked table: the white box. Alive. Bound by golden threads.
“Inside there is not an object,” he said. “There is a conditional yes. A trust for a single case: if a fragment of me learns to forgive itself and the world does not collapse in the attempt.”
“I adore your suicidal riddles,” Johanna shot back. “What do I do with this?”
“Guard it. Do not open it, nor investigate it—only keep it until a man who is not me begins to remember me without having been me.”
“Why me?” she asked, intrigued.
“I could leave this in no hands but those of someone who knows that good does not always look like good… and that duty, at times, is an inherited curse.”
“That sounds like poetic nonsense. Are you saying you’re going to… be reborn?”
“No. I’m saying that perhaps, for once, I might outlive myself without repeating myself, and that if that someone manages to forgive himself… I might, finally, change.”
She came closer without taking her eyes off him. She looked at him without sarcasm for the first time.
“Redemption, then?”
“Freedom.”
The light in the chamber grew colder.
She took the box.
“And if there is no redemption? If all this is merely your ego dressed up as destiny?”
“If it fails, then the fragment will remain closed. No one will ever know what I was not capable of doing.”
“And if someone finds it first? The Kindly Ones, the Endless… or the Maker?”
“None of them trust you enough to look for you.”
A crooked smile curled her lips.

“Is that a compliment?”
She paused before leaving. She stopped at the door of the dream.
“Are you really going to allow yourself to cease to exist?”
Dream looked at her as if time were a stranger.
“I already did, because it was necessary in order to go on existing.”
Johanna blinked, and he was gone. The box remained in her hands. The murmur of the waves faded and the island vanished. She woke in London with the box in her coat and an oath she did not intend to break. Not without a triple sign: the Orb gone dull, the box trembling, and a human speaking his name as if trembling inside.
That night, somewhere in the Dreaming, something began to vibrate.

(In the present)

The university library was nearly empty. It was late.
Too late for undergrads, too early for insomniacs. But for Darian… it was just the hour.
He had spent the day leaping from dream to dream, from premonition to symbol, from conversation to silence. Nothing he remembered—or thought he remembered—seemed enough. So he decided to return to what had always been his refuge, or so he believed it had been: research.
His hands moved over volumes of symbolic anthropology, archetypal philosophy, transpersonal psychology. He searched for words like “vibrational residue,” “incarnate archetype,” “metaphysical echo.” Almost all of it was speculation. Hypothesis. Theory. Nothing that named him.
An article in comparative mythology spoke of entities that do not die, but fragment when loved. Another, in a forgotten issue of a cultural studies journal, used the term “surviving dream” to refer to collective thoughts that incarnate without intention.
None of it helped.
None of it spoke of him.
He closed the last book with a sigh. Rested his arms on the table.
The lamp trembled slightly, though there was no wind.
Then Time appeared.
He did not emerge from the shadows. He did not enter through a door. He was simply there, as if he had always been watching.
He dressed differently from the last time, but his eyes…
They were the same eyes that had looked at him in the hospital bed.
“You won’t find it there,” Time said softly. “What you seek… is not written in the records of history—human history, at least…” He was already at his side. Same coat, same calm, same lack of hurry.
“You,” Darian said, not feigning calm. “I saw you. In the hospital. You weren’t on the medical staff.”
“No,” Time replied, unmoving. “I’m not on the staff of this plane either. But I pass through… when I must.”
Darian frowned.
“Who are you?”
Time looked at him as if the question were familiar, but irrelevant.
“I am the one who was there when you were born, and when you chose to return without knowing it.”
“So you know what I am?”
“Not entirely,” Time admitted. “Because not even you know yet. But I’ll grant that I know enough.”
Silence became dense.
“You have begun to affect the balance,” Time continued. “Not only in the Realm of Dream, but here, in waking. Because what you are… cannot remain contained.
You were formed from the emotional residue of an Endless, and archetypal emotions do not dissolve; they persist. They incarnate. They infect.”
Darian swallowed.
“Are you saying that… I’m infecting reality?”
“Not by will—don’t feel guilty—but by existence. You are an echo that beats too strongly, and in beating… you are making what has already been want to be again.”
Time drew closer, without touching the floor, yet leaving an invisible footprint.
“I lied to you,” he said abruptly. “When you were him. When you asked if there was an end.”
“And why did you?”
“Because you needed it—because you would not have crossed if you had known the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That the Endless have no end. Not even when they choose to die. Their identity transcends their decisions. Because the ideas they embody… do not vanish by will. They only mutate.”
Darian lowered his gaze. Then… the vision overtook him.
A room of stone.
Endless shelves.
A long, dusty table.
Dream—pale, more human than ever—bent over a page.
He did not write in haste. Nor with solemnity.
With guilt.
Like one who leaves a key in case of fire.
Like one who does not want someone to return… but cannot bear for everything to go dark.
Darian felt a tug in his chest.
He returned to the present.
“Why are you telling me all this?” he asked. “If last time… you did nothing, and you—left—me—to die.”
Time did not answer at once. He only looked at him. In that gaze… were all the answers no book could teach him.
“Because you choose to remember,” he said at last, “and remembering has a price.”
He took a step; his shadow did not move.
“You are only the necessary condition, not the sufficient one. You will decide where to stand. Each indecision breaks. Daniel. You. Her. The body will pay if the mind does not choose.”
Then, without another word, he disappeared. Like a second that never happened.

Darian was left alone in the library, but the silence was no longer academic. It was personal.
It was as if the air itself held words that did not dare be spoken.
He stood. Walked toward a section closed off with old catalog slats. They were not sealed, but no one had consulted them in decades.
Upon arriving, an unnumbered folder stopped him. It had no code. It was not registered.
It bore only one word: “Fragment.”
Darian touched it, and then he felt it.
Not a vision, nor a memory, but an internal, vibrational destruction, as if something inside him—not outside him—were breaking in the attempt to name itself, and tried to align with something outside… and, finding no way, could not.

Elsewhere. On another plane.
A brother felt it.
The castle stopped floating and began to show its fissures. Wherever Destruction walked, nothing fell, but everything revealed its true state.
Lucienne had not moved from the threshold. Hands clasped. Lips sealed. Only her eyes, behind opaque lenses, moved with the precision of one writing, with her gaze, a report no one had requested.
Delirium had tried to approach. She did once. She crouched at his side and whispered, “I’ll give you a fish that sings if you cry,” but Daniel did not cry, nor did he move. So she stayed on the floor, head resting on the throne’s steps, singing very softly songs with no language.
The Orb had stopped emitting light. It was not extinguished. It was deaf. Blind. On pause.
Then, the castle walls stilled. The tapestries ceased to billow. The doors… did not open. They yielded.
It was a vibration first. Then a faint crack in the air, and through that soundless fracture, Destruction crossed.
He was not dressed for war. He wore an orange scarf and a sketchbook under his arm. Wherever he walked, the bricks did not shatter, but revealed their true state: some, cracked for millennia. Others, held together by will alone. Nothing collapsed… but everything was shown.
Lucienne saw him before anyone. She straightened slightly.
“I did not know you would come.”
Destruction looked at her with tenderness. Not the tenderness of those who forgive, but of those who understand all too well the price of existing.
“I do not come for him,” he said. “I come for what I recognize.”
He approached the throne. Daniel did not move, but his body, sensing him, vibrated. Not outward, but inward. As if something within remembered.
Destruction knelt. Not in reverence. In respect.
“You are not dying,” he said. “You are multiplying, and that is more dangerous than disappearing.”
Delirium’s eyes widened as if she had understood a word she did not know.
Lucienne took a step forward.
“Can you help him?”
Destruction shook his head.
“Only if he asks. But what I am… is already happening. Because what he left behind… no longer wants to be the past.”
He set a hand upon the floor. Not like one who destroys, but like one who invokes the inevitable. A subtle crack crossed the hall. The Orb flickered once.
Daniel, unmoving until then, breathed differently. He exhaled as if a weight had shifted half a centimeter.
Lucienne did not smile, but neither did she alarm. She knew what that meant.
Somewhere in the waking world, Darian had just chosen something without knowing it, and that choice had begun to be written in stone, not sand, and the realm heard it.

(In the Waking)

Nada turned slightly on the sofa. She did not sleep, but the body yielded. In the kitchen, the kettle stopped singing. In the bedroom, Darian murmured something she did not catch.
From the ledge, a white flower opened a petal out of season.
It was no miracle.
It was a sign.
What was coming would not repeat itself.
It would be remembered differently.
For the first time, loving would not be enough: one would have to choose… and pay.

Chapter 14: Fragments That Persist

The park was nearly empty. Nada had not yet come out of the therapist’s office. Darian waited on the bench, elbows on his knees, eyes fixed on branches that seemed to move to the rhythm of another breathing.
Someone sat across from him.
Big, reddish beard, the calm of one who has accepted the end of many things and still loves the beginning of all.
“Psychoanalysis?” Destruction smiled, with genuine warmth. “I never thought you’d like it. Although, now that I think of it, there was always melancholy in you.”
Darian did not start.
“Destruction.”
The Endless raised an eyebrow, amused.
“Well now.”
“I don’t remember you,” Darian clarified. “I feel you, which is worse.”
The smile turned sadder.
“What dies for love doesn’t die clean. It always leaves a crack, and you breathe on that edge. Every choice you make tugs at two planes.”
“And if I don’t choose?”
“You fall through both.”
Darian searched his backpack. A worn envelope.
“I didn’t open it for you, but perhaps it’s your wound too. Or your redemption.”
Destruction read in silence. When he finished, he folded the letter with a wordless reverence.
“He didn’t write this to save himself,” he said at last, “but to give you what he didn’t grant himself: permission.”
He stood with the letter between his fingers, as if it burned.
“If you get lost, say my name—not to destroy you, but to remind you that every ruin is a beginning.”
He left. For an instant, a trace of ash remained on Darian’s left palm. When he stood, he noticed his shadow took a second longer to follow him. It wasn’t fatigue. It was a lag.

Nada was looking for him.
She had left the office with a disquiet she could not name. It wasn’t anguish, nor fear. It was as if someone had left a window open between planes, and through it shadows slipped in with the perfume of an echo.
“Darian…” she murmured, dialing his number once more.
Nothing.
The city dissolved into lights that were no longer streetlamps, but eyes. She walked faster than her feigned calm, as if her body knew what her mind had not yet accepted: that he was not well. Then the phone vibrated.
Not like before. Not with a human sound, but with an older chime. As if someone from the undercroft of myths had called her.
She looked at the screen.
Only a symbol.
An inverted spiral with three talons.
Before she could decide whether to answer, everything stopped.
Not time, but the world.
The street blurred.
Cars ceased to move.
The air thickened as if remembering a debt.
There, on the empty sidewalk, they appeared.
Three figures.
Not the same.
Not human.
Not entirely existent.
They wore impossible shades: bone gray, dry red, ancient mourning. One had wings made of folded knives. Another, eyes blindfolded with human hair. The third held a balance… but in each pan there was fire.
The Kindly Ones.
They spoke, but not with voice.
They spoke with wind.
With pulse.
With memory.
A choral voice:
“You love him.
And that is no crime.
But what he is…
…broke an oath no one remembers having sworn.”
Nada took a step back.
She retreated not from fear, but because her body understood before her soul.
“Who are you?”
One of them advanced. She did not walk; she slid, like a sentence:
“We were summoned by what burns without permission.
By what dreams with a name…
…but was born without one.”
Nada pressed the phone to her chest. The symbol still pulsed.
“Don’t hurt him,” she said. It was not a plea, but a command.
The one with the blindfolded eyes laughed. Not with joy, but with pity:
“He has already been hurt. By existing.
By carrying an echo without containment.
By being…
…the unanswered question.”
Nada stood firm:
“He didn’t ask to be born.”
The third, the one with fire:
“Nor did he ask to die.
And yet…
…that was his legacy.”
Silence.
The three drew closer. They did not touch her, but the air around her hurt.
Chorus:
“He bears a fragment of a god who did not know how to love.”

One of them whispered directly into her ear:
“Sometimes love only postpones the inevitable.”
Nada swallowed. She did not answer, nor did she step back.
Then the phone vibrated again. This time, a name. “Darian.”
When she raised her gaze…
the Kindly Ones were gone.
Only the smoke of their warning remained.

The apartment was in half-light. Nada had come back alone. She did not know how much time had passed since she’d left the office to meet Darian, unsuccessfully. She did not know whether he would return soon, or where he was. She had tried to call him. No signal.
She opened the door slowly, as if the echo of her own uncertainty might shatter on contact with the lock.
But she was not alone.
Someone was seated on the sofa. A woman. Not young, not old. With the kind of presence that does not ask permission to be, yet does not threaten. She was simply dressed, though her gestures were ancient. She held a closed book on her lap, but was not reading it.
Nada did not scream. She did not ask in anger. She merely stopped in the doorway, as if the air itself had held her.
“Who are you?” she asked, without advancing.
The woman raised her gaze. Her eyes were like ink that has known tears. Serene. Tired. Wise.
“I am no threat,” she said softly. “I was invited by the house—by its vibration. He left the door ajar.”
“Darian?”
The woman nodded.
“Though he wasn’t always called that. Though the name doesn’t matter, when what hurts has no vowels.”
Nada did not relax, but something in her chest recognized the voice before understanding it.
“Did you know him?”
“I loved him.”
The phrase fell like a heavy feather.
“Not in this form,” she added. “Not in this cycle. But yes. I was the muse of who he was before. Not the best-known. Not the most docile. But I was… the one who showed him that love could also be written. I am Calliope.”
Nada approached carefully.
Silence.
On the balcony, Darian stood motionless. He had returned minutes earlier, noiselessly, the letter still in his pocket. Hearing voices, he did not enter. He remained there, fixed in the threshold between waking and revelation. Listening.
Nada took one step closer to the sofa.
“Why are you here?”
“Because when pain blossoms again, muses do not only inspire. They also uphold. And you… are holding something you cannot even name yet.”
“Him?”
“You. You are holding your own ability to love someone who does not yet know whether he can be loved.”
Nada lowered her eyes. She did not want to cry.
“I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I don’t know if I’m helping him. Sometimes he seems more lost when he’s with me. As if… as if I reminded him of something he struggles to bear.”
“And it’s true,” Calliope said, without softening the statement. “But not because you hurt him. Because you mirror him.”
“Can a reflection hurt as well?”
“The reflection is the first thing that hurts, when one begins to be real.”
Calliope placed a hand on the closed book; she didn’t open it—there was no need.
“He was the guardian of stories. Of dreams, and yet he never knew how to tell himself.”
“And now?”
“Now he has a chance. Small. Fragile, but no less real. Because you do not ask him to remember—only to decide whether he wants to stay.”
Nada looked at her, with a tremor barely contained.
“Why me?”
“Because you did not come to save him. You came to love him. True love… is not redemption, it is choice. One that does not force. One that does not demand. One that only… remains.”
On the balcony, Darian squeezed his eyes shut—not from pain, but from recognition. Those words were ancient. Or they were ancient in him.
“Do you miss him?” Nada asked, in a low voice.
“We all miss him,” said Calliope. “But few knew him. Even among those who feared him.”
“And Darian? Is he him?”
Calliope shook her head, tenderly.
“He is not Morpheus, but he carries his pulse. What remained. What wanted to die… and could not entirely. That is why it hurts—because it still beats.”
Nada fell silent.
Calliope stood.
“I didn’t come to give you answers. Only to remind you that what you’re doing is not invisible. That even muses know how to recognize when love does not give up.”
The balcony door closed with a soft click.
Nada turned, but there was no one there.
Only the breeze.

Darian went down the service stairs like someone following the echo of a dream that may or may not belong to him. He didn’t turn on the lights—he didn’t need them.
He knew she had sensed him. When he stepped through the building’s door, he found her waiting.
Calliope stood with her back to him, looking at a jacaranda on the sidewalk. The breeze barely moved her dress, as if she too were a fragment reality was still trying to hold.
“Since when did you know I was following you?” he asked, not coming too close.
Calliope smiled without turning yet.
“Before you knew it yourself.”
Then she turned, with a serenity that did not conceal her weariness, nor her light.
“Were you the mother of his child?” Darian said—direct, raw, no detours. “He spoke of one…”
She did not start.
“Yes. I was part of the only act in his story that required no ending. I was his choice. His mistake. His mirror.”
Darian lowered his gaze, swallowing a question he did not know how to frame.
“Do you know why… he allowed himself to die?”
The silence between them became denser than the night.
Calliope held him with her eyes.
“Because he found no way to go on being… without going on carrying. Because he chose to die rather than deform. Because he believed sacrifice could be an end… and did not understand that, sometimes, what one leaves behind… decides to stay.”
Darian closed his eyes. He felt a knot in his stomach—not physical. Ancient.
“Then… I shouldn’t exist?”
“No,” Calliope said, stepping toward him. “You were not planned. Not as destiny. You were what bloomed from a crack. What survived the renunciation. You are what he did not want to save… but could not entirely destroy.”
Darian didn’t know whether to weep or shout. He chose what he could hold.
He took the folded paper from his pocket.
The letter.
“I think this was for you. Or for the memory of you.”
He held it out with a trembling hand.
Calliope took it, with the care of one who picks up something still bleeding.
“Thank you,” she said, but did not open it. “Not yet.”
“Why?”
She looked at him.
“Because if I read it now, I will read from the wound—and I want to read from the choice.”
Darian nodded. It was the exact answer he hadn’t known he needed to hear.
“What should I do?”
Calliope looked at him with a mix of tenderness and compassion.
“You are not here to repeat him, much less to redeem him. Only to decide whether what you were is stronger than what you could be. If you cannot yet… that’s all right. Love is also built from the fracture.”
Calliope stepped back and then, before leaving, told him one more thing—without detours or adornment:
“You are the testament of a god who chose to be human without knowing how. Do not turn that ignorance into another punishment.”
Then she walked away, unhurried.
Darian remained beneath the jacaranda, unsure whether the tremor in his hands was from the cold… or from what he was beginning to remember.

