Chapter 6. The Bond Bleeds

Selene slept.

But it was not sleep in any human sense of the word. It was a plunge—sudden, suffocating—into something old and dense, as though she had been pulled beneath the surface of molten earth and left to sink. Her body lay still, her lungs rose and fell like bellows, yet beneath it all her blood moved to a rhythm that was not her own. Something deep within her was shifting, aligning itself to a cadence she had never learned.

She dreamed, but not in fragments or wandering impressions. The dream had shape. Intention. It unfolded with an unnerving precision, like a memory pressed into her mind without permission.

She stood barefoot in a clearing unlike any she had ever known. The sky above was neither black nor violet but a burning convergence of both, as if dusk had caught fire and never been allowed to fade. The