Page 117 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

“Zarek tells me to forget him.” But she couldn’t. Not now. “And then the dream—”

There was no warning. One moment she was standing in the sky with her hand in Father Michael’s, the next the clouds fell away and her feet lost the floor, her stomach left miles above as she fell into the darkness.

A hundred feet

Then two hundred.

Three hundred.

Lost in the kind of helpless freefall that emptied her lungs and turned her legs into water. She gripped Father Michael’s hand hard enough to feel the bones of her own fingers and tried to scream, but there was no air to put behind it.

And then she was standing.

Underground.

In an amphitheater that grew around her like a closing fist. Stone benches were carved in tiers. A ceiling of raw, cavern-like obsidian rock pressed down with the weight of everything above it. There was no visible light source, yet she could see everything with horrible clarity. The walls pressed in, laced with an oily air that eerily spread across every inch of her skin.

And the smell.

She gagged before she could stop herself. Sulfur and brimstone along with an older, sweetly putrid aroma beneath it. She knew that smell.

Evil.

It was the smell of a hundred Black Cloaks concentrated into black stone, bleeding into the air and putrefying the deep shadows that surrounded them. It hit the back of her throat and made her eyes water. She pressed her free hand over her mouth and breathed in short, shallow pulls.

Just a dream. It’s just a dream. Just a dream.

“Breathe.” Father Michael’s voice was quiet beside her. “Hold the medallion if you need to. Focus on it. Use it to center you, so you can breathe.”

She clutched the medallion. The metal warming under her fingers somehow helped take away the edge of her terror, making it manageable enough for her to stand straighter. But even then…

“Don’t black out,” Father Michael warned her.

Oh, she wanted to. “Is this…”

“The part where you always black out and then wake up screaming and never remember? Yes. But in this dreamscape, it is time for you to remember.”

She didn’t want to. She wanted to be back in bed, or beside Zarek, or back in her bookshop repairing books while bantering with Aunt Claudine over what was magic and what was real.

When none of this was real.

Yet it was in startling, pristine clarity that made it oh-so-terrifyingly real. Her heart hammered as her pulse rushed blood through to her brain that stars started encroaching along the edge of her peripheral vision.

She was going to pass out.

“Don’t panic, little one,” said Father Michael as he squeezed her hand. “Don’t let it take you. Face it. Look at what frightens you.”

She didn’t want to.

But she made herself look.

Only for it to get worse…

The stone benches were filling with Black Cloaks. They emerged from the dark edges of the amphitheater as if shaped from shadows, faceless and red-eyed, moving with that unhurried fluidity that was so inhumanly wrong. She recognized those same movements, the over-long limbs from that first night in the alley right before she’d met Zarek.

The chilling sensation of those icy fingers wrapped around her throat like the memory of that first Black Cloak lifting her by the neck. She grasped the medallion tighter, desperate not to run. It’s just a dream. Just a dream.

“Good. Breathe, Angela,” urged Father Michael.