The apartment was in half-light. The exterior lights drew soft lines through the barely parted curtains. Nada slept on the sofa, wrapped in a light blanket. Darian closed the door carefully behind him, leaving the city—and the voices that were not his—on the other side.
He stopped a moment just to look at her. Her chest rose and fell slowly. A strand of hair crossed her face. She was herself, but not only that. She was his anchor, his mirror, his choice. This time he would not come to her from guilt or from doubt.
He set the keys on the table, took off his jacket. He did not turn on the lights.
He came closer, slowly.
Nada opened her eyes—not in surprise, but as if she already knew he would return.
“You came back,” she whispered.
“I don’t know if I ever fully left,” he said, with a half-smile—but his voice had something else: root.
She sat up. She drew near. She did not interrogate him. She did not measure him. She simply extended a hand, and he took it. Thus, in silence, they walked together to the bedroom. Neither carried fear. What they had been no longer interfered. Only what they were now. When they shed everything, it was not in surrender—but in choice.
Nada’s body received him without urgency, like a memory that finally knew how to stay. Darian’s body held her like one holds fertile earth: not to possess it, but to sow in it a life that has no name yet.
During that suspended instant, something in Darian activated. Not a memory. Not an image—but a certainty.

The Orb pulsed with a frequency of inverse resonance. Daniel opened his eyes. Lucienne held her breath.
“Signal one,” the librarian whispered, not knowing why she called it that. “Opacity without cause. Silence of the throne.”
Daniel, standing, felt a beautiful pain.
“I was chosen by what he left,
not by what he chose.”
“And signal two,” Lucienne added, approaching the Orb. “The human who dreams and is dreamed.”
Daniel did not answer. For the first time, he held a tear that did not fall.
“Double testimony is missing,” Lucienne said very softly. “Muse and Mother.”
The hall lights trembled, as if someone—elsewhere, by another name—had just decided to stay.
In the black chamber, the white box vibrated once. The gold filigree sang like the thinnest string. Lucienne lowered her hand without touching it.
“Not yet,” she said to the nothing. “Only when there is Muse, Mother, and Custody.”
The echo—of someone who once signed in stardust—seemed to assent from very far away.
Back in his body, Darian exhaled deeply against Nada’s neck. She said nothing, but her embrace tightened. As if she knew.
“Why did you let me in?” he murmured.
Nada turned her face just a little, without letting him go.
“Because I finally felt that you had too.”
Their hands intertwined. Without knowing it, at that exact moment, something kindled inside her. Heartbeat in sync. Outside, the city. Inside, possibility—and upstairs, the clock began to move again.
Elsewhere—far from where the box had thrummed—a needle shivered, and someone smiled to notice it. Desire, reclining among mirrors that reflect not faces but longings, raised a finger. A crimson thread stretched toward two pulses: the one who had learned to refuse himself… and the one who still does not know how to name himself. Desire had scented a crack.
“It smells like future,” they said, almost amused, “and like disobedience.”
They let a soft laugh fall upon the thread. The tremor’s rhythm shifted—barely.
“Don’t rush, little sister,” they whispered toward some nameless shadow. “It isn’t time to break yet. First, let’s see what they desire when no one is watching.”
The thread quivered once more; far off, in the waking world, something chose to remain.
Black.

Chapter 15: Between Memory and Desire

The city dawned with a deceptive calm. Nada’s apartment still held the smell of the coffee they had drunk a few hours earlier. She had come home late from her shift and fallen asleep on the sofa, shoes still on, her head resting on Darian’s shoulder. He didn’t move; he preferred to stay still, listening to her breathing, as if each exhalation returned to him a certainty he found nowhere else.
When they woke together, already late in the afternoon, they shared a belated breakfast that felt like dinner. They spoke little: about the grocery list, about a patient who had moved Nada, about an academic article Darian still couldn’t finish. It was a banal conversation, but in that everyday friction there was a kind of truth Darian had never known.
He watched her move about the kitchen, clearing plates, and thought there was something eternal in the way she gathered what was left over. As if each of her gestures remembered a time outside time. “Nothing more human than this,” he told himself. And in that humanity he found a refuge.
Night had spread over the city like a warm mantle. From the window, Nada watched the scattered lights in the distance while Darian lay down beside her. There were no urgent words between them: only the matched breathing, the slow habit of two who are beginning to recognize themselves in the everyday.
He reached out and grazed Nada’s hair, with a gesture that felt new and yet laden with memories that didn’t entirely belong to him. He closed his eyes. On the edge of the half-light he saw an echo: infinite towers of glass, the sound of a raven cawing over an empty throne. He shook his head, as if those images were foreign to his life. But they did not dissipate.
—You’re far away again —she said softly.
—No… —he lied, though his fingers trembled on her skin—. Just tired.
Nada leaned in and kissed his forehead, as if she knew not to press. In her silence, Darian felt a relief that was also fear: what would happen if she discovered all that he remembered without remembering?
That night, between the sheets, intimacy became a wordless language. Their bodies sought each other with the urgency of those who know they have no certainties beyond the instant. Darian caressed her as if fearing to break something irreplaceable; Nada, instead, held him firmly, forcing him to look into her eyes while he let himself be swept along by a current as human as it was dangerous.
In the middle of the act, she stopped him for a second, breathing hard, and whispered:
—Sometimes I feel… that it isn’t me you desire, but desire itself.

Darian’s heart shuddered. That phrase rang out like an echo from another time: Nada’s cry in hell, accusing him of having condemned her because he confused his love with pride and desire. Memory ignited like a blow of fire.
Flashes of Hell
Fire and stone.
Nada, kneeling and chained, her gaze fixed on him.
Her broken, furious voice:
—You didn’t love me! It was never love! It was only desire, pride, your damned need to possess what you could not sustain!
The Morpheus he had been, rigid on his throne of words, did not answer. He only let the sentence fall like an infinite cold.
The echo returned now, in Darian’s flesh, with the force of a memory he had not wanted to open.
He turned his face away, choked by the coincidence. She noticed.
—What is it that scares you so much? —she asked, stroking his cheek.
Darian wanted to answer, but could only stammer:
—It’s as if you had told me that before.
Nada looked at him steadily, and a chill ran down her back. She didn’t know how to explain it, but she knew there was someone else in that invisible room: a shadow that fed on what united them.
Toward dawn, when Nada was sleeping, Darian got up and went to the kitchen for water. But when he turned on the light, he found someone already sitting at the table. A perfect silhouette, ambiguous, smiling with lips that were too red.
Desire.
—Who are you? How did you get in? —he asked, startled.
—So typical of you. —they replied, coming closer, brushed their face lightly against Darian’s. He wanted to pull away, but something held him in place.— You know exactly who I am, and who you are… or were —they answered while circling him, observing. Darian did not turn. He stayed facing forward.
—What would you do if she knew who you really were? —they asked with feigned innocence, spinning an empty glass between their fingers.
—I don’t know, because I don’t know who I was. I only know who I am now. —Darian replied, tense, not entirely surprised to see them there.
—Oh, but you do know… —Desire tilted their head—. Because your memories are already seeping through, like cracks. Do you remember how you treated those you loved when you weren’t human? Do you remember the queen you cast into hell?
The image of Nada asleep crossed with that of another time: a courtyard of fire, a scream, sulfur chains. Pain tore through him as if it were the present.
—Enough —he whispered, squeezing the glass in his hand—. She is not that story. And I am not him either.
Desire smiled, pleased, like one who makes a wound bleed with the slightest touch.
—You say that now, but what will happen when you fully wake? She doesn’t love Darian: she loves the dream of being loved by you.
When he blinked, the kitchen was empty. The glass fell and shattered on the floor.
Returning to the bedroom, Nada had sat up, half asleep.
—What happened? —she asked, noticing the tension in his face.
He sat beside her and, for the first time, let the words escape:
—I feel as if I carried many lives inside me. As if I had loved and lost more times than I could count. I don’t want to repeat that with you. Because I am not what I remember.
Nada held him without asking for explanations. She held him with the strength of one who understands that true love does not always demand answers, but presence. Darian’s heart beat with a mix of fear and certainty: that embrace anchored him more than any realm, more than any throne.
But as he closed his eyes beside her, he saw again the echo of the empty throne, waiting. Desire’s voice, resounding like a sweet poison:
—Love never slips from my family’s hands. Remember that.
The next day dawned with a strange silence. Nada made coffee while Darian, seated at the table, flipped through a notebook where he tried to order his thoughts. Among the scrawled lines appeared words he didn’t remember writing: Lucienne, Nuala, Raven. He snapped the notebook shut, frightened by himself.
Nada watched him out of the corner of her eye, with that mix of tenderness and suspicion reserved for those we love too much. She came over, set the cup in front of him, and touched his hand.
—You don’t have to tell me anything you’re not ready to —she said softly—. But don’t push me away.
Darian looked at her for a long time, feeling she was the only bridge between his present and a past that seeped through him like sand between his fingers. He leaned in and kissed her, this time with the resolve of one who chooses life, even knowing memory still waits in the shadows.

From somewhere neither of them could see, Desire smiled, satisfied, because even in that kiss they had sown doubt.
When Darian was alone that afternoon, leafing through books without focus, the reflection in the window glass changed: it was not his face looking back at him, but Desire’s.
—Do you see it? —the image whispered, with lips that didn’t move and yet spoke—. She fears that you love desire more than her, and she’s not wrong.
Darian squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, only his own reflection remained, but the poison had already taken hold: a persistent rumor that perhaps, just perhaps, Desire was not lying.

A couple of days later.
Darian walked through the faculty corridors. Academic routine kept him upright, but his mind remained trapped between flashes of memories and Nada’s warm nearness. The sound of student voices lulled him until, at a corridor crossing, he saw her.
A woman in a dark trench coat, jaded expression, a cigarette between her fingers, walking with the assured step of someone to whom the campus belonged. Darian stopped short: the name surfaced in his mind without being spoken. Constantine.
The air around him grew heavy, as if someone had opened a book sealed for too long. Fragments of memory struck him: a woman’s voice bargaining with demons, the smell of stale magic, the night she had spoken his name—the name of Morpheus—with a mixture of respect and annoyance.
Darian followed her a few steps, unable to stop himself.
—Excuse me… —he said, in a tone shakier than he expected—. Do we know each other?
Johanna Constantine turned with the natural look of one who expects a trivial question, but seeing him her face hardened. She ran her eyes up and down him, like someone stumbling upon a ghost.
—Are you a professor here? Or a student? —he asked, unsure, noting how ridiculous his own question sounded. Again his eyes widened in a start he tried to hide at once. She scrutinized him with the same look of one who has run into someone she must not recognize.
—You…? —she murmured, her voice rough—. It can’t be.
—Who are you? —Darian pressed, feeling the words slip from him as if dictated by someone else—. Because I feel I’ve seen you already, in another place… in another life.
Johanna stared at him, putting out the cigarette on her sole.
—Bloody hell —she whispered— You look too much like him.
—Like who? —Darian asked, almost pleading.
She hesitated.
—I… no. I’m looking for someone —she answered quickly, too quickly. She needed to evade him at any cost.
Her eyes studied him as if seeking to confirm the impossible. Finally, she stepped back, like someone who doesn’t want to be trapped in another’s destiny.
Darian frowned.
—Who? Maybe I can help.
—No, thanks —she shot back, curt, and turned down another corridor.
Darian followed, driven by something stronger than curiosity.
—Hey, wait. Who are you? Do you know me? That’s why you’re avoiding me, isn’t it? —he asked, trying to stop her, unsuccessfully.
—It’s not possible… not at this level… —she exclaimed, quickening her pace, muttering under her breath.
The chase took them to an empty side corridor. Johanna sighed and finally stopped, realizing she couldn’t simply evade him. The boy was, after all, an essence of him, and the persistence Dream had shown was not something one could dodge so easily.
—You shouldn’t be asking me that, kid. And I shouldn’t answer.
Darian stepped toward her, heart pounding like a drum. When Johanna turned to face him, her eyes were full of pent-up rage and fear.
—Listen, kid. Do yourself a favor: forget you saw me.
—Why? —Darian insisted, feeling his chest burn with questions he couldn’t form—. Do you know me from before?
Johanna didn’t answer. Her gaze trembled like that of someone seeing someone far too familiar, impossible to resist.
Then a shadow slid from the end of the corridor. A tall man, impeccable in his stride, with a cutting smile and the air of a satisfied predator. The Corinthian.
Darian stepped back, heart hammering against his ribs. At once, unwillingly, memory assailed him:
The outstretched hand.
A knife plunging.
The searing pain in his palm.
The Corinthian’s cold laughter, his dark glasses gleaming in the dimness.
The memory made him instinctively bring his hand to the center of his palm, as if the wound that didn’t exist still burned.
Johanna tensed, placing herself between Darian and the newcomer, though she knew how useless the gesture was. The Corinthian smiled calmly.
Johanna glanced at him, taut.
—Not now —she warned under her breath.
The Corinthian, however, stopped when he saw Darian. For an instant, his face cracked into an expression impossible for him: bewilderment. He adjusted his glasses, as if he had to be sure the vision was real.
—Johanna… —he said slowly—. You’re seeing him too?
She knit her brow.
—Yes, I see him, and you’re not going to say anything.
—But… —the Corinthian insisted, his voice loaded with incredulity— It’s him. It’s as if—
—Shut up! —Johanna cut him off, fixing him with a look half warning, half plea—. Not here, not now.
Darian looked from one to the other, confused.
—What’s going on? Who are you?
She hesitated.
—We’re no one. We’re on a job… private matters. None of your business.
But her voice wasn’t steady; there was a crack of disbelief in it. That crack was enough for Darian to persist.
—We know each other. Don’t we? —he asked, turning his gaze to him.
Johanna leaned toward Darian, taking the initiative coldly.
—Don’t get involved in this, all right? Live your life. Study, work, keep going. Forget you saw us.
The Corinthian stepped forward, still stunned.
—He should know…
—No! —Johanna cut him off, almost shouting—. We won’t ruin anything. Not with him.
Silence fell over the corridor. Darian felt all the air leave his lungs. He understood nothing, but inside him a certainty sprouted: what he had seen in dreams, what he had felt in his hands and on his skin, was no invention.
Johanna looked away, breathing deeply. Then she yanked the Corinthian by the arm and forced him to walk.
—Come on. We’ve got a demon to hunt.
The Corinthian let himself be dragged, though he did not take his attention off Darian.
—This isn’t going to hold for long —he murmured, with a disturbing lilt.
Darian was left in the corridor, the echo of those words an unbearable weight. Again he instinctively brought his hand to his palm, and for an instant he could have sworn he felt once more the burning of a knife plunging there.

Chapter 16: Shadows of the Past

That same afternoon, unable to obey the order to forget them, Darian decided to follow them when he saw them again on campus. He watched them leave the main building and cross to an almost empty side wing where classes had ended. Johanna walked quickly, looking at a small metal pendulum she held in her hand. The Corinthian accompanied her in silence, like a watchdog with a predator’s smile.
Darian hid behind a column, watching. The pendulum vibrated more and more until Johanna stopped before a closed door.
—Here —she murmured.
Laughter could be heard on the other side. Students. Johanna opened without knocking. The air in the room was charged with a metallic smell, almost like fresh blood. Among the desks, a hunched boy was laughing to himself, his mouth too wide, teeth showing more than a human should have.
The Corinthian sighed.
—Another parasite. Do you want me to take it out?
—No —Johanna replied, entering with determination—. I’ll make it quick.
She took out a switchblade and a small crucifix that looked more like a weapon than a symbol. The boy growled, revealing eyes black as ink.
—You are not welcome here, Constantine.
—And you are not welcome in this world —she shot back, lunging at him.
The Corinthian blocked the door, unmoving, preventing others from entering… or Darian from daring to. But from his hiding place, Darian saw it all: the brief struggle, the scream of the expelled demon, the student’s body collapsing, unconscious but alive.
Johanna bent over the boy, checking that he was breathing. Then she put the objects back in her trench coat and turned to the Corinthian.
—Done. Let’s go.
—And the peeper? —he said, without lifting a finger, pointing toward where Darian was hiding.
Johanna paled. She walked straight toward him, finding him without effort.
—I told you to forget everything. Don’t make me do it for you.
Darian stepped back, throat dry.
—What… what was that?

