The Weight of Visions
The city was already burning when Ethan opened his eyes inside the dream, and it burned the same way it always did—slow, almost tender, as if the fire loved what it consumed. Towers of glass and rusted steel leaned against a sky the color of a healing bruise. Water lapped at the shattered foundations below, black and glassy, reflecting flames that never seemed to move closer or farther away. He stood on nothing, some impossible vantage above it all, and felt the old, familiar dread pool in his stomach like cold oil.
Then came the hand.
It rose out of the smoke on the horizon, vast beyond any human scale, fingers uncurling like the ribs of some drowned leviathan. Shadow given form, given hunger. It did not reach for the city so much as settle over it, patient, inevitable, the way dusk settles over a field. Ethan tried to scream and could not. He tried to run and there was nowhere to run to, no ground beneath his feet, only that terrible descending dark and the whisper that rode beneath it, threading through his skull like a needle through cloth.
*The Reckoning comes home.*
He woke gasping, one hand clawed into the thin blanket, the other pressed flat against his chest as though…
