The Moon Waits

Dream Between Worlds

Lorcan first saw her in a dream.

But it did not feel like sleep.

It felt like falling.

There was no ground beneath him—only ash drifting upward instead of down, as though the world itself had forgotten which direction grief was meant to move. Darkness stretched endlessly around him, cold and silent, while fragments of ruined towers floated like broken memories suspended in the void.

And in the center of that weightless ruin stood a girl he had never met.

Yet something inside him shattered at the sight of her.

She was not fully formed. Not at first. Her figure flickered like smoke beneath moonlight, delicate and unreal, as though she were a memory struggling to become flesh. Like a name the universe had tried desperately to erase... and failed.

Then she turned.

And looked at him.

Not through him. Not past him.

Into him.

As though she had always known where he would stand in every lifetime he had ever lived.

"Find me," she whispered softly, though her lips barely moved. "Before the moon completes its turn... or I will be lost to you forever."

Lorcan woke with a violent gasp.

Silver dust coated his tongue as he choked for air, his chest burning as though invisible claws had carved something from inside him and left only emptiness behind. Moonlight spilt across his chamber walls, pale and cold.

His trembling gaze fell to his wrist.

The mark.

The strange symbol he had carried since birth—one he had always believed was meaningless—was glowing faintly beneath his skin.

Across an impossible fracture of existence, Aveline awoke at the exact same moment.

Her world was too perfect to trust.

Above her stretched a crystalline sky, layered with glass-like clouds that imprisoned the moon like a watching eye that never blinked. Light poured over everything in sharp silver streams, too flawless, too controlled, too clean to feel real.

But Aveline had always seen what others could not.

Tiny fractures.

Hairline cracks hidden within perfection, like glass beginning to remember it was once broken.

And through one of those fractures...

She had seen him.

A boy standing in ruin while ash fell around him like mourning snow. His dark hair moved with the wind of a dying world, and his storm-grey eyes locked onto hers with such devastating familiarity that her breath caught in her throat.

As though he were the only real thing left in existence.

When Aveline awoke, blood slipped from her nose in thin crimson streams, warm against her lips. Pain throbbed behind her eyes, sharp and unbearable, as though her mind had been forced to carry memories that did not belong to her.

Yet somehow, impossibly—

She already knew his name.

Lorcan.

And he knew hers.

Aveline.

Neither understood how.

The dreams returned every night after that.

Without mercy.

Without explanation.

Each vision pulled them closer together, threading their souls across worlds that should never have touched.

------

"Father, I have told you countless times," Lorcan said through clenched teeth, "I do not wish to marry Lilith. My heart longs for someone else."

"Enough!"

The King of the Ash Realm's voice thundered across the hall like cracking stone.

"You have repeated this nonsense for years, Lorcan," the king snapped, rising from his obsidian throne. Shadows twisted beneath his feet like living smoke. "You are twenty-five years old. You will marry the woman I choose."

Lorcan's jaw tightened, but he remained silent.

"If I die before you produce an heir," the king continued coldly, "you will never ascend the throne. The bloodline cannot end with you."

The room fell heavy with silence.

At last, the king sighed, exhaustion briefly piercing his anger.

"This is the final time we will have this discussion. You will obey me—not only as your father, but as your king."

Lorcan lowered his gaze, frustration burning beneath his skin.

"Then give me time," he said quietly. "Just a little more time."

Without waiting for permission, he turned and left the hall, his cloak trailing behind him like smoke, leaving the King of Ashes alone in simmering fury.

Lorcan lived in the Ash Realm—a kingdom scarred by forgotten wars where cities crumbled beneath eternal grey skies and outlawed magic still breathed beneath broken stone.

And lately, the realm had begun whispering to him.

He heard things before they happened.

Voices hidden in ash.

Echoes of choices not yet made.

Fragments of futures that clawed their way into his mind while he slept.

And always, beneath it all—

Her voice.

Soft. Distant. Unrelenting.

Threading itself through his thoughts like a wound that refused to heal.

Meanwhile, in the Glass Moon World, Aveline's visions grew stronger with every passing hour.

At first, Lorcan had appeared only in dreams.

Now she saw him everywhere.

In reflections.

In fractured mirrors.

In the spaces between light.

Not as an illusion, but as an intrusion.

A boy whose existence pressed so violently against her reality that the world itself seemed to crack around him.

And with every vision, both of them weakened.

As though something unseen was pulling pieces of their souls through the divide between worlds.

It was Aveline who first discovered the mark.

An ancient symbol burnt faintly into the skin of her wrist, glowing silver whenever thoughts of Lorcan crossed her mind.

When Lorcan uncovered the same mark upon his own wrist, his glowed differently—dark as bleeding shadow.

Identical.

Yet opposite.

Through fractured glimpses and fleeting moments where the barrier between worlds thinned like a dying breath, they slowly began to understand.

Their connection was not coincidence.

It was something far older.

Far more dangerous.

They were bound.

And the moon knew.

It had always known.