Day four after the conversations ended.

Aiden looked worse than he had the morning he’d first told me. The defense rotation had run for three nights — Seraphina sharing the suite, then Lucien, then me — and each morning Aiden walked out of his bedroom with the same hollowed eyes, the same too-careful smile, the same Starfire signature humming at a frequency I’d come to associate with bodies burning fuel they didn’t have.

He ate breakfast. He went to morning lecture. He trained with Draven on the terraces. He attended the cure protocol session at noon. He came back. He went to bed. He didn’t sleep — not really. He dreamed. And in the dreams he was somebody else, doing something the somebody-else version of him had been built to do. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

By the third night, the green of his eyes had started to look thinner. Like watercolor that had been worked over too many times. Whatever he was burning to stay himself, the supply was finite.

The fourth evening, Seraphina made the call.

"It’s not enough," she said. We were in the common room. Aiden had gone to lie down at nine, earlier than his usual eleven — the body asking for rest the mind couldn’t deliver. "The Celestial protection is disrupting the surface of the dreams. It’s not reaching the mechanism underneath. He’s being attacked at a level my training can hold off but can’t dismantle."

"How long can he go?"

"Two more nights. Three at most. After that the meridian damage starts. Sleep deprivation at this level corrupts cultivation pathways. We can’t keep him stable on disruption alone."

"What’s the next step?"

She looked at me. The white-gold eyes were tired in a way I hadn’t seen before. Sera’s death, then Brindlemoor, then the cure protocol, and now this. The Saintess’s reservoir wasn’t infinite, even if her conviction was.

"There’s a technique," she said. "Restricted. The Church teaches a fragment of it to senior healers — enough to walk a dying patient out of their own delirium so the last words come clean. The Cult has a different version. Older. Crueler. Both descend from a root that predates either institution." She paused, choosing ground. "It’s called Mindwalking. The root tradition came from a sect called the Temple of Quiet Hands — a pre-Imperial order in the Verdant Reach who specialized in entering disturbed minds to retrieve people. The Reach fell during the Reformation. The Church absorbed half their texts. The Cult stole the other half. What survived in either institution is incomplete."

"You can do the Church version."

"I can do a fragment. Walking a patient out of delirium isn’t walking a teammate out of an active narrative attack. The technique I’d need — to enter another mind, sustain my presence inside it, and disrupt structured manipulation — that level was lost when the Reach’s archives burned. The Church didn’t recover it. The Cult—"

"The Cult has it."

"The Cult has a corrupted form. They didn’t preserve the technique to retrieve people. They preserved it to remake them." Seraphina’s voice was steady. "We don’t have access to that knowledge. The Cult guards it. The Church can’t replicate it from their fragment alone. What we have is — half a key. We need the other half."

I knew where she was going before she got there. So did she. I watched her arrive at the same destination I’d already reached and wait for me to say it first.

"Mira."

"Yes."

"She was on the receiving end."

"Dozens of times. She told me, the third week after her seal broke. The Cult used Mindwalking on her as a child. She knows the shape of the technique from inside the experience. Not from the practitioner side. But knowing the shape from inside is a different kind of expertise. It might be enough."

"And asking her to use it—"

"Is asking her to wield what was used on her. Yes."

I was quiet for a beat. Seraphina waited. She’d already had this thought. She was letting me have it without rushing.

"I’ll talk to her," I said.

"I think she’ll say yes. I think she’s been waiting for an excuse."

"That’s what worries me."

"It shouldn’t. Mira’s healthier than she looks. She’s been waiting to use what was used on her in service of something instead of having it sit inside her doing nothing. The waiting has been its own weight. Lifting it might be — good for her."

I nodded. It wasn’t comfortable. It was probably correct.

---

Mira came when I called.

She wore academy standard, the pale gold eyes registering the room — Seraphina, me, the open-flame lamp, the closed door — in the cataloguing rhythm she’d developed during her sealed years and hadn’t yet let go of.

"You need me to do something," she said.

"Yes."

"Tell me."

I told her. About the technique. About what Seraphina could do and what Seraphina couldn’t. About what the Cult had done to children in Brindlemoor that the Church couldn’t replicate.

Mira listened without moving. When I finished, she sat in silence long enough that I started to worry I’d asked something I shouldn’t have.

"I was the one being walked," she said, eventually. "Not the walker. The Cult used the technique on me dozens of times before I was sealed. They restructured memories. Removed associations they considered inefficient. Planted associations they wanted activated when triggers presented. I know what the technique feels like from the inside of it. I have never been on the other side."

"Can you?"

"I think so. The technique runs on resonance — the walker resonates with the subject’s mental signature and enters through the resonance. I have been resonated with so many times that I know the shape of the resonance from the receiving end. Reversing the flow should be possible. I have never tried."

"If you don’t want to—"

"I want to." Her voice was even. "I have been waiting for a chance to use what was used on me. This is that chance. I will not pretend the chance is unwelcome."

