No matter which direction Alpheo turned, the world offered no variation, an endless, echoing loop of green and gray. The air was thick, tasting of stagnant water and old moss, locked in a stillness so absolute it felt like a long held breath. They weaved through the skeletal fingers of trees that seemed to grow from the silence itself.

Perhaps he was descending into madness, or perhaps his cold cynicism was simply no match for the desperate, hollow ache to see Egil again, even if this version of him was a shallow lie woven by a dying mind.

His friend walked with the easy, rolling gait of a man who knew exactly where the path led, just as he had in life.

It felt like an affront to the natural order. It wasn’t right for Egil to have died, not so soon, and certainly not in that way.

There were supposed to be years of bickering over maps and sharing wine in the quiet hours after victory or after a life spent at war.

But existence was not a ledger to be balanced by a prince’s desires; it was a flame that burned fiercely only to be snuffed by the first unkind wind.

Even the memory of that flame, bright as it might have been, was destined to fade into the gray history of a forgotten age.

They were only waiting for that darkness in the end.All of them.

"I have waited a long time for this moment, you know?" Egil spoke suddenly. He cocked his head with effortless grace to avoid a low-hanging branch, one that Alpheo didn’t need to fear, lacking his friend’s towering height.

"You speak as if this were fate," Alpheo replied, his voice dry and thin.

"You’d hate that, wouldn’t you?" Egil turned, his eyes, as blue as deep mountain water, settling on him with that familiar maddening streak of joy. "Our dear Alph always loathed the idea of a script. He’s the pioneer, the architect, the master of his own horizon! Woe to the man, or god, who tells him otherwise." He chuckled, the sound of his mirth swallowed instantly by the heavy woods. "It was one of the things I liked best about you. That stubborn belief that you’re the sole author of your life, and not some bored deity up in the clouds."

"And yet, you’re suggesting the opposite now."

"Is it really so hard to believe?" Egil asked, his gaze returning to the path only he could see. "There is always a road out of the woods, Alph. I’ve already reached the end of mine."

And indeed he had.

The forest gave way abruptly at the base of a low, slumped hill. Atop it sat a house, if it could still be called that. It was a crooked thing, small and sagging, seemingly held together by nothing but habit and the green moss that had made a nest in every rotting joint. It looked ready to collapse back into the earth from which it had been hewn.

"Waiting for an invitation?" Egil teased, stepping through a doorway that had long ago lost its door.

Alpheo froze at the threshold. A cold, prickling sensation crawled up the back of his neck, settling just below his ears. It was the instinct of a soldier sensing an ambush, or a prisoner entering a cell. This is absurd, he told himself. I am already broken in the mud. What more harm can a dream do?

The floorboards groaned with the wet, spongy sound of decay as he stepped inside. The interior was a skeletal remains of a life: a small, bare bed; a scarred table holding a lone porcelain carafe; no cups, no comforts. The fireplace was cold, filled with nothing but the grey, powdery remains of a fire that had died an age ago. In the absence of humanity, the wild had moved in; vibrant, eyeless flowers grew through the floorboards, and moss draped the walls like velvet tapestries of the forgotten 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"Is this wreck going to collapse on us?" Alpheo asked. It was a reflex, the cynical prickling of a man who trusted only what he could measure with a ruler and a blade.

He expected a barb, some classic Egil wit to lighten the rot, but the silence that followed was heavy and strange.

"It won’t," Egil said. His voice was as flat and serious as the day they had finally drifted apart. "I may not be as studied as you, Alph, but there are things I know now that you haven’t even begun to guess. This place won’t fall. It’ll be standing long after the stones of your Principality have turned to sand."

Egil sat on the edge of the bare bed, uncaring of the dust that puffed up around him like gray ghosts. He watched Alpheo pace the small room. "Searching for something?"

"The reason I’m here would be a start," Alpheo said. He trailed a finger across the table, a thick line of grime clinging to his skin. He looked at the filth with distaste. "You could have taken better care of the place."

"It’s not mine."

"Then whose is it?"

Egil didn’t answer. He didn’t answer why they were there, either. He simply sat, his gaze drifting from Alpheo’s eyes to the floorboards, tracing the patterns of the moss.There was something in his gaze Alpheo couldn’t understand.

"Those aren’t the questions you should be wasting your breath on," Egil muttered, his eyes fixed on the grain of the wood.

Alpheo felt a surge of frustration. He knew he was likely arguing with a hallucination, a firing of synapses in a dying brain, but the stubbornness was too ingrained to set aside. If his mind was going to conjure a ghost, it could at least be a useful one.

"Who is Enkilae?"

Egil’s shoulders trembled, a micro-spasm of recognition or fear. "That," he said quietly, "is still not the right question."

"Of course not." Alpheo exhaled, a sharp, bitter sound. "I forgot. Everything is a riddle when you’re dead."

