5

First there was the feeling of stone underfoot — damp, cool, uneven, the way real ground is uneven, not the way imagination draws it.

Alice was standing barefoot on a shore.

The night around her ran deeper than any night she'd ever seen awake — not darker, but deeper, as if the sky here simply went on farther than a sky was supposed to. The stars weren't where they should have been: too bright, too dense, arranged into patterns she'd never seen in any atlas.

At the water's edge grew tall reeds, nearly translucent against the light — swaying steadily though Alice felt no wind at all, as if the lake itself were breathing on its own. Very far off, at the edge of the horizon, faint lights trembled on the water — reflections of unfamiliar stars, maybe, or windows in houses too small and too distant to make out, too regular to be some accident of light. The air smelled of wet earth, something faintly sweet and floral, and, just barely, of metal, as if a storm had passed close by and hadn't quite finished dying down.

The lake lay before her — huge, still, black, the same lake she'd seen through the tear in the air and in her own sink. Only now it was as real as anything can be inside a dream: she could smell the water, hear the soft lap of it against the shore, feel the cool rising off the stone.

Alice crouched down and carefully touched the water with her fingertips — just to see if it would answer the way it had in the sink. The water turned out to be surprisingly warm — nearly body temperature — and that made her only more uneasy: cold water would have made far more sense for a midnight lake under someone else's stars. Warm water suggested something for which Alice, so far, didn't have a single workable theory.

She looked up — and saw the dragon.

Not a silhouette. Not a shadow, not a symbol, nothing she could easily wave off as an overactive imagination. A living, enormous creature moved slowly above the water, unfurling wings with the heavy, confident grace of a large ship coming about at anchor. Black scales caught the silver light of the moon and held it, as if lit from within. The beat of its wings sent a wave of air rolling across the lake, and Alice felt it against her skin — real, tangible, smelling of damp and something wild.

Something deep in Alice's chest gave a lurch — not from fear, but from the sheer, almost physical impact of scale, as if she were only now learning what the word "enormous" could mean beyond a figure of speech. The dragon was bigger than any building she'd ever seen in her own city, and it moved with an ease that size had no business allowing: not one wasted beat, not one lost second — just the clean, confident mechanics of flight, as if nature had simply declined to put any limits on this particular animal.

Her first reaction wasn't wonder.

Wonder would have belonged to someone else — someone who loved fairy tales and had spent a lifetime waiting for one. What rose in Alice instead was purely rational, adult disbelief: this isn't possible, and since it isn't possible, now is exactly the time to either wake up or, failing that, pay very close attention and remember every detail, in case waking up doesn't happen to be an option.

She was just about to go with the second plan when she noticed the man.

He was standing in the water roughly waist-deep, his back to her. For the first second, Alice told herself she was only looking to determine whether he was even real — part of this strange place, or one more detail of a dream about to dissolve the instant she blinked.

She blinked — once, twice, deliberately slow, almost theatrically, as if she were daring this world to prove itself fake.

He didn't disappear.

Water ran down his back in thin, glinting rivulets, pooling at the small of his back before sliding back into the lake. His shoulders were broad, his movements calm, almost lazy, carrying the natural ease of a man who expected no danger here. Dark, wet hair, just past his shoulders, clung to his neck; he ran a hand through it, pushing it back, and that utterly ordinary movement, for some reason, made Alice forget about the dragon for several seconds.

She watched the muscle shift under the skin of his shoulder, watched the water catch the light as it ran down his spine to the small of his back, and only afterward caught herself no longer bothering to wonder whether he was real. She simply liked looking at him, and that realization arrived along with a flash of irritation: her breath had gone uneven on its own, and her fingertips had started prickling without permission. A living dragon was flying over the lake — an event that, by every reasonable law, should have commanded her entire attention — and her gaze kept drifting stubbornly back to the man in the water.

That was when he went still, as if he'd sensed her. His shoulders tensed, barely. He turned his head slowly, over his shoulder — his profile first, a sharp cheekbone, a dark eyebrow — then turned further. The water hid him below the waist, but his chest and shoulders were fully visible now, and where the water hadn't yet dried on his skin, small shadows from the moonlight moved across it.

Alice made herself, quite deliberately, lift her eyes to his face — and immediately understood exactly how much effort that had taken. Her pulse was pounding in her throat, in her wrists, somewhere under her ribs — everywhere she normally wouldn't notice it. Heat pooled low and heavy in her stomach, slow and insistent, and something strange and unsettled woke in her chest, something close to recognition, though there was no one here for her to recognize. Goosebumps rose on her forearms despite the warm air. This wasn't love at first sight — she didn't believe in that, not even now, under someone else's stars, beside an impossible lake. It was something simpler and more honest than that: desire, real and entirely her own. Which was exactly why it irritated her more than anything else that had happened tonight.

He was looking at her the same way — a beat too long, with the same badly hidden astonishment.

