She could feel hands on her skin, fingers in her hair, gently shifting it away from her face. Strong arms banded around her as her body was pressed against a solid chest that rose and fell beneath her cheek. Voices surrounded her, layered and frantic, yet they reached her as though filtered through deep water, distorted and distant. She tried to open her eyes, but no matter how hard she fought, her lids refused to lift.
Then the world fell away.
She was suspended in a void of nothingness, weightless and unmoored, surrounded by countless lines of glowing threads. There were so many of them, far more than she could count. They floated before her, weaving and drifting in slow, hypnotic patterns. Each one emitted a low, irresistible hum, a siren song that curled around her senses and beckoned her forward. To touch. To taste. To feast.
They were the most enthralling things she had ever seen. She watched, transfixed, as they danced and intertwined, luminous against the endless dark. The longer she stared, the more certain she beca that reaching for them was inevitable. She could so easily lift her hand and brush her fingers against one.
Without thinking, her hand reached out to do just that. It felt instinctual, as though guided by sothing old and buried inside of her.
Her finger made contact with a glowing thread, and it imdiately seeped into her skin. As it did, a dull flash of warmth blood just beneath the surface, spreading outward in gentle waves. She traced her finger through a second thread, then a third, and a fourth. Each ti, the sa warmth followed. It was comforting, almost soothing.
Then her attention shifted.
A small cluster of threads floated apart from the others, and they glowed sharper sohow. They felt different even before she touched them, as though they carried a heavier presence. Still, she reached for them.
The mont her finger made contact, the reaction was imdiate and violent.
Pain exploded in her abdon, flaring bright and hot. It was so intense it nearly folded her in on herself, leaving her montarily dazed and gasping. It felt like being stabbed all over again. For a terrifying heartbeat, she saw him, the man who had driven the blade into her. His image flashed before her.
She sensed him standing right there, occupying the space where those different threads hovered.
It made no sense. It couldn’t be real and yet the vision had been too vivid to be dismissed as imagination.
Still, the threads continued to seep into her skin.
In her distress, more and more of them burrowed into her, flooding her from the inside. Each thread that sank into her flesh seed to siphon away a fraction of the pain. Slowly, her breathing steadied. The wheezing stopped. The agony dulled until it beca nothing more than a low hum at the back of her mind, a distant echo of what it once was.
Eventually, there were barely any glowing threads left.
Circe felt heavy with their power. She could feel it pooled in her chest, coursing through her veins, threaded through the very fiber of her soul. It was vast and unfamiliar, yet undeniably hers. But when the last of the glowing threads faded away, the void collapsed in on itself, plunging her once more into abject darkness.
When she opened her eyes again, she found herself back in the cave from her dreams.
She was not alone.
On the far side of the cerulean pool sat the woman who had tornted her subconscious, the sa woman who wore her mother’s face. It had been a while since Circe had last been summoned here, long enough that she had begun to believe she was finally free of whatever force kept dragging her back. That belief crumbled the mont their gazes t.
She had been wrong.
As Circe stared at her, sothing shifted. The woman before her was less a woman now and more of sothing other, a being whose power oozed from its very essence.
Circe didn’t know why she could sense it now when she hadn’t before, but it felt as though a veil had been lifted from her senses. Her vision sharpened. Her hearing deepened. Even her sense of sll seed keener, more aware.
She could feel the strange pulse of magic humming through the cave, could see the way the pool shimred with an unearthly glow, as though the water itself were alive. When she shifted her weight, she beca acutely aware of a deep well of raw power coiled inside her.
The woman spoke first, her voice cutting cleanly through the silence.
"I help you unlock your powers," she said calmly, "and the first thing you do is block from accessing your dreams."
There was no anger in her tone. If anything, she sounded faintly amused.
Circe’s brows furrowed in confusion. It was true that she hadn’t had any disturbing dreams in a while, but she hadn’t known she was responsible for it, or even knew how she might have done it.
"What powers are you talking about?" Circe asked, stepping closer to the edge of the water. "If I truly blocked you from reaching , then why am I here?"
Even as a child, she had suspected she wasn’t normal. But hearing it spoken aloud sent a strange mix of dread and vindication through her.
The woman’s expression didn’t change. "It’s because you are still inexperienced," she replied smoothly. "When you fed your powers and healed yourself, you dropped all the barriers you had erected, including the one you put in place to keep out."
Circe fell silent, absorbing her words. She studied the woman for a long mont, turning the revelation over and over in her mind. Then sothing occurred to her, sothing she had never considered before. And once the thought took root, it refused to let go.
"Am I still in Lamora whenever you bring here?" she asked. She knew her body always remained behind in Ragnar’s bed whenever she was drawn into this place, but the sa could not be said for her mind. That part of her slipped free too easily, untethered and wandering. She did not even know where this place truly was.
"This cave is in Lamora, so there is no need to worry," the woman said.
Circe suspected the words were ant to be reassuring, but the woman must have known nothing at all about comforting people, because she failed at it spectacularly.
The woman’s mouth curled when she ntioned Lamora, and disgust flashed across her face before it vanished as though it had never been there.
Circe stared at her without blinking. "But you are not."
The woman’s lips stretched into a wide smile that was vicious and utterly terrifying. "You are very clever," she said smoothly. "Just like your mother."
Circe knew she should have felt fear standing before a being like this, a spirit whose nature she could not na, whose intentions might have been malevolent for all she knew. But her exhaustion weighed heavier on her mind than terror. A type of bone-deep exhaustion that dulled every sharp edge of panic. In that mont, she wanted only answers, and the creature before her was the only one who could give them.
"How do you know my mother?" Circe asked.
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