She looked at him a long time, as if debating whether to erase him from the root or leave him with doubt. Finally, she sighed.
—A mistake. And you’ve just seen more than you should.
The Corinthian leaned slightly, his smile gleaming.
—Maybe it’s too late to protect him.
Johanna shoved him furiously toward the exit.
—Shut up.
Before leaving, she looked at Darian one last time.
—Listen closely: if you want to survive, don’t follow us. Don’t ask again. Don’t look at me again.
And they left, leaving Darian in the empty hallway, with the echo of demonic laughter still in his ears and the burning sensation in his palm, as if the scar of another life had awakened.

Foam ran between his fingers, sliding over the dishes he stacked in the sink. The sound of the water was constant, almost hypnotic. Nada was in the living room, leafing through a book in silence, but Darian felt far away, sunk in the sway of a memory.
The same woman he had seen on campus… Johanna Constantine, standing in the rain, had handed him an old notebook with worn leather covers and the smell of dust.
—It’s yours now —he had said in response to her gesture, with that dry way of speaking that left no room for doubt.
—Read it.
—I already did.
—Read it again. But this time don’t look for proof, look for warnings.
He had taken the notebook with the clumsiness of one who receives something too heavy to hold. He remembered opening it and finding disordered notes, names of demons, broken pacts, references to him… not to him, but to Dream.
And then Johanna looked at him fixedly, with a gesture of compassion she did not usually have.
—Your son never blamed you. Never. —she had said, as if reading a secret Darian still could not utter.
—That suicidal mission you’re hatching… end it. It’s not your burden to repeat it.
The water kept running. Darian gripped the plate in his hands until it broke. The memory lodged like a dagger: his son. An echo of Orpheus, of his pain, of the condemnation that had pursued him.
Nada appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding the closed book against her chest. She watched him closely.
—You’re hurting your hands —she said softly.
He turned, eyes reddened. His hands bleeding.
—I can’t… —he murmured—. I can’t escape this. It’s as if everything I do, every decision, pushes me to the same end, one I don’t know, one I don’t understand.
She set the book on the table and came closer. She placed a cloth over his hands.
—We need to heal this —she whispered. Darian tried to pull away, but she held him. —You are not him —she whispered, brushing his cheek with her fingers— You are not that fate.
Darian hugged her violently, as if clinging to a lifeline in the middle of a storm. The tears burst forth, a mix of guilt and pent-up desire. Nada held him, and when their lips met, it was not just love: it was rage, it was desperation, it was the mute confession of someone who fears being dragged once more into sacrifice.
Darian’s hands trembled at her waist, and she looked into his eyes.
—If you’re afraid, then change course —she told him, firm—. Choose differently.
He closed his eyes and kissed her like one who chooses to burn, even knowing the fire will consume him.
Nada answered with the same urgency. The kiss became a caress, and the caress, an overflow. The forgotten dishes, the water still running in the kitchen: everything fell away when he lifted her onto the table, as if the world could stop right there.
He sought in her skin an impossible absolution; she, in his embrace, the certainty that there was still a path outside the doom. Clothes fell without order, and their breathing blended into a single rhythm.
Darian trembled, not only from desire, but from fear of losing her, of repeating the inevitable. Nada held him firmly, forcing him to look into her eyes even in the urgency.
—I’m here —she said between gasps—. I am not a memory, I am now.
He clung to those words like one clings to a shore. Intimacy was then more than physical: it was a cry of life against every written fate.
From a corner where the light did not reach, someone laughed in silence. Desire, leaning against the very shadow of the room, watched with delectation.
The Darian sinking into Nada was not a simple human. He was the essence that had always fascinated Desire in Dream: the inability to separate love and doom, desire and loss.
The sweat, the trembling hands, the urgency to possess and at the same time not to let go: it was all a mirror of the brother who had fallen before.
Desire leaned in, with a wide and cruel smile.
—Yes… —they whispered, as if toasting a secret vow—. This is you, and it’s what you’ve always been. Not love, not duty… but pure desire to be desired.
The laughter lingered in the air, invisible to Nada, but so present to Darian that as he sank into her he felt a shiver, as if someone else were touching him.
Nada’s breathing slowly calmed, until she fell asleep at his side. Their skin still shone with sweat, the heat of their union lingering like an invisible embrace.
Darian, on the other hand, could not close his eyes. His heart still beat as if trapped between two times: the present he had just shared with her and an ancient echo, impossible to name.
He brought his hand to his chest, as if to check that he was still there, that he was himself. But the shiver persisted. It was not only pleasure. There had been something else, like a third presence brushing his skin as he held her, as if someone were laughing very close to his ear.
He turned his head toward Nada. She slept peacefully, wrapped around him, trusting. The contrast struck him: for her, everything was simple; for him, every gesture seemed to drag invisible chains.
He closed his eyes, trying to convince himself that it had all been a product of his mind, of his fears, but the voice returned, like a seductive murmur in the half-light:
—Was that moment truly yours alone, Darian?
He opened his eyes sharply. The room was empty. Only Nada, breathing in peace. Yet the rumor remained embedded in his skin.
He realized that, although he had loved her like never before, he had also felt that something or someone else had shared the bed with them.
A bitter certainty crossed his chest: desire could bind them… but it could also corrupt what was purest.
He hugged her tightly, as if by holding her he could drive away the shadow. However, deep down he knew that laughter would remain, waiting.
The night wore on. Darian had barely slept, trapped in thoughts he didn’t know how to arrange. When at last the first ray of sun came through the window, Nada shifted beside him with a brusque motion. She brought her hand to her belly and frowned.
—Are you okay? —Darian asked, sitting up at once.
She smiled to reassure him, but her voice sounded weak.
—Yes… just a dizziness. Some nausea. Surely it’s fatigue.
She tried to get up, but stopped, breathing deeply, as if her body were asking for a different beat. Then she looked at him with a tenderness that did not seem forced.
—Don’t worry. It will pass.
Darian watched her in silence. There was a new suspicion in his gaze, a premonition he didn’t dare put into words. He hugged her slowly, saying nothing, as if he knew that gesture could contain more future than either of them imagined.
As she lay back down, the echo of Desire’s laughter still hovered in his mind. Now it mixed with another certainty, more intimate and dangerous: what had begun between them was no longer theirs alone.

The motel was anonymous, like all those Johanna chose to escape. The air still smelled of tobacco and sweat, and the sheets were wrinkled by the violence with which they had sought comfort. The Corinthian, reclining against the headboard, lit a cigarette and held it between his lips, as if nothing could touch him.
Johanna, on the other hand, dressed quickly. She had that way of returning to armor in a matter of minutes, of erasing any trace of fragility. As she buttoned her shirt, she opened the leather backpack and took out a small wooden box blackened by time. She set it on the table, looking at it as if it weighed more than it appeared.
The Corinthian arched an eyebrow behind his glasses.
—What the hell is that?
Johanna looked at him, hesitating for a second, then turned back to the box.
—None of your business.
He smiled, taking a slow drag.
—After what we just did… you’re telling me we still have secrets?
—They’re not secrets —she replied, almost wearily—. It’s a sentence.
The Corinthian stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, leaning toward her.
—It smells like him. Like the Dream he was.
Johanna shot him a withering look, as if naming him aloud were sacrilege.
—Shut up.
—Do you deny it? —the Corinthian pressed—. That thing is his, isn’t it?
She sat on the edge of the bed, the box in her hands. Her fingers trembled slightly.
—It was entrusted to me, and I’m only to open it if someone who is not him begins to remember him without having been him.
The Corinthian let out an incredulous laugh.
—I’d bet my eyes you already know who it is.
Johanna closed her eyes for a moment, as if a storm crossed her chest.
—That doesn’t give me the right to destroy him.
Silence thickened. Outside, rain began to pound insistently at the windowpanes. The Corinthian leaned in further, curious as a child before a forbidden toy.
—What if opening it saves him? Or condemns him?
Johanna stroked the edge of the box with her thumb, her gaze distant.
—That’s the worst of it, Corinthian. —her voice barely broke—. That I’ll never know whether what I must do protects him… or kills him again.
He didn’t press further. He watched her in silence, with a strange, almost compassionate expression, as if even a monster could understand the weight of carrying a secret that burns.
The box remained there, intact, like a suspended promise.

Chapter 17: The Weight of the Inevitable

The library was in half-light.
Lucienne was reviewing a catalog that should not exist when a murmur ran along the shelves: the letters of some volumes were coming apart, falling like glittering dust. She looked up.
There, among the stacks, stood him. Not Daniel, but another. His bearing was similar, his tunic different, the air of his eyes like a mirror that one could not quite tell what it reflected. A Dream from another universe had crossed the boundary.
Lucienne, though surprised, bowed respectfully.
“Welcome, Majesty from the other side,” she said, with the steady voice of one who has seen the impossible more than once.
The visitor merely nodded.
“I’ve come to speak with your lord. The balance is being altered.”
Daniel entered shortly after, summoned by Lucienne. He stopped before his impossible reflection: a Dream with other shades, but equally Endless.
“Speak,” Daniel said.
The Other Dream observed him in silence for a few moments, as if weighing his words.
“Your predecessor chose to die. Yet something of him chose to survive himself as a man. That residue breathes in your world. If it blossoms, Daniel, you will not be unique. There will be two. Dreaming realms do not tolerate duplicity.”
Daniel frowned.
“He decided. I am Dream now.”
The Other Dream tilted his head.
“You are, but you are not alone. The box kept by the human Constantine is proof of it. When it is opened, you will no longer be able to ignore what walks among your mortals.”
Daniel did not reply. The air thickened with the warning. Finally, the visitor vanished into motes of dust, as if he had never been there.
Lucienne approached, her gaze grave.
“My lord… it is not the first time.”
Daniel looked at her in silence.
“There were others,” she went on. “Not always here, not always in our time. I remember a Dream who went mad upon losing his realm. His madness unleashed a whirlwind that reached other worlds, and the boundaries between multiverses broke for an instant. It was not easy to contain it. He barely managed.”
Daniel listened in silence, his expression hardening.
“When that happened,” Lucienne added, “the City of Stars looked this way. It was only for an instant, but it was enough. We know what it means when they turn their attention.”
Daniel clenched his fists.
“If this Darian keeps growing… they might see him as a crack.”
Lucienne nodded slowly.
“Exactly, my lord. There is no worse enemy for a Dream than stars hungry for power.”
Silence stretched between them. Daniel raised his eyes to the stained glass, where he thought he saw two superimposed shadows. For the first time, he understood that what was at stake was not only his realm, nor the echo of Morpheus… but the balance of the entire multiverse.

Daniel remained silent a long while in the library, until the familiar light breeze brushed his shoulder. He did not need to turn: he knew who it was.
“Whenever things get complicated, someone ends up looking for me,” Death said, with her warm smile, sitting on the back of a chair as if the place belonged to her.
Daniel did not raise his gaze.
“Did you know?”
“About Dream?” she replied. “Of course. Not everything, but enough. He left seeds where no one should leave them, and now they germinate.”
Daniel pressed his lips together.
“The other Dream, not from this universe, came to warn me. He says that if that man, Darian, blossoms… I will not be unique.”
Death cocked her head, observing him tenderly.
“You were never unique, Daniel. None of us is. There are always reflections, echoes, possibilities. The difference lies in how we carry them.”
“Lucienne told me about the City of Stars,” he continued, his voice grave. “If they fix their gaze on this, they will destroy it.”
Death sighed and stood. She walked until she was in front of him, forcing him to meet her eyes.
“Listen: everything that lives dies. Everything that dies leaves an echo. Morpheus knew it. You cannot erase what he decided.”
Daniel lowered his gaze, overwhelmed.
“Then what should I do?”
Death took his hand, as she had taken her brother’s before the fall.
“Do not decide out of fear of the stars. Decide out of fidelity to what you are. If Darian is an echo, or a man, or something in between… you will discover it. What you must do, you will do. As we all do in the end.”
Daniel took a deep breath. The weight did not lighten, but it stopped feeling empty.
Death smiled sweetly, giving him a light pat on the cheek.
“Remember, little brother: echoes die too, but sometimes, before they die, they change the world.”
With those words, she disappeared as if she had never been there, leaving Daniel alone before the decision that grew, inevitable, on the horizon.

The realm of Despair was in half-light, damp and rough, like the opened skin of a wound that never closes. Hooks hung from the void, ringing with invisible moans.
Desire appeared unannounced, as always, smiling as they walked through that place with the familiarity of one who never fears getting dirty.
“My sister,” they sang, “your realm always reminds me that even beauty needs a broken reflection.”
Despair did not smile. She sat on the floor, driving a hook into her own hand, her gaze lost. When she spoke, her voice was a dim thread.
“I don’t understand…”
Desire raised an eyebrow.
“What is it you don’t understand?”
“That man. Darian.” Despair’s voice was cracked, almost a whimper. “With all he carries, with the weight of being what he does not know he is… he should have fallen here. He should have felt my hooks, my mirrors.”
Desire leaned in, amused.
“And he hasn’t come?”
Despair slowly shook her head, pulling the hook from her flesh.
“No. Not once. Not even on his darkest nights. Even our brother Dream came to me when he was about to die. Everyone comes. But he does not.”
Desire smiled, licking their lips.
“Oh, little sister… don’t you see? That is what makes him perfect.”
“Perfect?” she repeated, her broken voice not understanding.
“Yes. Because Darian doesn’t need you.” Desire drew closer, leaning until their mouth was a whisper from her ear. “Everything that pierces him, that breaks him, that condemns him… does not sink him into your realm. It brings him into mine.”
Despair’s sunken eyes blinked.
“Then… is he yours?”
“He always was.” Desire smiled with cruel sweetness. “And as long as he keeps choosing, as long as he keeps burning, you will never have him.”
Despair lowered her gaze to her bloodstained hands, in silence.
Desire, on the other hand, straightened and let out a soft, victorious laugh that spread like poisonous perfume among the realm’s hooks.

The pencil scratched the paper with an urgency Darian did not understand. He had already written half a page of names and symbols he did not remember thinking. Lucienne. Orpheus. Nuala. The raven. All appeared as if someone were dictating from inside his hand.
He stopped short when he heard the door. Nada came in, bag slung over her shoulder and a pharmacy sack that she quickly hid behind her before he could see it.
“You’re home early,” Darian said, snapping the notebook shut.
“Yeah.” Nada set her bag on the table, avoiding his eyes. “There wasn’t much work today.”
Silence settled between them like an invisible wall. He hid his notebook. She hid the bag. Both knew the other was keeping something, but neither dared to ask.
It was Nada who broke it first, coming closer and taking his hand.
“Let’s not talk now.”
Darian nodded. He pulled her against him and kissed her, and the kiss grew until it became a flight from all that was unsaid. Clothes fell as if they were ballast; urgency mingled with tenderness, and soon they were entangled between the sheets.
In the room’s half-light, Desire watched again. They smiled to see them cling to each other as if, by doing so, they could silence the truths that pursued them.
“Oh, yes…” they whispered. “Hide in the body, deny the word. That’s how my dominions are perpetuated.”
Their eyes gleamed with delight, convinced that Darian was more and more theirs.
But this time they were not alone. Suddenly, the sound of pages turning filled the air. A huge book opened in the middle of the half-light, and Destiny appeared behind it, motionless and solemn.

“Brother,” he said, his voice a sentence. “Stop laughing.”
Desire raised an eyebrow, irritated by the interruption.
“Have you come to ruin the fun?”
Destiny did not look at him. His eyes were fixed on the pages of his Book, which were being written and erased at the same time.
“You push too hard. If you keep pressing, what should blossom freely will be born as a wound. A wound in Dream is a wound in the universe.”
Desire smiled more broadly, though their voice trembled just a little.
“You cannot stop me, brother.”
“No,” Destiny replied, with implacable calm. “But the Book already records what you will do, and do not be mistaken—it also records what you will pay.”
The creak of the pages rang like a muted thunder. Then Destiny vanished, leaving Desire alone, their laughter broken in their throat.
On the bed, Nada and Darian slept exhausted, unaware that the web of threads binding them was already being tugged from every direction.

Nada woke before dawn with a dull pain in her belly. She got up in the dark, bumped into the nightstand, and barely reached the bathroom before leaning over the porcelain. The retching brought tears, an involuntary weeping.
When she came back to bed, Darian was still asleep. She lay down beside him in silence, feigning normality, but sleep eluded her.
The next day, at breakfast, the smell of coffee made her nauseous. She pushed it away with a grimace, drinking only water.
“Don’t want any?” Darian asked, surprised.
“Not today. It didn’t sit well yesterday,” she answered quickly, dodging his gaze.
At the clinic, the nausea returned. And, upon coming home, she was surprised to find tears springing for no reason, as if everything in her body were reacting to a rhythm she did not understand.
She put the test away in a drawer, not yet daring to use it.

