Nameless didn't sleep.
He closed his eyes, yes. Let his limbs go slack on the cot and let the stale air of the Guild's underground quarters fill his lungs in slow, measured draws. But the moment consciousness began to fade, the moment the veil of sleep dared to close over him…
She was there.
In the corners. In the mirror he had covered with his coat. Beneath the bed.
She didn't whisper this time. Didn't move.
She simply watched. With her head tilted slightly, her stitched mouth smiling beneath eyes that should have been blind, but weren't.
So he didn't sleep.
Hours passed - he could only guess how many. Time in the depths moved sluggishly, like syrup running uphill. The lamp overhead, powered by dream light or perhaps some other esoteric mechanism, never flickered. Its glow was constant, a pale cream hue that never warmed the room, only illuminated it in clinical stillness.
Nameless sat at the desk again.
The parchment now had three lines, all written in his cramped, angular hand.
"I was born in someone else's dream. She kissed my shadow. I cannot forget a face I never knew."
He didn't know why he was writing. Was it a test? A ritual? A confession?
Or a trap?
Whatever the answer, the room hadn't "corrected" anything yet. No whispers through the vents. No dripping ink crawling back up the page. Not yet.
A soft knock echoed from the other side of the brass-bound door.
Not the Warden's kind of knock. No rhythm. No authority.
Tap… tap… tap.
Polite. Almost uncertain.
Nameless stood, fingers grazing the revolver instinctively, but not drawing it. He moved to the door, pressed his ear against the cool metal, and waited.
"Hello?" came a voice—female, clear, but hesitant. "I'm… your assigned handler. Are you decent?"
Nameless frowned.
"Handler?" he asked. "Now?"
A muffled sigh.
"They never tell the new ones anything, do they? Yes. Handler. You're unaligned, unstable, and probably dangerous. I'm here to keep you from melting someone's brain. Or your own. Can I come in?"
He paused, then unlatched the door.
It creaked open.
She stepped through wearing a burgundy waistcoat, long gloves, and a tailored coat bearing the same silver moth emblem—but hers had three embroidered eyes beneath the wings.
She was young—early twenties, perhaps. Auburn hair tied back in a ribbon, eyes a sharp slate blue. A brass monocle with etched runes hung at her hip by a silver chain. A walking stick—not ornamental—tapped softly against the stone floor as she moved.
She looked him up and down.
"You're even less stable than I expected," she muttered.
Nameless raised an eyebrow. "That's one hell of an introduction."
She held out a hand. "Elira Thorne. Dreamwright 3rd Circle. I'm to escort you during your first surface excursion."
"Surface?" His body tensed involuntarily.
She tilted her head. "You didn't think you'd stay buried forever, did you? The Guild doesn't feed mouths that don't produce results. And since you're still unaffiliated, they want to test your… potential."
He said nothing.
She walked over to the desk, glanced at the page, and raised an eyebrow. "Poetic. Cryptic. Slightly suicidal. You'll fit right in."
Nameless couldn't help the twitch of a smile.
Elira turned, her expression hardening. "Get dressed. We leave in ten."
Vinterra's surface, when they reached it, was not much kinder than its depths.
The street they emerged onto was wet with last night's drizzle. The gutters ran dark with runoff that smelled of copper and ash. Above them, the buildings leaned like mourners, stone angels atop the rooftops casting long shadows that twitched if stared at too long.
The moon still hung above, ever crimson, half-veiled by soot and cloud.
Elira led him through the narrow walkways with confidence. People passed by—ordinary people, it seemed. Men in overcoats. Women in layered dresses. Vendors shouting wares, hawking glass-bottled dreams, plague-purging elixirs, and forget-me-lamps.
But Nameless noticed it immediately.
"No one looked them in the eye."
As if they could smell something wrong clinging to their clothes. As if the mark of the Guild made them ghosts even in daylight.
After several blocks, Elira ducked into a side alley and pushed open a narrow iron gate, leading them into a moss-covered courtyard between three gothic buildings. At the center stood a stone fountain—long dry—its sculpture depicting a blindfolded woman with a dagger in her throat and a key in her mouth.
Around the fountain, six others were waiting.
Dreamwalkers. Each stranger than the last.
One wore a porcelain mask shaped like a weeping face. Another had gloves stained with ink that dripped continuously, never drying. A third, tall and stiff-backed, wore a wide-brimmed hat from which strings hung like puppet lines, vanishing into the air above.
A circle had been drawn in chalk and bone-dust on the cobblestones.
Inside it lay a body.
Nameless froze.
It wasn't fresh.
Ritual scars ran across its skin—sigils carved in careful, almost loving precision.
A dreamcatcher of human teeth hung around its neck.
Elira leaned in.
"This was a dream-runner. Illicit. Not Guild-approved. Burned out during entry. But the mind still echoes."
She gestured toward the circle.
"You're going in."
Nameless stared at her. "What?"
"You're unaligned. Wild. That means you can pass through unstable fields. Maybe you'll find what burned him. Maybe you'll wake with a better idea of what you are. Or maybe you'll break. The Guild considers all outcomes useful."
Nameless stepped back. "You're sending me into a dead man's dream?"
She didn't answer directly.
But her eyes softened—just a little.
"You survived her. This is nothing compared to that."
The other Dreamwalkers began chanting, soft and rhythmic. The circle pulsed once with red light, the air inside it growing thick and shimmering like oil atop water.
The world shifted.
Nameless stepped forward.
And the moment his foot touched the inside of the circle, the ground fell away.
