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Taly stared into the dark, eyes frozen in a wide, unblinking stare. Her body felt heavy. She lay on her back, unable to move, unable to wake up.

Dreams slip through the Weave quietly , Azura once said. Scrying snags the threads, sending out ripples into the void.

Hands pawed at her body, forcing her onto her side.

So, build your defenses tall.

Fingers dug into her mouth. She tried to bite down. Couldn’t. The line between her body and mind had been cut.

Make them strong.

Bone crunched, and she felt pressure but not pain. It took her a moment to realize those fingers were now digging inside her broken skull.

And be ready for when the monsters come hunting.

“ Grimble… ”

The thing hovering over her was large and hunched. In the dark, she could only make out its shadow and the faint impression of too many arms moving around her, too many hands dragging at her body.

“ Grimble ,” it muttered in a rotting, gravelly voice, those fingers still digging, digging, digging inside her skull. “ Tell me, grimble, show me, show me… ”

Taly didn’t know what she’d done wrong. She’d been careful, followed every one of Azura and Leto’s rules for responsible dreaming. One moment, she was trailing a riftway key down a shadowed alley; the next, everything went black.

Those fingers stopped. “ There, grimble…” It gave the most horrible, little laugh. “ An open thought, practically inviting me in… ”

Then the landscape shifted. The darkness gave way. Red dirt scraped against her cheek. Her eyes remained open, unblinking. Beneath her, blood pooled, leaking from the wound at the back of her head.

“ You think much of this place. Can’t help but come back… ”

In front of her, the Aion Gate loomed.

Of all the gates on the island, Aion was the largest. Almost 100 feet wide and so tall it was impossible to see the top through the gray wall of clouds.

Twin pillars of hyaline towered high, their translucent forms catching and refracting the eerie light of the swirling sky.

Between them stretched a flat pane of shadow crystal with a thin sliver of gold slicing through the center—rising into the clouds like a seam in reality.

A rotting fist slammed into the dirt beside her, another yanking her onto her back.

The thing that Taly saw above her was a creature born of nightmares—a monster fashioned from sagging gray skin stretched over emaciated bone.

Too many arms sprouted from its body, each ending in a writhing cluster of too many hands.

Its head was large and bulbous, bald and unnatural, with slitted holes instead of nostrils and a lipless mouth filled with twin rows of razor-sharp teeth.

With each breath, its body heaved, its sides working like ancient, wheezing bellows.

It leaned in to take a long sniff.

Taly whimpered as two sickly, milk-white eyes blinked open.

“ Knock, knock… ”

Fingers dug into her mouth, wrenching her jaw open and closed as it said in a high-pitched imitation, “ Who’s there? ”

“ Grimble. ”

“ Grimble who? ”

“ GRIMBLE! GRIMBLE! GRIMBLE! ”

It jumped, a tangle of arms crashing down, fists pounding the ground around her. Laughing—Shards, its laugh was awful, like nails on a chalkboard.

“ Time mage like joke? ” Fingers dug back into her skull to pick through her brain. “I see here like joke. Like when male tell joke. ”

Its eyes blinked, and suddenly they were emerald green. A quiet, almost inaudible whine rose from her throat.

“ I try over. Knock knock… ” It couldn’t wait this time. “ GRIMBLE! ”

A shrieking laugh tore free as it clapped all its many hands, delighted with its own joke. Then with a single, mighty push, it launched itself into the air, landing in a roll to skitter across the field.

“ I know this place. Last snack like this place. Look different now.” It hobbled up to the Gate, each movement of its bony hips jerky and unsettling. “She like you, tasty. She dream of shiny. Show you… grimble show you. ”

Rearing back, every arm lifted at once. Hands layered over hands, fingers tangling, clutching, grasping for the sky.

Something like power shivered out of it, sweeping across the landscape and making it ripple.

Colors swirled like a distorted reflection.

And then in that way that only dreams could manage, the world around her changed.

Red dirt and bright sunlight gave way to a vast nighttime cityscape bordering a white marble plaza.

Above her, the Aion Gate still loomed.

Same place, different time.

This was still Tempris but before the Schism. Back when the island was a crossroad for the worlds—the jeweled heart of the Fey Imperium.

Next, those countless hands turned inward, clawing at the grimble’s own flesh. They tore through sagging skin, dug into muscle, wrenched at bone. Wet, tearing sounds filled the air. Blood dripped onto the white marble as it remade itself like a potter forming clay.

“ The plaza is six miles wide ,” the creature said, its voice shifting into something higher, more feminine, more alive.

“ And there are six city gates .” It pointed a bloody, clumsily transforming hand at the six perfect circles of quartz that bordered the city plaza.

“ Leading to six avenues named for the six underground cities .”

A teenaged Fey girl with a wild tangle of chestnut curls now stood in place of the grimble.

Her face was flawless. Below the neck, everything warped.

One arm wrenched backwards like the beast had forgotten the appropriate assembly.

The other hung too long. Her legs supported her, but barely—one was too short, the other bent at an odd angle, the joints misaligned like a marionette forced to stand on its own.

“ Six for the Sacred Six,” the grimble said through her, using her stolen voice. “Six for the six schools of magic. Six for the number of High Lords and Ladies that must always sit on the Council. ”

The grimble’s mouth peeled back into a smile so wide that the girl’s cheeks slashed open. “ She loved this place, ” it croaked in its own throaty snarl once more . “ Begged ‘Momma, Momma, let me see the Gate.’ ”

Taly wondered what had happened to her—this poor girl. More importantly, was it the same thing that was about to happen to her?

