Chapter 2: The Unwanted Lullaby
The days that followed were a brittle ceasefire. Nadine slept in the bed, a tense, solitary island in its center. Kaelan occupied the couch, a brooding silhouette against the firelight. They spoke only when necessary, a clipped exchange about schedules or meals, the air between them thick with everything unsaid. The portraits on the walls did watch, their painted eyes seeming to follow the silent choreography of their mutual exile.
The nightmare, when it broke the truce, did so with artillery force.
It started not with the woods of Earth, but with the grand hall of the Eastern Keep. She was singing for the court, a formal dinner, the notes flowing sweet and compulsory from her lips. But the faces gazing up at her weren’t those of nobles. They were Megan, Sam, Leo. Her friends. Megan’s smile was too wide, her teeth sharpening as Nadine hit a high note. Sam’s eyes wept black oil. Leo’s neck elongated with a series of sickening cracks.
The song morphed, twisting into the same frantic, glissando melody from that night. She tried to stop singing, but her breath was compelled, a wind through a broken instrument. The courtiers began to writhe, their fine clothes tearing as spines arched and skin split. And standing behind them, leaning against the great stone hearth with a familiar, casual arrogance, was a figure. Tall, draped in shifting shadow, but with a grin she knew. A grin from home. A face that should not, could not, be here.
Understanding, cold and sick, drenched her.
She wasn’t screaming yet. She was vomiting sound, a wordless, harmonic shriek of betrayal and horror.
Then the scene dissolved into pure sensation: the wet heat of blood spray, the sound of cartilage snapping like twigs, Megan’s final, gurgling plea that was cut short by a sound like a rumbling growl. They were all dying, changing, melting because of her, because of her song, and he had been there. He had seen. He had—
“NO!”
The scream tore itself from her throat, raw and real. She was upright in the bed, drenched in cold sweat, the echo of her own voice bouncing off the mosaic tiles. Sobs racked her, painful, gulping things. The fire had died to embers, and in the deep gloom, the shadows from the hearth swam like the monsters from her dream.
“Nadine.”
Kaelan’s voice was close, urgent. He was already moving from the couch, a dark shape approaching the bed. Logic was gone. Primordial terror had its hooks in her. The figure from the dream, the betrayer’s grin, superimposed itself on the man coming toward her.
Her hand shot under the pillow. Her fingers closed around the cool, carved hilt of the small dagger she’d taken from the dining hall a week ago. A stupid, secret comfort.
“Stay back!” The words were a ragged choke.
He didn’t stop. He took another step, his expression unreadable in the dark, his arm outstretched. “You’re dreaming. It’s me.”
It wasn’t him. For a blinding second, it was him. The one responsible.
With a cry that was part fury, part despair, she threw the knife. It was a clumsy, frantic motion. The blade spun, glinting once in the faint ember-glow.
His eyes widened, reflecting that tiny flash of light. He didn’t flinch; his body moved with a soldier’s ingrained reflex, a sharp tilt of his shoulders. The dagger hissed past his ear and clattered against the stone wall behind him, skittering across the tiles.
Silence, louder than the scream.
Then he was there, at the bedside, not with tenderness but with swift, overwhelming purpose. He grabbed her wrists as she flailed, pushing against his chest, her blows weak and panicked.
“Let go! Don’t touch me! You were there, you saw, you let it—”
“Nadine. Look at me.”
His voice was a low, solid anchor in the whirlpool of her panic. She blinked, lungs heaving. The sweat stung her eyes. The details of the room swam into focus: the concerned, sharp line of his brows, the pulse hammering in his throat, the absolute reality of his hands holding hers. Not the dream. Not the monster. Kaelan.
The fight bled out of her. A pathetic, broken sound escaped her lips, and then the tears came again, a silent, flooding wave that shook her entire frame. She went limp, her forehead dropping against his chest where she’d been pushing him away seconds before. He released her wrists but didn’t move away. His hands hovered, uncertain, before one settled stiffly on her back.
She cried for a long time. For Megan, for Sam, for Leo. For the stranger in the shadows of her dream. For herself, trapped here, haunted, married to a man who was a stranger. For the profound, isolating shame of it all.
When the tears finally subsided into shaky hiccups, the emptiness they left behind was filled with a hot, prickling bitterness. The embarrassment was a secondary agony.
He shifted, his voice gravelly from disuse and the late hour. “Was it an assassin? In the dream. Did someone hurt you?”
The question hung in the air. She could feel the assumption in it, the trajectory of his thoughts—a violent past, a violation, something explainable in the brutal logic of this world. Rape, pillage, war. Honorable wounds.
It was easier. So much easier than the truth: that she was the instrument; that her gift was a curse; that her friends were gone because of a song she didn’t know she could sing; that the enemy might wear a face from a coffee shop on Earth.
She couldn’t give him the easier truth. The real one was a lockdown in her soul.
A dull anger rose, shielding the raw nerve. She pulled back from him, her movements stiff, and yanked the heavy duvet over her head. The world reduced to the hot, dark, wool-smelling cavern of the blanket. Her voice, muffled and thick, was aimed at the fabric, at the bed, at the unfairness of everything.
“This is why,” she spat into the darkness. “This is the reason I wanted a separate room.”
The silence from beyond the blanket was profound. She could picture him standing there, his knuckle probably bleeding from where she’d scratched him, a thrown dagger at his feet, his new wife a sobbing, violent mystery under a mound of bedding.
After what felt like an age, she heard his footsteps retreat. Not to the couch. They moved toward the hearth. The sound of iron on stone, a gentle scraping. The whisper of kindling, then the first crackle of new flame as he rebuilt the fire.
The light grew, penetrating even her fabric fortress, turning the darkness a warm, translucent red. He didn’t speak. He didn’t return to the couch. The soft rasp of a whetstone on steel began—a slow, rhythmic, relentless sound. He was sharpening his sword. Or perhaps the dagger she had thrown.
The message was clear. He wouldn’t ask again. He wouldn’t approach. But he would stay awake. He would guard. Against the nightmares, against the shadows, against whatever world she carried inside her that lashed out with steel while she slept.
Nadine lay curled tight beneath the blanket, the sound of the whetstone etching itself into her bones. The shame was a cold weight in her stomach. The secret was a colder one, pressing against her ribs. And between them, measured in the steady scrape of stone on metal, was the vast and wary space their marriage had become.