Five weeks after the battle, I stopped dreaming about Seraphine.
I'd been dreaming about her every night since, not nightmares, exactly, but something worse in its way: conversations.
The two of us across a table or in a field or somewhere liminal and unspecific, talking. About choice. About what you become when you make enough choices in the same direction. About the thing she'd said at the end: Can you simply let it go?
The night I stopped dreaming about her, I dreamed about Alaric instead.
He was standing in a room I didn't recognize — no, not a room. A space. Something between walls and open air, lit by a light that came from everywhere and nowhere. He was small in it, the way a six-year-old is small, but his eyes were the silver I'd seen in Cassius's reports, and when he looked a
