The dream had no sky.
No ground either — only black, endless and complete, like a thought that refused to finish forming. I was aware without weight or breath, suspended in a space that existed only to hold attention.
And then he was there.
Not arriving.
Simply present.
Armor fitted without excess. No flourish, no insignia — each piece chosen because it performed better than the alternative. The blade at his side was clean, unadorned, balanced to the point that it felt less like a weapon and more like a tool.
I knew him immediately.
Not by name.
By design.
"You removed resistance," he said.
The words didn't echo. Nothing here did.
The darkness shifted and figures surfaced around him — dragged up from memory without ceremony. Enemies I remembered approaching with caution once. Creatures that had demanded positioning, preparation, compromise.
They moved to attack.
He didn't.
The first fell in a single motion — no wasted force, no correction after the fact. The second never reached him; its strike failed before it completed, as if the outcome had already been decided elsewhere.
More came.
They died faster.
There was no urgency in him. No exertion. He stood exactly where he had begun, untouched, as bodies dissolved back into the black.
"This is efficiency," he said.
He turned toward me.
"You optimized until the outcome was inevitable."
I tried to speak. The dream didn't acknowledge the attempt.
"A challenge that cannot fail is not a challenge," he continued. "It is repetition."
The last of the darkness stilled.
"You created me so that effort was unnecessary," he said. "So that uncertainty could not exist."
He took a single step forward.
The space tightened.
"And when effort disappears," he added, "so does meaning."
I felt it then — not fear, not anger — but the sterile emptiness of victories that never asked anything in return.
"You did not play," he said calmly. "You processed."
I woke abruptly, the inn rushing back in around me — wood and stale warmth, faint voices below, the thin slice of morning at the shutters.
My heart wasn't racing.
That was the worst part.
Because nothing in the dream had felt like a warning.
It had felt like an audit.
The room was dim but intact — real walls, a narrow bed, a shuttered window leaking a thin blade of morning light. No bedroll. No shared breathing. No instinctive inventory check before sitting up.
I lay still, letting the world prove itself solid. The dream clung stubbornly, not as imagery but as weight. My heart beat evenly. No lingering panic. No cold sweat.
That unsettled me more than fear would have.
I swung my legs over the bed and stood. The floor was cool beneath my feet. Ordinary. Grounded. The kind of mundane detail that should have chased away lingering thoughts.
It didn't.
I dressed slowly, deliberately. Armor settled into place with familiar ease — too familiar. Muscle memory filled in where thought should have been.
You processed, the dream-voice said, unbidden.
I tightened the last strap harder than necessary.