Seraphina caught my eye. Something passed between them that wasn’t for me — the Saintess and the sealed girl, both carrying violation-shaped knowledge, both about to put their knowledge to a use the people who’d given it to them would have called blasphemy.

"Then we go tonight," I said.

---

The plan came together in two hours.

Three of us would walk. Me, Seraphina, Mira. The rest of the team would hold the perimeter. Lucien would command the room. Ren would run the technique itself — the channeling required precise timing, and Ren was the only person whose pen-and-clock discipline I trusted with timing that precise. Valeria would provide Infernal supplementation if Mira ran short of her own reserves. Elara would stand by to heal whoever came out wounded. Liora would track the bonds — she could sense, through her Wildgrove training, if any of us started losing cohesion inside the dream. Draven and Caelen would secure the suite physically. Nyx would run the information network. Anyone who came looking for us tonight would find a wall of plausible explanations.

Aiden’s body would be the anchor.

Aiden himself wouldn’t know.

We’d discussed waking him to consent. Seraphina had said no — once, sharply. The Script was already inside his subconscious. Telling Aiden about the operation would have meant telling the Script. The walk had to happen blind.

I sat with that for a while. The team was about to do something to a teammate without his consent. Even with the reasoning, even with the necessity, the line was uncomfortable.

Lucien noticed me sitting with it.

"Highmark would call it betrayal," he said, quietly, just to me. "Drakeveil would call it pragmatism. The truth is in between. We do what saves him. We tell him after. We accept that he might be angry. The friendship has to be strong enough to hold that anger if it comes."

"It will come."

"Then we hold it."

I nodded. It wasn’t comfortable. It was correct.

---

We began at midnight.

Ren had drawn the resonance pattern on the common room floor — three concentric rings in chalk, with anchor sigils at the cardinal points and a resonance sigil at the center. Seraphina positioned us. I sat at the eastern point. Seraphina at the south. Mira at the west. The northern point was empty. That was Aiden’s spot, but Aiden was in his bedroom, asleep, and the connection ran through the wall.

Mira closed her eyes first.

"I’ll establish the resonance," she said. "When I tell you to follow, follow. Don’t look at the room. Look at me. The walk is unstable for the first few seconds. If you fix on the room you’ll snap back."

She breathed out. The Aether around her shifted — a faint heat-shimmer, the kind you got near forge fires but cold. Her pale-gold eyes closed. Her breathing slowed. The shimmer expanded, reaching toward the empty northern point of the pattern.

"He’s there," she said. Her voice was flatter than usual. The tone of a person reporting from somewhere else. "Resonance acquired. I’m in the outer layer. The dream architecture is — heavy. Highly structured. This isn’t natural REM. This is being written."

"Can you bring us in?"

"Yes. Now."

I closed my eyes.

The room dropped away.

---

The throne room.

That was the first thing I registered. Stone. Vaulted ceiling. Banners with the Valdrake crest hanging from the rafters. A throne at the far end, raised on three steps, draped in dark velvet. I was sitting on it.

Seraphina and Mira stood beside me. Visible to me, presumably invisible to the dream. Mira’s eyes had a different quality here. They tracked things I couldn’t see. Seams. Threads. The places where the writing showed.

The doors at the far end opened.

Aiden walked in. The Starfire was already in his hands — the legendary weapon, the ancestral gift, the protagonist’s anointed blade. He wore the field armor of a Class A graduate. His green eyes were fixed on me and there was nothing in them except the duty he’d described on the terrace four days ago. The relief of a job almost finished.

"He doesn’t see us," Mira said. "Only Cedric. The Script is presenting the scene to the dreamer. We’re outside the frame."

"Can we step into it?"

"Only by the rules of the frame. If we want him to see us we have to give him a reason. Adding us would require rewriting on our side — and rewriting from inside the dream is what the Script is good at. We don’t want to compete on its terrain."

"Then what?"

Seraphina moved first. She raised her hand and a thread of Celestial light unspooled from her fingers — the disruption protocol she’d been using nightly. The light reached toward Aiden and met something invisible, pushed against it, and the throne room shivered. The banners rippled. Aiden’s stride slowed by half a step.

The dream re-stabilized.

Aiden kept walking.

"It’s adapting in real time," Seraphina said. "The Script is rewriting faster than I can disrupt. It expected escalation. It’s been preparing for this since the first night."

"Mira."

"I see the seams." Her pale-gold eyes had narrowed. "There. Above the throne. The ceiling’s geometry doesn’t close — there’s a fold in the dream’s surface where the Script is feeding new material in. It’s like watching a tailor stitching a garment while the wearer is still inside it. Every time Seraphina disrupts, the tailor patches."

"Can we cut the feed?"

"Cutting it would collapse the dream. Aiden would wake disoriented. The Script would learn what to defend against next time. We’d buy one night and lose the war."

"Then what."

Mira was silent. Aiden was halfway across the throne room. The Starfire glowed at the standard intensity I’d come to recognize from his waking training. He moved with absolute conviction. A man finishing a task he’d been built for.

"We don’t fight the dream," Mira said. "We anchor him outside it."