The salt flats had turned into a graveyard of light. All around the stalled trucks, the Lunar Pack stood still, their eyes fixed on the shimmering Memory-Thicket. Roric reached for a crystal shard that glowed with the faint image of a woman he hadn't seen in ten years.
"If they touch those crystals, Liora wins," Elara whispered, her white hair trembling with the force of the Dead Magic she was holding back. "She's not just recording us anymore, Kael. She's gathering the grief we haven't dealt with."
Kael felt the tempting pull in his mind-a vision from the night of the rejection, but in this one, he didn't pick up the Wolfsbane. In this one, they were happy. "How do we stop a hallucination that feels better than reality?"
"We don't stop it," Elara said, gripping his hand. "We replace it. We use the Soul-Binding to pull them into our truth. But Kael, the Barrens will use our own secrets against us. If we lose ourselves in the dream, we become part of the thicket."
The Neural Link
Kael nodded. He sat on the floor of the truck, pulling Elara into his lap. He became the anchor, his Alpha-will acting as the CPU for the heavy psychic burden they were about to carry. Elara placed her hands on his temples, pressing her thumbs against the Beacon resonance in his skull.
"Close your eyes," she commanded.
The world of salt and rust vanished.
Kael felt a sickening drop, like falling from a great height, until he slammed into a glass floor. He opened his eyes and found himself in the middle of a twisted, dream-like version of the Lunar Pack House. The walls were made of moonlight, and the floor flowed like a river of violet ink.
Beside him stood Elara, her form flickering between the tough woman she was now and the soft-eyed healer she had been five years ago.
The Rescue of the Lost
"We have to find them," Elara said, her voice echoing as if in a cathedral. "They're trapped in their own Perfect Lies."
They moved through the corridors of the dream-house. They found Roric in the library, sitting across from his sister's ghost. The room filled with salt, crystals creeping up Roric's legs, turning his skin into translucent glass.
"Roric! It's a trap!" Kael shouted, reaching for his Beta.
But Roric didn't hear him. He was lost in a loop of a conversation from a decade ago.
"You can't reach him with words, Kael," Elara realized. She stepped forward and touched the air. A wave of violet shadow rippled from her fingers, shattering her sister's image. "You have to show him the pain. The real pain."
The library dissolved. Roric screamed as the memory of his sister's death-the cold, hard truth-slammed back into his mind. He gasped, the glass on his legs cracking and falling away. He blinked, finally seeing Kael and Elara.
"Alpha? Luna?" Roric wheezed, his eyes clear but filled with fresh agony.
"Follow the light," Kael commanded. "Find the others. Bring them to the Great Hall of the dream."
The Trap of the Rejected
As Roric ran to find the rest of the pack, the house began to change. The walls groaned and stretched, becoming the forest clearing where Kael had rejected Elara.
The air turned cold. The smell of Wolfsbane filled the dream.
"No," Kael whispered, his heart racing. "Not this. Not again."
A version of Kael from five years ago stepped out of the shadows, the Wolfsbane blade glowing with a sickly, toxic green light. Across from him stood a young Elara, tears on her face, her hand reaching out for the mate about to shatter her soul.
"This is the core of the thicket," Elara said, her voice shaky. "Liora didn't create this. We did. Every bit of shame you feel, Kael; every bit of hate I carried, it fuels this entire desert."
The Dream-Kael raised the blade. "I do this for the Pack," he said, his voice hollow and robotic.
"Stop him," Elara urged.
Kael stepped forward, but his feet were turning to salt. He felt paralyzed by his own guilt. He watched as his younger self moved to strike, feeling the phantom pain of the rejection again-the moment the bond snapped and the world went gray.
"I can't," Kael choked out. "I deserved the hate, Elara. I deserve to stay here."
The Truth that Heals
Elara walked past him, her white hair glowing like a star in the dark forest. She didn't look at the Dream-Kael. She focused on the man she was bound to in the real world.
She reached out and grabbed the Wolfsbane blade with her bare hand. The green light flared, but it couldn't burn her. Her Void-Touch absorbed the toxic energy, turning the blade into a harmless piece of glass.
"You don't get to stay in the past, Kael," she said, her eyes filled with fierce clarity. "And I don't get to be a victim anymore. We aren't the people who were in this clearing. We are the monsters who survived it."
She crushed the glass blade. The forest shattered.
The Awakening
The shared dream collapsed.
Kael woke up in the back of the truck, gasping for the thin, salty air. Beside him, Elara slumped over, her forehead resting against his. Around them, the members of the Lunar Pack were waking, coughing and crying as they realized they were back in the Barrens-alive, human, and grieving, but free.
The Memory-Thicket was gone. The crystal shards had turned to dull gray sand.
But as Kael looked at his hands, he noticed the violet veins were darker. The Shared Dream let him vent the Void energy, but it left a permanent mark on his soul.
"They're coming," Roric croaked from the front of the truck.
On the horizon, a new fleet of Aethelgard ships appeared. They weren't ground-effect vehicles. They were massive, heavy-lift carriers. And they weren't dropping soldiers.
They were dropping Glass-Cages.
"They aren't trying to kill us anymore," Elara said, her voice hollow as she watched the big containers fall from the sky. "They're here to collect the data we just processed."
