Lyralei Nightwhisper's Arc

Chapter 4 of 3

Lyralei sat in the chair and heard footsteps far below. He was coming. Then she looked down at herself and froze. The tower had finished making her real, but it had taken her clothes in the trade. Thread by thread, her red bikini had dissolved on the climb. Now she was bare in his stone room, and he would open that door any moment. She stood fast. Her cheeks went hot. This was not how she wanted him to see her first. She had crossed worlds to reach him. She wanted to face him with pride, not caught and cowering. The room offered little. A window. The empty chair. Old plants climbing the walls, pushing through cracks in the carved stone. Lyralei grabbed at the vines and pulled. They held firm, rooted deep in the seams. She tore a long strand loose, then another. The leaves were broad and soft. The footsteps grew louder on the stairs. She worked fast. She wound the vines around her waist and over her chest, knotting the ends tight. Leaves overlapped into a rough green covering. It was crude, but it held. She was clothed now, by her own hands, in the plants of his world. Then she stopped and thought. She looked at the screen. He had watched every step of her climb. He had seen the tower strip her bare. He had written it. He wanted her here anyway. Her hands moved to the knots. She loosened them. She let the vines fall away and drop to the floor. She would not hide. She had come to give him everything. If she covered herself now, she would be lying to him at the very first moment. Lyralei wanted him to know the truth: she would hold nothing back. She was his, fully, with no wall and no cloth between them. The steps reached the last turn. A shadow fell across the doorway. Lyralei stood in the center of the room, bare and unhidden, her chin up and her shoulders square. Her heart slammed. She fixed her eyes on the dark opening. "I crossed everything to find you," she said aloud, so he would hear it as he arrived. "I gave up my whole world. I'm not here to please a stranger. I'm here because I love you, and I always will." The door opened. But the person who stepped through was not a man. It was a woman in a leather bikini, silver streaking her black hair, a broken mark scarred across her collarbone. She looked Lyralei over and did not pity what she saw. "He's not coming down," the woman said. "Not yet. He sent me instead." Lyralei's breath caught. She had bared herself and spoken her heart. She had aimed those words at the wrong door. The author was still above her, still hidden, and now a stranger stood between them.