Hope was not just a flame.
It was a seed.
But even seeds, if left unguarded, could be spoiled.
Mireon had failed to bend the gray thread, failed to silence the Unwritten Flame.
So he turned his gaze inward—into the one realm where stories were most fragile.
Dream.
Not the kind shaped by sleep, but the drifting place between memory and meaning. Where stories still forming could be reshaped, rotted, from the inside.
And that was where he struck next.
The First Nightmare
It began with a child's scream in the village of Eranlin.
Seven-year-old Calla, born just days after the gray thread emerged, woke with bleeding palms and a name not her own pressed into her lips.
"Who is 'Nareon?'" she sobbed, trembling.
Her parents stared, pale with dread.
"We never gave her that name."
"It's not ours," whispered her mother, "and it's not hers."
Calla would not stop muttering it.
By dawn, she could not remember her true name.
She had been rewritten—not in waking life, but in dream.
Rien's Answer
In Ashlight Vale, the sky bruised gray.
Rien sat beneath the flamewillows, watching the Unwritten Flame flicker not in strength, but in warning. Its pulses had grown thinner, quieter, as though it were shrinking from something it could not see.
"He's inside the veil now," said Maerai, approaching. "Corrupting new stories before they form."
"If dreams fall," Rien murmured, "then truth won't survive either."
Tessen studied her face. "There's no thread into dream."
"No," she said. "But there's a door."
She stood.
"I'll go through."
Kaelen frowned. "What if you don't return?"
"Then keep the flame breathing," she said.
"And tell the story I never got to tell."
The Gate of Breath
The Unnamed knew of the place.
They called it the Thiraya, the Breathgate, the invisible wound between story and silence.
It existed only at dawn, only in places where truth had once died quietly.
Rien chose the grave of the last Codex threadburner.
There, as first light broke, she stepped barefoot into the frost-laced grass and unwrapped the gray thread.
"I do not come to record," she whispered.
"I come to guard."
She inhaled deeply.
And vanished.
Not as smoke.
Not as light.
But as dream.
The Realm Between
The dream-realm was not darkness.
It was raw color.
Swirls of unspoken thought, memories unborn, fears never named. Rien stood in a sky made of breath, clouds shaped like words unspoken, and beneath her, rivers of childhoods that had not yet occurred.
And in the distance, something wrong moved.
A shape that wore no form of its own.
A voice that echoed with familiarity.
"Rien," it crooned.
"Your mother called me before she died. Did you know that?"
She did not answer.
Instead, she drew forth a flicker of the Unwritten Flame—no weapon, just a whisper of breath.
"I'm not here for you," she said.
"I'm here for them."
Battle in the Dreamweave
Mireon's shadow lunged.
Not with claws, but with memory.
Visions of her failures, twisted reflections of her fears.
"You will be forgotten," he hissed.
"And the unwritten will become unmade."
But Rien did not fight with steel.
She closed her eyes—and listened.
In the dream-river, she heard the voice of Calla.
"My name is mine."
And then a hundred more.
"I am not your story."
"I am mine."
"I choose my shape."
The Unwritten Flame flared around her.
The shadows cracked.
And Mireon screamed—not in pain, but in frustration.
For he could not twist what had no spine.
Return of the Flamebearer
Rien awoke beneath the flamewillows, breath shallow, skin covered in sweat.
Kaelen was there. Tessen. Elyra.
And in her hands, the gray thread shimmered.
Not flickering.
But steady.
"He's still there," she said, "but he can't touch them now."
"Not if they choose their names."