He was dreaming again. Not the curated oblivion he preferred, but the other kind. The strange, insistent nightmare that raided the locked vaults of his own being, playing his forgotten life on a screen of shattered bones and dying stars.
This time, he was in a hall of black marble, so vast the ceiling was lost in a thunderhead of swirling, ash-grey smoke. The air was cold and still, thick with the scent of ozone and myrrh. Before him stood a door—not of wood or metal, but of woven light and shifting, geometric symbols. It was beautiful, and it was locked. From behind it, a voice seeped through, a sound that carved a hollow directly into his soul.
It was her voice. The woman from his surgical dreams. The one who wept.
But she was not weeping now. Her voice was a blade, sharpened by desperation.
Nathaniel.
His name, spoken not as an identifier, but as an accusation and a plea.
Find the Key, Keeper. Why do you think your excuse of a home was set ablaze? It was not an accident. It was a message. Written in a language you have forgotten how to read.
A shadow detached itself from the deeper shadows of the hall. It had no form, only a presence—a chilling, intimate emptiness that felt like the space where a star had once been.
Your enemies are patient. They have slept as you have slept. But they are waking. The shadow pulsed, and her voice dropped to a whisper that was somehow more terrifying than a scream. They lurk closer than you'd expect. In the smile of a stranger. In the silence between a loved one's heartbeats.
The great door of light shuddered. A hairline crack split its center, and from it bled not light, but a profound, chilling wrongness. The air grew heavy, pressing in on him.
The Merge is beginning, her voice echoed, fraying at the edges, straining against the pressure from the other side of the door. The walls are thinning. The locks are failing. Uphold your oath. The Key, Nathaniel. You must find the Key. Please… remember…
The crack in the door widened with a sound like a universe breaking. Through it, he saw not the other side of the hall, but a vision: a city street, twisted and wrong, the sky a bruised purple, and things with too many limbs scuttling through a geometry that hurt to look at. And standing in the middle of it all, her back to him, was the woman. She turned her head, just enough for him to see the profile of her face, etched with a sorrow as deep as time.
Find it before the @#$%&*#@$ does.
Nathaniel's eyes snapped open.
He was on the sofa, the white void of his apartment swimming into focus. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic breathing of Mabel from the other room. For a moment, there was only the sterile silence and the frantic, trapped-bird rhythm of his own heart.
Then, the Voice in his head spoke, its usual dryness absent, replaced by a grim solemnity.
Nathaniel sat up slowly, the phantom cold of the dream still clinging to him. "Trapped?" he whispered into the quiet, his voice rough with sleep and dread.
"The fire," he breathed, the pieces clicking into a horrifying mosaic.
Nathaniel's gaze snapped toward Mabel's door. They lurk closer than you'd expect.
He stood, a restless energy forcing him to his feet. He paced the short length of the living room, his gaze falling on the pot of ash on the table. The phoenix. A Keeper's responsibility. A failure. But the woman's voice wasn't asking about the phoenix. She was asking about the Key.
Find the Key.
His eyes widened infinitesimally. It wasn't a command to find a person. It was a command to find a thing. The True Keeper was the Key itself. The dream was not just a memory; it was a mission from a prisoner of a war he'd abandoned.
"They're not just coming for the Key," he said, the realization dawning with cold, brutal clarity. "They're coming for her. To break the lock completely."
The sheer, overwhelming effort of it all—the hunting, the fighting, the remembering—threatened to crush him back into the sofa. It was the most tedious, complicated, and terrifying scenario imaginable.
He heard Mabel stir in her room, the soft sound of her feet hitting the floor. The day was beginning. His niece, for whom he had just chosen the "colossal hassle" of Option B, was about to walk into a world where the sky could tear open and the woman in his dreams was screaming silently from behind a cracking door.
He had two choices. He could do the easy thing. He could forget the dream, dismiss the woman's voice as a phantom, and go back to sleep. He could let the Merge happen, let the enemies come, let them take her and whatever they wanted. It would be, in the short term, far less trouble.
But then he saw it in his mind's eye: not the shadow from his dream, but her face, turning back to him, filled with a disappointment that was worse than any hatred.
