The dream clung to her like mist at dawn.
Lyra awoke with the sharp taste of longing and dread in her mouth, a bitter pairing that had become all too familiar. The witch's spell had worn off. Whatever barrier once kept the Forgotten King from whispering through her mind had shattered like glass beneath a scream.
In the dim hush of early morning, Raven was by the fire, sharpening his blade, back turned to her. A mundane act, one he'd done countless times, and yet… she watched him as if through new eyes.
His shoulders were broader, shadowed in the flickering light. His profile sharper, eyes darker, hungrier. The memories—or were they illusions?—flooded her again: Raven at the heart of an ancient battlefield, soaked in blood not his own. Raven whispering her name with a lover's devotion and a traitor's fire. Raven burning.
But none of those things had happened. Not in this life. Not yet.
He turned slightly, sensing her gaze. "You didn't sleep."
"I did," she lied, standing. "But dreams don't always rest with the body."
He frowned, rising to meet her, concern lacing his brow. "Lyra… you've been distant. Cold."
She stepped closer, as if drawn by a thread she couldn't sever. "Have I?"
He nodded. "You flinch when I touch you. Sometimes I speak, and it's like you don't even know me."
"I don't know anything anymore," she whispered, barely audible.
The silence stretched between them, thick and brittle.
Then, in a rush of emotion too complex to name, she closed the space between them and pressed her lips to his.
It was desperate.
It was wrong.
It was not hers.
A heartbeat later, she tore herself away like she'd touched fire. Her hand rose before she could stop it and struck him across the face. A flash of red bloomed along his cheekbone. Her nails had broken skin.
Raven stumbled back, more shaken by the act than the pain. "Lyra?!"
She gasped, staring at her hand like it no longer belonged to her. "I didn't mean—"
"Is it me?" he asked, voice low, trembling with restrained anger and heartbreak. "Or is something in you?"
Tears threatened, but she refused them. She couldn't break here. Not when everything inside her already felt fractured.
"I don't know what's real anymore," she confessed, retreating. "Sometimes I look at you, and I feel everything… and then I feel nothing. And then I feel rage. It's like someone else is inside my skin."
He took a hesitant step forward. "Then let me help you. Tell me what's happening."
She shook her head violently. "No. If I tell you… you'll look at me like I'm already lost."
In the silence that followed, the wind howled like it knew their names. Like it carried secrets buried in bone.
That night, as Lyra drifted into another dream, the King was waiting.
He stood in a chamber made of mirrors and thorns, eyes like eclipses, voice like velvet and rot.
"You're fighting me," he said, almost amused.
"I'll never become what you want," she spat.
He stepped forward, his reflection multiplying in every pane of glass. "Oh, sweet thing. You already are. You just don't know it yet."
She tried to move, but the dream held her still. Her limbs were her own, but not her will.
"I can smell the shift in your blood," he whispered, reaching out. "You think you can resist it. But every kiss you deny, every blow you strike, every tear you shed for him… it feeds me."
"No," she rasped.
"Yes. You carry my mark now. And soon, he will fall by your hand. Not because you want to. Because it is written."
She screamed—whether from defiance or despair, even she didn't know.
Back in the waking world, Raven watched her twist in her sleep, whispers escaping her lips like broken spells. He reached for her but stopped, unsure if touching her now might burn him, or worse—wake the thing within.
He didn't know.
She didn't tell him.
And somewhere, in a place beyond stars and sanity, the Forgotten King smiled.
The witches sensed it first—an unraveling. Lyra's aura, once a steady glow of ancient magic, now flickered like a dying star. One of them, the oldest, touched the edge of that presence and recoiled with a gasp.
"She's fraying," she whispered to the others. "Something's nesting inside her light."
Raven noticed too. Not in spells or glimmers, but in how she looked at him.
Like he was someone she wanted to love.
Or kill.
She would speak gently one moment, fingers tracing his jaw as if memorizing him, and in the next, withdraw with such abrupt hatred that the air between them snapped tight like a drawn bowstring. And though her words remained hers, the weight behind them felt... foreign. Coated in something colder.
Each day, a little more of her was borrowed.
Each night, she returned emptier.
She was still Lyra—her voice, her memories, her laughter in rare moments. But buried beneath it was a shadowed thread pulling taut. A puppet's string. And the hand holding it smiled from the void.