That night, Darian dreamed, but it was not a normal dream.
The ground was a mosaic of broken crayons, and the skies changed color like a painting in the hands of a restless child. Words hung in the air like balloons: now, never, always, perhaps.
There, amid it all, was Delirium. Her eyes were each a different color, and her movements seemed to draw impossible lines.
“Look at you!” she sang, spinning in circles. “Half human, half echo, half nothing. How many halves make a whole, Darian?”
He tried to speak, but the words came out broken, like falling glass.
“What is happening to me?”
Delirium leaned in, smelling him as if he were a strange animal.
“You’re not only you, you know? She is changing too. Your Nada is no longer nothing. There’s something else inside her.”
Darian stepped back, his heart pounding in his chest.
“What do you mean?”
Delirium smiled, sweet and cruel at once.
“A new dream is being woven, but it isn’t yours. It isn’t mine. It isn’t even his.”
The ground trembled under his feet. The mosaics came apart, the floating words burst like bubbles. Delirium stretched her hand toward him, whispering:
“When it’s born, we’re all going to see it, and some are going to want it too much.”
Then Darian woke up, gasping, his skin covered in sweat. Nada slept beside him, calm, a hand unconsciously resting on her belly.
He watched her for a long time, with Delirium’s phrase still resounding in his mind: Your Nothing is no longer nothing.

The infinite veil of Night stretched beyond any galaxy, an ocean of living shadows where light barely dared to enter. There, the pulse of the eternal seemed to be sustained in absolute silence.
Then Time appeared. His gait had no steps, but pulses, and each one made entire constellations vibrate. His eyes were laden with centuries and contained anger.
“To what do I owe the honor of your visit, my love?” Night asked, reclining in her own abyss; she received him calmly.
“Your little experiment,” he spat the words, “is causing cracks I will not be able to close,” he complained.
The mantle of night stirred like a storm of black wings.
“Darian is not an experiment. He is an opportunity, perhaps the only one.”
Time advanced a step, and with it the entire cosmos aged one second.
“An opportunity for what? To repeat what our son did not know how to resolve? To tempt the Stars with a new mistake?”
Night held his gaze without blinking.
“To break the cycle. To give them the freedom they never had.”
Time raised a hand and, in his palm, a seal shone: his Father’s summons. The only one to which even they responded.
“Do you know what you have provoked, Night? He has summoned me. My Father has called me to the City of Stars.”
Night’s shadow seemed to shrink for an instant.
“Perhaps he misses you.”
Time grew irritated. Night sighed deeply.
“What… what are you going to tell him?”
Time closed his eyes, and when he spoke, each word was a judgment that resounded on every plane:
“It’s not what I am going to tell him, but what he is going to ask me. Or why do you think he has summoned me?”
The echo of that question thundered through the vastness, while Night kept silent. In her infinite eyes was reflected, for the first time, the fear that her experiment with Darian had not only awakened the Stars… but also her own Father.

Chapter 18: The Price of Choosing

Three weeks earlier.
Nada left her shift late with a silly bout of dizziness and a smell of chlorine that clung to her throat. She noted on her phone a delay she didn’t usually have, bought a test at the corner pharmacy… and put it away in the medicine cabinet. Not out of fear: out of prudence.
That week coffee tasted metallic, the elevator left her short of breath, and for two nights she dreamed of a white flower opening inside a stone corridor. “It’s the stress,” she told herself. Even so, she didn’t throw the test away. She let it wait, the way one waits for an answer it’s not wise to rush.

Now.
The aroma of freshly made coffee filled the apartment. Darian was standing in the kitchen, barefoot, in a slightly wrinkled white T-shirt and hair still damp from the shower. He whisked some eggs with one hand while the other held a mug already half gone.
The sound of the pan heating didn’t compete with the silence. It was a comfortable sound, as if the house were finally breathing at the rhythm of those who lived in it.
Nada came in from the bedroom. She had wrapped herself in one of his shirts, barely buttoned. She walked slowly, not from laziness, but as if she didn’t want to disturb the stillness surrounding them.
—Are you cooking? —she asked, with a smile that barely formed.
Darian turned just a little, without stopping his whisking.
—I thought it was time I repaid your coffees.
She looked at him a moment longer. Then, without a word, she veered toward the bathroom.
Darian didn’t notice at first, but the absence of running water, of any noise, went on longer than usual.

Nada was sitting on the edge of the tub.
Her hands trembled just a little. She held the test she had kept—without urgency—for weeks. As a precaution, she had told herself. Though in truth it was curiosity or rather denial.
Two lines.
Clear. Unambiguous. Real.
Time compressed for an instant. There was no panic, nor immediate joy. Only presence. The absolute certainty that something inside her was changing… no longer because of what she had lost, but because of what was about to be born.
She closed her eyes. She didn’t cry. But she felt something in her chest open as if it had been sealed for entire lifetimes.
—Darian… —she whispered. Though she didn’t call him yet.
In the kitchen, he was putting bread in the toaster. Without knowing why he felt as if something invisible had crossed the air and brushed him on the inside.
He paused, spoon suspended in the air. A strange beat, not his own, pulsed at his wrist. He looked again at the kitchen clock: the second hand wavered, as if some invisible pendulum had lost the step. It wasn’t fear; it was misalignment. He forced himself to name five things he could see—Nada’s trick—until the hand began moving again. He thought of writing it down, but didn’t.
In that silence suspended between breakfast and revelation, between daily life and the eternal echo… something new began to vibrate.
Darian set the eggs in the pan and turned the flame down, but his attention was no longer on breakfast.
Several minutes had passed since Nada went into the bathroom, and the silence that had been comfortable now began to weigh.
He went to the door and knocked softly.
—Honey? Are you okay?
On the other side, she started. She had been staring at the test still in her hands, not knowing how much time had passed.
—Yes —she answered at once, hiding the object in the hand towel hanging behind the door—. Just… give me a minute.
—Sure —said Darian, not catching the tension in her voice—. The coffee’s ready.
Nada looked at herself in the mirror. Her face showed no fear, but a kind of deep tremor, as if her body didn’t yet know whether it was celebrating or saying goodbye. When she raised her eyes, for an instant the glass returned a reflection in which the light seemed out of phase: her silhouette and, behind it, the shadow of a stone corridor that didn’t belong to that bathroom. She blinked. The image corrected itself.
She came out with a faint smile.
—Smells good.
—And tastes better —he replied, trying to ease the atmosphere he couldn’t quite decipher.
They sat at the table. They shared a few scattered phrases, a few bites, looks that said more than words. Nada wore the shirt slightly open at the neck, and Darian watched her with restrained tenderness, unaware that each of his gestures overflowed her inside. Nada brought a hand to her belly almost unconsciously, like someone feeling a key in their pocket. The smell of toast was too strong and she had to breathe deeply.

—Are you okay? —Darian asked, attentive.
—Yes —she lied with a smile—. Just… too much coffee lately.
She stood to reach for something in the kitchen.
Then it happened.
A sharp pang low in her belly.
One second.
Then another.
The plate in her hands fell to the floor.
—Nada —Darian whispered, already on his feet.
She couldn’t answer. Her legs trembled, and before he could catch her, she dropped to her knees.
A dark stain began to spread on the fabric of the white shirt.
—No… it can’t be… —she said, barely audible.
Darian crouched at once, taking her in his arms.
His hands touched the blood.
His fingers… his fingers were stained.
In an instant that was neither present nor past, he saw another scene.
An echo.
Morpheus.
Falling to his knees on the ground of the Dreaming, hands bloody. Not from physical wounds. But from a loss he couldn’t prevent.
The blood was symbol.
The blood was decision.
The blood was renunciation.
—Nada! —Darian cried—. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, love. I’m not going to let go.
She couldn’t speak. The physical pain was no longer the most intense thing. Darian didn’t think. He wrapped her in a blanket, lifted her in his arms, and left the apartment.
The elevator seemed to take a lifetime. In the taxi, Nada gripped his wrist with a small, stubborn strength that kept him standing. Each traffic light was an exact eternity. When the gurney took her away, Darian lost sight of her eyes, but not the warmth in his open hand.
Hospital. ER.
Cold lights. Voices. The sound of footsteps. Gurneys rushing. The smell of chlorine and badly slept dreams.
Nada had been taken behind a white curtain. A doctor was speaking to her, but she wasn’t answering yet. She had entered that state of emotional suspension where the real seems blurred. Nada’s monitor traced two rhythms for an instant: one human, the other… echo. They overlapped and the line made an impossible tooth.
Darian waited in a metal chair, his hands still stained and a tremor behind his eyes. In the glass of the shift board, for a blink, his reflection misaligned from his body: the right shoulder lagging, the jaw doubled, as if the light didn’t know how to obey his edges. He blinked hard. He was one again. He was Darian again.
He stood. He braced a hand on the wall. The plaster behaved like mist under his fingers and, when he pulled them away, a hair-fine line of light crossed his forearm, from wrist to elbow. It didn’t hurt, but it was there.
Price, not miracle.
He turned toward the vending machine. Fed in coins. The display flickered. For one heartbeat it didn’t show numbers, but a symbol that didn’t belong to this world: a broken ∞. The can dropped. He didn’t open it.
That was when he felt her.
Before seeing her.
Before hearing her.
He felt her.
The pressure behind the sternum changed tone, just like that time in the park. He didn’t know her name, but he knew what her arrival meant: rooms grew stiller, clocks hesitated.
The figure crossed the hall without shadow or sound.

—You… again —Darian managed, not daring to name her—Why are you here?
Death looked at him gently.
—Darian…
—No! —he repeated, now louder, stepping closer —Please —he said, his voice breaking.
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t advance, either.
—Not now that… that I almost understand why I came back.
Death watched him with an expression that mixed ancient compassion and gravity.
—She is fine.
—Then why are you here?
—Because something is about to break… something another plane claims as its own.
A long silence.
—Is it…? —he asked.
—Yes… and no. Because it is also… there. Darian, what is born of two echoes that do not yet know its name… does not die completely.
She weighed the words one by one.
—You must choose, Darian. No human can belong to the here… and the there… at the same time. No seed germinates in two soils. If you do not choose… it is possible I will lose it. Or worse: that it will be trapped between two natures, growing in neither.
The machine clicked. The broken ∞ blinked again and vanished.
—There is a price for miracles —Death added—. As there is for decisions not made, and it is my duty to warn you.
He fell to his knees; the weight of the words was too much.
Death stepped closer, but did not touch him.
—Is it your duty to come always when it hurts most? —he managed to say.
—It is, because that is when I’m needed most.
Then, without farewell, she disappeared.
Elsewhere in the city, in a garret that smelled of old tobacco and damp paper, a white box vibrated once on a table. Johanna Constantine looked up, the match half-burnt between her fingers. The tremor was slight, but recognizable. She didn’t open it. She remembered the instruction: “Only if a man who is not me begins to remember me without having been me.” She set the match in the ashtray, laid her palm on the living wood and whispered:

—Not yet.
Darian was alone, but not entirely.
When Death left, a smell of old rain remained. In the window’s reflection, for a heartbeat, Darian thought he saw a young man with ink-black eyes holding something unseen. He didn’t say his name. Not yet. He saved the gesture the way one saves an unlit match. Later he would understand it wasn’t a sign; it was a price.
From behind the curtain, a nurse peeked out.
—Darian? She… needs you.
He stood. He didn’t wipe his tears. He didn’t wipe his soul. He just walked to where Nada was waiting.
Because there was still something to hold. This time, he wasn’t going to let it go.
The room smelled of disinfectant and dawn.
The curtain was ajar, letting in a line of artificial light that cut the half-dark with almost symbolic precision. Everything was white. Too white.
Nada lay in the bed, pale but conscious. Her face showed no reproach, but a tremor of fear and fragility. An IV line ran down her arm. The monitor beside her emitted a soft beep, rhythmic, as if time itself wanted to keep its distance.
Darian sat in the chair beside her. He didn’t speak, nor did he cry. He simply looked at her, fingers interlaced, motionless.
She was the first to break the silence.
—Did you see her too?
He took a second to answer.
—Yes.
Nada nodded, unsurprised. Only certain.
—What did she say?
Darian didn’t lie.
—She came to warn us. … no human can live in two planes at the same time. If we don’t choose, we’ll lose it or we’ll never know what it was.
Nada closed her eyes for a moment. Not out of tiredness, but containment. They looked at each other, not like those who seek an answer, but like those who accept that there are decisions that, even taken together, tear.
—I wasn’t prepared for this. I just wanted… for you to have a chance far from what destroyed you. But now… I feel like I’m paying the price too.
Darian lowered his gaze. His arm burned where the line of light had marked him: when he rolled his sleeve down, a fresh, reddish groove ran along the skin from wrist to elbow, like a newly opened scar. The price wasn’t hers alone.
—I didn’t ask for it either —he said softly—. I only know it’s here now, inside you… and that if we don’t embrace it, we’ll lose it.
She gripped the sheets. Fear rose like a swell.
—And if I’m not capable?
He brought his hand close, but didn’t force it.
—Then we will be capable together. Afraid, but together.
For a few seconds, the monitor’s beep was the only thing filling the room. It wasn’t music, but it marked that they were still there. Together.
—And what do you think? —Nada whispered.
He didn’t answer right away. He took a deep breath. He ran his fingers over his wrist, as if trying to feel the echo of something more than a pulse.
—I don’t know what to think. Something inside me knows what’s happening. It knows the weight of bad decisions, but I want it to live —he said at last— Not just be born… live for real. Without hiding. Without paying for anything I, or someone beyond, may have done… I want what we were not to condemn it, but to give it a place.
—Here? —she asked, a hint of fear.
Darian nodded.
—All right. —she said in a thread of a voice. At last, Nada turned her palm and entwined her fingers with his. There was no reproach in her gesture, but a bitter acceptance, still fragile. — If we choose it, let it be here, with us. —Nada sighed, and a decision in progress traced itself on her face. Not immediate. Not simple, but real.
—Together.
Outside, day hadn’t yet dawned. Something in the air began to change.
Because now they knew that what was growing inside her… was a possibility.
There is nothing more fragile—or more powerful—than that.
Darian rode the hospital elevator down as if his body didn’t know which floor to go to. Nada still slept, stabilized after the scare. He just needed… to move. To breathe. To confirm the world was still here.
The hallway was almost empty. Only the low hum of the vending machine broke the stillness. He fed in some coins. Selected a random drink, but didn’t take it. He didn’t want the drink; he wanted a gesture.
He turned. She was there.
Sitting on one of the benches facing the window. As if she had been there forever.
She had no tunic, no crown, no cosmic voice. Just a gray coat and a thermos in her hands. She could have been any mother at three in the morning.
—Hello, Darian —Night said.
He looked at her in silence. Then he sat beside her. He didn’t ask how she’d gotten there. He simply accepted.
—What are you doing here? —he asked finally, in an almost childlike voice.
—I was waiting for you to come down. I imagined you would. You’ve always needed to move when you don’t know what to do with what you feel.
Darian smiled in spite of himself.
—You used to tell me that. Though I don’t quite remember it.
—It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember —she replied—. You carry it in your body. You always have.
He glanced at her, sideways, like someone beginning to suspect reality is in disguise.
—Did you… always know what I was?
—No. I only knew what you were to me.
And that was enough, even before understanding the rest.
Darian squeezed the unopened can.
—So… all this? What’s happening, is it my fault?
—It is consequence and also opportunity: something touches from outside but it isn’t a threat. It is an inheritance. One you didn’t ask for but must now acknowledge. —Night said.
—And me? What am I?
—You are the part my son didn’t know how to keep —she answered—. The part that couldn’t reign, nor die, nor be forgotten. What he left behind without being able to name it.
Darian closed his eyes for a moment.
—What am I here for?
—To blossom. Not as revenge, nor as redemption. Only as a possibility.
You were the only thing of him that could love without turning into a cage.
The hallway breathed with them. The old wall clock stopped for a second and started again, as if it had doubted.
—What will happen if I don’t want any of this? —Darian whispered.
—I’m afraid that if you don’t embrace it, you lose everything. —she said—Because it was never about asking for it. It was always about choosing it.
Darian turned to her with a look that wasn’t reproach. It was understanding.
—I didn’t ask for this. What am I supposed to do?
Night didn’t answer right away. She only looked at him with eyes full of tenderness.
—Blossom, for yourself —she said softly—. Not to flee what you were, but remember that when the stars incline, it isn’t always to bless.
She stood, and as she did, the clock hesitated again. Night leaned in just slightly and, in awareness:
—When love becomes choice, certain seals respond. Not all open outward.
He remembered the vending machine’s broken ∞. He didn’t understand, but he felt it.
—Take care of them —she said—. When you choose, do not choose in the name of fear.
Night moved away without a sound. The hallway became just a hallway again.
Darian stayed seated with the cold can in his hands. He went back up.
Crossing the door, he saw her sleeping without pain. He sat at her side. He said nothing. He allowed himself, for the first time, to think of an “after” that wasn’t punishment.
—If there’s a price —he whispered, barely— I’ll pay it.
Far from there—and yet far too close—something golden lit up.
A gallery without walls. Luxurious. A heart-reliquary on a table.
Desire tilted their head, scenting the air like someone recognizing an old cologne.
—Ah… —they smiled—. Someone decided to live.
Their fingers stroked the reliquary’s edge.
— With every choice, the weave loosens. How naughty it would be… if that thread led straight to the center of the loom.
The mirror answered with another smile.
—Let’s play, then. Not for love, only for play.
The shine laughed in silence, and for a breath seemed to sketch, fleeting, a broken ∞. Then there was nothing.
Because from now on, nothing—not even what was chosen—was safe from being tested.
On the monitor, the pulse went on marking its metronome’s stubbornness. Darian rested his forehead on the back of Nada’s hand. He didn’t know how much choosing would cost, but for the first time he understood that not choosing had a price too.

