CHAPTER 1215: FIELD OF DREAMS (1).

Cain scanned the chamber again. Nothing moved, nothing breathed besides the two of them. The air felt wrong—not stale, but too still, like the room was waiting for the next action before it allowed itself to exist properly.

He looked back at the chains. "Why are you even alive? If this place kills intruders, you shouldn’t still be breathing."

The figure’s expression remained empty. "Because I didn’t enter for myself."

Cain raised an eyebrow. "Then for who?"

"For you."

Cain blinked. "Try again."

"It won’t make more sense the second time." The figure exhaled. "I came because the forest told me someone would arrive with the lantern. Someone who wasn’t erased. Someone who didn’t dissolve between the branches."

Cain stared. "You’re telling me the forest talks."

"Not with words." Their gaze flicked toward the chamber’s ceiling. "It breathes, it remembers, it warns. And it led me here to wait."

"For what?"

The figure finally leaned forward as far as the chains allowed, voice dropping lower.

"To tell you that you don’t belong in this forest—and it’s trying to keep you from going deeper."

Cain exhaled through his teeth. "Great. Then I’ll leave. I didn’t plan on sightseeing."

"You can’t."

No hesitation.

No room for argument.

Cain frowned. "Why not?"

"Because you stepped through the archway."

The figure nodded toward the entrance behind him. Cain looked back—and froze.

The archway was gone.

Where the opening used to be was nothing but a solid wall of the same dark stone, smooth and unmarred, as if it had never been carved.

Cain stood slowly, lantern held tight.

"You’ve got to be kidding me."

"The shrine doesn’t open the same way twice." The figure’s voice remained maddeningly calm. "It only lets you leave after you’ve seen what it wants you to see."

Cain turned back. "And what does it want me to see?"

The figure lifted their bound hands slightly. The chains scraped softly against the stone.

"You wouldn’t be here unless you already know."

Cain didn’t. He was sure he didn’t. But the lantern’s flame flickered again—leaning toward the far side of the chamber, toward another set of symbols that spiraled into the floor.

Cain moved toward them, slow but steady.

Behind him, the figure said quietly:

"Be careful. The lantern doesn’t protect you once you step into that pattern."

Cain stopped. "Why?"

"Because that isn’t darkness." The figure’s voice tightened for the first time.

"It’s memory."

Cain stared at the spiraling glyphs carved into the floor. They pulsed faintly—like the heartbeat of something ancient buried beneath the stone.

He stepped closer.

The lantern’s flame dimmed.

And the chamber suddenly felt impossibly deep.

Cain clenched his jaw.

"Alright," he muttered. "Let’s see what you’re hiding."

He stepped into the spiral.

The lantern went dark.

For one breathless instant, Cain felt weightless—suspended between the extinguished lantern and the spiraling glyphs beneath his feet. The chamber vanished in a blink, not with the violence of a collapse, but with a smooth, deliberate transition, as if reality had quietly rotated and placed him somewhere else.

Darkness didn’t swallow him. It shaped itself around him.

A soft, pulsing glow replaced the void. Not light—memory.

The spiral beneath him unfolded outward like petals opening underwater, revealing long corridors of dim color, each one quivering like strands of living fabric. They weren’t paths. They were threads. And they tugged at him gently, as though deciding which part of him they wanted to unravel first.

Cain held the dead lantern tight. The handle was warm, still carrying the echo of its flame, but it didn’t reignite.

"Fine," he muttered. "You got me here. Let’s get on with it."

The closest thread brightened. He didn’t touch it. It reached for him.

A soft snap echoed as it latched onto his palm. Cain jerked back out of instinct, but there was no pain—just a rush of sensation. A memory surged upward, unfamiliar yet uncomfortably intimate.

He saw a forest at dusk.

Not this one—another, gentler, warmer.

Fireflies drifted in the air like small wandering stars.

A child stood in the center of a clearing, lantern in hand.

Cain blinked. The image flickered like it was projected through water. He stepped closer, the thread pulling him in without force, simply offering. The child lifted the lantern—its glass identical to his, even the scratches in the same place.

Cain felt his breath hitch.

"This isn’t mine," he said aloud.

The memory didn’t respond. It only rippled, dimmed, and drifted backward into the tangle of threads. Another slid forward, brushing his arm. This one was heavier—thicker, darker.

He let it touch him.

A different scene snapped into clarity:

A woman kneeling beside a riverbank, her hands cupped around a flame that hovered without fuel. She wept silently. Not from fear. From reverence.

Behind her stood a figure Cain recognized instantly.

The one from the shrine.

Chained.

Only... not chained yet.

The hood was lowered. The face was clearer. Human, but touched with something other—something that made the air around them tremble. The figure whispered something into the woman’s ear, and her tears shifted from awe to dread.

Cain stepped back. The thread released him.

"Why am I seeing this?"

The chamber didn’t answer. The threads only shimmered, adjusting their positions like a ring of waiting witnesses.

Another thread drifted toward him—this one faint, almost hesitant. Cain didn’t want to touch it. This one felt closer to him than the others. Too close.

He reached anyway.

A battlefield snapped into focus.

Burning trees. Screaming ash. Shadows leaping across the ground like wild beasts. A man—broad-shouldered, blood-soaked—charging forward with a curved blade. His face wasn’t fully visible, but Cain knew something about his stance, his angles, the set of his shoulders.

He felt it in his bones.

The man wasn’t him.

But he was connected to him.

Cain pulled back sharply. The thread whipped away like it had been burned.

He set his jaw and glanced around. "Enough. If this place is showing me something, then show it. Don’t play guessing games."

The threads stilled—then parted.

A fourth path opened.

Cain froze.

This one pulsed with a different rhythm. Not memory. Purpose. The glow didn’t tug, didn’t drift, didn’t flicker. It waited like a door already unlocked.

Cain stepped toward it.