CHAPTER 78: EYE DREAMS

The camp held its breath.

A stillness settled over the ridge, the kind born not of calm but of dread suspended. Soldiers whispered in low voices. Mages kept their hands near their belts, their runes half-etched and glowing faintly. Horses shuffled nervously, their eyes wide with something older than fear.

Leon had not crossed the threshold. But he had answered.

The gate no longer pulsed. It stood inert, as if satisfied with the taste of his defiance. Yet something had changed. The snow had stopped, the wind dead. Even the sky above—grey and cracked like old glass—had quieted.

And then, without warning, the eye blinked.

Only once.

It didn’t open or close like flesh. It simply shimmered—and vanished. The entire gate went dark.

Then Leon collapsed.

No shout, no cry. Just a sharp exhale and a sudden drop, like a puppet with its strings cut. Elena caught him before he hit the stone, lowering him gently to the ground. His body was cold. Too cold.

"Leon—Leon!" She pressed her hand to his chest. His heart still beat. Barely.

Kellen was already moving. "What the hell did that thing do to him?"

Naeve crouched low, eyes narrowing. "It didn’t take him. It brought him somewhere."

—

Leon stood alone.

Not in the snow. Not in the camp. Not even in the ravine.

He was somewhere else.

The world around him was a plain of bone. Not skeletal remains, but a landscape of marrow and ivory, ridged and smooth and endless. Above him, a sky of eyes—no stars, no moon. Just unblinking orbs suspended in twilight, watching.

He didn’t move.

He couldn’t.

Not because he was bound. But because he remembered this place.

He had seen it before. In dreams. In fever. In that brief moment when the Thorn Crest burned and he touched the ash.

A voice moved through the air. Not heard, but remembered.

You were warned.

Leon didn’t speak.

You are not the first of your line to find this gate. Nor the first to fall before it.

The ground shifted beneath him. Shapes moved within the bone. Not worms. Not roots. Names.

He saw them.

Thorne. Luthien. Velra. Kass. All etched in pale grooves, buried in the marrow.

Blood remembers. And so does the eye.

He clenched his fists.

"Then why me?"

Because you walked into the dark.

The eye above him blinked again. Just once.

And suddenly, he was not alone.

A man stood opposite him. Same height. Same frame. Same eyes.

But the mouth smiled wrong.

"Come home, Thorne."

Leon took a step back.

The other him stepped forward.

The sky of eyes narrowed.

And behind the echo of his own face, a gate opened—

Not one of bone. But of memory. Of fire. Of the night his father died.

The dream deepened.

And Leon fell into it.

—

It wasn’t the fire that struck him first—it was the heat. Alive, stifling, the kind that pressed into lungs and made breath feel like drowning. Smoke curled through the air in slow coils, the world coloured orange and black.

He stood in a hallway. Not his childhood home—but close. Echoes of it. The wood along the walls pulsed faintly with vein-like carvings, and every step he took creaked with memory.

Down the corridor, a door stood open.

The light within flickered.

He walked.

Not cautiously. Not recklessly. Just forward, like gravity.

Inside the room, the fire hadn’t touched anything. It was clean, untouched. His father sat at the edge of a long table, facing away.

"I’m not supposed to be here," Leon said.

His father didn’t answer at first.

Then "You always were."

Leon stepped in fully. "This isn’t real."

"No. But neither is what you’ve built around your name."

The man turned. He looked younger than Leon remembered. His eyes sharper. His voice less worn.

"You think blood gives you clarity? That inheritance makes purpose easier? It doesn’t. It burdens it."

Leon’s throat felt dry. "Then what does it mean? This place. That gate. The eye."

His father stood.

And for a moment, the flames flickered in his shadow.

"It means someone made a deal long before you were born. And now the debt has come due."

Leon stiffened. "What deal?"

His father walked past him, placing a hand briefly on his shoulder. Cold. Regretful.

"You’ll remember. Just not all at once."

The door behind him closed.

And the floor fell away.

Leon dropped through layers of firelight and memory, through voices that didn’t belong to him. Screams. Chants. Laughter. Steel against bone. Crowns melted. Names lost.

He landed hard—

Back in the bone plain.

The other version of himself was waiting. But now it wore a crown.

And all the sky-eyes blinked in unison.

Leon reached for his blade—

But his scabbard was empty.

The echo stepped forward. "Not steel. Not here. Here, we only bleed truth."

And from the sky came the eye’s voice once more—

Choose.

Which part of you survives?

Leon stared at the crowned mirror. It did not move, only waited.

Memories clawed at the edge of his thoughts—his mother’s voice humming a lullaby; the scent of ash on old books; the crack of a whip in the night. Each memory weighed something. Each one bled truth.

"I’m not just one thing," Leon said aloud.

The crown-wearing reflection tilted its head. "But you must be. Here, choice is the only gate."

The sky darkened. The bone plain rippled.

And before Leon, two paths opened. One carved in fire. The other in shadow.

A boy’s voice echoed from the left. "Run, brother. Run faster."

From the right, a woman’s whisper. "You promised me the quiet would never return."

Elena. Her voice, but not her. A memory caught in dream.

Leon took a breath.

Then another.

He stepped forward, toward neither path.

The echo frowned.

Leon walked to the centre, where both paths met but did not merge.

"I bleed truth," he said. "But I will not cut myself to fit your shape."

And he knelt.

The crowned reflection flinched.

Above, the sky-eyes trembled.

And the plain cracked open.

Not beneath Leon.

Beneath the other him.

It fell. Without scream. Without weight.

The crown rolled across the bone.

Leon stood.

"If I must choose," he whispered, "then I choose to remain whole."

And the Eye wept again.

A second tear. Not black.

Gold.

And the world shattered.

Leon opened his eyes.

He was back.

But nothing felt the same.

Not even his name.

The air smelled wrong.

Elena’s hands were still on his shoulders, but she froze as his eyes opened—because they glowed. Not brightly. Just faintly, like candlelight behind frost. The glow faded quickly. But for that one moment, something ancient had peered out from behind his gaze.

Kellen’s voice cracked through the camp. "He’s up!"

But no one moved.

Leon sat up, slow, measured. His breath came shallow at first—then steadied.

"Elena?"

"I’m here."

He reached for her hand. Clasped it.

Then he looked past her—toward the bone gate.

It was gone.

Not destroyed.

Just... absent.

A smooth stone wall now stood where it once arched. No pulse. No eye.

Naeve’s voice came low. "What did you do?"

Leon stood, the movement almost silent.

"I made a choice."

He looked down at his own hands.

"They asked which part of me should survive. I told them all of it."