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CHAPTER THREE — THE CLOAKED DREAM
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2025-12-13 00:04:47Nora’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.
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Claimed by Death Chapter Seventy-Two — Fate’s Point of View
The world has returned to its ordinary rhythm. Not peace, but steadiness, the way a vast mechanism resumes its hum after a brief disturbance. Threads continue to flow. Lives continue to bend toward their ends. The Weave holds, as it always does. And still, something refuses to align. It is not shattered. It is not broken. It is shifted, and stubbornly so. From my vantage, existence resembles a living map. Luminous lines bend toward one another, separate, then converge again. Birth arcs toward death. Choice ripples into consequence. Probability drifts beneath everything like an invisible current, always present and always accounted for. It is efficient. It is beautiful. It is merciless only in its consistency. Yet in the center of it all, a blank remains. A silence where there should be pattern. Nora. Her name carries weight now, though it should not. Names belong to mortals, fragile labels for fragile lives. To me, she should be a coordinate, a trajectory, a clean line
Claimed by Death Chapter Seventy-One — The Gravity of Us
Kieran’s Point of View The silence of the clearing is not empty. It is heavy, vibrating with the weight of things unsaid and the sudden, sharp proximity of a woman who has become my entire horizon. Nora lies on the blanket, her skin catching the moonlight until she looks less like a person and more like a celestial event. I have watched the birth of stars, the slow, violent churning of nebulae, but they were distant. Cold. This is warm. This is breathing. I shift, propping myself on one elbow to look down at her. My hand finds the curve of her bare shoulder. The dress she chose is a soft, dark fabric that leaves her collarbones and shoulders exposed to the night air. Under my touch, she is electric. “Nora,” I whisper. Her name is a prayer I didn’t know I was capable of offering. She turns her head toward me, her hair spilling across the blanket like ink. Her eyes are dark, the pupils blown wide as she tracks my movement. I lean in, my breath ghosting over the shell
Claimed by Death Chapter Seventy — Where the World Once Paused
Nora’s Point of View The morning does not rush us. We move through it slowly, as if neither of us is quite ready to name what it is yet. The light shifts across the floor while I move around the kitchen, pulling things together from habit more than thought. Eggs. Bread. Butter. The quiet rhythm of something familiar grounding me after everything that came before. Kieran watches. Not in the distant way he usually observes the world, but with a kind of focused curiosity, like he’s trying to understand why any of this matters at all. I crack eggs into a bowl and glance back at him. “You’re staring again.” “I’m observing,” he says. “There’s a difference.” I smile despite myself. “Is there?” “Yes.” His gaze follows my hands as I whisk. “You’re doing this without thinking. But it’s intentional.” “That’s just cooking.” He tilts his head slightly. “No. It’s preparation. You’re making something because someone will receive it.” The way he says it makes my chest tighten. “I guess,”
Claimed by Death Chapter Sixty-Nine — Morning Light
Nora’s Point of View I wake slowly. Not all at once, not with the jolt of panic or confusion that usually pulls me out of sleep, but gently, as if the morning itself is being careful with me. For a moment, I don’t move. I don’t open my eyes. I just breathe. There’s warmth beside me. Steady. Solid. Real. It takes a few seconds for my mind to catch up to the sensation, to remember why the weight against my side feels unfamiliar but not unwelcome. When I do open my eyes, it’s to the quiet light of early morning filtering through the curtains. Pale and soft, the kind that makes everything look a little kinder than it did the night before. Kieran is lying on his side, facing me. He looks peaceful. Not guarded. Not distant. Not like he’s bracing himself against something unseen. His face is relaxed, lashes resting against his cheeks, breath slow and even. He looks asleep. I watch him longer than I mean to. There’s something about seeing him like this that feels almost unreal, lik
Claimed by Death Chapter Sixty-Eight — Narrowing
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Claimed by Death Chapter Sixty-Seven — Small Denials
Nora’s Point of View The first thing that goes wrong is stupid. I miss the bus. Not dramatically. Not because I overslept. I’m standing at the stop with time to spare, phone tucked into my coat pocket. I even see the bus turn the corner at the end of the street. Then it doesn’t stop. It passes me by with a soft hiss of air, the driver’s eyes fixed straight ahead like I’m not there at all. I stare after it, blinking. “That’s… weird,” I mutter. I check my phone. No delay alert. No reroute notice. Nothing to explain it. The schedule insists the bus stopped exactly where it was supposed to. Where I was standing. I shrug it off. Small things happen. People miss buses every day. I pull my phone back out and open my messages. My thumb slows when I see her name. Claire. The woman from the café. The one who sat down already knowing how her day was supposed to end. The one who stayed instead. The one who keeps choosing to wake up. My fingers move without hesitation. Running a litt
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