Why couldn’t she move ?

A bony, gray arm punched out of the girl’s chest. “ I let her see the Gate. ” Skin ripped as the creature clawed its way back out, leaving a sagging pile of flesh on the ground.

“ I gave her beeeautiful dreams so that when I eated her… No. Ate . ” It gave a full-body shiver.

“ See, grimble already getting smarter. Already finding more words in your head.”

It shuffled across the plaza, dragging the girl’s discarded skin with it. “Grimble nice. Grimble don’t like the taste of fear. Not like others. You lucky. When I ate my last time mage, I put her right here. ”

It slapped the skin down on the Gate interface, a four-foot pedestal that jutted from the ground.

“ I put her here, so that she could see… ” It turned those green eyes up towards the starry sky, where the smooth crystal panes of the Aion Gate disappeared into dark clouds. “ I let her see this thing that she loved so dearly. Other grimbles not so nice. Other grimbles like it when you scream. ”

And then that lipless mouth split open. Wider. And wider. And wider . Until its entire body had almost torn in two—the top half peeling backward, ribs splaying wide like a jaw unhinging.

It dropped the lifeless skin into that maw packed with teeth.

Taly began to sob as it crawled back over her, pawing at her face. Every instinct screamed—run, fight, move —but she couldn’t.

“ Don’t cry, don’t cry. Grimble don’t like the taste of tears. Grimble look inside, yes? Grimble find dream. Good dream, and then you let grimble in. You say yes next time grimble knock. ”

Taly stared numbly into the night sky, tears rolling down her cheeks as it scraped along the inside of her skull with surgical care, not looking for a way out—but a place to nest.

As it worked, it began to sing, “ Time mage, time mage, my favoritest, tastiest snack. I’m so hungry, craving your flesh to…” It stopped singing. “ Oh, I found something. Well, that’s interesting. That’s why you so smell so tasty.”

Its head slid back into her field of vision. Milky eyes blinked. “ Kairó vuun’manii?”

The words hit bone. Taly flinched.

The grimble giggled softly. “You don’t know what it means,” it whispered. “But I do.”

Then—something pulsed inside her.

It didn’t belong to the dream. It came from outside it.

A force that pulled her body up like there was a string attached to one of her ribs.

The grimble slapped her back down. Those fingers went back to digging. “ It means you’re going to be tasty . Means she’s going to be angry, but grimble quick. Grimble smart. Grimble knows how to hide from lady. ”

Its head craned, swiveling to look her in the eye. “ Knock, knock… ”

Taly screamed through her teeth.

Monsters are real , Azura had said. And the grimble, the dream spinner, was the most monstrous of them all.

This place—it was just an antechamber, a place in her mind she’d carved out and tucked away.

Here, she was safe, but the grimble would keep digging, rooting through her memories. It would keep her here until it found the right words, the right dream, the perfect illusion that would trick her into believing in this reality.

And then when her mental shields finally fell—then it would feed.

Yet there was still a way out.

A horrible, terrible way.

A way that might still leave her fucked even if she did everything perfectly.

The grimble slapped her across the face. It was getting impatient. Greedy.

“ Let me in! ” it screeched.

“No,” Taly breathed. It was barely a wheeze of air between stiff vocal cords, but she finally found her voice.

The grimble reared back to slap her again, but she was ready this time.

It took every ounce of will, every shred of self—lifting a hand, she caught its wrist.

And because this was still her dream—her mind—a single push sent it flying.

That something was still pulsing inside her, that string still tugging at her, frantic and desperate.

Taly lurched to her feet. She stumbled, then collapsed to her knees. Her body felt too heavy, too clumsy, still not quite her own.

The grimble snarled, crawling upright in a jerky, hunched motion. It’s eyes blazed with a hunger that bordered on madness.

It heaved in a breath, and the world rippled. It was re-weaving the dream, starting over—

“No,” she wheezed again and looked down at her chest.

This was her dream. Her body. Her rules.

She punched through her own chest like it was paper soaked in blood. Her hand sank deeper, through her body, through the dream. Up to the elbow, she stopped.

There it was—that fluttering, pulsing rhythm.

With Luck, she hadn’t needed to resort to such measures. The kid got cocky and accidentally showed her the way out.

This time, there was no such slip up. The only way out of the nightmare was to force a shutdown.

The grimble charged, its mouth open and screaming.

Taly waited until the beast made its final lunge to clench her fist, snuffing out that beat.

“Taly,” Skye said. But she didn’t respond. He shook her shoulder, gentle at first, then harder. “Taly, wake up.”

She was on her back, arms splayed where she fell. Her hair fanned out like a halo.

“Wake up,” he tried again, the words hitching.

Her chest no longer rose and fell with breath. Her fingers lay still, lifeless. The gentle flutter of her eyelids had ceased.

He grasped for the bond, the place it should’ve been—and found nothing but an eerie stillness, a silence so profound it felt like a scream.

His mind raced, a whirlwind of fear and denial. She was too pale, too still.

Not again. Please, please, not again.

“Taly…” he whispered, shaking her more firmly.

Ivain hovered behind him, worry etched onto his features. He held a finger to his lips. “Do you hear that?”

The world contracted to a singular, deafening void—the place where her heartbeat should have been.

Among the rising, uneven chorus of their own, hers was missing.

No heartbeat.

No breath.

Just a body on the floor, already cooling.

Taly was dead.