Selena’s memories held their horrors and showed no sign of letting go. Reaching a ghost who couldn’t even see him was never going to be straightforward, but this was a dance, and Selena had thrown herself into it completely.

The logic held: even the smallest change in pace should have been enough to shift something in her consciousness. But it wasn’t working, and the gap sat heavier with every passing moment.

Since he couldn’t touch her physically, he did the only thing available to him: danced alongside her, falling into the same flow she moved through, matching her as closely as the space between them allowed. She was dancing with a ghost. He was making sure she wasn’t dancing alone.

"I think you’re missing something, Scar. Selena danced that day as if she were dancing with her fiancé. She poured her heart and soul into it, which is why she could dance nonstop for an entire week. You need to do the same."

Solus’s words stirred something Scar hadn’t expected. She was right. Selena was a ghost, that was the fact of it, but what came through in her movements wasn’t ghostly at all. The passion was real and emotional.

This was a dance she had spent time learning for her fiancé, and when the memory of the wedding came around, she gave it everything she had. She was building the joy that day was supposed to bring her. The joy it never actually did.

Scar took a deep breath and held Selena’s gaze. He couldn’t give her the passion she was searching for, not the way the dance required. But Haven was someone else entirely.

He could dance with Haven with that same passion and pour the same feeling into it. He just needed to see it. Picture himself with his woman and let the rest follow.

"That’s it. I think you’re starting to get it, Scar."

A soft smile tugged at Scar’s lips. He’d expected Solus to be a hindrance... her mysterious nature and that creepy smile she’d given him hadn’t inspired confidence. But she’d been surprisingly helpful.

He’d found the passion, that much was working. The emotion was harder. Selena was heartbroken in a way he wasn’t, and no amount of effort was going to close that gap entirely. He was willing to try anyway.

He searched for something about Haven that would give him even a fraction of heartbreak to work with. The first thing that surfaced was their last meeting, weeks ago now. Haven had attacked him. Of everything he could have landed on, that was what arrived first.

It wasn’t close to what Selena had felt; her betrayal ran far deeper than anything Haven’s actions had left in him. But sympathy didn’t require equal suffering. He could meet her there, and that was what mattered.

The moment it clicked, action and emotion fell into sync with Selena at once, and something shifted. The ghost he’d believed was beyond his reach reached out first. She grabbed his hands.

Scar panicked, just for a moment, but something pulled him back into motion before he could lose it. Selena’s palm was warm and gentle in a way he hadn’t expected from a ghost, and the tears in her eyes had changed. The grief was still there, but something else had moved in beside it. Hope.

The dance shifted into something more intense, a drastic change from what it had been. If it could have radiated color, the air around them would have been full of it.

Every shade would represent something, every emotion both of them were carrying in that moment would be laid out without words.

While the dance continued, Solus wasn’t watching it. Her eyes moved steadily through the room, scanning the audience for the one responsible for keeping Selena trapped in this.

Everything had been unremarkable until it wasn’t. Lionel was there. Selena’s childhood friend, the necromancer who had brought about the Karma Era, was standing among the audience with anger written plainly across his face.

When the dance had first started, Lionel stood out for one reason: he was the only one not laughing at Selena. They’d read it as affection, as Selena seeing something in him that the others didn’t. But what was on his face now had nothing to do with that. It wasn’t normal.

The dance had shifted the audience entirely. Solus would have admitted without hesitation that it was the most emotional dance she’d ever witnessed, and the audience’s reactions were saying exactly that for her.

Something was off with Lionel. The question was whether what they were seeing was still Selena’s memory or something else entirely.

Solus started toward Lionel, and he disappeared before she reached him. She scanned the entire room to be sure. It was true. Lionel wasn’t there anymore.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. Enough to give her the faintest idea of what needed to happen next.

"Don’t stop dancing, Scar. Even if your legs break, you mustn’t stop. This is the only way we can get rid of this."

Scar heard her. He was reluctant to admit how much he was enjoying the dance. Haven was in his thoughts, yes, but Selena was something else entirely. Too skilled, too captivating to simply stop.

If he were being honest, had he been born in her era and seen this dance, he would have learned it just for the chance to dance with her.

The young woman had poured everything she had into the dance, every bit of herself, and it was a genuine pity that no one had recognized it for what it was. Scar appreciated it.

He also had a concern. If Selena was aiming for a full week of this, he wasn’t sure his appreciation was going to hold up that long.

Solus, meanwhile, was growing wary, and it showed. She looked preoccupied, restless, and unable to hold still, caught between competing ideas of what was actually happening around them.

Lionel had been arrested decades ago after his massacre and escaped. The question was whether this was his work. Could necromancy do this: resurrect a ghost and trap it inside its own worst memories? And if so, why choose his best friend as the instrument? Why force her soul back to the worst day of her life?

While that played out, Luccy, Storm, Amber, and Walker were moving through the mansion, searching for the culprit. It was Amber who found it: a small room, just behind the hall, easy to miss.

The door opened onto a grey, overgrown creature that had long since run out of room. Its body filled the space so completely that there was nowhere to enter and nowhere to retreat to. No one needed to say it. Dreamwalker.

The questions were countless. How had it gotten there, and why did it look so deliberately placed? Nobody got the chance to work through them. Before anyone could settle on an approach, Walker acted irrationally and attacked the Dreamwalker. Of course he did.

The creature was angered, and its actions made that plain. With everything it had, it began forcing itself out of the narrow room, and the entire building trembled with the effort.