They were already laughing when I woke.
Not a cruel laugh. Not joyful either. Something between, a purr, a whisper, a rhythm in their throats that was not quite human. It echoed against the velvet walls of the Hollow, slipping into my skin like breath on the back of my neck. I didn't shiver. I didn't move. I simply listened.
Sarassis stood closest. The low candlelight turned her skin to burnished gold, and the chains at her collarbone shimmered--tiny linked rings that caught the light with every slow, deliberate motion. Her hips moved as if caught in a tide that obeyed only her will. She did not speak. She rarely needed to. Her presence spoke in silence, and even that could silence the storm.
Beside her, Eshara lingered in the soft shadow. Her skin was luminous, kissed by blue-veined light that pulsed just beneath the surface. She looked like someone conjured from moonlight and still water. Her silence was not absence. It was tension. Like the air before thunder. A warning. And beneath her ribs, as always, the moon-cut sigil glowed faintly--pale and pulsing like breath.
Vaelith turned her back to me. Her hair shimmered between copper and ink, spilling over a spine etched in obsidian. I watched as her fingers danced, drawing glyphs into the air that pulsed and shimmered before fading into nothing. They were not gestures meant for me. They were ritual, memory, power. I had seen those sigils before, in dreams. I never remembered them when I woke.
But this time... something new moved behind them.
She stood apart from the others. Not distant, not excluded. Behind, like a shadow, like a second heartbeat. I felt her before I saw her. She stirred the space around her simply by being there. Her presence pressed into my mind, not like a scream but like a held breath. A presence that had always been there, just beneath the surface of my thoughts. Hidden. Waiting.
Her name did not come in words. It came in sensation. Like an echo in bone.
Only when her eyes met mine did I hear it:
Thae'lyn.
The one who remembers.
Her hair was the black of forgotten ink, strands that curled like questions. Her eyes were silver and lidless, reflecting not light, but thought. She was voluptuous in the way myths are, in the way temples are. Her wrists and ankles bore bands of metal, soft and thin, but many, so many, and they sang softly when she moved--like the hush of wind through glass.
She did not speak. But she asked.
Her question unfurled inside me like smoke: "Why do you tremble, dreamer?"
I could not answer. My mouth refused to form shape. My tongue lay heavy. I did not own my limbs. I wasn't afraid. I wasn't even surprised. Somewhere deep inside, I knew--they had never expected me to run. And I would not have wanted to.
Their voices rose again, those strange syllables curling through the air like perfume and fog. I did not know the language, but I felt its meaning. The words clung to my skin.
Th'ralei.
