✧ Chapter Nineteen ✧
The Awakening in Her Sleep
from Have You Someone to Protect? By
©Amer
The wind had teeth that morning.
It bit at Lhady's cheeks as she stood on the icy stone platform, her breath spilling out in clouds she couldn't control. The station bell had already rung. The train hissed—alive, impatient. She clutched the satchel close to her chest like it could anchor her, like it could stop the shaking in her fingers.
"Silas!" she called again, louder this time. Her voice cracked. "Silas—please!"
But no answer came. Just the low groan of wheels against the rails and the shuffle of other travelers boarding.
She darted forward as if she could make the train wait by force of will alone.
He had promised. Just two nights before. Beneath the old chapel arch, wrapped in festival gold and night-chilled air, he had brushed her hair back and whispered,
"I'll turn it down, Lhady. I only wanted to see if I still had it in me—to be chosen. But I'm not leaving."
She had believed him. She had smiled like someone who trusted the sunrise.
"You'll come back?" she had asked, half-laughing.
"I'll be back before you miss me," he'd said, touching her cheek. "You know where I'll be. Just wait."
So she waited.
"Silas—!"
The train began to move.
"No, no, wait—"
Her feet slammed against the platform, lungs burning as she chased it, tears hot against the cold.
"Silas!"
The name broke apart in her throat as the engine howled and the cars blurred past. A conductor shouted something behind her. Someone called out her name.
She didn't stop.
She ran until there was nothing but smoke and steel in the distance—and silence, where a goodbye should've been.
Sian was the first to reach her. She wrapped her arms around Lhady from behind, catching her mid-collapse. Mira followed seconds later, eyes wide with panic.
"Lhady! Lhady, he's not—he's not there, he's not coming—"
And Lhady just shook her head, over and over, whispering,
"He said he'd be back."
Her scarf had come undone in the rush. The knot had slipped, the ends fluttering like torn ribbon.
She sank to her knees, unaware of the stares around her. The murmurs.
The old bookbinder knelt at her side. He said her name gently, like he was trying to stitch her back together the way he taught her to mend pages.
But there were no words to bind this.
And from the stone balcony across the tracks—unmoving, unspeaking—stood Lady Calvera. Her black veil shimmered faintly in the breeze, hands folded as she watched the scene unfold.
She saw what no one else did.
The violet shawl. Folded on the bench where Lhady had waited. Left behind like a forgotten letter.
Calvera's lips pressed together. She recognized it—the soft, handwoven piece, embroidered at the corners with stitched morning glories. A gift from Thorne, on one of the last quiet mornings before fate turned cruel.
Now, it sat abandoned. Just like the girl who could barely breathe through her sobs.
One grief had bled into the next.
The man who raised her—gone.
And now, the boy who once gave her wildflowers and laughter—vanished without goodbye.
The next morning brought news that should never have existed.
The train that had left that day—the one Silas was supposed to board, the one she chased in tears—it had exploded just before it reached the border. Sabotage, they said. No survivors.
But what broke her wasn't the headline.
It was what arrived in the small parcel wrapped in waxed cloth—delivered by a solemn courier with no answers in his eyes.
Inside: a fragment of dark brown wool, scorched at the edges, with two silver thread loops stitched along the collar.
His coat.
The one he always wore. The one he used to throw around her shoulders when she forgot her shawl. The one she buried her face in when the winter wind was too sharp.
It was found near the wreckage.
It was proof, they said.
She had stared at it in her trembling hands, the scent of ash clinging to it still. Her mind refused it. Her heart screamed no.
But the town nodded solemnly.
That was enough to believe he had been on board.
That was enough to mourn.
She didn't speak for days.
She kept the coat folded beneath her bed, untouched, like a wound too deep to press.
And in the dream, the coat returned to her again—crumpled on the bench where she first waited, its corners burning, catching flame as she screamed his name.
She screamed his name in the dream, but her voice barely reached the edge of it.
"Silas!"
Still no answer.
Only the train.
Only the fire.
Only her, waking up without him again.
A cold cloth pressed to her forehead.
Soft sheets tangled around her legs.
The scent of lavender water drifted through the room.
Caelum was there. Silent, steady, his hand wrapped gently around hers.
Her lips parted. Her voice cracked, smaller than it had ever been:
"He said he'd be back..."
Caelum sat by her bedside long after the dream had stolen her voice.
The first morning, her fever had burned bright and sudden, though the apothecary found no illness—no cough, no wound, no poison. Just sweat along her brow, a tremble in her hands, and sleep she would not wake from.
He stayed.
"I don't know where you've gone," he murmured, voice low. "But I wish I could follow."
The fever still lingered. She would whisper sometimes, not words—just broken syllables, almost like names.
Sometimes he thought he heard his.
But more often, it was another.
When the town grew quiet and the festival banners were pulled down,
When Mira brought soup and left with tears in her lashes,
When Sian returned with old folk remedies and nearly shouted at the heavens in frustration—
He stayed.
Sian placed a satchel of dried herbs by the bed and tried not to cry.
"She's never fallen ill like this before," she said, sitting stiffly in the corner chair. "Not even when her uncle passed. This is… something else."
"She's heart-wounded," Sian had muttered, arms crossed, staring at the sleeping girl as if willing her to wake.
They all fell quiet.
Three days passed.
She did not stir.
The sunlight came and went across the wooden floor of the bookshop's spare room. Shadows from the window lattice curled like fingers across her blanket, and still she slept—trapped somewhere between now and memory.
Caelum adjusted the cool cloth on her forehead again. He had already changed it seven times that day.
"You don't have to do this," Mira had said softly, standing by the doorway just yesterday. "You need rest too."
He hadn't answered.
What rest was there to take, when she slept like this—silent, still, lost?
He studied her face now, the slight twitch of her lashes, the curve of her fingers curled at her side. Like she was bracing for something in the dark. Like she was searching.
And it hurt—because he could not follow her into that place.
He could only hold her hand at the edge of it.
Lady Calvera arrived on the third evening.
She stepped into the bookshop without announcement, her veil drawn back, her black gown nearly blending into the dusk. The scent of rosemary followed her—a sharp, earthen thing that didn't quite belong in the warm air.
Caelum rose when he saw her. "My lady."
She approached the bedside quietly, and for a moment said nothing at all. Her gaze lingered on Lhady's sleeping form, then dropped to the coat folded neatly on the desk—Silas's coat. Caelum had found it beneath the bed and placed it there himself, unsure if it was a comfort or a curse.
Lady Calvera rested one gloved hand on the bedpost.
"There are wounds that do not bleed," she said softly, "and griefs that hide where the eye cannot follow."
He nodded.
Her eyes glinted.
"Not all sleep is slumber, Lord Virelian. And not all dreams are escape."
He waited, sensing more beneath the words.
She looked at Lhady again and tilted her head slightly—almost like she was listening to something Caelum could not hear.
Then, in that calm, unreadable tone of hers, she added:
"She is not resting because she is tired.
She is sleeping because something has awakened in her."
His breath caught. "You speak in riddles, my lady."
"No," she replied. "The riddle is her life. I am merely watching the answer take shape."
But Calvera only stepped back, her expression as serene as moonlight over black water.
"You should not fear the awakening," she said.
"But you would be wise to ready yourself for it."
He followed her gaze as it settled on Lhady's hand—the faintest light flickered beneath her fingertips, gone before he could speak.
By the time he turned back to the doorway, Lady Calvera was already gone.
That night, as Caelum dozed beside her in the chair, Lhady's fingers twitched again.
Her lips parted.
And in a voice no louder than a breath, she whispered—
"The vow…"