Chapter 44: The Garden in Her Sleep
Seraphina agreed to the conversation without hesitation, though Ethan caught the flicker of old, familiar anxiety crossing her expression the moment he explained what they hoped to learn from her — the particular unease of someone who had spent years being told her instincts and perceptions couldn’t be trusted, now being asked to treat those same instincts as potentially significant.
"I’ve never spoken about the dreams in detail," Seraphina admitted, settling into the same private sitting room where she’d first shown Ethan the vulnerable, unguarded version of herself the court had never been permitted to see. "I mentioned them to you once, in passing, and I confess I’ve spent considerable effort since then not thinking too hard about what they actually meant, given everything else this investigation has already revealed."
"Take your time," Cecilia said gently, seated beside Ethan with a small notebook already open, her Prime Acolyte’s training toward careful, respectful documentation settling naturally over the conversation’s more delicate subject matter. "We’re not trying to extract information quickly. We want to understand this properly, which means understanding it at whatever pace actually serves the truth."
Seraphina’s shoulders eased slightly at that, and she closed her eyes, gathering her thoughts with the same deliberate care she brought to court negotiations, before beginning.
"The garden is always the same," Seraphina said slowly. "Not my own garden, though it shares certain qualities with it — the same kind of quiet, deliberate cultivation, roses that seem too perfect to be entirely natural. But it’s not Nightrose Manor. The proportions are wrong, somehow, the way dreams often distort space without quite breaking it. There’s always a fountain at the center, though the water never actually moves, simply sits there, perfectly still, reflecting a sky that doesn’t match whatever time of day it should logically be."
[ Recommend continued careful documentation. Environmental details may correspond to specific locations or symbolic representations relevant to Iris’s current liminal existence. ]
"And the girl," Ethan prompted gently. "Tell us about her."
"She’s always sitting on the fountain’s edge," Seraphina said, her voice carrying a strange, distant quality now, as though the memory itself pulled her partially back into the dream’s texture even in the retelling. "Pale hair, unbound, the way a child’s would be before anyone taught her to style it for court presentation. She never seems surprised to see me, the way you’d expect in an ordinary dream. She looks at me like she’s been waiting, patiently, for exactly this specific visit, out of many others she’s apparently had before."
"Does she speak," Cecilia asked, her pen moving carefully across her notebook.
"She does," Seraphina said. "Though I can never quite hold onto the words properly upon waking. It’s like trying to remember water after it’s already run through your fingers. I remember the feeling of what she said, more than the actual words themselves. Sadness, mostly. And something that felt, the last time, considerably more like urgency than the dreams before it."
[ Anomaly noted: increasing urgency in dream-content over successive contacts may correlate with the accelerating Veil instability and the broader Cycle’s approach toward some critical threshold. Recommend cross-referencing dream timing against known instability spikes. ]
’That’s not a comforting correlation,’ Ethan thought, a fresh chill running through him. ’If her urgency is increasing in step with the Veil’s own instability, that suggests whatever’s happening to her is directly tied to the same deteriorating structure threatening everything else.’
"Do you remember anything specific from the most recent dream," Ethan asked. "Even fragments. Anything at all might help."
Seraphina was quiet for a long moment, her eyes still closed, working carefully through memory that clearly resisted easy retrieval. "She said something about time running differently for her than for us," Seraphina said finally, slowly, as though drawing the words up from somewhere considerably deeper than ordinary recollection. "That what feels like moments to her might be years to us, or the reverse — I couldn’t quite parse which direction the comparison ran. And she said—" Seraphina’s brow furrowed with visible effort, "—she said something about a name. Not her own. Someone else’s, though I couldn’t hold onto it clearly enough to be certain what it actually was."
[ Significant. Recommend attempting to recover this detail through additional dream sessions if possible, or through Host’s own direct dream-contact attempt, given the potential importance of an unretained name. ]
"Would you be willing to try again," Ethan asked carefully. "Tonight, if you’re comfortable with it. With Cecilia and me both present, in case anything happens that requires immediate intervention."
Seraphina’s expression carried a complicated mixture of willingness and old, ingrained fear, the particular hesitation of a woman who had spent years being taught that her own unusual perceptions were dangerous rather than valuable. "I’m frightened," she admitted quietly. "Not of the dream itself, precisely. Of what it might mean, if this is genuinely real contact rather than simply my own troubled subconscious processing everything we’ve learned these past months."
