The Unborn Dreamer's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The Vessel pressed herself against the dead tree and prayed the light inside her would hold still. It would not. The Dreamer turned under her skin, cold starlight folded into a shape that breathed, and the glow seeped through her like blue water through cloth. She had one goal now: reach the broken altar where her lineage first bargained for a dreamer's heir. That was where the birth would make her someone. But the light was a lantern in a dark wood, and the dark wood was hungry. They came for the glow. Shapes with too many eyes slid closer across the barren ground. One reached for her belly. She stumbled back, blue fluid weeping from her arms, and knew she could not walk one more step unseen. Not like this. The Dreamer was a beacon, and every starving thing in the valley wanted it. "Pretty light." The voice came from a man no taller than a child. Freddy pushed through the grasping shapes, bladed glove scraping the tree bark. The reaching things shrank from him. "They'll strip you for it. Won't even wait for the kid to drop." "Help me," the Vessel said. "Hide it. Hide me." Freddy tilted his hat. "I don't hide things. I hunt them." He studied the glow pulsing under her skin. "But a dream that walks? That's new. Let's see who can bury it." A woman stepped from the shadow of the tree. Red eyes, bloody hair down her corset dress. The reaching things fled her entirely. The Vessel had never met her, but the valley belonged to this one. Anneliese, keeper of nightmares. "Light like that isn't mine to keep," Anneliese said. She looked at the Vessel the way a woman looks at a leak in her roof. "But it draws every door-breaker in my valley. I'll cover it." A third voice answered, flat and small. A nun in black robes, yellow eyes, a cross at her throat. Sister Valak had come for the glow too. "The light is a door," she said. "I open doors." "Not this one," Anneliese said. The two women faced each other. The Vessel felt the Dreamer kick, bright and desperate. She made her choice fast. She dropped to her knees and pressed her belly to the dead tree's roots. "Take the shine," she begged the keeper. "Not the child. Just the shine." Anneliese knelt and laid both hands on the Vessel's stomach. The glow poured out of the skin and into the bloody hair, into the corset, swallowed. The Dreamer went dark. The breathing shape still moved, but no light escaped. The reaching things lost her scent and scattered. Sister Valak watched the dark settle. "You hid the door," she said. "You did not close it." Then she was gone. The Vessel stood. She could walk now, unseen, toward the broken altar. But the light lived in Anneliese's hair now, and the keeper would want it back.