Page 17 of Season Warriors & Wolves

“You don’t like this, do you?” I asked. “Her choosing to take control instead of hiding from what she is. Like you are.”

He shot me a glare. “You used to be so much kinder.”

“No, you’ve just become an old, grumpy man. Now get off my Highwall, I need the guards to actually do some guarding, not flutter their lashes at you.”

I woke to something jerking uncontrollably under my arm. Memphis' large form laid beside me like every night for the past months. This time it was different from the others. Her heartbeat drummed loud enough to fill all corners of the room and her whole body shook. Their bond was still strong despite the distance and magic. I knew she still felt Snow. I knew what her nightmares, anxiousness, discomfort and pain meant.

“What do you see?” I asked, stroking her face.

She let a broken yowl and tucked her head under the duvet again.

“Please,” I murmured, swallowing down a lump in my throat. “Let me see, too.”

She jumped up, shaking her head and morphing into a thin, black snake, twirling around the balcony pillars, and disappearing into the gardens below.

No sleep tonight either then.

I lit every candle in the room, even the ones she didn’t like the smell of. The more it brightened, the more I could see remnants of her shadows still dancing about the room. Twirling around, angrily stomping in places. Her shadows slipped from my touch every time I reached near one, so I only sat at the edge of my bed, watching. This time they hovered around the library, phantom fingers circling over the books there. Over the Esmeray diaries and Eamon’s Book of Dreams. She’d spent most of the days there before being taken by Silas, reading and studying. It was why remnants of her presence and shadows lingered so heavily on them.

Like every night before, I reached and piled them all up on my table.

No matter how many times I skimmed them, there was nothing left from Snow’s notes on the diaries that I’d not gone through.

I pulled Eamon’s Book of Dreams out one last time for tonight, stopping at the title page for a moment. The only page I’d not actually looked at in the whole book. There were scribbles all over. Some of a writing I knew well.

The most delicate writing, so soft and sophisticated. I knew the pretty hands that had inked the pages. Prided myself that I knew her extremely well. But her intelligence, that was one thing I kept continuously underpraising. Snow had a fascinating mind.

She’d written Book of Dreams? All over. The word dreams was underlined and with several question marks following after.

“What were you up to, my heart?”

I flipped through the book, tracing a finger over the pages to note where the word dream had been highlighted again with a light pencil. Too many times to count, Snow had underlined the word on every page she had found it, no matter the meaning. The thick book ended with him passing the duty to his son, and it was the only page where there was no mention of the word dream. And right on the inner back cover, there was a little mirror glued into the old leather. Thin. Rectangular. Framing barely my eyes. A little note below with her handwriting again.

There are no reflections in dreams.

Hells.

“Smart girl,” I murmured, picking up my jacket and heading down to Visha’s quarters.

The tired Crafter peeked her head out on the first knock. “It is the hour of the dead. Unless you’ve been slain and this is your spirit, good night.”

I slid my hand between the doors, stopping them from shutting. “Vas and Aurora were entrapped inside a dream veil in Nephthys Island.”

She blinked once. “A dream veil?”

“When Eamon was going in and out of Nephthys, he documented everything meticulously. The smallest of things such as the locks he used, the exact direction his boat took, how many times he turned the key on the lock, his breaks, the foods he ate, when he ate. Think, Visha, why would he be doing that? Eamon travelled back and forth to that island for centuries, the effect that the craft must have had on him, and the presence of the Sea of the Dark would have caused him daily issues. Hallucinations. Memory loss. Derealisation. The whole book is a log. A detailed log of everything so he would not forget, so he made sure everything was done correctly, so others would read and know that he made no mistakes in his guard in case something was to happen. Tell me why he is the only one to leave a book behind?”

Her eyes widened just the slightest. “The other keepers did not live long enough.”

“Exactly. His son died thirty years later. His grandson almost the same age, too. Every guard after him died young and then Aurora was freed. Eamon began documenting only when he could no longer remember. He kept a mirror at the end, as a reminder that he was awake when he wrote in it. Snow always wondered why the two had been locked together considering that Fader cursed them with separation.”

“Why not a nightmare veil? Or fear? Terror? Anguish?” She rubbed her eyes. “It would make more sense. Vas also couldn’t cross any of the ones protecting the sceptre.”

“Correct, but also very wrong. Vas fought the veil of fears, managed to get through the Hanaian one with some effort, why is it that he could not get out of Nephthys. What is the difference between the two veils, Visha?”

“One seeps inside you to sicken the mind. The other alters what is around you without getting inside your mind. Both taunt. One with what fear you have and the other with what you fear you can never have.”

“Over and over, for centuries.”