CHAPTER THREE — THE CLOAKED DREAM

Nora’s Point of View

Sleep claimed me only after exhaustion dragged me under. My body felt too heavy to hold my thoughts, but my mind refused to settle. One moment I stared at my ceiling, tracing the familiar cracks in the paint. The next, I was somewhere that wanted to look like my bedroom.

But wasn’t.

The shift was subtle at first. The air felt thicker, like it had weight. Then the details sharpened into wrongness. The walls leaned at angles that distorted the room, subtly bending toward me as if listening. The moonlight glowing through the window carried a blue so unnatural it hummed against my skin. My nightstand lamp flickered weakly even though I hadn’t touched the switch.

I knew immediately.

This was a dream.

But not one born from my own mind.

A chill slid across my skin, thin as ice water.

Someone stood in the room with me.

I pushed myself upright slowly, bracing my hands against the mattress. My breath fogged in the air as though winter lived inside the walls. In the far corner, half swallowed by shifting shadows, a cloaked figure waited.

Tall.

Silent.

Watching.

He did not move, yet the entire room seemed to draw toward him. The shadows at his feet pulsed like something alive.

My heart thudded wildly, but fear did not seize me the way I expected. Not completely. Part of me felt the strange safety of knowing I was asleep. Another part, deeper and quieter, sensed the truth.

This was not only a dream.

“I know this isn’t real,” I whispered.

My voice sounded too small in the bending room.

The figure remained still, but the shadows tightened around him, pulled inward as if they responded to the sound of my words.

I swallowed hard and forced myself to speak again. “You can’t hurt me in a dream, can you?”

The answer came instantly.

And in the same voice I had heard the night before.

The voice that slid into my bones like frost and left something trembling there.

“If you believe that, then sleep is the most dangerous place you possess.”

My blood ran cold.

That voice was not imagined.

It was not a distorted echo of memory.

It was not a product of fear.

He was here.

“In my dream…” My voice trembled before I could stop it. “You’re actually here.”

The shadows shifted as if they inhaled. The cloaked figure leaned forward only a fraction, but the movement felt like gravity pulling at my spine. I could not see his face beneath the hood, yet I felt the precise moment his focus sharpened.

“Dreams are doors, Nora.”

My breath hitched.

He knew her.

Of course he did.

He had written it.

“And you opened one.”

The air thickened in my lungs. The room warped again, bending inward and outward like melting glass. My pulse raced, not entirely from fear. A strange heat and cold mixed inside me, like two emotions fighting for the same place.

“What do you want?” I whispered.

His answer landed like a falling weight.

“You altered what was written.”

My chest tightened. Not with guilt. With something truer. Something that felt like defiance rising through my ribs.

“I couldn’t just let him die.”

The shadows around him stilled completely. Not softening. Not fading. Just pausing. As if my words touched a place in him that had been quiet for too long.

When he spoke again, his voice was slower, wrapped in something I could not name.

“Mortals do not do that.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I whispered. “It just happened.”

Silence filled the room. Heavy. Pressing against my skin as if waiting to see what I would do with it. His attention rested on me like a hand at the back of my neck, steady enough to keep me still.

“You fear less than you should.”

I shook my head, clinging to the only logic I had. “I know this is just a dream.”

The hood tilted slightly. The motion felt deliberate.

“Are you certain this is where your dream ends and I begin?”

The bed dissolved beneath me.

One moment my hands were braced on the mattress. The next, the sheets turned to smoke. The floor stretched downward into a yawning dark. The walls peeled away like burning paper. The impossible blue moonlight shattered across the vanishing room.

I gasped—

And woke in my real bed.

My room was normal again.

No warped walls.

No humming blue glow.

No figure in the corner watching from behind shifting shadow.

But my heart hammered against my ribs like I had run miles. A cold sweat clung to my skin. I pushed myself upright, breath shaking, trying to convince myself it had only been a nightmare.

Then I saw it.

On my pillow, where my head had rested moments ago, lay the Death card.

My name still written across it.