'These nightmares.'
Alex exhaled a long breath, the sound of someone surfacing rather than simply breathing, and opened his eyes to darkness that flowed around him like fog, shifting and drifting with the slow purposefulness of something that was never entirely still.
The sight of it only reminded him of what he had spent considerable effort trying to suppress. To forget, if forgetting was something still available to him.
He looked up.
He was no longer in his palace inside the domain, though the throne beneath him was his own, its familiar weight and presence unchanged.
The space around it was different, undefined at its edges, and in a high-backed chair across from him sat a woman.
Her presence arrived before her details did, the particular quality of it settling into the space around her the way significant things settled, not intruding but simply being there in a way that made everything else in the vicinity aware of it.