The sigh that left him was not one of weariness, but of resignation. It was the sound of a man picking up a sword he had buried a thousand years ago, and finding it heavier than he remembered, not because of the metal, but because of the hand that had once forged it for him.
"Remember," he whispered to himself, the word a feeble weapon against the tide of his own neglect.
"Can't you just tell me where it is?" he muttered, the plea pathetic even to his own ears.
The door to Mabel's room creaked open and she stepped outside, rubbing her eyes with one small fist. Her blonde hair was a sleepy mess, and she'd changed into a t-shirt that was too big for her, swimming in the fabric. She blinked in the flat, morning light of the white void.
"You're loud," she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep. "I could hear you thinking all the way in my room."
Nathaniel froze, the frantic energy from his dream and the Voice's warning instantly banked, hidden behind a familiar, weary mask. He forced his shoulders to slump, aiming for his usual affect of benign inertia.
"Impossible," he said, his tone deliberately flat. "Thinking requires effort. I was merely… existing at a detectable frequency."
Mabel wasn't buying it. Her blue eyes, sharp even half-asleep, scanned him. They narrowed as they landed on his hair. "Your roots are… glowing."
He instinctively ran a hand through his hair. She was right. The stark white roots seemed brighter than last night, as if the dream had charged them with a faint, lunar energy. A crack in the facade, widening.
"It's a condition," Nathaniel deflected, turning away from her probing gaze to stare pointedly at the blank wall. "Luminiferous Alopecia. Very tedious. Now, shouldn't you be… I don't know… contemplating cereal or something?"
Mabel padded further into the room, her gaze shifting from his hair to his face. She studied him the way a mechanic might study a faulty engine. "You look different."
"I assure you, I am the same monument to minimal effort I have always been."
"No. You're… tense. It's weird." She crossed her arms, a tiny, stubborn general in an oversized shirt. "Was it a nightmare?"
The directness of the question struck him like a physical blow. He could lie. But no, the truth is almost the easiest answer. A non-committal grunt and a change of subject. But he looked at her—this girl who had chosen the void, who heard the Voice, who saw the light leaking from his pores—and the lie felt like just another kind of effort, a heavier one.
"Something like that," he admitted, the words tasting foreign.
"About Mom?" Mabel asked, her voice softening slightly.
Nathaniel's eyes flicked involuntarily to the pot of ash on the table, then back to her. "No," he said, and it was the truth. "Older."
A silence hung between them, filled with the unspoken understanding that "older" meant things she couldn't possibly imagine. Mabel seemed to accept this. She walked over to the table and pointed at the pot.
"Is it hungry?"
The absurdity of the question was so profound it almost short-circuited his anxiety. "It's ash, Mabel. It has the dietary requirements of a handful of dust."
"But it was a phoenix," she pressed, undeterred. "Maybe it's not about food. Maybe it needs… a reason." She looked at him, and in her eyes, he didn't see a child playing with fantasy. He saw an Inheritor in the making, already asking the right, impossible questions. "You said it grew tired. Maybe we need to give it a reason not to be."
The simplicity of it was terrifying. The woman in his dreams was screaming about Keys and Merging realities, and here was this mortal child, suggesting the solution to one of his cosmic failures was a matter of motivation.
Nathaniel stared at his niece, a strange, unwelcome feeling stirring in his chest—a feeling that was the antithesis of sloth. It was the faint, irritating spark of purpose.
"A reason," he repeated, the word feeling like a rock in his shoe. "What reason could we possibly give it?"
Mabel shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. "That it's not alone anymore."
The door to the apartment, the normal, physical door, suddenly seemed incredibly flimsy. They lurk closer than you'd expect. The dream-woman's warning echoed in his mind. The Key was hidden. His enemies were searching. And the only thing standing between them and whatever they planned was a lazy immortal, a pot of apathetic ash, and a thirteen-year-old girl who believed a phoenix just needed a friend.
Are they idiots to go after a Keeper of all things.
The sheer, catastrophic hassle of it all was absolute.
But as he looked at Mabel, standing defiantly in the heart of his void, he knew with a sinking certainty that the path of least resistance was no longer an option. For the first time in centuries, the easiest way out was to go straight through the problem.