Kaida
I knew immediately that this was not Caelum’s dream.
There was no candlelight. No cold galleries, no perfect roses, no evidence of a man who had spent centuries arranging his world exactly as he wanted it. This place had not been arranged by anyone. It had simply happened, the way grief happened, without permission or design.
I stood at the edge of a forest and looked in.
The trees were dead. Every one of them. Not fallen, not rotting — standing, but stripped of everything that made them trees. No leaves, no bark in places, the pale wood beneath exposed like bone. They went on as far as I could see in every direction, rank after rank of them, silent and grey and utterly still. No wind moved through them. There was nothing for wind to move.
The sky above was the color of old ash.
