Shattered planks and debris framed the scene like a deranged artist's masterpiece. Ana's head swam through intoxicated dreams, the haze of her inebriation cushioning her fall as she swayed near the edge of a sprung trap. Echoes of battle, ghostly and distant, reached her ears like a forgotten melody. Her sword hummed with fading energy, its music matching her own uneven heartbeat. She staggered, each movement a slow-motion testament to her current state of oblivion. The world spun. The air thickened. Then the crushing blow—a symphony's last note played with violent finality. She collapsed, the line between reality and dreams dissolving as her mind drifted into vivid visions.

  Ana's head lolled as if her neck were suddenly boneless, the fight fleeing her body before she even had the chance to draw on its last reserves. She watched as her own arms flailed, felt her ribs rattle in her chest. Every motion was syrup-slow and disconnected. And there was the thought, briefly coherent, that this time she had done it—that the force of recklessness had trumped even her luck.

  Then, at last, her mind was mercifully blank.

  She was in a field, impossibly alive and lush, a vibrant, vivid green she had not seen since she was a child. Everything was real and unreal at once, edges and lines too sharp for her memory, for her history. A gust of wind tugged at her hair and brushed her cheek with the breath of forgotten things. She took it in—crisp and strange, laden with flowers and unfamiliar hope.

  The sky was filled with shadows.

  Monstrous creatures soared and swooped above her head, their shapes massive and majestic. Great wingspans blotted out the sun and cast swift-moving clouds of darkness over the grass. She saw the familiar, unmistakable forms of Dragons. Wings beat like the pounding of war drums, steady and deafening.

  A sturdy wooden table sat in the middle of the meadow. Weathered by time or rain or the world that had been here before this one, it had room enough for two, for a pair, for the partnerships and bonds she used to know. She blinked, felt a fleeting urge to rub at her eyes, to rub the images away.

  Ana didn't want to sit. Didn't mean to. She was seated anyway.

  The sky changed its hue. There was something almost mournful in the colors that unfolded above. She squinted up, shielding her eyes from the sight of the descending creatures, and felt her pulse echo the sky's confusion, its turmoil, its impossible beauty.

  "Where am I? What is this place? What's happening?" The questions tasted like sour regret in her mouth, and she tried not to spit them out, not to throw them at the impossibility of this illusion.

  Across from her, someone appeared. A shimmer of blue fabric. An angular face, harsh and striking as memory itself. Ana did not need to think twice, and then she did think twice because it was too much, and not enough. The parts of her that she tried to bury reeled from the sight.

  Ethan.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The name was a knot she hadn't undone, a path she had not walked again. His mouth moved, but she couldn't hear him over the beat of the Dragons' wings, over the sound of her own heart. Then the world came into focus, each word cruel and lovely and vibrant with its clarity.

  "This is your mind, Ana." Calm. Detached. Almost clinical. "Everything you're seeing—all of it—is a battle within yourself."

  She glared at him, angry with the ease of his presence, with the poise that settled over him like fog on an unwelcome day. Ethan was there, flesh and thought and shimmering blue certainty.

  But how? Ana's mind whirled with new shapes. How?

  "Don't make it more complicated than it is." He smiled, and it was not the grin she used to know, but something colder, carved in ice instead of joy. "Your greatest fights aren't out there. They're in here."

  The table. The meadow. The world. All of it felt strange and close and unfamiliar, everything happening at a distance she could not close.

  "But—" Ana was never short on words, not on words and certainly not on breath. This time they stuck in her throat like they were treacherous, like they might mean things she was not ready to face. She glanced at the Dragons, their wings carrying the weight of prophecy, and then back to the boy she had not thought to see again.

  Ethan interrupted her with his silence, and Ana hated that most of all. It was the waiting, the quiet, the steady stillness that settled into the parts of her that had been turned loose. Her hands were open on the table, unarmed and vulnerable.

  His were not.

  Ana caught the shift in his body language, saw the way his stance hardened with menace. He moved before she even knew she was ready, before she thought there was anything to be ready for. She didn't see where the blade came from, only that it was there, bright and lethal in his hands.

  "I should have done this years ago, Ana." He stood over her, looming. The air went sharp, and everything had edges again. "I should have finished this the day you left."

  "Ethan—"

  This time he cut her off with violence, a lunge she was unprepared for. Ana jerked away, more instinct than plan. Her seat tipped backward, and she felt the ground's betrayal in her shoulder blades. She gasped at the impact, then again at the figure towering over her, so different and not different at all.

  His face twisted into something she couldn't bear, not even here, not even in the confines of this monstrous projection.

  "You always think you can outrun the consequences," he said, each word wrapped in wrath, edged with fury. He was all raw nerve and raw truth. She could not stand to see him this way, and yet she could not close her eyes, not to him, not to this.

  Ethan lunged again. And again. The Dragons flew on, the air whipped by the frantic flapping of their enormous wings, Ana caught the terror of the moment and the madness of her own mind. Her breath was a tightrope in her chest, suspended by uncertainty and disbelief. Ethan was too close, and the world felt both endless and finite.

  She refused to fight back.

  "I said your greatest battles are in your own mind!" The shout tore through her with the force of a crushing blow, and it was the force that crushed her instead. "And this one," Ethan screamed, his voice a seismic shift, "is over!"

  Everything went black.

  When it came back, it was louder and more brutal than even the dream. Battle cries shattered the night, steel on steel splintered the air, and Ana gasped like she'd never had breath before. Chaos swirled around her. Warriors clashed, the debris-strewn battlefield alive with danger and noise. Her mind spun as wildly as the scene, and there were no comforting dreams to dull the reality of it.

  She heard the words before she understood their shape. Before she understood the fear they pressed into her.

  "Your fate is sealed!"

  A man stood over the boy, his frame dark and imposing, his stance alive with lethal intent. She did not need to see his face to know the danger there. She did not need to see anything but the truth of the moment.

  Ana's truth. Caden's truth. Zarathos.