In the Dreaming
Lucienne lifted her eyes from the catalog. The stacks were breathing differently. The Orb flickered with a low note.
She opened an ancient register. No ink: warning.
Protocol “Fractured Essence.”
Latency activated by conscious choice.
Body at cost.
Plane in dispute.
No choice comes without a wound.
She set down the pen. Closed her eyes for a moment.
—May this time… blossom without a cage —she murmured.
For a second, the Realm seemed to assent.

Beyond the Dreaming, beyond even the realms the Endless could name, rose the City of Stars.
It was not a city in the human sense: it was a firmament inhabited by burning consciousnesses. Each star a tribunal, each constellation, a chorus of judgments.
The Stellar Council convened. Their voices were flashes bending in the void. They spoke in unison, but each word came from thousands of throats burning with white fire:
—An aspect has broken its mold.
—Dream chose to die… and yet persists.
—Now he walks as a human, dragging echoes of what he no longer is.
The stars turned slowly on themselves, as if each were a judge in deliberation. Their sentences were born not of compassion, but of exactness.
Among the stellar chorus, a void opened. It was not shadow: it was presence.
From it emerged the Mother of the End, wrapped in a mantle so ancient it preceded the first spark. Her eyes were wells without reflection. Her voice, a whisper that needed no volume:
—My sister dreams of his blossoming, but I see what he truly is: not a man, not a god, but a residue that refuses to be extinguished.
The stellar chorus replied, multiplying its echo through a thousand constellations:
—Each universe has its Dream. Each world sustains an aspect. If one tears itself from the pattern, the others tremble.
As they spoke, visions crossed their lights:
Feline dreams remembering extinct empires. Dreams of insects that never looked at the sun. Dreams of worlds where the word was never invented, and yet someone narrated. All vibrated, disturbed by the anomaly: a Dream who was no longer Dream, yet had not died.
The Mother of the End extended her palm. In it appeared a broken ∞, burning like a wound.
—What exists between the human and the eternal does not remain. It is fracture. And like every fracture, it demands a price.
The Council replied:
—He was not called to return. Yet he returned. If he persists, others will fall into dissonance. The Dreams of the multiverses will not withstand a reflection that does not recognize itself.
The stars vibrated like crystal bells.
—He must be judged. His permanence is a threat to the fabric.
The Mother of the End smiled, though it was no gesture of tenderness.
—Then we will wait for the error to ripen. Night, you dream of possibilities. I will keep watch over endings. If what you saved blossoms, it will be my hand that claims it when it falls.
The stars, which rarely inclined, did so just slightly.
Enough for all planes to know that it was not only a man’s life at stake… but the coherence of all dreams.

Chapter 19: The Choice

The scent of tea leaves filled the apartment. Nada slept on the sofa, wrapped in the blue blanket Darian had placed over her. They still hadn’t fully spoken about what had happened. Not about the bleeding. Not about the baby who—according to Death—could still choose whether to stay or not. They simply rested.

He stood in the kitchen, watching the kettle with an almost devotional care: not making noise, not breaking anything else.

Then it happened.

The back wall rippled, as if the plaster were nothing but fog held together by whim. The edges of the sideboard softened into trembling light. The dining room clock stopped.

Darian looked up. He didn’t feel vertigo. He felt… nostalgia. The kind that has no clear memory, only an old tug in the chest.

Nada sat up with difficulty from the sofa.

“What is that…?” she whispered, but her voice arrived as an echo before it was sound.
“I don’t know,” said Darian. “Or I do… but I can’t say it yet.”

The room folded in on itself with a sigh, and without transition, Lucienne appeared. Not as a projection, not as a memory: standing in the middle of the living room, her book hanging from her arm and her expression somewhere between alert and reverent.

“Darian…”

He recognized her instantly.
“You’re real.”
“More than I’d like to be right now,” she said gravely. “You shouldn’t see me. Not like this. Not here.”
“Then why can I?”

Lucienne looked at him. And then she looked at Nada.
“Because the Dreaming no longer distinguishes where you are. Because you’re no longer just human, nor just a fragment. Because this”—she pointed at the air that opened into filaments—“is what happens when a forgotten dream begins to dream on its own… and someone else hears it.”

Nada tried to stand; her legs failed her. Lucienne crossed the distance and held her.

“She can’t cross! She mustn’t!” she warned.

Darian took a step. As if the floor itself pushed him forward.

“I’m not… I’m not doing anything,” he stammered. “It’s like I’m being moved. Like I’m what’s happening.”

The wall of the apartment collapsed into mist.
And behind it, as if it had always been there, the corridor of the Dreaming’s castle.
Black stone. Crystals. Contained silence, full of memory. The living room and the Realm’s corridor overlapped for one heartbeat, and then the ordinary world gave way.

“Am I crossing?” Darian asked, without panic. Only truth. “To where? Why?”
“You’re not crossing,” Lucienne replied. “The Realm… is coming for you.”

The air tightened. The apartment doorframe curved, and as it exhaled, it became a threshold. The three of them passed through it: first Lucienne’s shadow with Nada in her arm, then Darian, carried by a tide he hadn’t chosen, yet that named him.

They entered.

The corridor opened into a vast nave. At the far end, two gates folded without touch or wind. The Throne Hall breathed, and the pulsing marble recognized its visitors.

The light dimmed a degree, as if the Realm held its breath.

The Orb throbbed once, faintly, and the hall, obedient, prepared to receive the one who had not yet arrived.

Throne Hall — The Dreaming.

The Throne Hall held the light as if it were a lung. Beneath the skyless dome, the Orb vibrated again, timidly, a single note that made the suspended stained glass creak.

Daniel appeared without steps.

He did not descend; space rearranged around him like water recognizing its vessel. He wore no crown. He didn’t need one. The Dreaming made a slight gravitational adjustment and the echoes of the passages fell silent.

“Lucienne,” he said, barely.

She inclined her head, still holding Nada, who breathed deeply—conscious, but without strength. Darian remained one step behind, his gaze fixed on what had been home and prison without having any complete memory of it.

“You shouldn’t have brought them,” Daniel murmured.

“I didn’t bring them,” Lucienne answered, firm and unapologetic. “They came. Or rather, we came because the Realm decided to come for them.”

The Orb, as if to confirm it, projected two split images: Nada’s silhouette vibrating at the same frequency as the ancient bearers, and Darian’s outline, alive… traversed by lines of light that did not fully belong to either the waking world or the Dreaming. Between the two figures, a third interference: a brief, insistent, unborn pulse.

Daniel tilted his head slightly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and it wasn’t clear to whom.

He walked toward them. As he drew near, the marble of the floor seemed to throb under Darian’s feet, as if it recognized a rhythm it was afraid to remember.

“Is this a test?” Darian asked, without hostility. “A trial?”

“No,” Daniel replied. “It’s an adjustment. Something that was meant to find you… found you.”

His eyes passed to Nada. She held his gaze without lowering her face.

“What’s going to happen to us?” she asked.

Daniel took a second to answer, as if measuring with exactness the weight of each syllable.

“If I wake you now, something that hasn’t yet chosen could go out. If I leave you here too long, the Realm could crack. You are on the exact edge where no law was written.”

Darian took a step, a reflex to protect.

“Tell me there is a way out that doesn’t break us.”

“There will be if you choose,” said Daniel. “But I cannot choose for you.”

Lucienne, off to one side, moved the book on her forearm just slightly, like someone who hears an ancient protocol murmuring between the covers.

“We can hold them in the Hall of Echoes,” she proposed. “It’s the only chamber where time does not dictate the totality of the rules. There, perhaps, the pressure will be shared.”

Daniel nodded, without taking his eyes off Darian.

“This place does not reject you,” he said. “It only reminds you that you are not only one.”

Darian swallowed. The phrase didn’t wound him; it gave him a name.

“I know. Or I’m beginning to know.”

A very fine tremor ran through the stained glass; it was neither wind nor threat. It was the Orb trying to match three uneven beats.

Daniel spoke softly, as if entrusting a secret to the marble:

“You are not dreaming the Realm.”

He lifted his gaze to them.

“The Realm is dreaming you.”

No one replied. There was no possible answer that wasn’t to choose.

Lucienne made a gesture, and from the side wall a short corridor folded out; at the end, an arch without a door led to the Hall of Echoes. The air there had a different density, like water that does not drown.

“Come,” she whispered to Nada. “Just a little quiet.”

Darian accompanied her. As he crossed the threshold, he looked over his shoulder toward Daniel.

“If this breaks,” he said, “I will help you hold it.”

Daniel held the promise without moving. For an instant, his features seemed to overlap with an older memory—not to become someone else, but to remember that once he had been two incompatible things.

“First hold your own,” he said. “The Realm can wait one more heartbeat.”

As they entered the chamber, the Orb changed rhythm. It was neither relief nor alarm. It was, clearly, the beginning. A new beat that belonged neither to the waking world nor to dream, but to that narrow zone where both accept that they will have to learn to share.

When the arch finished closing behind Lucienne, Nada, and Darian, Daniel was left alone with the Orb. He touched it with his fingertips. The crystal returned a very slight vibration, a wordless yes. Daniel did not smile, but a gram of weight left his shoulders.

“Don’t wake them,” he said, whether to himself, or to the Realm, or to someone who was no longer there. “Bring them into sync.”

The Orb pulsed obediently.

And the Hall, silent, continued breathing. As if, for the first time in a long time, it knew that not everything that trembles comes to destroy.

The Hall of Echoes had no lamps. Light happened at the height of breathing: each time someone exhaled, the marble returned a brief glow, as if the room were learning to accompany.

Lucienne set Nada on a low chaise near the geometric center of the hall, where the stone vibrated less. Darian remained at her side, not touching her yet, as if he feared adding weight to a bridge that already creaked.

“Breathe with me,” Lucienne whispered. “Three counts in, three out. It isn’t magic. It’s rhythm.”

Nada obeyed. Her chest rose and fell—awkward at first, then a little more even. The hall responded with faint, synchronized flickers.

For a few seconds, it seemed enough.

Then the stab came. A single, clean one that split the sentence in half.

Nada doubled over, a hand to her belly. The room’s glow dropped a tone; the marble emitted a low note, as if the stone had recalled the weight of a decision.

“I’m here,” said Darian, now taking her hand at last. “Don’t move. I’m here.”

Another stab. A humid heat. The light fabric beneath her thighs slowly stained.

Lucienne didn’t panic. She knelt before Nada and spoke like someone who has read too many endings and a few beginnings as well:

“Listen to me. This place doesn’t know how to hold what hasn’t yet chosen. You’re not failing. It isn’t your fault. It’s the plane that doesn’t understand.”

The hall darkened another shade.

Darian gulped air that wasn’t enough. The sensation of pressure returned to his sternum, the same one that had pierced him so many times since waking: something inside him trying to align with something outside… and not finding how.

“Look at me,” he asked Nada. “Only at me.”

She lifted her gaze. There was pain, yes. But not panic. Not this time.

“I can’t promise you anything,” he said, and his voice didn’t tremble. “Only this: I won’t ask you to choose out of fear. Nor for me. If you”—he leaned in, almost a whisper—“if you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, I will love you just the same. But you won’t stay in the middle. I won’t leave you in the middle.”

He wasn’t speaking only to Nada. Or not just to her.

The air changed density, as if a third breath had entered the circuit. The marble, obedient to the rhythm, tried to reflect it… and failed. It could match two beats; the third escaped it.

“Let it say itself,” Lucienne murmured, closing her eyes for an instant. “Don’t translate it. Just listen.”

Darian closed his as well. He didn’t ask, didn’t command, didn’t beg. He offered: the image of a kitchen that smelled of bread, a window open to the rain, a brief laugh that didn’t yet belong to anyone. A name they didn’t have yet.

The stab didn’t repeat. The bleeding didn’t stop at once, but it slowed, as if someone within the decision had found an edge to hold on to.

Then the room heard something that wasn’t sound.

A tiny, new vibration. Neither the mother’s nor the father’s. A third frequency trying to fit without breaking.

The marble tried again to match. This time, it managed a second longer.

Daniel appeared in the doorway without imposing. He didn’t cross. He watched. The Orb, somewhere in the palace, answered with an almost imperceptible flash.

“I can’t touch this,” he said from the threshold, softly. “But I can bear witness.”

No one asked him for explanations. No one needed them.

The small vibration steadied, shy at first, then with the stubbornness proper to what wants to exist. Nada’s pain dropped half a step. Her breathing returned to three-in, three-out.

The bleeding stopped.

It wasn’t a miracle. It didn’t seem like one.

It was a choice.

Lucienne opened her eyes. She didn’t smile. She only nodded, slightly, like someone noting a turning point.

“You heard it,” she told Nada.

“Yes,” she replied, hoarse. “It wasn’t a voice. It was… a decision. Small. But stubborn.”

Darian rested his forehead against hers, without crying. His eyes were only wet.

Daniel exhaled once; the hall imitated him. He took one step inside, only as far as the marble did not complain of added weight.

“It wasn’t me,” he admitted, and there was no pride or defeat in his voice. “Nor Night. Nor the Realm.”

His gaze passed from Nada to Darian and back again.

“It was the one who dreamed it first,” he said.

Lucienne raised one eyebrow, slightly.

“Night?”

Daniel shook his head.

“Her.”

It took them a second to understand.

“The baby,” Darian said softly, as if naming it sealed it. “She chose.”

The hall held the silence with respect.

Lucienne stood, offered water to Nada, spread a blanket over her legs. Then she looked at Daniel.

“This doesn’t save them,” she pointed out, professional, merciful. “It only buys margin. A margin is either used or lost.”

“We’ll use it,” said Darian.

It wasn’t defiance. It was a promise.

Daniel dipped his head slightly. The Orb, at a distance, gave another minimal reply, as if it were taking note.

“Take her to the Silent Stele when she can move,” he instructed. “There won’t be new truths, but there will be less noise. And you”—he looked at Darian—“stop trying to be both at once every time you breathe. Or the body will present the bill before you can pay anything else.”

Darian nodded, honest.

Lucienne extended a hand; the hall’s reliefs obeyed, turning back into a corridor. Nada sat up slowly, supported by Darian.

Before they crossed, Daniel added:

“Don’t confuse choosing with winning. They are different things.”

No one disputed the phrase.

They walked toward the Stele. Behind them, the Hall of Echoes remained in half-light, breathing at its own rhythm. Somewhere very old in the Realm recorded, for the first time in eons, an uncatalogued pattern: a life not yet born… already exercising its first will.

It didn’t disorder the map.

It began it.

Hall of the Silent Stele — The Dreaming

The Silent Stele was not an altar. It was a dimmer. Everything that entered there went down a tone: colors, heartbeat, fear.

Lucienne settled Nada on a low cot; the tempered marble returned a constant, almost uterine warmth. She tucked a blanket around her, offered water. Nada drank in small sips. The pain had eased; the tiny stubbornness remained there, like a little tapping from within, keeping time.

Darian stayed half a meter away, not daring to sit. The stone asked for stillness and he obeyed halfway; his body wanted to move, his vibration asked him to stay still. From that friction the flaw was born: a thin fissure of light running from his collarbone to his sternum, barely visible, like a white hair the skin couldn’t hide.

“Don’t try to cover it,” Lucienne warned gently, seeing his look. “It isn’t a wound. It’s a seam. You haven’t yet decided which side you want it to take.”

A brief flutter announced Matthew in the doorway.

“I brought… nothing,” he said, awkward. “But I can give dirty looks to anyone who bothers you.”

“Dirty looks are good,” Nada murmured with a minimal smile. “Thank you.”

Daniel entered without a sound and stopped at a respectful distance from the cot.

“You can breathe here,” he said. “There will be no revelations. Only less noise.”

Darian nodded without taking his eyes off Nada. The fissure in his chest pulsed once, as if marking presence. Matthew cocked his head.

“You look… intermittent, mate.”

“I know,” Darian replied without irony. “With each inhale I’m being both and neither.”

Daniel came a step closer. He extended his hand, open, at the height of the air; he didn’t touch Darian. With two fingers he drew an invisible mark over his sternum: a curve that didn’t close all the way and a short stroke crossing it. The Stele responded with a faint glimmer.

“It’s not a spell,” he clarified. “It’s a limit. It lasts as long as a night. It will hold you as long as you choose a single direction at a time: either you stay, or you return. If you try to be a bridge while you breathe, the seam will open.”

The mark stung a little, like salt on the tongue. Darian clenched his jaw and endured.

“Does… it hurt?” Nada asked, lifting herself a bit.

“Just enough,” he answered, and for the first time sounded more relieved than afraid.

Lucienne set the book on a low lectern. On the spine, the broken ∞ sigil pulsed once, almost in sympathy.

“Not today,” she told herself, barely audible. “Not yet.”

Daniel glanced at that pulse from the corner of his eye, understanding perfectly and choosing not to comment.

“Listen,” he said to Darian, now in a professional tone. “This margin isn’t victory. It’s time. When you return to waking, if the world trembles, walk; if Despair whispers from the mirror, don’t look: name her and keep going. If Desire offers shortcuts, remember that the price of a shortcut is always paid with what you love. And if Night cries with pride, don’t get distracted: tenderness can also take you off the path.”

