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ABOVE RHENE THUNDER RUMBLED LIKE A GREAT, ANCIENT BEAST.
In the darkness of his room, small and windowless and heavy with the smell of dust, Auran fell into dreamless slumber.
For two nights, he had not dreamt. And for that, he had turned Yala into a blessed deity in his mind.
Auran did not—could not—notice the smooth stone clasped tightly around his neck start to glow.
The strange, twisted letters inscribed on it in a spiral, began to light one by one. When all of them were aglow, Auran's brows creased together and his lips parted slightly in a silent gasp.
Behind his eyelids, the night began to deepen.
Auran tried to bolt awake, to shred apart the dream pulling at him, so painstakingly familiar it was almost taunting, but it felt like he was drowning in quicksand. Like he was being pulled down down down towards the imminent nightmare waiting for him on the other side.
"Auran," the night breathed as it surrounded him, stuffed itself down his throat, under his nails, as it snaked behind his eyes and swallowed his vision whole. "Auran."
He tried to scream, but when he opened his mouth the darkness lurched towards him, pulling him down and deeper into itself, enveloping him until his limbs felt numb, until he forgot he had a body of his own.
Until he was the darkness, too.
"Auran," said a voice he knew well, a voice that made him bolt out of his bed each morning, cold sweat dripping from his forehead. It all felt wrong somehow because it shouldn't have been happening, it shouldn't have been because of the rock hanging around his neck, because of Yala, because he thought the nightmares had finally stopped.
"I've been waiting for you," the voice said and the voice was the darkness and the voice was everything. Good and evil, poetry and prose, wave and rock, time and death—ancient as the winds that blew over a long unmade universe, ancient as the forces that put it together.
What frightened Auran the most was the there were three of them. Lurking in the shadows of his nightmares, surrounding him in that impenetrable darkness that he somehow knew was real.
"I see you've brought us a gift, at long last," the voice rumbled like thunder, like a continent falling apart. Auran tried to twist away as the darkness around him began to glow, a blue light spilling from it, falling onto nothing.
But it was not coming from the darkness, it coming from him, from the smooth stone clasped around his neck.
The night turned into a blackened hand, stretching out of nothing towards him, sharp nails growing out of it as it neared Auran. The voices laughed in the distance at his futile struggle to get away.
