Three nights passed. The season turned. The air grew sharper, biting at exposed skin.
Kael lay in his small cottage on the edge of the Sink. His bed was narrow, the mattress stuffed with straw that rustled when he moved. He was asleep, but his mind was active, wandering the dreamscape.
In his dream, he was back in the glade. But the sun wasn't golden; it was a pale, sickly green. The water in the stream didn't roar; it whispered names.
He saw Elara. She was standing on the other side of the water, naked, her skin glowing like moonlight. She held out a hand to him.
"Kael," she called. "I'm burning."
In the dream, Kael stepped into the water to reach her. But the water wasn't water. It was cold, thick oil. It clung to his legs, dragging him down.
Across the valley, in the Master Suite of the Chief's Manor, Elara was having the same dream. She was reaching for Kael, but the space between them was stretching, warping.
Their desire—that intense, illicit, overwhelming need—acted like a beacon. In the spiritual spectrum, their connection was a bright, throbbing wire stretching across the darkness of Oakhaven.
At exactly midnight, something saw the wire.
It wasn't a ghost. It was older. It was a consciousness that had been drifting in the void between worlds, starving, waiting for a crack in the wall. The affair—a mix of love, lust, guilt, and secrecy—was the perfect frequency.
Kael's body in the cottage went rigid. His back arched off the mattress. His eyes snapped open, but he didn't wake up.
He was shunted.
It felt like a physical blow to the center of his chest. His soul, his "Kael-ness," was grabbed by a fist of ice and thrown into the backseat of his own mind. He tried to scream, What is this? Get out! but his mouth didn't move. His vocal cords were disconnected.
He was a prisoner in a bone cage.
Across the valley, Elara gasped. Her eyes rolled back, the whites swallowed by a sudden, spreading darkness.
Two vessels, a voice whispered. It wasn't a sound; it was a vibration in Kael's marrow. One for strength. One for reach.
The presence settled into Kael's body. It tested the fingers, flexing them. It felt the raw strength of the woodcutter, the repressed anger, the hunger.
Yes, the voice purred, dripping with ancient satisfaction. This one has teeth.
Then, it flowed across the connection to Elara. It felt her influence, her access, the trust the village placed in her.
And this one... this one has the keys.
Kael lay paralyzed in the dark, watching through eyes that were no longer his own, as his vision shifted. The shadows of his cottage weren't grey anymore. They were alive. He could see the heat signature of a rat in the wall. He could hear the heartbeat of the neighbor sleeping next door.