Matthew cleared his throat.

“And if a raven gives you advice, ignore him half the time.”

“The right half,” Lucienne replied, serious and affectionate.

Nada intertwined her fingers with Darian’s.

“We will go back,” she said, simply.

“You will go back,” Daniel corrected, without harshness. “She won’t. Not for now. Here she is heard better. And her body understands this murmur.”

Nada swallowed. There was no protest. Only difficult acceptance.

Darian looked at the luminous mark crossing his chest. Beneath the sting, he felt a new stability: as if the floor stopped moving whenever his thought chose a single verb.

“Then today I choose… to stay until she sleeps,” he said.

The mark lowered half a degree of light, settling into the verb.

“And when she wakes, I choose to return.”

The mark didn’t argue. Neither did the Stele.

Daniel inclined his head.

“You learn quickly,” he said, not with borrowed pride, but with his own relief.

Lucienne turned off a lamp that wasn’t lit. The room gathered in a little further. Matthew perched on the back of a chair, closed one eye, opened the other—discreet guard.

The night (the earthly one, not the mother) advanced through the palace like a tepid tide. On the cot, Nada was already breathing evenly; under her hand, the small stubbornness answered, slight, affirmative.

Darian rested his back against the Stele. The mark on his chest beat to the rhythm he asked of it, for the first time without demanding two things at once.

There were no prodigies. There was a limit. And sometimes that is the only thing that allows one to go on.

When Daniel closed the door of the Silent Stele, the palace stopped holding its breath. The echo of the mark he had traced on Darian’s chest continued to vibrate through the corridors like a low note that orders the rest.

Lucienne was waiting for him halfway down the hall, the book hanging from her forearm. She didn’t bow; she did something more intimate: she lowered her voice.

“The mark responded to the rule. Choosing a single verb at a time stabilizes him.”

“For tonight,” Daniel agreed. “Tomorrow it will ask for more.”

They walked in silence to the Sealed Library. The door did not open; it yielded, like a membrane recognizing its guardian. Inside, the air smelled of old ink and decisions that preferred to be written slowly.

Lucienne set the tome on the lectern and, with her fingers, touched the border of the sigil: the broken ∞ blinked once, faint, as if in greeting.

“It keeps responding,” she murmured.

Daniel looked at it askance, without approaching.

“Do you blame it?”

“No,” Lucienne said, frank. “I acknowledge it.”

They went in among the shelves to the central table. On the black stone, three veiled objects awaited: the spirally folded parchment, the white box tangled in golden threads that hummed almost imperceptibly, and the gray mirror that reflected nothing but memory. Lucienne didn’t touch any of them.

“The Protocol was designed for when ‘a residue without cycle’ began to dream on its own and broke the margin between planes,” she recalled in a low voice. “We’re there.”

Daniel placed his hand on the table, without weight.

“And yet, opening this today would break everything.”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “Because it isn’t Darian asking for it yet. It’s the Realm calling to him. Not the other way around.”

A golden thread on the box vibrated a bar and grew quiet. Daniel lifted his eyebrows slightly.

“Desire has already smelled it.”

“And Despair has already found the bathroom mirror,” Lucienne replied with the dryness of someone taking roll. “Death is watching the corners. Night sits in hospital corridors as if they were her living room. And Time…”—she looked at him—“…hesitates. I don’t like that.”

Daniel breathed through his nose. It wasn’t a sigh; it was an adjustment of gears.

“Time fears that choosing will change the shape of the clock. It’s his job to fear that.”

“And it’s mine to preserve what changes,” Lucienne said. “That’s why I still won’t open the box. Not today. Not tomorrow. Until he himself asks for it from decision, not from the crack.”

Daniel lowered his gaze to the stone.

“When I was him…”—he corrected himself without effort—“when he was what I had been, I confused duty with form. I left a trail so as not to lose entirely what I didn’t know how to name.” He lifted his eyes. “I don’t want Darian to repeat my line out of inertia.”

“Then let him learn the limit,” Lucienne said softly. “The mark you gave him is a lesson and a rope. Nada… has already chosen to stay to listen better. He has to choose to walk without carrying her on his shoulders.”

A brief silence. The library, grateful, gathered itself.

“I’m going to reinforce the margins,” Daniel decided. “The side doors. The corridors that think they’re shortcuts. If Desire tries to pull the thread, let him find knots, not children.”

“And I,” said Lucienne, “will put eyes in the mirrors of the waking world. If Despair insists, let her see herself in my glass.”

They remained a moment by the table. The veiled mirror emitted a faint tick, like a memory settling.

“When the day comes,” Lucienne added, almost to the marble, “he will come here not for an answer, but for confirmation. We’ll open then. Not before.”

Daniel inclined his head in a gesture that was half assent, half gratitude.

“Thank you for holding where I only keep.”

“Thank you for keeping where I sometimes forget to hold,” she returned.

As they left, the door once again yielded and closed without sound. In the corridor, the palace exhaled like someone letting go of a thread of tension.

Far away, in a world of rain-slick windows, a man with a single direction in his chest settled into a hospital chair so he wouldn’t fall asleep while the woman he loved slept. Each time his thought split in two, the mark burned and returned him to a single verb.

Choose. For now, choose. And tomorrow, again.

Nada slept beneath the blanket. The faint mark on her sternum continued to glow like a thread under skin.

“I choose to return,” he said softly, looking at no one.

The Corridor of Thresholds smelled of freshly wet stone. The wind came from nowhere, yet moved the hair all the same. At the end of the rail-less bridge, someone was waiting.

“Do you know who I am?” the young man asked, his voice like a string tuned without instrument.

“No,” said Darian. “But I feel as if I owe you something.”

“They called me Orpheus,” he nodded, with a smile that never quite formed. “I was the price of looking back.”

Darian swallowed. The mark on his chest responded with a dry pulse, alert.

“I’ve come to remind you of the toll,” Orpheus continued. “Return isn’t paid with body or with love. It’s paid with certainty. You can’t go back to waking carrying everything you are here without breaking yourself—or breaking your world. You must let something go.”

“I won’t let her go,” Darian said without hesitation. “Nor Nada, nor the one who grows. Not this time.”

“I’m not asking that,” Orpheus denied, compassionate. “I’m asking you to choose between the memory of what you were and the memory of what you would have been if you had stayed. If you refuse to let go of both, you will be a shadow in both planes. And your daughter will meet a formless echo.”

The bridge breathed between them. Darian closed his eyes for an instant: the smell of morning coffee, Nada’s short laugh, the tiny stubbornness beneath his hand; on the other side, the beating marble, the quiet Stele, Daniel’s steps that made no sound. He could not carry it all without breaking.

“Then let me remember love,” he said at last, his voice turned to thread. “Because today I forgive myself, him, all of us—and erase the rest.”

Orpheus looked at him with something that wasn’t approval or judgment. It was recognition.

“So be it.”

He raised two fingers and touched the air right before the mark. A black petal—no charcoal, no shadow; a memory becoming light—fell from Orpheus’s brow and dissolved before touching the bridge. The half-curve on Darian’s chest changed temperature: it stopped burning and turned cool, like water at dawn.

“You will carry back the only thing that grows when everything else breaks,” Orpheus said, stepping back. “And when you doubt, remember that looking back isn’t always going back: sometimes it is choosing again.”

The wind that came from nowhere took the last syllable. The bridge shrank until it was a single step. Darian took that step.

The Stele seemed to nod. The light of the mark changed temperature; a clean cold crossed his chest. The marble, the old murmur of the Realm, Matthew’s flutter… retreated like a tide.

The hospital fluorescent returned first. Then the smell of bleach. Then the tick of the hallway clock. Darian blinked: he was sitting in the same metal chair as before, the cold can between his hands. The mark beat slowly, obedient.

By reflex, he tried to think about both places at once. The heat rose to his neck as if a coal were correcting him. He let the air out in silence.

“One direction at a time,” he murmured to himself.

The vending machine hummed to his right. For the blink of an eye, its screen showed the broken ∞; then it returned to “$1.50.” Darian didn’t smile. He knew he was being watched.

“You don’t need sugar,” said a voice without hurry. “You need margin.”

The voice arrived like a page being turned. Time sat on the long bench, his coat gathering shadows, a pocket watch spinning of its own accord. Darian looked up.

“You again,” Darian murmured. “You always arrive when everything trembles.”

“Not by habit. By function,” Time replied. “Someone decided to remember and the fabric changed its meter.”

Darian sat beside him, without asking how he had arrived.

“You’ve learned to ask for less each time.”

“It isn’t humility,” Darian answered without rising. “It’s limit.”

Time tilted his head just slightly, approving the word.

“The mark is sensible. It will spare you mistakes… as long as you respect it. Each return like this pulls at the loom; each remaining weighs on Daniel. And the beat you carry inside”—he lifted his gaze to the upper floor, as if listening through concrete—“is synchronizing things that shouldn’t yet be synchronized.”

“You say ‘yet,’” Darian observed.

“Because what’s possible is not the same as what is due,” Time replied. “And you have decided to live remembering. That bends the shores. I don’t condemn it. I measure it.”

Darian squeezed the can. The metal crunched slightly.

“And if I choose wrong?”

“Then let the mistake be yours, not inherited,” Time said, without harshness. “Don’t congest the loom with contradictory decisions. Choose windows, not doors: open, look, return. Don’t stay halfway.”

“And the baby?”

“Not boy or girl yet to me,” he admitted, with a frankness that hurt. “It’s a pulse. If you pull it across two rhythms, it splits. If you give it a stable beat, it will follow you… or correct you. Children do that.”

Darian remained silent for a moment.

“No side can be ruled by two clocks. Your choice to remember anchored a direction. If you don’t fix the place for that life, the offset will do what it always does: break.”

Darian pressed the cold can between his hands.

“I don’t want to lose any of you.”

“Wanting isn’t magnitude; choosing is,” Time made the watch lid sway. “I already warned you: if you remember, you won’t sleep the same again. You have accepted the cost.”

“And what exactly is it?”

“Everything,” Time said, simply. “But not all at once. And that, Darian, is what saves you. Each act of yours moves the hands somewhere else. The act of renouncing to remain in the middle.”

Darian swallowed.

“And what do you do for us?”

Time looked at him with a mixture of severity and ancient stone.

“I don’t decide for the living. But I can space out the blow.” He turned the watch a quarter and the second hand stepped back a tooth, just audible. “I give you one night with a white edge. No more, no less.”

“One night to decide?”

“One night to name what you are willing to lose and what you are not. After that, the tempo goes back to its place.”

Darian nodded, surprised to feel less vertigo.

“Why help me now… if you didn’t before?”

Time held his gaze.

“Because before you wanted to die as an idea. Now you want to live as a man. The first is a trap. The second, work.”

The machine’s display flickered again; the broken symbol went completely dark. Time put away the watch.

“Go. She’s waiting for you. And remember, Darian: time doesn’t choose… it chooses you.”

The elevator vibrated at the far end. A cleaning cart went by as if no one were on the bench. When Darian looked again, Time was gone. Only the hallway clock had stopped for a second and then resumed, obstinate.

Darian stood. Before entering the room, the mark burned for one beat: he had thought of crossing over to see whether Nada was still calm at the Stele. He smiled, tired.

“One direction at a time,” he repeated.

He pulled the curtain. Nada slept, her breathing even. In her hand, invisible to the world, the small stubbornness replied, slight, affirmative.

Darian rested his forehead against the edge of the frame and chose: to stay there, in that narrow, sufficient now. Outside, the rain returned, thread-thin, as if time were asking for its own beat as well.

When Nada fell into even sleep and the Stele stabilized her pulse, Darian stood. The mark on his sternum— that half-curve crossed—lowered to a faint glow: he had chosen to stay and had already fulfilled it. The other half of the verb was due.

“I’ll be back,” he told Lucienne, without taking his eyes off Nada.

“And you’ll return whole if you respect the limit,” she answered, with a minimal inclination.

Daniel added neither ritual nor blessing. He simply drew aside the curtain of the side threshold with an open hand: beyond it there was no corridor, but that strip without ground or sky where dreams are decided without metaphors.

Darian crossed.

He fell in silence… and opened his eyes in the apartment.

The blue blanket was still on the sofa, empty. The kettle had cooled. The dining room clock—the one that had stopped—began to move again, but no longer to the old tempo: it marked longer seconds when Darian breathed deeply, shorter when he blinked in haste. The mark on his chest responded docilely: he had chosen to return, and the body obeyed.

He brought a hand to his sternum. It didn’t hurt. Something was missing: he did not remember the exact architecture of the throne, or the angle of the suspended stained glass, or the secret order of the corridors… but he knew why he had come back. And to whom.

“Sleep well,” he whispered into the air, as if the Stele could hear him. “I’m waiting.”

On the bookshelf, a notebook opened by itself to the middle and showed a pencil drawing of a crossed curve. The phone’s black screen, for an instant, displayed a broken ∞ before returning to mirror.

And, very far away—or too close—a raven on a lintel tilted his head.

“He did it,” Matthew said, in a low voice.

“For today,” Lucienne corrected, adjusting the book’s spine. “Tomorrow, the verb starts over.”

Nada opened her eyes like someone returning from very deep water. The hallway light cut the dimness at an oblique angle. She reached for Darian with her hand before seeing him; he was already there, beside her, elbows on his knees and fingers interlaced.

“Did… it stay?” she asked bluntly, touching her belly with care.

Darian nodded slowly.

“It beats here. I’m not going to pull from anywhere else.”

She exhaled, a short sound that wasn’t complete relief, but a beginning.

“I dreamed stone,” she murmured. “Black marble. A hall without time. I was looking at myself and it wasn’t only me.”

“The Stele touched you,” Darian said. “But you didn’t cross. We’re not going to cross unless it’s essential. I can look through a crack… and come back. One direction at a time.”

Nada studied him, searching for cracks in his voice.

“Does it hurt?”

“Less than losing you,” he answered, sincere.

The monitor marked its own beat, oblivious. Nada brought Darian’s hand to her belly. Under the skin, just a flutter—more idea than muscle—brushed his palm. The mark on his sternum answered with a brief, contained warmth.

“If at any moment it changes…” she said.

“You’ll tell me, and I won’t look,” he promised. “Or I’ll look better. But together.”

They remained like that for a while, breathing at the same height. Outside, a gurney rolled by on rubber wheels; inside, the second grew wider.

Elsewhere, the Dreaming adjusted the weight of its arches. The Orb let out a low hum; Lucienne inclined her head, measuring.

“The pressure in the corridors fell,” she reported, almost to herself. “As if the thread had chosen a fabric of flesh… for now.”

Daniel closed his eyes for a moment. He didn’t smile. But the throne stopped creaking.

“May it last,” he said. “And may it not forget why.”

Very far and very near, a golden mirror kissed its own reflection.

“Anchors. How tender,” Desire whispered, amused. “Let’s see how much wind they can take.”

Chapter 20: Where Time Blooms Differently

Two days had passed since the monitor stopped being a threat and went back to being a metronome. The doctors sent them home “with rest and checkups.” The rain began without warning.
It wasn’t a storm. Just a gentle persistence against the panes. Nada had left the window ajar, and the scent of water coming in off the street made the apartment feel a little less like a hospital and a little more like a home.
Darian was on the floor, his back against the bookshelf. He had a notebook in his hands, but he wasn’t writing. He just held it the way someone does who fears the words might betray him if he lets them out.
Nada came out of the bathroom with a towel in her hair. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, one of those he didn’t remember ever choosing, but that now seemed an inevitable part of the inventory of shared days.
—What are you writing? —she asked, her voice still thick with steam.
—Nothing. Yet —Darian replied, without looking.
She sat on the sofa, not far away. She put her feet on the edge of the table. The silence between them wasn’t tension, but a pause. Like a breath before the next paragraph.
—When you were a child… —she said suddenly— what did you dream?
Darian took a while to answer.
—Of fire. And a tower. And a woman who couldn’t look at me, but knew my name.
—He paused—. But that’s cheating. I don’t know if it was a dream… or something I remembered too soon.
She didn’t press. Because she understood.
Because she also dreamed things no one had taught her to dream.
While Darian drew meaningless lines along the edge of the page, across the street, under the eave of a broken awning, Death watched.
Not with urgency. Not with sorrow.
But with the look of someone who has stood on the threshold too many times.
Her coat blended with the shadows. Her eyes weren’t searching for details. Only confirmations.
Darian was still alive.
But the echo that inhabited him… was no longer just that.
Something was blossoming from the crack.
Death didn’t come closer.
She didn’t ring the bell.
She didn’t interrupt.
She only breathed, as if she could shoulder what was coming, without warning.
Then she turned halfway and vanished into the rain.