Darkness.
Then - A door. Made of glass and bone. With no handle. Etched into its surface was a phrase, familiar now:
"Everyone will die. Including me."
The door loomed before him.
Glass and bone. Fragile and ancient. Elegant and cruel.
The bone framework was yellowed with age, and it curled around the translucent glass in spiraling designs - like ribs enclosing a heart. The surface shimmered, reflecting not Nameless's body but his shadows, flickering like candlelight with too many limbs.
No handle. No hinges. No lock.
Only the phrase, etched in delicate script that shimmered faintly in moonlight:
Everyone will die. Including me.
Nameless lifted his hand and touched the phrase.
Cold.
Then - warmth bloomed beneath his fingertips.
The door breathed.
It inhaled slowly, soundlessly, like a slumbering creature stirring from dreams of hunger. The etching pulsed once. Then the door cracked down the middle—not violently, but precisely—as if responding to a command it had been waiting centuries to hear.
Nameless stepped through.
The world beyond was… wrong.
Sky stretched above him, but it was a sky of canvas - painted in brushstrokes too real, too raw, as if it might peel back if touched. The clouds drifted in odd, reversed patterns. The stars twinkled, then blinked out at random, like dying eyes. And the moon - It was gone.
In its place hung a clock.
A massive, unmoving pocket watch, floating in the heavens.
No ticking. No movement. But time passed anyway.
Nameless stood on a platform suspended in nothing - a fragmented piece of cobblestone street. Debris floated around it: benches, lamp posts, pages torn from books that never landed. The air here buzzed with static and memory.
A whisper.
"He wasn't ready…"
Nameless turned.
The voice hadn't come from behind him. It had come from inside the broken cobblestones.
Another whisper:
"He lied to the door."
Nameless crouched.
The stone was bleeding.
Black, ink-like ichor seeped between the cracks, and if he looked closely, he could see it forming words.
"Lucien was the first. But you are the last."
Lucien.
There it was again. That name. The man whose dream Nameless had first stolen. Or entered. Or become. His presence had not faded, it had sunk deeper, threading itself through each of these strange events like a needle sewing a shroud.
Then something shifted in the air.
A sound.
No - a note.
Clear, sharp, and piercing, like a violin string pulled too tight.
From the far edge of the platform, something approached. Walking upside down across the underside of a floating streetlamp, as if gravity bent to its will.
A figure in a plague doctor's mask, long beak and all, dressed in tattered robes of shimmering black ink. Their hands were gloved, but their fingers moved too fluidly, like tendrils pretending to be bones.
They carried a book.
And the book—like the journal Nameless had first found - breathed.
The figure halted at the edge of the platform and tilted its head.
Then it spoke.
"You are not the Dreamer."
The voice was hollow, echoing twice - once in his ears, once in his spine.
Nameless stayed still. "No."
"But you have his mark."
The figure raised the book. Opened it.
Pages flipped. Fast. Faster. Blurred.
Then stopped.
"Lucien fled," the figure whispered. "But left the door open."
"You are the echo that walked in."
Nameless swallowed, tension gripping him like ice. "What is this place?"
"A failed dream. A broken echo. The mind of a dead man that never stopped thinking."
"Why am I here?"
The book closed. The masked figure tilted its head again.
"To be chosen."
Behind the figure, a second door appeared in the air.
Not glass and bone this time, but steel and thread, suspended by chains woven from hair and memory. It pulsed faintly, like a heart left on life support.
The plague-masked entity turned toward it.
Then back to Nameless.
"Do you wish to remain unaligned?"
Nameless hesitated.
"I don't even know what I am yet."
"Exactly," said the mask.
The door opened without a sound.
A staircase unfolded downward into a spiral of shadow and blood red light.
The air thickened. He could smell - faintly - the scent of violets, sulfur, and something else…
Her perfume.
The dream-woman.
She was near.
Nameless stepped forward, past the masked figure, onto the first step.
"Wait," the figure said, placing a tendrilled hand on his arm. "You must leave something behind."
Nameless turned. "What?"
"A name."
"I don't have one."
"Then leave the absence of one," said the plague doctor.
The ink on the book began to bleed.
Nameless closed his eyes.
And whispered.
"I am not Lucien. I am not no one. I am…"
The rest was silence.
The figure nodded. Then vanished.
Nameless descended.
The staircase was endless - not in size, but in emotion.
Each step triggered a memory he'd never lived, His hands, covered in someone else's blood. A child's lullaby in his own voice. The scent of fire on a wedding day. A hallway of mirrors where every version of himself died screaming.
He gritted his teeth, pressing onward.
At the bottom was a chamber.
Circular.
Carved from the inside of a massive skull. The walls were ridged bone. The floor was a single slab of obsidian, etched with two symbols.
One: a closed eye, surrounded by a spiral of chains.
Two: a cracked mask, beneath a black flame.
Between them sat a pedestal.
A single item rested there:
A dream-mirror shard - glimmering like moonlight trapped in glass.
Nameless approached.
When he touched it, the shard melted into his palm, leaving no wound—just a mark.
The mark of the Pathless.
His choice was made.
He had not aligned to any archetype.
He had become something worse.
Or greater.
Far above, Elira stood in the ritual circle, watching his body twitch once. Then twice.
The other Dreamwrights stirred, murmurs rising.
Elira frowned.
"He's gone too deep," she muttered. "The Path is choosing for him."
One of the masked Walkers leaned close. "He's not choosing a Path at all."
"He's becoming one."