For several long seconds, neither of them said a word. The lap of water against the shore seemed like the only sound in this entire impossible world, and Alice caught herself afraid — not of the silence, but of whatever she might say if she were the one to break it.

"You're not supposed to be able to see me," he said.

His voice turned out to be low and calm, and it carried less a warning than a simple statement of fact — one that clearly violated some rule that had stood for a very long time.

"Trust me," Alice answered, crossing her arms over her chest — whether against the cool air or in some attempt to claw back a little control over the situation, she couldn't have said — "I've got exactly as many questions about all this as you do."

He took a step toward her. The water parted around him in soft rings.

He stopped closer than two people who had only just met would normally stand, but here, by this lake, the usual rules didn't seem to apply at all. Drops of water on his shoulders caught the moonlight almost as generously as the dragon's scales did.

"Who are you?"

"Usually people introduce themselves first," she said, arching an eyebrow, though her heart was pounding in a rhythm that had nothing to do with how light the line had sounded coming out.

He opened his mouth for a second, as if he really had been about to introduce himself — then visibly changed his mind, catching himself doing it so obviously that Alice couldn't not notice.

"I can't," he said simply, without a single attempt to apologize or explain.

"Convenient," Alice said, raising an eyebrow. "You must have a whole collection of those, for every occasion."

Something like a laugh touched the corners of his mouth, though he didn't actually laugh out loud.

"A few," he admitted.

"Then I'll take that as your full introduction. Pleasure to meet you, 'I can't.'"

He looked at her strangely — as if he were trying to remember something and, at the same time, didn't quite trust his own senses, like a man hearing a familiar tune somewhere it had no business being. The dragon passed over the lake again, lower this time, so low that the shadow of its wing swept across the water between them.

This time Alice took in more detail: the long, supple neck curving with an almost serpentine fluidity, the low ridge of spines running down its back, dully catching the moonlight, and the eyes — large, almond-shaped, touched with that same elusive silver that had flickered in the man's eyes a few minutes before. The dragon's gaze lingered on her for a moment — curious, but not remotely predatory, as if it were assessing not prey but some rare oddity that had wandered onto its territory.

Alice took an instinctive half-step back.

The man didn't even look up.

She noticed that — and couldn't not notice it.

"You're not even going to look up?" she asked. "There's, you know, a dragon. Right there."

"I know," he said, unbothered.

"You're saying that like it's normal."

Something shifted, faint, at the corner of his mouth — almost a smile, restrained, but real.

"Here, it is."

That brief answer made an entire world feel more convincing than any long explanation of magic, dragons, or the laws that governed this place ever could. Alice felt, suddenly and sharply, that she was standing on the shore of a place where things like this were simply part of daily life, not miracles — and that this man, evidently, was as at home here as she was at home in her own city, with its predictable streetlights and its punctual man with his dog.

She caught herself thinking that she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt this curious instead of this afraid. The thought surprised her — here, on the shore of an impossible lake, in conversation with a man stepping out of the water as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she felt, against all logic, almost good. Possibly too good, for a woman in her right mind.

The air around her was starting to shimmer with silver more and more visibly, and now the light wasn't just hanging in the dark — thin threads were pulling away from her skin toward the water, vanishing into it, one after another.

He saw them.

The calm vanished from his face so quickly it was as if it had never been there. He closed the distance between them in a few strides.

"Don't move."

"That's usually what people say right before doing something extremely suspicious," Alice said, though her own voice sounded a little less steady than she'd meant it to.

He opened his mouth to answer — and froze.

For a moment his gaze went completely still — not frightened, not startled, but as if some memory had just opened inside him that hadn't been there a second ago.

"Alice."

The name came out quiet, and so naturally it was as if he'd said it before.

She stopped smiling.

Something shifted between them. Even the sound of the water seemed to recede, and the silence turned dense, ringing.

He knew her name.

She definitely hadn't told him.

"How do you know my name?"

Only then did something dark cross his face. He seemed to have heard what he'd just said at the same moment she had, and understood it just as fast. But there was no taking it back now.

Something in his expression — desperation, maybe, or resolve, Alice couldn't tell which — made her forget, for a moment, that only minutes earlier she'd been absolutely certain this was just a dream, and dreams, by definition, ended without asking permission from the people inside them.

And that was the moment the world around Alice shuddered.

A thin silver crack ran through the air between them, like a fault line splitting through clear ice. Its edges pulled slowly apart, and Alice understood, without needing it explained: this place wasn't collapsing. She was being pulled out of it.

He understood it too.

He stepped toward her.

Alice did the same.

She simply wanted to move toward him. It wasn't magic pulling her forward — she was as sure of that as she was of her own name. The wanting was hers. All of it.

Only a few steps separated them when he reached out his hand.

She reached back, almost touched his fingers — and in that instant a vast black wing came down slowly over the lake, blotting out the moon.

Everything went dark.