The dreams were never like this.

  Lyra’s dreams were usually of light: the shifting, liquid light of Rylar’s sky-temples, the warm glow of her mother’s smile, the bright, safe colors of her chambers in the Celestial Temple. This was not light. This was a place.

  She stood in a corridor of impossible geometry. Walls of seamless, dark metal curved upwards into a gloom that swallowed any ceiling. The air was still and silent, a silence so complete it pressed against her eardrums. It smelled of ozone and cold stone, a smell that had never touched the perfumed gardens of Terra Primius.

  This is a bad dream, she thought, and the thought itself felt thin and small in the vast quiet.

  But she wasn’t afraid. Not yet. She was a princess of Rylar. She was curious.

  She walked, her bare feet making no sound on the cool floor. The corridor branched, then branched again, a labyrinth of grim, featureless metal. It felt like the inside of a giant, dead machine from a long forgotten age. And then, she saw a door.

  It was not like the other seams in the wall. It was ornate, a circle of intricate, interlocking symbols carved into the metal, and at its center, a soft, rhythmic pulsation of green light leaked through the cracks. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Like a heartbeat.

  Her own heart answered it. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.

  Without knowing why, she reached out. The symbols under her fingertips were ice-cold, but the light was warm. The door wasn’t locked. At her touch, the circle split with a soft hiss and irised open, revealing not another corridor, but a small, spherical vault.

  In the center, on a pedestal of the same dark metal, sat a locket.

  It was beautiful. A teardrop of polished silver, etched with fine, swirling lines that seemed to move in the faint light. At its core, the same green pulse glowed. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It called to her. It sang a song of terrible age, of power so vast it was lonely, of a secret kept for ten thousand years. The loneliness in the song made her want to cry for it.

  She didn’t think. She was dreaming, after all, so she floated forward and picked it up.

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  It was warm. The pulse vibrated through her palm, syncing with her heartbeat. The song grew louder in her mind, a symphony of isolation and whispered might. She held a star’s secret. She held a god’s sorrow.

  "WHAT ARE YOU?"

  The voice was not a sound. It was the air turning to knives. It was the silence shattering into a billion screaming fragments. It was inside her skull.

  Lyra froze. In the doorway of the vault, a presence coalesced. Not a man. A concept given form: rage, ambition, and ancient, cunning intellect. He was tall, clad in robes of shifting shadow, his face was a grey metal skeleton and wearing armor to match, or perhaps that was his body, but his eyes… his eyes glowed sickly green with hate. They were fixed on the locket in her hand. On her.

  "PUT. IT. DOWN, THIEF! …no, no, it cannot be!" He felt it, they both did, it was the feeling Everliving got in each other’s presence, and she was so powerful that he could feel it in his dream.

  The command was a tidal wave of will meant to crush planets. But laced within it, underneath the monumental fury, was something else. Something that turned Lyra’s blood to ice.

  Fear.

  He was terrified. Of her. A little girl in a nightdress, holding a shiny locket.

  His terror was more real, more contagious, than any monster from a story. It was the terror of a god seeing the first crack in its immortal vault. It flooded her, colder than the metal walls.

  She gasped, the dream-world unraveling. The vault, the presence, his screaming, terrified eyes: they all stretched into streaks of dark light.

  Lyra sat bolt upright in her bed, a scream trapped in her throat. She was in her opulent chamber in the Celestial Temple. Moonlight filtered through the gossamer curtains. The familiar scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air. Safe. Home.

  She was trembling. Sweat plastered her nightdress to her skin. Her right hand was clenched so tightly her nails bit into her palm.

  Slowly, forcing her fingers to uncurl, she opened her fist.

  There, lying in the sweat-damp center of her palm, was the locket.

  The silver was cool now, the sickly green pulse diminished to a faint, sleepy glow. Thump… thump… It was real. She had pulled it out of the dream.

  She stared at it, her breath coming in short, shaky hitches. She had no idea what it was. She only knew two things with absolute, child-certainty: the beautiful, lonely song it sang was the most important thing she had ever heard, and the man in the dream, the terrifying, powerful man, had been more afraid of her than she had been of him.

  Carefully, she looped the fine silver chain around her neck. The locket settled against her chest, its faint pulse beating in time with her heart. A secret. Her secret.

  She lay back down, pulling the silken covers up to her chin. She clutched the locket in her small hand, its solid reality an anchor in a world that had just become much, much larger and stranger. Within minutes, exhausted by terror and wonder, she was asleep.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road