The days following Kaelen's nightmare were heavy, weighted with something neither of us could name. He was distant—not cold, not unkind, but present in a way that felt like absence. His eyes followed me across the great hall, across the training yard, across the battlements, where we had watched so many dawns together. But when I approached, he would look away, his jaw tightening, his hands clenching at his sides.
I watched him struggle, and I recognised the weight he carried.
They were not quite memories, these visions that haunted his sleep. They were echoes—fragments of a timeline that had never come to pass, a future that I had sworn to prevent. The battlefield, the dying saint, the blade meant for another. They were not his memories, not truly. But they felt real to him, as real as the stone walls of Frosthold, as real as the cold wind that swept down from the mountains.
