After everyone had left, the room grew quiet in a way that felt unfamiliar.
The remnants of the evening lingered: half-empty cups left where no one bothered to collect them.
The faint scent of wine clinging to the air, the dull impression of voices that had only just faded.
I remained seated for a time, unmoving, letting the silence press in.
It felt earned, that quiet. Heavy, but not unpleasant.
Eventually, I rose and dismissed the attendants with a word.
Their footsteps retreated, leaving the corridors empty.
The lights were dimmed for the night, casting long shadows that shifted with every step I took.
It was the kind of darkness that encouraged thought rather than rest.
Mirabel was already waiting when I reached my quarters. She did not ask anything of me.
She never did, not when my mind was still tangled in things too large to name.
She simply moved closer, and I allowed myself to sit with her, to exist without purpose for a moment.
We spoke little. There was no need, nothing said that couldn't wait until we both just took a break.
When we finally lay down, the world felt distant, as though the walls themselves had agreed to keep their burdens outside.
Her presence was steady, grounding in a way power never was.
I let my breathing slow to match hers, letting exhaustion seep in gradually rather than collapse upon me all at once.
Sleep did not come immediately.
Thoughts drifted through my mind, unfinished plans, unspoken fears, but they lacked the sharpness to wound.
Eventually, they softened, blurred, and slipped away.
For a while, sleep was kind to me.
It was deep and unbroken, free of images or memory. A rare mercy. I held onto it as long as it would allow.
Then something shifted.
At first, I believed I was still safe.
I could feel Mirabel's arms around me, the warmth of her presence anchoring me in place.
I leaned into that certainty, unwilling to question it.
And then I realized the stillness was wrong.
I was meant to be protected. Held.
Instead, the warmth began to thin, not pulled away in anger, but receding as though it had never truly belonged there.
The logic of the dream twisted it into betrayal.
[A foolish man, clinging to the warmth of his lover, and denying her grace within something of his own creation. Or rather, not entirely his.]
The dream did not shatter.
It clarified.
My mind became lucid, aware in a way that dreams are not meant to allow.
The space around me stopped behaving like imagination and began to obey something far more deliberate.
Darkness gathered, not emptiness, but density. From it, Cradella emerged.
Around her was nothing. Within her was everything.
She took form without fully committing to it, vast and monstrous, yet unmistakably herself.
She hovered before me with an almost childish glee, as though pleased I had finally noticed her.
And to my surprise, I felt something close to relief.
"Little goat," she said, her voice folding through the space itself.
"You pray so earnestly, and you crave so greatly. Such lustful wishing, born of the heart."
Her voice did not echo. It occupied. This, I realized, was the revelation of her power.
Cradella was a monster of sleep, of dreams and nightmares, of darkness given permission to linger.
And yet, even in her vastness, she carried a story of her own.
It was a story I had never been told. And yet, somehow, I understood it.
Long ago, a goat climbed a mountain and screamed its desire into the peaks.
It wished to go beyond them, but desire alone was not enough.
The goat was greedy, and it was lazy, unwilling to labor for what it wanted.
The world heard that wish regardless.
The mountains were passed. The stars were touched.
And the goat began to appear in the dreams of others who shared its hunger.
It was my ancestor, Destrarossa, whom she blessed first. And through him, she gave her name.
Cradella Anstalionah.
A name carried by all those she marked, a lineage that bore her children in their arms and wielded her power with vanity and consequence alike.
I understood why she showed me this.
She felt my hunger for power. And she felt my resentment toward the gift I had already been given.
My eyes bled within the dream, sight stripped away until only her form and her memories remained.
[Nicholas was blessed. And what is a blessing from a monster, if not a curse that has learned how to smile?]
"Little stained darkness," she continued, "you must yield to the first desire. The first of darkness."
I was hurled backward.
The world folded, and I was thrown against a vast mountain of snow and black ash, my body left bare and exposed.
All pretense was stripped away. I had been cast backward in time.
I recognized it at once.
This was the world as it had been before the war. Before it shattered. Before it was reforged.
Only the runes I had carved into myself anchored my existence there.
I looked upward, breath burning in my chest, and understood her intent.
She wanted me to do what she had done.
To surpass the mountain.
To claim my blood not through inheritance, but through trial.
I laughed, the sound sharp and breathless, and after a moment, I began to climb.
"Alright, Cradella," I said aloud. "I accept."
I reached out, fingers digging into wet, freezing stone, and pulled myself upward.
The surface was slick beneath my grip, unyielding, yet familiar in a way I couldn't explain.
Now that I stood within the fifth wall, the cold no longer shackled me as it once would have.
And yet it still found its way into my bones, sending sharp chills through my limbs as I climbed.
I rose higher and higher, my heart aching as the air thinned, already far above the clouds.
Cradella would not give me a trial I could not surpass. I would not die here.
So what reason did I have to hesitate? To think?
I climbed.
I kept climbing, kept rising, kept becoming, until the world below felt distant and unreal.
My breathing burned, my muscles screamed, and slowly, my vision began to soften at the edges.
This dream, this nightmare, this reality seemed almost fond of me.
For a moment, sunlight pierced through the clouds.
Warmth brushed against my skin, brief and fragile, and I allowed myself a heartbeat to feel it.
Then it vanished.
Stopping was not an option. Lingering would only invite failure.
So I continued upward, chasing the heights themselves, determined to see how far they truly extended.
And then I saw it.
The peak.
I climbed faster, certainty flooding my limbs as I drew closer, every movement more intimate than the last.
When I finally pulled myself over the edge, I stood atop the summit and screamed.
It was a scream this world had seen before. Had heard. Had accepted with innocent reverence.
[Nicholas was a madman, screaming atop a mountain. And yet, soon enough, he fell.]
The ground vanished beneath me.
I fell from the peak I had only just claimed, tumbling through air without resistance.
Yet I did not lament. I did not wallow. I simply fell.
The impact came suddenly.
And then I woke.
Morning light flooded the room, pouring through the windows in pale sheets.
Mirabel stood nearby, calmly tying her hair back into a neat bun.
When she turned and saw me sitting up in the bed, her expression shifted, fear flashing across her face.
"Nicholas," she said softly, "are you alright?"
I raised my hand.
Blood stained the covers. Tears slid freely down my face.
And when I looked at her, the world seemed distant, washed beneath a vast, colorless veil.
It was though everything were being viewed through a thin, endless glare.
I smiled anyway.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I am."