"Whatever it turns out to be," Ethan said gently, "we’ll face it together. You won’t be alone in it, the same way none of us have faced anything alone since this investigation actually began."
---
They arranged the attempt for that same evening, Cecilia drawing careful protective wards around the private sitting room’s modest daybed with the same practiced precision she’d once used to shield them during the ambush on the western road, and Ethan settled into a chair beside Seraphina as she lay down, Aurelia standing watchful near the room’s door, her hand resting lightly against her sword’s hilt despite the absence of any visible, immediate threat.
"Just breathe," Cecilia said softly, her hands moving through the final gestures of the protective ward, a faint, warm light settling over the room like a held breath. "We’re here. Whatever you find, we’re here."
Seraphina’s breathing gradually slowed, her expression easing into the particular stillness of genuine sleep rather than restless unconsciousness, and Ethan watched, tense and alert, as several long minutes passed in silence, the only sound the faint, steady crackle of the room’s low fire.
Then, without warning, Seraphina’s brow furrowed, her lips parting slightly, and words began spilling from her, quiet and halting, carrying the particular cadence of someone speaking from within a dream rather than fully awake.
"You’re back," Seraphina murmured, her closed eyes moving rapidly beneath their lids. "I didn’t think... it’s been so long, for me. I don’t always know how long it’s been for you." A pause, her expression shifting toward something like listening. "I know. I know it’s getting worse. I can feel it too, from here, whatever here actually is."
[ Confirmed active dream-contact in progress. Recommend continued careful observation. ]
"Ask her the name," Ethan said quietly, leaning forward. "Seraphina, if you can hear me — ask her about the name she mentioned before."
Seraphina’s brow furrowed deeper, some visible effort crossing her sleeping expression, and after a long, tense pause, she spoke again, her voice carrying fresh urgency. "The name. Tell me the name again. I couldn’t hold onto it last time." Another pause, longer this time, and then Seraphina’s eyes snapped open, wide and unfocused, her breath catching sharply as she sat upright too fast, disoriented and pale.
"Seraphina," Ethan said, steadying her with careful hands. "You’re safe. You’re here, with us. What did she say?"
Seraphina blinked rapidly, the disorientation of sudden waking giving way, gradually, to focused, urgent clarity. "Vane," she said, her voice shaking. "She said the name Vane. Not Bishop Vane specifically — she didn’t seem to know the title. Just the name, said like it mattered enormously, like she needed us to understand something about him that we don’t currently know."
[ CRITICAL. This directly connects Iris’s dream-contact to Vane, suggesting she is aware of him specifically, beyond simply being his historical victim. Recommend immediate clarification — this may relate to unfinished business, warning, or additional context regarding his role that has not yet surfaced. ]
"What else," Cecilia asked urgently. "Did she say anything else about him?"
Seraphina’s expression carried genuine, frightened uncertainty. "Just his name, and something about... I think she said ’he’s not the only one,’ though I can’t be entirely certain I heard that correctly. The dream felt like it was ending even as she said it, like something was pulling me back before she could finish."
The room fell into a heavy, considering silence, and Ethan felt the shape of the mystery expand once again, the fragile hope of a straightforward path toward Iris’s restoration complicating into something considerably more urgent and uncertain.
’He’s not the only one,’ Ethan thought, a cold unease settling into his chest. ’Not the only one who knows about her. Not the only one who erased someone. Not the only one still protecting a secret this dangerous. Any of those possibilities changes everything about how carefully we need to move from here.’
[ Synchronization: 97%. No change. ]
[ Recommend immediate consultation with Vane regarding whether he has knowledge of other individuals connected to Iris’s erasure, or other similar cases within the Order’s historical practice of this duty. ]
"We need to talk to Vane again," Ethan said, his voice carrying fresh, focused urgency. "Immediately. If Iris is trying to warn us that he’s not the only one connected to this, we need to understand exactly what that means before we take another step forward."
Aurelia, still standing watchful near the door, met his eyes with the same grim, determined resolve that had carried both of them through every previous crisis this investigation had demanded of them. "Then we leave for the monastery again at first light," she said. "Whatever Iris is trying to tell us, from wherever she currently exists, I don’t think we can afford to wait and find out the hard way what she means by it."