II

Alana’s dreams that night were not the abstract fantasies of brightly-colored escapements that she longed for every time she crawled into their worn cot at the end of the day. Instead, moments after she closed her eyes, she knew that she was once again reliving a memory that had replayed over and over a hundred times before. There was never a way to change it; though Old Gods know she’d tried. Dejectedly, she watched the scene unfold before her.

She and Rafi had been playing in the maze; racing across rooftops, chasing birds. His childish squeals of delight were the brightest sound she’d ever heard in Clearwall and she couldn’t help but whoop in solidarity. This was life. This was everything she could ever want.

Smiles plastered across windswept faces, the siblings tore across the city together, young, free, and—above all—together. Their laughter brightened the sun and echoed through alleyways, and Alana remembered hoping that they could live like this forever.

But then, just as the thought occurred to her, the town grew quiet, and Rafi was no longer beside her. She searched for him, but her familiar taunts and birdcalls went unanswered as she tried in vain to get Rafi to respond. A million terrified possibilities paralyzed her. Had he fallen? Had the Proclaimers caught him? Had one of the merchants held a grudge? Frightened, Alana retraced her steps, her heart hammering in her chest as she continuously called for her brother, using all the languages they’d made up over the years. All the whistles and secret codes. All of his usual routes were empty. No one answered her cries.

The silence was broken suddenly when the hollow clangs of the temple bells sounded over Clearwall with an ominous toll. The birds that she and Rafi had not already startled from their roosts filled the air with a fluttering of wings in the aftermath of the bells’ mournful peal.

Consciously, Alana knew that the market in the temple’s courtyard was always busy—filled with chatter and merchants shouting their wares. There had never been a time when Clearwall was truly silent. But as she wandered through this foggy dreamscape, everything was muffled, and she could only hear her frightened calls and the insistent toll of the great iron bells. She wandered aimlessly, looking for Rafi amongst the crowd. The people of Clearwall passed her without noticing.

Finally, Alana came to the temple courtyard, settled now without even the echoes of the bells to fill the silence. The people in the open space still passed her in throngs, shouting wares and obscenities that barely reached her ears. They still jostled each other, trying to find room in the overflowing space. But everyone seemed faded, worn. They passed Alana like shades, never noticing her as they briefly inhabited the space on either side of her before dissolving into the mist that cloaked the marketplace. Alana pressed on, knowing already what she would find.

In the center of that bustling market, there was a single solitary figure, untouched as the throng of citizens moved around it like water around a stone. Alana tried to stop her feet, tried not to reopen that terrifying box that still, after all this time, haunted her memories and dreams, but she was compelled. She approached her brother with a shaking hand.

“Rafi? What’s wrong?” The words tumbled from her lips just like they had that first time and a hundred times since. She tried to pretend she hadn’t said them. Tried to change the dream.

But there was no escaping it, and for the first and hundredth time she saw her brother’s unfocused eyes as he stared vacantly at the temple and its alabaster columns looming against the slate-grey sky. Its beautiful, disfigured statues and carved, irregularly-jagged front stared impassively back, and in that moment Alana somehow knew with a dreaded certainty that Rafi saw it without the chips and chiseled scars. She tried to pull him away from the place again, afraid to see his eyes, afraid to hear the words she knew were coming. But he was like a pillar in himself, and a sudden wind howled around them, tossling his hair as she touched his shoulder.

 And in that moment of contact, she saw what he saw: a temple unbroken. Its face adorned with deep rigid symbols she could not comprehend and its disfigured statues whole with braids and breastplates carved from gleaming stone. Even in her dream, Alana repressed a scream, slamming shut doors inside her mind with all the willpower she could muster. It worked, and she forcefully shoved the ghostly image back out of existence, leaving only the defaced temple and its stark, piercing reality unmarred by the soft dreamlike qualities that Rafi still stared at.

Again, Alana tried to convince Rafi not to look. To shut the doors, to close his eyes. Not to see. But his unfocused pupils roamed tirelessly over the defaced surface of the temple. They were so intent, so piercing that she knew he was looking at something specific, tracing it with his eyes as he sought to understand what only he could see.

Then, Rafi’s mouth opened and the word that Alana would come to know as the first true crack in the dam slipped between his lips.

“Li…Library.” A pause. A scrunched up face. “Lana. What’s a library?”

Alana’s guts filled with cold water. It was the first witchy word Rafi had ever spoke, but she knew in that moment that things would never be the same. She’d never be able to slam the doors shut for Rafi now that he had entered them willingly. She would never be able to protect him from the ghostlike world he’d brought them both to unintentionally. She’d cut herself off from that shifting, superimposed realm out of fear and willpower in the first instant she saw it—but Rafi had seen the cracked door and chosen to open it further. And Alana felt her grip on his shoulders loosen beneath her hands, even as she worked to hold him tighter.

From the temple, she could feel Madame Elise’s eyes on both of them.

Alana woke in a cold sweat, shivering under their blanket. Next to her, Rafi exhaled silently through parted lips and she slowly relaxed as she watched his frail chest rise and fall. Again, she wished she’d been able to shut the door for him during that first frightful experience in the temple courtyard years ago. Again, she wished she’d been able to protect him from those visions that were both real and not. But she had failed, and now the door would not shut at all. Rafi walked back and forth through its gaping, terrifying maw without awareness, and with ever-increasing frequency. Again, Alana prayed to whatever gods were left that she could protect him from it.

Again, there was no response except for a flutter of ashes in an icy wind and a hollow pang in her heavy heart.

Next Chapter: Sneak Peek