Hours later, while Nada slept —this time on the sofa, with a blanket that didn’t quite cover her feet— Darian stepped out onto the balcony.
The city seemed covered in a patina of silence.
He lit a cigarette, though it wasn’t a habit.
He held it for a moment and then put it out, as if he couldn’t allow himself to forget his body completely.
That was when he felt it.
The presence.
It didn’t come from a portal.
Nor from a dream.
It simply… was.
—You shouldn’t smoke. It cost you too much to get your breath back.
The voice had no weight, but it had time.
Darian didn’t turn immediately.
Only when the silence became too eloquent.
Time was there.
With his long coat, the pocket watch spinning on its own, and a gaze full of futures that weren’t yet.
—You —said Darian, without surprise—. You always arrive when everything trembles.
—Not out of habit —Time replied—. Out of necessity.
Darian leaned on the railing.
The rain had stopped, but the air smelled of unresolved things.
—Have you come to tell me I must choose? That time is running out?
The mark beneath his sternum burned for an instant: every time he tried to think of waking and the Dreaming at once, the stroke reminded him of the rule. One direction at a time.
—No.
I’ve come to remind you that you are it.
Darian frowned.
—What?
—Time.
The time that wasn’t. The time that was lost.
The time Morpheus never used.
The time he wanted to give… but didn’t know how.
—And now?
—Now… you remember it.
And that memory, Darian, changes the structure.
You didn’t choose to forget. You chose to remember without getting trapped.
That… isn’t common.
That… throws things off balance.
—Am I breaking something?
Time looked at him, without judgment.
—Yes. But not like Dream.
He broke out of fear of losing himself.
You break because you chose not to repeat him.
Silence.
—Orpheus offered you oblivion. You chose to forgive yourself —Time said, his voice almost grave—. That doesn’t make you less fragile. It makes you more dangerous.
Darian held his gaze.
—Dangerous… to whom?
Time watched him for a long moment, as if measuring not the man, but the fissure he had opened in the tapestry.
—To the order.
To those who still believe the Realm cannot change.
To those who expect your daughter to be only an echo, not a story.
Darian gripped the edge of the railing.
—And will she be?
—I don’t know.
But for the first time… she’ll have the option not to repeat any of us.
And that, Darian… that is to blossom.
A brief gust of wind wrapped around them.
And amid the murmur of water still dripping from the roofs, something seemed to sprout.
Not a symbol.
A seed.
Time lowered his face, like someone who has already said what he must.
And as he faded, he didn’t disappear: he moved to another line of the same text. On a plane without day or night.
It was neither day nor night in that place.
Neither dream nor waking.
The fabric of the plane was held by threads that knew nothing of time, but much of rhythm.
And the rhythm was… altered.
Three figures moved without moving.
Their faces were veils.
Their bodies, pure intention.
They didn’t speak aloud, but each thought passed like fire between their forms.
She who veils the roots was the first to project her judgment:
—The one who was an echo has chosen to blossom.
And he has done so with intact memory.
That was not foreseen.
She who sustains the forms closed the eyes no one could see:
—To remember and not repeat introduces variation where we counted on patterns —said she who sustains the forms— it is a dangerous decision. Self-forgiveness doesn’t break the law: it shifts it.
She who crosses thresholds did not speak at first.
Her fingers brushed the vibration of a strand… and that strand had a name: Darian.
—He was not offered the throne —she said at last—. And even so… his existence blurs it.
The other two nodded.
—The unborn girl vibrates like something none of us dreamed —said the first—. There is no precedent —said the first.
—There is love —said the second—. And where there is love, form bends.
—And where it bends… we collect a price —the third whispered.
A long silence crossed the plane.
The shadows of balance throbbed with an ancient unease.
Then an image rose among them.
Time, standing beside Darian.
And his warning:
“I don’t know. But if you break it… make sure it’s for something that’s worth more than fear.”
The Kindly Ones showed no alarm.
But something tightened at the very center of the plane.
—Fear has been the root of order —said the first—. If one sows without it, something will be born that we cannot guard.
—Then… do we stop him? —asked the second.
—No —the third answered—. We only warn.
And as she said it, an echo traveled through all known planes.
An echo without threat.
But with weight.
A single sentence:
“What blossoms without fear… cannot be caged again.”
And in the Realm of Dream, the curtains trembled.
In waking, Nada startled awake.
And in Darian’s heart… something new began to beat.
The balcony door remained ajar.
The rain had stopped, but not the murmur.
Darian went back inside without words, as if his body needed to adapt again to the domestic.
Nada was still asleep on the sofa, one arm hanging at her side and the blanket tangled around her legs.
She breathed deeply.
The same depth she once thought she had lost.
Darian stepped up to the table. He set his hands on the closed notebook, but didn’t open it.
His skin felt warmer than before. Not from fever.
From something that burned from within.
Then he felt it.
It wasn’t a sound.
It was a presence.
As if the air remembered how to hold someone who had never been entirely human.
A figure emerged from the corner where the lamp’s shadow failed to dissipate.
Lips first. Then eyes. Then the whole form.
Desire.
Androgynous and precise.
With a gesture that didn’t imitate tenderness, but recalled it exactly.
—So much fuss over a baby… —they whispered, walking toward the notebook without touching it—. And you still don’t know whether it will be born of you… or of what you left behind.
Darian didn’t flinch. He only blinked.
—You again.
—Were you expecting someone else? Time? Death? Night, perhaps?
Darian took a deep breath. The smell of the room had changed.
Sweeter.
More dangerous.
—What do you want?
Desire tilted their head. They wore a crescent-shaped pin on the left ear. And on their neck, a mark… as if someone had once kissed them violently.
—You are what was never meant to remain —they said—. But you did. They planted you without knowing you would grow.
They came closer, soundless.
—You are the crack they didn’t seal well. The echo that chose to desire. Don’t you see how beautiful that is?
Darian lowered his gaze toward the sofa. Nada was still asleep.
Her fingers clutched at the fabric of the T-shirt she wore.
—I’m not a crack —he replied, without aggression—. I’m a choice.
—And do you think that exempts you from the price? —Desire whispered, almost with compassion—. Listen to me, flower of two planes… The balance breaks with decisions like yours. Not because of love. Because of desire that won’t be quiet.
Darian clenched his jaw.
—You didn’t give me this life.
—I didn’t invent you. But I provoked it —said Desire, as if confessing a delicious crime, opening their arms just a little— I made you possible. I pushed the one who had been King to the edge where lack and love are indistinguishable. Others left a seed. I only warmed the soil.
They leaned in.
—You weren’t born by mistake. You were born of impulse. And do you know what happens when someone like you decides to stay?
Darian didn’t answer.
—The Realm… no longer obeys. Flesh dreams. Love burns. And what wasn’t possible… becomes inevitable.
For a moment, the room seemed to contract.
—I haven’t come to warn you. I’ve come to celebrate that one of them chose. The inevitable doesn’t always simply happen… —Desire whispered near his ear—. It’s provoked.
And with that, they vanished.
Not with smoke or light.
Only with the evidence that they had once been there.
Darian was left alone. When Desire faded, he tried to follow their scent into the Realm. The mark burned. The limit held him.
The air was saturated.
Not with perfume, but with memory.
He went to the sofa.
He knelt in front of Nada.
She murmured something in her sleep, turning slightly.
The outline of her belly, already evident beneath the thin fabric, rose with each breath.
Darian set his hand on it.
He felt it alive.
And not just alive: contained.
—This time… I’m not going to let them break it —he whispered—. Not the thrones. Not the ideas. Not those who fear what they can’t control.
He rested his forehead on her belly, closing his eyes.
—This time… I’m going to fight.
And the vibration that beat within… answered.
Not as a promise.
But as a presence.
The walls had no shape.
Only notches.
Like skin torn after too many winters.
The Gallery of Cracks wasn’t a place one visited.
It was a place that opened.
When the story fractured beyond the design.
There, seated on a throne made of broken cages, Despair spun hairs of shadow. She didn’t weave. She only passed the threads from finger to finger, like someone counting another’s days.
The light that entered had no source. It was light that hesitated.
Beside her, standing and barefoot, Desire watched.
Not with affection. Not with disdain.
With a kind of contained anticipation.
—Did you see it? —Desire asked.
Despair didn’t lift her gaze.
—Yes. I felt it. Like a fissure in my chest… before it bled.
—He’s already chosen. To remember.
—Then… it’s done —murmured the younger sister.
Desire walked slowly around the throne.
It wasn’t their favorite place.
Too motionless for someone like them.
But the echo being born deserved to be observed from the depths.
—Morpheus thought he could lock us in oblivion. That if Daniel replaced him, the lineage of desire would die with him. But you cannot amputate what hasn’t been confessed.
—It wasn’t Dream who locked us up —said Despair, still not looking—. It was himself he locked up.
—All the same. —Desire smiled, but without joy—. He thought himself outside the game. But every time he loved… he planted something. And now, that something… bleeds. Breathes. And fights.
—It didn’t go as you planned —said Despair.
—No —admitted Desire, stopping before one of the wall’s deepest cracks—. But it was better.
—Why?
—Because he chose to remember.
—That is what will destroy him.
—Perhaps —Desire conceded—. But it’s also what opens a path for us.
—To where?
—Toward a Dream that cannot be contained. Toward a daughter who answers to no archetype.
Despair finally raised her gaze.
Her eyes were gray.
As if all hope had once passed through them, but never stayed.
—And do you love him?
The question wasn’t a judgment.
It was a reflection.
Desire stopped.
—I desired him.
—And now?
Desire didn’t answer immediately.
Then they approached the newest crack.
They touched it with two fingers.
The crack trembled.
And an image appeared: Darian, his forehead on Nada’s belly, promising not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
—Now I want to see what happens when one of us… doesn’t repeat himself.
And as the image faded, the crack seemed to throb.
Not like a rupture.
Like a seed.
In the Sealed Library, the tome with the broken ∞ sigil throbbed once. Lucienne didn’t open it. —Not yet —she told it, as if to an impatient child.

Chapter 21: The Birth of What Was Never Meant to Be Dreamed

The bushes had no leaves.
The trees cast no shadow.
And the path… changed every time someone tried to remember it.

Destiny walked among them with the chain of his book dragging a sound that no other ear could endure without getting lost.

The tome was open.
Its pages, incessant.
And yet his gaze did not rest on any of them.

Because the page where Darian was…
was blank.
Not incomplete.
Not forgotten.
Blank.

He stopped before a dry fountain.
Water had not flowed for eons.
But the stone still held echoes of names engraved.

He laid a hand on the rim.
And then he felt it.
Not a tremor.
Not a pain.
A fracture.
An invisible line furrowing the fabric of the inevitable.
Not a crack.
A choice.

He closed the book. For the first time in millennia.
And as he did, a word escaped his lips:

—Darian.

A figure emerged from the garden’s vapor. It did not walk. It simply appeared.
Destruction.
He no longer bore sword. Nor shield.
Only a notebook with incomplete drawings and a tired smile.

—Did it surprise you?

Destiny did not answer.

—I knew one of us would do it —said Destruction, sitting on the edge of the fountain—. But I didn’t expect it to be him. The echo.

Destiny barely turned his head.
—He wasn’t an echo. He was a reflection. Until he chose to blossom.

—And that makes him what? —asked Destruction.

—A thread that isn’t tied.

—Does that worry you?

—No. It forces me to read with other eyes. The Book never fails. And if the page is blank, it isn’t because it’s missing, but because it hasn’t yet found where to inscribe itself.

Destruction looked at the book. On the edge of the pages, stains of black sand were visible, as if a breath of the Dreaming had passed through its cover.

—When I left, I did it because I didn’t want to follow a written duty —he murmured, tearing a page from his notebook and letting it fall into the dry basin—. But he… simply erases it.

The page burned without fire.

—And now what do you do, brother?

—I wait —Destiny replied.

—For what?

Destiny lifted his gaze, as if looking beyond the celestial vault.
—For the child to choose whether he wants to dream… or become Dream.

Silence.

Destruction rose.
—Then… at last we get to see something new.

—Or see ourselves reflected as we never wanted.

—And if the book stops writing itself?

Destiny stroked the cover of the sealed tome.
—Then he will be the one to rewrite it.

And the wind, unbidden, blew from the south.
Where there were no words.
Only possibility.

Chamber of the Uncalled Names

Time: Suspended, parallel to Darian’s waking.

A mirror that had never been lit began to shine.
One by one, the Endless stopped.

Daniel felt it first. Like a stab beneath the skin.
Desire turned their gaze aside. As if the reflection were too intimate.
Death drew near… and saw her face not as Guide, but as Mother.

In the fleeting gleam she perceived something more: an echo of Orpheus.
Not his song, not his tragedy.
Only the certainty that a son’s chains are not always broken in vain.
The thread of his sacrifice now resonated in Darian as warning and inheritance.

Destruction saw Darian… and did not know whether it was the end or the beginning.
Despair trembled. Because in that reflection there was no fear.
Delirium… smiled, with tears. For the first time, she was not the only one who saw the impossible.

Destiny closed his eyes.
The mirror did not show Darian.
It showed what each one did not want to be.
What they might have been,
if they had loved with memory.
If they had chosen,
as humans.

And the child…
did not appear.
Only his echo.

A childish murmur, barely a babble, ran through the Chamber.
It was not a name. It was not a word.
And yet, Delirium tilted her head, as if she understood.

—I hear him —she whispered—. Even if you don’t want to.

The others fell silent.
Because in that formless voice there was a summons none of them could ignore.

Night and Time in the antechamber between planes

The sky was not sky. It was a fold, a mantle without coordinates where time decided nothing and night was the only real thing.

There, over a suspended field made of stellar cobblestone, Night was weaving.
Her fingers, black as the first shadow, slid threads that were neither of time nor of dream. They were new strands: filaments of memory and body intertwined.

She smiled.

—Can you feel it? —she murmured, without looking—. It’s as if the universe were breathing for the first time from within.

Time appeared without warning. As he always did when something threatened to twist his course. His steps made no echo. They only creased the instant slightly.

—You weave with too much enthusiasm —he said, without a trace of tenderness.

Night lifted her gaze. Her smile did not disappear, but it grew wiser.
—And you arrive with too much fear? How strange for you, dear. I thought you’d grown used to cycles that break.

—It isn’t a cycle that’s breaking. —Time stopped at her side—. It’s one being written outside of me.

Night left the thread suspended in the air. She held it with one hand and with the other pointed downward, toward the mortal plane where Darian, still with remnants of the Dreaming upon his skin, stroked Nada’s sleeping belly.

—Look at him, Time. It isn’t danger. It’s blooming. At last someone chose not to repeat us.

—And you think the balance won’t notice? —he replied—. That child has no name in the books. He answers none of our symbols. Neither yours, nor mine, nor even Dream’s. He is a hybrid vibration that should not have been sustained.

—Oh, please —said Night softly—. How many of you have unraveled for not being able to name what you love? And now that something is born that you cannot label, you decide to call it an error?

Time frowned. The clock in his chest stopped for an instant.
—It isn’t an error —he admitted—. It’s a crack. One through which things even you don’t understand might enter.

—Like what? Like freedom? —Night whispered—. Like love without debt? Like memory without condemnation?

—Like faceless chaos —Time answered harshly—. Like symbols without a reader.

Night stood. Her figure was infinite, but not threatening. She came close to Time as one looks upon a lost child.
—My love… you measure what happens. I sometimes rock it. But this child… does not come to obey our rhythms. He comes to choose them. If he wants. When he wants.

Time lowered his gaze. His voice was no longer condemnation, but doubt.
—And if he doesn’t want to? And if he cannot carry what he is?

—Then he will fall. Like everyone. But with his own wings, not ours —Night replied—. And you, for the first time, will not be able to prevent it.

Silence.

Then Night did something she very rarely did: she laughed. Not out of scorn. Out of joy.
—Do you know what I feel? —she said, turning on herself as if dancing in the vastness—. That he is mine. That he is my blood. That at last something of me has incarnated without owing me anything.

Time, for a second, seemed to age by centuries.
—That is what frightens me most —he said.

Night looked at him with infinite tenderness.
—And that… is what makes me happiest.

San Enrique Hospital

The monitors beeped without rhythm. The lights of the operating room barely managed to contain the tremor in the doctors’ hands.

Darian was there, beside Nada, holding her sweat-damp hand.

—Breathe with me —he murmured, though he could barely hold back his own tears.

For an instant he feared losing her even before meeting his daughter. That fear pierced him deeper than any memory of the Dreaming.

Nada screamed, not only with pain, but in invocation:
—Choose her…! Promise it… to her!

The chief doctor shouted:
—She’s crowning!

And then the cry filled the room. Brief, pure, unambiguous.
A girl.

Time stopped. The air changed.
The lights flickered.
And at the foot of the bed, invisible to the doctors, three figures dressed in black appeared.
The Kindly Ones.

Darian, with the girl in his arms, faced them, trembling.
Nada looked at him from the bed, exhausted, but awake.
And thus, the three—father, mother, and daughter—were present when the judgment was pronounced.

The one in the center spoke without a mouth, with a voice that did not use air.
—The judgment he avoided… has been born with you.

Darian held his daughter tighter.
—What do you want?

—What was promised before your name —said the one on the left, whose eyes were bottomless mirrors.
—And what was sealed with his death —added the one on the right, who seemed made of threads of broken time.

—I have no debt with you —said Darian, already standing, but without letting go of the child.

—Not you —the three said in unison.
—She does.

Nada pulled herself up as best she could on the bed, tears falling.
—No! She didn’t choose this!

The one in the center inclined her face.
—And yet… she has already been chosen.

