CHAPTER 1216: FIELD OF DREAMS (2).

The world snapped into clarity—not hazy like before, not distant or symbolic. Real.

He stood in a small stone chamber, different from the shrine but built with the same style. A man knelt at an altar, shoulders trembling. His face was hidden, but his voice carried clearly.

"Just let her live. Take anything else. Anything. Take me."

Cain’s pulse slammed in his ears. He recognized that voice. Not immediately—memory didn’t snap into place like a revelation—but a deep ache stirred in his chest. A piece of something he’d forgotten long before waking in the forest.

The man pressed his forehead against the altar. "I’ll pay any price."

The air thickened. Shadows gathered on the walls—not like darkness, but like silhouettes of wings stretching and folding.

Cain stepped closer despite himself. "Who are you talking to?"

He received no answer. The memory wasn’t aware of him. It played forward, unstoppable.

The shadows behind the kneeling man shivered—and descended.

A voice, layered and resonant, spoke from everywhere and nowhere at once:

"A price offered is a price taken."

Cain’s stomach dropped. The lantern in his hand vibrated.

The man lifted his head. "Then save her."

Cain’s breath hitched as he saw the man’s face at last.

Not his own.

But similar.

Far too similar.

A brother.

A predecessor.

A bloodline he didn’t remember.

The shadows folded around the man in a slow, terrible embrace.

"Done."

The chamber cracked like ice. Flames burst from the altar, not consuming but transforming. The man screamed—his voice ripping into a sound no human throat should make.

Cain lunged forward. "Stop!"

The memory shattered.

Glass. Light. Stone. All gone.

Cain stumbled backward into the spiral chamber again, breathing hard, the fragments of the vision still burning behind his eyes.

Threads fluttered around him like disturbed birds.

He steadied himself. "What was that? What did he pay? What did you take?"

The threads recoiled.

The floor pulsed once.

A single glyph ignited beneath him—bright, blinding, final.

The lantern in his hand relit with a violent snap of flame.

And a voice—not memory this time, but present—whispered directly behind him:

"He paid for your life."

Cain spun around.

The chained figure from the shrine stood unbound, free, eyes burning brighter than the lantern.

Cain didn’t move at first.

The figure standing before him wasn’t a trick of the threads or a memory fragment. The air around it warped subtly, like heat rising off metal. Its outline wavered between solid and incorporeal, but the eyes—those stayed clear. Sharp. A color that wasn’t color at all, like molten glass catching the reflection of a star.

The chains were gone. No broken links. No scorch marks. No remnants on the ground.

They had never existed here. Or they had been stripped away with purpose.

Cain tightened his grip on the lantern. "You."

The figure tilted its head slightly, a gesture that shouldn’t have carried weight but did. "You know who I am now."

"I know what I saw," Cain snapped. "Doesn’t mean I know anything about you."

"You know enough."

The voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t echo. It pressed directly into his chest like a hand closing around a heartbeat. "He bargained for you. He offered his life before yours even began."

Cain took a step back, the spiral beneath him brightening in response. The threads trembled overhead, as if at attention.

He didn’t look away from the figure. "Who was he to me?"

"Blood," the figure said simply. "The closest kind. He placed your name, your future, your breath into a contract forged in fire. A fire you carry."

Cain raised the lantern. The flame inside flickered, sensing the figure—recognizing it, maybe even resonating with it.

"What kind of contract?" Cain asked.

The figure exhaled softly. If a god could sound tired, this was what it would be like.

"One an ordinary man should never have offered. One I should never have accepted."

The last part slipped out like an accident. Or a confession.

Cain kept his posture rigid. "So why did you?"

The figure took one slow step toward him. The spiral pulsed under Cain’s boots, reacting to the presence approaching.

"You want the truth?" the figure asked. "You weren’t supposed to walk this path. Your life was meant to end in the cradle. An illness. Mundane. Unremarkable. Quiet."

Cain’s throat tightened. He couldn’t remember ever being sick, not truly, but he’d always carried a vague sense of a missing beginning—like waking in a life already halfway spent.

"But he refused that ending," the figure continued. "He begged. He offered everything. He believed he was bargaining with a god."

"And he wasn’t?"

The figure’s expression barely shifted, yet something cold passed through the room.

"A god does not bargain. It decrees."

Its voice hardened. "A Fallen does. A Fallen takes."

Cain’s pulse hammered. "So you took him."

"I granted what he asked. I spared you."

"And the price?"

The figure didn’t answer.

Cain closed the distance between them in three steps. "What was the price?"

The figure held his stare. At this proximity, Cain could see faint lines etched across its skin—marks of symbols, promises, ancient compacts burned into flesh that didn’t behave like flesh.

Finally, the figure spoke.

"The price," it said, "was you."

Cain froze.

The flame inside the lantern guttered violently, as if the air itself recoiled.

The figure continued, tone measured. "Not your life. Something far more binding. He offered you into my domain. Into my keeping. Into my reach."

Cain’s jaw clenched. "You’re saying he gave me away?"

"He gave you purpose," the figure corrected. "He traded your ordinary death for an extraordinary existence. One tied to me. One set on a path only fire can reveal."

Cain stepped back again, muscles tight. "I didn’t agree to that."

"You were an infant."

"Then it wasn’t a contract. It was theft."

The figure finally looked away—not out of guilt, not out of shame, but as if considering whether to tell him more.

"You misunderstand," it murmured. "There is no theft between a Fallen and the willing. His choice bound you, but you were not powerless in it. You have walked under my shadow your whole life. You felt the pull long before today."