The Silent Dreamers
The stone corridor breathed around them.
Each step Cuco took echoed like a question the walls were too afraid to answer. Shadows writhed along the carvings—ancient lines and figures etched into the rock that seemed to shift just outside the light.
Isabela moved ahead, her candle a flickering heartbeat in the dark.
"How many of us are left?" Cuco asked quietly.
She didn't turn.
"Fewer than you'd hope," she said. "And fewer still who haven't gone silent."
They descended into a smaller chamber—low-ceilinged, warm, and thick with the smell of candle wax and something older. Dust, maybe. Or time.
Four narrow beds lined the curved wall. Three were occupied.
Dreamers.
Real ones.
Cuco felt it before he saw them. A pressure in the air. Like standing inside someone else's nightmare and realizing it had teeth.
The first sat upright, legs crossed, her hair a white flame against the gloom. Shards of broken glass orbited her head, reflecting fractured versions of the room—each one showing something off: a flickering movement, a warped shadow, a glimpse of someone who wasn't there.
"That's the Shardwalker," Isabela murmured. "She dreamed herself into a mirror world. Got stuck. Then tore her way back."
Cuco watched a shard flash. In its reflection—his own face blinked when he hadn't.
He looked away.
The second bed held a boy, motionless, arms wrapped in thick, stained bandages. His eyes were open, but glassy, like he was somewhere else entirely. The veins in his arms pulsed with a dull green glow—too slow to be alive, too rhythmic to be dead.
"Echo," Isabela said. "Every word he speaks becomes truth—for someone else."
Cuco's voice caught. "That's... terrifying."
"It was," she said. "That's why he stopped speaking three years ago. He dreamed his best friend into a coma."
The silence that followed felt like it was listening.
Then Cuco turned toward the final bed.
A small figure curled beneath a thin sheet. Their body trembled—not from cold, or fear, but restraint. Power bristled under the fabric like static before a storm. The light beneath the blanket throbbed bright, almost blinding. A mark—alive and burning.
"Who's that?" Cuco asked.
Isabela hesitated.
Then: "Lira. Strongest of us all."
"She doesn't look—"
"She's not sleeping," Isabela cut in. "She's remembering."
Cuco's skin crawled. "Remembering what?"
Isabela's voice was barely a whisper now.
"She walked through the Gate. Alone. Came back wrong."
He swallowed. "You mean she went to the Other Side?"
She nodded, slow and grim. "When she returned, she said three words. Then she went silent."
Cuco leaned in, pulse racing. "What words?"
Isabela turned toward him.
Her eyes were dark with fear.
> "It saw me."
The candle shivered. Flame sputtered.
And then—
Lira sat up.
Fast. Like she'd been waiting.
Her eyes—milky white but burning with something behind them—locked onto Cuco.
Her voice cracked through the air like ice snapping:
> "You're next."
The candle blew out.
Darkness.
Cuco stumbled back as the chamber plunged into shadow. The carvings on the wall began to writhe—no longer hints, but shapes now. Figures. Reaching. Turning. Watching.
Isabela cursed under her breath and struck a match—just enough light to show the walls moving.
A shadow crawled across the stone—tall, humanoid, but wrong.
It stopped behind Cuco.
He turned.
No one was there.
But Lira whispered again. Not to him. To something else.
> "It's already inside."
A low rumble shook the room.
Not from the earth.
From beneath it.
And Cuco realized, for the first time, that he hadn't entered a sanctuary.
He had entered a warning.