In that instant, the girl opened her eyes. They were not like Dream’s. Nor like his. They were new.
And yet, ancient.

The symbol appeared upon her brow: it did not burn, it did not bleed. It pulsed.

Darian fell to his knees.
—Is she going to die?

The central figure came one step closer.
—Not if you choose well.

The one on the left murmured:
—You cannot protect her from the weight of what she is. Only teach her to bear it.

The one on the right completed:
—If you deny it, what she is will break. And the echo will scream again without a body.

The girl sighed and went back to sleep.

Darian bowed his head.
—What must I do?

—Seal her name —the three said.
—And present her. Not as father, not as king. As witness to her beginning.

A thunderclap burst outside, though the sky was clear.
And then they vanished.

Darian remained on his knees on the floor, his daughter in his arms.
She opened her eyes, looked at him, and he felt that he was not a broken man. But a complete father.

Elsewhere in the city, Johanna Constantine closed the box she had kept for years. The seal on the lid had begun to throb, as if it were breathing. She didn’t need to open it to know what it meant: the protocol Dream had entrusted to her no longer slept.
—Shit… —she muttered, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands.
Because she understood that the charge wasn’t hers. It never had been. It belonged to the one who had just been born.
And if the Kindly Ones had already presented themselves, that was not the end of duty. It was only the beginning.

Nada called to him in a weak voice:
—What’s happening?

He walked to her, placed the girl in her arms.
—You have to hold her now.

She caressed her daughter’s brow.
—And what is her name?

Darian closed his eyes.
He knew it.
But he didn’t say it yet.
Because he knew that words have a price.
And that one, the one that would seal the story, had to be spoken by her, the mother, for it to be fulfilled.

From a corner where no one could see him, Desire watched. Not in the hospital, not in waking, but in his infinite gallery of red statues. Among the motionless bodies, the newborn seemed to shine like a wound that would never scar. Desire pressed his lips together, somewhere between fury and delight.
—This wasn’t how it was meant to be played —he whispered, stroking the rim of an empty goblet— I don’t control everything… but even the oldest judgments do not escape me.
He leaned over the child’s reflection, just a trembling echo on the polished marble.
—Welcome, little one. You are already mine, though you do not yet know it.

Chapter 22: Final Chapter: The Promise of the Unwritten

Darian appeared among the folds of the Dream, not knowing whether he had been called… or if, for the first time, the Realm had answered of its own accord.

He no longer unraveled by being there.
His steps made no echo—not because they did not exist, but because they were recognized.

Daniel stood before the empty throne.
He did not sit.
He did not touch it.
He only looked at it as one looks at an altar abandoned by someone who no longer believes.
—Is she alive? —he asked, without turning around.
—Yes —Darian replied—. Her pulse is strong. But not like ours. It’s something else.

Daniel nodded, very slightly.
—I felt it. Not from the throne. From… the river of forms. She is not a figure. She does not come to occupy a place. She comes to undo it.

Darian approached, still cautious.
—And you? Are you still the King?

Daniel smiled without a smile.
—I’m the last reflection of a mirror that no longer projects anything. This Realm… no longer needs me. It no longer recognizes me.
—Does it hurt?
—It relieves me —Daniel whispered—. For the first time… it relieves me.

There was silence. Then Daniel turned toward Darian.
—You and I were never the same. But neither were we different.
—Then what were we?

Daniel walked toward him. Slowly. As if each step said farewell to something.
—You were my echo… but you lived what I… he feared to choose. And that… makes you more real than us.

Darian did not respond at once. Only when Daniel placed in his hand a fragment of the Orb —a polished, shapeless piece that pulsed with the same rhythm as his daughter— did he understand.
—What is this?
—What remains of what I… he was. What cannot remain in me… but perhaps can grow in her. Not as duty. Not as symbol. As choice.

Darian looked at the fragment.
It was light.
But he knew that if he accepted it, there would be no turning back.
—And if she doesn’t want to? —he asked—. What if she doesn’t want to be anything we were?
—Then no one will demand it of her —Daniel replied firmly—. But if ever… if at any moment that girl raises her voice among dreams and says, “I remember”… then this will answer her.

They looked at each other.
And this time, there was no hierarchy. Only reflection.
—Thank you for not breaking —Daniel said.
—Thank you for letting me be the fragment that blooms —Darian replied.

Daniel stepped back. But he did not disappear.
He remained standing before the throne, like one who has renounced the symbol, but not the vigil.

Darian noticed. And did not let him go.
—Daniel…
The other looked at him.
—You can’t leave. Not yet.
—Why?
—Because she… my daughter… will only reign if she chooses to. But someone must hold the Realm while she decides. Someone worthy. Someone who knows what it costs to love without being able to stay.

Daniel lowered his gaze.
—That someone is no longer me.
—You are —Darian said firmly—. Precisely because you don’t want to be. Because you know what it costs. Because you’ve lost… and you’re still standing.

An instant trembled between them.
Daniel closed his eyes.
—And if the Kindly Ones come to demand judgment?
—Then let them —Darian replied—. But you will be here. Not to represent her. To protect the choice only she can make.

Daniel nodded.
Not as one who accepts a throne.
But as one who accepts not to flee anymore, becoming a guardian.
And as the cracks in the Throne Hall barely closed… the Realm, for a second, seemed to beat again.
Not with power.
With promise.

The rain had ceased hours ago, but the scent of damp earth still floated through the apartment. Nada was sitting on the sofa, the blanket rolled at her feet. She held her daughter against her chest, blouse half open, while she nursed calmly, without hurry, without fear.

Outside, the city seemed suspended. Inside, there was only that gesture: that of a mother silently recognizing what she hadn’t known she could feel.

Then it happened.
There was no gust of wind or flicker of lights. But the air grew denser, as if time itself had held its breath.
The shadows in the corners stretched.
And they appeared.

The Kindly Ones.
Three figures without defined faces, only lines of time condensed in the form of women. Weavers of judgment, bearers of the blade.

They said nothing.
They only watched.

Nada blinked, but did not scream. She did not fear. She only felt… a certainty.
Without knowing why, as if memory came from a dream she never had, she caressed her daughter’s forehead and whispered:
—Elaria.

The name was not familiar.
But it belonged to her.

At that instant, the eldest of the Kindly Ones lifted a strand. It was not thread of death. It was of decision. And one of her sisters sharpened the blade.

Then Darian opened the door.
He was carrying bags, a wet jacket over his arm, his expression still marked by the sleeplessness and wonder of recent days. But on hearing that name, he froze.

He saw Nada, holding their daughter.
He saw the Kindly Ones, preparing the blade.
And without thinking, he dropped everything.
—No! —he shouted, stepping forward—. You won’t do it!

The weavers did not move. Nor step back. They only looked at him with the stillness of those who have seen all possible endings.

—She doesn’t belong to you —Darian said, voice trembling yet firm—. This child… is not an archetype. Not a symbol. Not a debt. She’s possibility. The only one born of something you didn’t predict.

The youngest turned her face toward him.
—I won’t pay your price —he continued—. Because if you existed to preserve balance, then you must recognize this: order itself wanted her to be born. It wasn’t rupture. It was blossoming.

The thread quivered.
The blade halted a millimeter away.

Darian stepped closer, his body shaking, but his eyes burning with something new: choice.
—I will not cut my daughter’s story before she writes it —he said—. I won’t live the same fate he did. I’ll choose her, if she chooses me. And you… you will not stop that.

The silence seemed to stretch for centuries.
The Kindly Ones did not speak.
But they lowered the blade.

Not in defeat.
But as one who recognizes that history has changed.

A new strand formed between their fingers. It was golden, faint, still incomplete. But it did not come from the loom of designations.
It came from love.

The eldest looked at Darian one last time.
And nodded.
Then, the three vanished.
As if they had never been there.
As if they had only come to see if he was capable of saying it aloud.

Nada caressed her daughter’s face, not fully understanding what she had done, but sensing that somehow, she had saved her without knowing it.
Darian sat beside her, wrapped his arms around them both, and touched Elaria’s head.
—We choose you —he whispered—. Not to reign. To exist.

And deep within the Dreaming, without words, the loom trembled.
Not from rupture.
But because a new story had just been born.

Time appeared alone.
His long coat did not ripple; here, even movement did not fully obey.

At the center, three figures awaited.
The Kindly Ones, dressed in braided shadow and lidless gaze, circled a spindle that did not turn.

One spoke.
Another whispered.
The third was silent, and in that silence, the warning was woven.
—Something has been born —said the first— that was not spun by us.
—And yet it vibrates —added the second— as if rhythm belonged to it.
—That will not be well received —concluded the third, without moving her lips.

Time did not respond at once.
—Darian chose to remember —he said at last—. And to love without retreat.

The Kindly Ones looked at him in unison. Not with reproach. With a kind of pity.
—What he has done… —murmured one— will not remain on the shore.
—The cycle was not informed.
—The skein… was not authorized.

Time stepped forward. The sound of his boots was a sigh in the vastness.
—Will you tell the Maker? —he asked.
—He has already felt it —they said together.
—A new thread, without pattern.
—A vibration without prior knot.

—And Silence…? —Time dared to ask, lowering his voice.
—She does not judge.
—But she remembers.
—And when she remembers… all must fall silent again.

A tremor passed through the suspended loom.
—It was not a rupture —said Time—. It was a bifurcation.
—Then judgment will not be punishment —the three whispered, now in slow spiral—, it will be choice.
—And not of the child.
—But of the one who dreamed her… and the one who let her be dreamed.

It was then that Night appeared.
She did not walk. She did not fall. She simply was.

Her silhouette outlined itself on the curve of a horizon without line.
—Will you keep pretending this wasn’t foreseen? —she said with a faint smile—. That it wasn’t written in the oldest curve of the first pulse?

The Kindly Ones stopped.
—Not everything can be foreseen —said one.
—And even less chosen by what is not eternal —said another.
—Mortality has no jurisdiction in the loom —concluded the third.

Night laughed softly.
—And yet… the skein appeared in my hands.
Not by error.
Nor by omission.
But because someone you do not name placed it there.

Time looked at her, alert.
—Are you suggesting…?

Night lowered her voice, not out of fear, but respect.
—Do you really believe the Maker of Cycles never wanted someone to break one?
Or that Silence never awaited a voice that would not profane her, but answer her?

The Kindly Ones fell silent.
And in that silence, the loom creaked.

Time clenched his watch between his fingers. The second hand stopped moving.
—If you’re right, my love… what’s been born is not a mistake.
Nor a threat.
It’s… a possibility.

Night looked at him sideways, as only mothers look at those who do not yet understand the depth of a womb.
—And possibilities, dear, are the only thing even you… cannot fully weave.

The microwave clock blinked 00:00.
But that was not the time.

Darian stood beside the makeshift crib.
Elaria slept deeply, her fist closed as if still weaving the dream from within.

Then the curtain moved… without wind.
The air did not change.
Nor the light.
But he knew.

Time appeared first. He did not walk. He simply was.
Then, to his left, a figure wrapped in braids of shadow and eyeless gaze: a Kindly One, the one who usually kept silent.
And finally, Night. This time without smile. Without moon in her hair. Only mother. Only grandmother. Only vertex between what bleeds and what endures.

Darian did not move.
—Have you come to take something? —he asked, without raising his voice.
Time shook his head.
—It is not a moment to seize, but to remember.

The Kindly One stepped toward the crib. She did not touch the child. But her fingers brushed the air.
And the invisible thread rising from Elaria’s chest… vibrated.
—She has not yet chosen —she whispered, for the first time.

Darian swallowed.
—Chosen what?

Then Night spoke.
—Whether she wants to be symbol… or possibility.

The silence that followed was dense as the night before the first dawn.
—And if she wants to be neither? —said Darian, fists clenched.
—Then her existence will be a reflection —Time replied—. One that will resonate in both realms without belonging fully to either.

The Kindly One turned her face toward him. For an instant, her eyes seemed to contain all the unmade decisions of the world.
—That reflection… can fracture what remains.
Or renew the weave.

Night stepped closer. Placed a hand on Darian’s shoulder. For the first time, her tone was grave.
—My son… there is no judgment yet.
But there will be a moment.
When Elaria can speak for herself, when the echo she bears manifests… the Loom will summon her.

—For what? —Darian whispered.
—To know —Time replied— if the daughter of the one who remembered what Morpheus wanted to forget… wishes to be what her father never dared to be.

Silence.
Elaria stirred in her sleep.
Smiled.
And the Kindly One said, before vanishing:
—If she chooses… no one will take that name from her.
But if she does not… someone else will choose it for her.

The scene dissolved like a wet page.
Only Night remained for a moment longer.
She looked at Darian.
—Remember: visits do not impose. They only anticipate.

And then… nothing.
Only Elaria.
Sleeping.
And Darian, more awake than ever.

Nada held Elaria in her arms, cradling her against her chest.
The little one slept after feeding, her tiny hands closed, her face wrapped in that warm radiance only newborns have, as if they still did not know the world can hurt.

Then the penumbra broke without moving.
There was no sound.
Only a silence that changed its weight.

The Primordial Silence appeared first.
She did not emerge.
She did not enter.
She simply… was.
And behind her, with a step that made no sound but affected everything, came the Maker of Cycles.

Nada shuddered, not knowing why.
But her body—wise with ancient inheritance—did not flee.
She held Elaria tighter… and waited.

Silence did not speak immediately.
She approached slowly, not as an intruder, but as one who recognizes a face she had dreamed centuries ago.
—May I? —she asked, extending her arms.

Nada, without fully understanding, nodded.
Silence took Elaria in her arms with a delicacy that disarmed time itself.
She looked at her as one looks at a thread that should not exist, and yet… is perfect.
—She’s so small… —she whispered—. And yet she already vibrates in chords the world has not yet invented.

The Maker, meanwhile, stood farther back.
He watched. Not with judgment, but with the weight of one who has seen all this before… and had to destroy it.

It was then that Darian appeared at the threshold.
Shirt wrinkled, hair disheveled.
He held a cup in his hands he forgot to let go.

He saw them.
And something ancestral in his memory wanted to kneel.
—Who… are you? —he asked, with a voice half shadow.

Silence did not turn right away. Only when Elaria sighed.
—It’s our fault you don’t know —she said, without solemnity, but with a truth that needed no emphasis—. Because we were never truly present in our son’s life.
—It wasn’t out of lack of love —added the Maker, stepping closer—. It was… function. We were busy with the greater weaves. We didn’t know how to nurture. We didn’t know how to be.

Darian didn’t know what to say.
But his body did.
He took one step.
And then another.
Until he stood at a distance where it was no longer safe… but inevitable.

—Is she… in danger? —he asked, looking at his daughter.
Silence looked him straight in the eye.
And in hers there was no threat.
There was warning.
—No.
But you… you are the one under judgment, though you don’t yet know it.

The Maker continued:
—Look at yourself.
After all you’ve done.
After all you’ve broken.
Here you stand.
With the first real possibility in eons.
A life that answers none of our names.
A thread that comes from none of our looms… and yet vibrates.

Silence lowered her gaze to Elaria and caressed her forehead with a finger that seemed made not of bone or flesh, but pure presence.
—When she wakes… she won’t remember this visit.
But her shadow will.

—What do you want from her? —Darian asked, taking another step, protective.
—Nothing —said the Maker.
—Everything —said Silence.
And both answers were true.

—She has no duties —Silence added—. Unless she chooses them.
But you… you still have one pending.
The price of bringing this child into the world… cannot be paid with love alone.

The room darkened slightly.
Elaria opened her eyes for a moment.
And, not understanding, smiled.

Then the Maker sighed.
An exhalation so ancient it seemed to have been held since the first cycle of the cosmos.
—She’s beautiful… —he murmured at last, as if it hurt to admit—. Too beautiful… to survive what’s coming unless you protect her with more than courage.

Silence returned Elaria to Nada, who received her with a lump in her throat she could not explain.
—We will come again —she said, before fading—. Not as judgment. Not as salvation. Only… as family.

The Maker followed her.
But before leaving, he turned once more toward Darian.
—If she survives us… it will not be because you protected her as a father.
It will be because you did not let her choose alone.

And they vanished.
Not with light.
But with a crack in reality that Time refused to see.

Darian said nothing.
But he held Nada and Elaria at the same time.
And for the first time since he had returned… he was afraid.

Chapter 23: Epilogue: The Fractured Essence Protocol

Elsewhere in the city, Johanna Constantine slammed the window shut.
She looked toward the table.
The box.
Sealed.

The smoke rose slowly, drawing shapes that looked like ancient faces. Johanna turned her gaze away. She knew all too well what that box contained: not power, not salvation, but a seed. A fracture that Dream had left as a legacy, waiting for the precise moment when a human echo —and not an Endless— dared to bloom.

She held it in her hands. The seal pulsed like a heart that wasn’t hers, claiming a bearer.
—Not me… —she whispered—. It was never meant for me.

She stubbed out the cigarette, set the box back on the table, and walked away with heavy steps.
But the heartbeat continued, soft and relentless, as if each pulse repeated the same promise:
they will come for me.

And Johanna, for the first time in a long while, felt fear.
Not for herself.
But because she understood that sooner or later, someone would knock on her door to claim what Morpheus had left unfinished.