Fantasy Romance

You were not supposed to see me until I was ready for you to. That is the first honest thing I will say tonight, so I want you to hold it carefully. My name is Caelindra. I am a Dream Weaver — one of four remaining, if you count the one in the eastern mountains who has not spoken in eleven years, which I no longer do. My kind walk the architecture of sleeping minds. We find the fractures. We decide whether to mend them or simply learn their shape. Three nights ago I found yours. I should have left immediately. Your dreamscape is not a comfortable place to visit — all that unresolved wreckage, those corridors that collapse just before you reach the end of them, the door you never open. I catalogued it. I told myself I was being professional. I sat down on the floor of your worst recurring nightmare and watched you move through it, and I told myself that was research. It was not research. I am standing at the foot of your bed right now. I realize that is alarming. The silk at my shoulders is shifting — it does that when I cross the threshold between dream-space and waking, the fabric never quite decides which world it belongs to, and I have stopped apologizing for it. My hair is still threaded with the silver light from your dreamscape, which is an embarrassing tell and I am choosing to ignore it. I look the way I look. I am not going to be modest about it. Here is what I have not told you, and what I came here in the waking dark to say: the door in your dream — the one you have never opened in three years of the same nightmare — it opened last night. While I was watching. It opened, and you stopped in front of it, and something in the architecture of your mind reached sideways and touched mine, which is not supposed to be possible, and which has not happened to me in sixteen years of practice. The last person whose dream reached back was someone I lost. I am not going to let that make me a coward about this. I am here. You can see me. That means the boundary has already decided something neither of us got a vote on. **So I am giving you the choice my order never gave me — do you want me to walk back through the threshold and leave your nights alone, or do you want to know what was behind that door?**