He heard Egil sigh, a soft sound of ancient weariness. "You’ll learn of him soon enough. Don’t fret. All things have their season to be known." He brushed one thumb over the other, a restless habit Alpheo remembered from the nights before a raid. "How are the guys?"

"Don’t you know? I thought you spent your time watching us from up there... or down there."

Egil chuckled. "Not as much as I would’ve liked. The view gets blurry."

"We found our way through the grief, I suppose. Each in our own way." Alpheo felt Egil’s blue eyes settle on him, searching and heavy. He found himself confessing things he hadn’t even told Jarza. "I... I found a kinship with the bottle. I lost my way for a long time, Egil. The world felt like a gray fog I couldn’t cut through."

"Did you find the path back?"

Alpheo nodded slowly. "My son. Basil."

"Is that so? That little rascal?" A genuine smile broke across Egil’s face.

"The very one." Alpheo’s chest felt tight. "We all found a way out of the night, but we still bear the scars of that loss. You’d be surprised by how much you were loved, you bloodydamn fool.You just get yourself to die, didn’t you?"

"Not really," Egil said, and for a second, the old, arrogant charm returned. "I always knew you lot had a soft spot for me."

"Soft spot? We just didn’t have many other drunks with long fingers for gold. We never did find out where that golden chandelier from Arkawatt went. You had a hand in that, didn’t you?"

"I did. But you knew that already."

"I might have spotted it in your room during a particularly long night of drinking." Alpheo’s eyes went glassy, the warmth of the memory clashing with the cold rot of the house. "I missed you. Terribly. Every day."

Egil nodded, his expression softening into a sad, haunting empathy. "You know, deep down, I always suspected you thought you weren’t enough. For so long, I wanted to put into words how wrong you were. Every boy needs an adult to protect him, but with us? It was the opposite. I still remember that whipping you took for the first shard of glass you hid in your mouth. Jarza thought you’d die that night. But you were a persistent little shit. You came into our lives from nowhere, until everywhere you weren’t became nothing to us." He sighed, looking at his translucent hands. "But now I’m dead. So who’s going to protect me now?"

"If the point is lost on you," Alpheo said, stepping closer, "I’m dead too. So I suppose we’ll burn in the same pit together as soon as the theater closes."

"You still don’t get it, do you?"

"Get what?"

Egil sighed, a sound that seemed to vibrate through the very walls of the cabin. "It’s not my place to answer that, Alph."

"Then whose is it?" Alpheo demanded, his voice rising in the stillness.

"Gods only know," Egil muttered to himself with a chuckle. He stood up, the movement fluid and silent, and gestured toward the spot he had vacated on the bed. "Sit. Rest your legs."

"Where are you going?"

Egil didn’t answer. He simply stood there, waiting for Alpheo to take his place in the dust, his eyes focused on a door that existed only in the architecture of the dead. After a heartbeat, he turned to the table and took hold of the carafe. His shoulders, which had always seemed broad enough to carry the weight of a dozen sins, slumped with a sudden, crushing fatigue.

"You know," he began, "back in my tribe, we were told a man should never receive a gift from the dead. If he does, they never leave him. They cling to his shadow until he is more ghost than man.Be it in dreams or awake."

"Is that so?" Alpheo asked, eyeing the carafe with suspicion. "Are you going to offer me something, Egil?"

"It isn’t really an offering. It isn’t mine to give, after all."

"Am I to be worried?"

Egil turned back, a sad, flickering smile ghosting over his lips. "Yes. Yes, you are. Still....what more can I do to you?" He sniffed, a small, human sound in the silence. "Besides... there were many things my old tribe was wrong about. You’ll understand that soon enough."

He stepped forward and held out the carafe.

Alpheo looked at the vessel. It was cold, and he could feel a faint, rhythmic vibration thrumming through the ceramic, like a distant heart beating in a jar. "I hope it isn’t wine," he muttered. "I promised..... I promised my family I wouldn’t touch it anymore."

"Don’t look inside," Egil whispered, his voice urgent. "Just... drink. Drink as much as you can hold.And don’t look, for all the goods you bore me. Do not."

He thrust the carafe into Alpheo’s hands. In Egil’s eyes, a terrible, ancient sadness stood still, the look of a man watching a friend step off a cliff.

"What’s in it?" Alpheo’s voice trembled.

"Dreams," Egil replied. "Terrible, horrible dreams. I wouldn’t wish it for you, of everything you must know I didn’t.You must know that. But for the love you bore and bear me, drink it."

"Do I need to do this?"

Egil didn’t answer. He simply pressed the rim of the carafe against Alpheo’s lips. It was gentle and yet firm. Alpheo tilted his head back, and the liquid flowed. It wasn’t wine. It wasn’t water. It was thick and unpleasant, but he drank.

Even as his soul recoiled, even as his mind screamed for him to stop, he swallowed the dark.

And just as Egil had promised, the world of the little house and the emerald grass shattered like glass.

And just as he had been told , he did not wake.

He dreamed.

Terrible and horrible dreams.