The Temple of Nightglass breathed around her like a dying beast. It groaned and whispered, the walls slick with centuries of sorrow, dark side rot curling through every stone like ivy. Her room, a former sanctum, now a gilded cage, was high in the eastern spire. It was beautiful, in the way that old graves are beautiful. Still. Choked with memory.
She sat by the window most days, legs curled beneath her, cheek resting against the stone, watching the valley. She liked the trees best in winter, bare, brutal things that didn't pretend. She wondered if they could see her, trapped all the way up there. She wondered if Lorn could feel her waiting.
Her mother, once the fiercest presence in her world, had dissolved into a wraith. Virginia wandered the halls like a forgotten specter, eyes glazed with visions not meant for her, speaking only to ghosts. Some days she didn't even recognize Isla. Others, she wept when she saw her. Those were the worst days. Isla could handle cruelty. She could even handle silence. But the weeping, made her chest feel hollow.
Isla had learned early that her visions weren't gifts. They were demands. People didn't want the truth, they wanted a weapon. A tool that could turn the tide. She had played that role, for a time. Pointed where they told her to point. Let the war bend itself around her glimpses of the future. But all of it had led to this: a cold tower, a dying mother, and a father who didn't know her.
And yet.
Every night, she found him. Wandering his own dreams like a man half-asleep even when awake. He resisted her at first, the way wounded things do. Braced against the sting. But over time, he listened. Not with words, not entirely - but with breath, with silence, with the flicker of his eyes when she whispered warning. He didn't know who she was to him, but he knew she mattered.
That was enough.
For now.
She stood from the window, her bare feet whispering against the stone. The wind howled through the opening, sharp and hungry. She didn't flinch. She never did. Instead, she crossed the room to the center of the old sigil etched into the floor, once used for rituals she didn't care to know about, and knelt down with the same quiet reverence one might offer a dying star.
She exhaled, slow and steady. Her eyes fluttered shut.
The Force moved through her like water through fractured glass - beautiful, broken, inevitable.
And then, she sank into his dreams.
