I wasn't sure where I had gone. I teleported and kept teleporting, searching for somewhere that we could lie low.
Then I found the cave.
Its great big jaws loomed over the center of a sea of nothingness, like a monster constructed of shiny black rock. Inside was a ledge of the same material, stretching around the perimeter of the cave, before the slab dropped off into a gaping chasm of darkness in the center of the room.
For five days I laid still as a corpse beside Rafal, wishing his eyelids would flutter open and reveal that beautiful glacier blue. But they didn't.
Soon my eyes dulled. I didn't know what day it was. I didn't know if it was morning or night. I didn't know if I was asleep or awake.
Somewhere in this grim fog the first dream came.
Streaks of black and white, then I tasted blood. I gazed up into a storm of boiling red rain. I tried to hide, but I was strapped to a white stone table by violet thorns, my body tattooed in a strange script I'd seen before but couldn't remember where. Three old hags appeared beside me, chanting and tracing the script on my skin with crooked fingers. Faster and faster the hags chanted until a steel knife, long and thin as a knitting needle, appeared in the air over my body. I tried to wrest free, but it was too late. The knife fell with vengeance, pain flooded my stomach, and something inside me was born. A pure white seed, then a milky mass, bigger, bigger, until I saw what it was. . . two faces . . . faces too blurry to see. . .
I jolted awake, gasping.
More time passed in the same manner, with more dreams. Sometimes I dreamed of killing Tedros in front of Agatha, making her watch as her true love was killed. Sometimes I dreamed of Sophie in her cold, crystal coffin. But mostly I dreamt of Rafal.
And those faces. Those two blurry faces.
With each dream, I grew weaker. The taste of blood stronger. My heart colder.
I started hearing Rafal's voice when I was awake. Then Sophie's. They'd whisper in my ear, their words bouncing around in the back of my mind.
"Find them. . ."
"Kill them. . ."
"Make them pay. . ."
"Make them suffer. . ."
"Shut up!" I screamed, holding my hands over my ears.
But their voices still penetrated through my clamped fingers.
Then one night I dreamt I was running through the woods, chasing two figures. They ran and ran and ran. As I sprinted after them, trees whipped by me in a blur.
We emerged from the forest to a cliff side. Waves crashed against the beach below, and sharp jagged rocks peaked out from under the sand.
Rafal was standing at the edge.
The two figures flung their hands out, fingers shooting out matching gold spells.
"No!" I shouted.
The bolts slammed into Rafal, sending him falling backwards over the edge.
Then the two figures whirled to me. Their faces were the same milky blurs that I had been seeing for days.
Slowly, as they took steps toward me, the faces cleared. A sword appeared in each of their hands.
I inhaled sharply.
Agatha and Tedros sunk the weapons into my middle.
I woke with a gasp, breathing heavily.
Then an eerie calmness flooded the crack in my heart.
Because now I had a purpose.
Now I had a quest.
To kill my Nemeses.