8.10 -- Mother, I'll Protect You

Somewhere beneath the stillness of sleep, in the place where memory goes when a soul finally stops holding it at arm's length, Ilyrisse dreamed.

It was not a dream she would remember clearly by morning -- most of them weren't, not anymore, not after so many centuries of the mind learning, gently and without being asked, to blur the sharpest edges of what it carried. But for the length of it, it was vivid in the particular, merciless way only old grief can be vivid: a small room, dim and close, walls she could not have named if asked, and a figure standing between her and something vast and formless pressing in from every direction at once -- not a monster, not quite, but an absence given shape, hungry and patient, the way Nothing itself might look if it ever chose to wear a face.

The figure standing between her and it was dark -- not menacing-dark, but the dark of something burning low and steady, banked embers rather than open flame, an ambition held tightly in check because letting it loose, even here, even now, would cost more than it would ever save. Small. Young. A child's shape, though the voice that came from it carried none of a child's uncertainty.

"Mother," the shape said, without turning, without taking its eyes off the vast pressing absence in front of it. "I'll protect you."

Ilyrisse tried to reach for it -- tried to pull it back, away from whatever it was standing so calmly, so certainly, in front of, because some instinct far older than the dream itself understood, with total clarity, that this was not a fight a child's shape should ever have had to stand in front of alone. But her hands would not close around anything. The dream held her at a distance she couldn't cross, the way the worst dreams always do, making her a witness to something she could not reach in time to stop.

"You don't have to," she tried to say. "Let me. Let me be the one who--"

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But the shape did not turn, did not waver, did not so much as tremble in the face of the vast dark thing pressing closer, closer, patient as only Nothing itself could be patient.

"Mother, I'll protect you," it said again, the exact same words, in the exact same steady voice, as though repetition alone might be enough to make the promise true.

Ilyrisse woke with her heart working harder than it had any right to, still tangled in Vaelira's arms, the crystal ceiling above her catching the Fragment's soft, endless dusk exactly as it always did, indifferent and gentle and entirely unaware of what had just passed through her.

She did not wake Vaelira. She lay very still instead, staring upward, and did not let herself examine, not yet, not tonight, why a dream she barely remembered had left her hands trembling faintly against a woman who was still, blessedly, fast asleep.

Vaelira stirred once, in her sleep, and murmured something too soft and too slurred to make out -- a name, perhaps, or simply a sound with no shape to it at all -- and settled again, her arm tightening reflexively around Ilyrisse's waist, an instinct that had nothing to do with waking and everything to do with whatever quieter part of her noticed, even asleep, that something nearby had gone tense.

Ilyrisse let herself be held by that arm without disturbing it. She thought, staring up at the high, indifferent glass, of the small dark shape that had stood between her and something vast and formless, refusing to turn, refusing to yield an inch of ground it had no business defending alone. She thought of how certain the voice had sounded, for something so young, so small, standing in front of something so much larger than itself. She thought, though she did not let the thought finish forming all the way, that certainty like that was rarely a comfort. It was, more often, the sound a person made when they had already decided the cost of staying was one they were prepared to pay, regardless of what it took from them.

It was, she told herself, nothing. An old fragment surfacing without permission, the way old fragments sometimes did, meaning nothing beyond the simple fact that even centuries did not make certain memories lie down and stay quiet forever.

She almost believed it.