Sleep comes like drowning, pulling me under in waves. The darkness behind my eye expands, spreads like ink through water until it fills everything. In this space between consciousness and oblivion, the barriers I maintain start to slip.
I dream of my mother.
Not Mother Superior – my real mother, the one who carried me in her womb when the Church first touched her with their power. I see her as she was in the few photographs I managed to steal from the Church's archives: young, pretty, with eyes that held a hint of the same darkness I carry. They told me she died giving birth to me, that the power was too much for her mortal form to bear.
In my dream, she stands in an endless field of black flowers, their petals moving though there is no wind. Her belly is swollen with pregnancy – with me – and her skin is translucent, dark veins visible beneath like rivers of ink.
"My beautiful girl," she says, but her voice echoes strangely, as if coming from very far away. "My bridge-builder. My door-opener."
"You're not real," I tell her, but in dreams, certainty is a fragile thing.
She smiles, and her teeth are made of starlight. "More real than you know. They chose me carefully, you see. Bloodlines matter. Power calls to power across generations."
The black flowers at her feet begin to twist, their stems wrapping around her legs like loving serpents. Where they touch, her flesh becomes even more transparent, showing the darkness flowing through her veins.
"What does that mean?" I try to move toward her, but the space between us stretches impossibly. "What aren't you telling me?"
"They didn't infect you, Vesper. They woke what was already there. What has always been there, sleeping in our blood since before humans walked upright, before they built cities, before they learned to fear the dark."
The flowers reach her waist now, and through her translucent skin I can see something moving inside her womb. Not a baby – at least, not entirely. Shapes that shift and flow, tentacles that press against the boundary of her flesh like prisoners testing the bars of a cell.
"No," I say, but my voice comes out weak, uncertain. "The Church did this. They made me what I am."
Her laugh sounds like breaking glass. "The Church." She spits the word like a curse. "Blind children playing with forces they barely understand. They found me because of what I was, what my ancestors were. They thought they could control it, shape it, direct it. Such arrogance."
The flowers reach her chest, and where they touch, her flesh dissolves like sugar in rain. Inside, she is filled with stars and darkness, with shapes that hurt to look at.
"Then what am I?" I ask, and my voice sounds young, frightened.
"You are what you've always been." Her face begins to lose coherence, features flowing like wax. "A door that walks. A key that thinks. A piece of Them that learned to dream it was human."
The flowers consume her completely, and the field of black blooms begins to pulse with a familiar rhythm – the same rhythm as the darkness behind my eye. Each beat sends out ripples of unreality, making the dreamscape shift and warp.
The scene changes.
I'm in the Church's underground temple, but it's different. Older. The walls are rough-hewn stone instead of concrete, and the symbols carved into them are cruder, more primal. By the guttering light of torches, I see figures in robes moving through complex rituals. Their chants are in no human language, and listening to them makes my teeth ache.
"You see?" My mother's voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. "Before the Church, there were other churches. Other cults. Other groups who knew about the spaces between spaces, the Things that wait to be invited in. We were always there, always watching, always keeping the bloodline pure."
The scene shifts again, faster now. I see glimpses of other temples, other rituals. Stone circles under stars that don't belong in Earth's sky. Pyramids that point to impossible angles. Caves where the walls are painted with symbols that squirm and change when viewed directly. And through it all, I see my mother's bloodline – my bloodline – watching, participating, preparing.
"For what?" I ask the darkness. "Preparing for what?"
"For the Convergence," she whispers. "For the moment when all walls become thin, when all doors can be opened. For the return of those who walked these spaces before time began, before reality crystallized into its current form. For the unmaking and remaking of all things."
I'm falling now, tumbling through memories that aren't mine. I see my ancestors dancing around fires that burn with black flames. I see them coupling with shapes made of shadow and starlight, producing children with darkness behind their eyes. I see them guiding humanity's steps, nudging us toward...
Toward...
I wake with a scream locked behind my teeth, sheets soaked with sweat. The darkness behind my eye pulses frantically, reaching for something just beyond perception. On the nightstand, my phone shows I've been asleep for barely an hour.
There's something wet on my cheek. I touch it, expecting tears, but my fingers come away black. I scramble to the bathroom, flip on the harsh fluorescent lights. In the mirror, I see thin trails of what looks like ink leaking from my left eye, tracking down my face like mascara in rain.
But it's not ink. As I watch, the substance moves on its own, forming tiny patterns before dissolving into my skin. The same patterns I saw in those ancient temples, the same symbols carved into the Church's walls.
My phone buzzes, making me jump. It's a text from James:
Need to meet. Found something about your mother. The Church didn't choose her randomly. Call me.
I stare at the message until the screen goes dark, then look back at my reflection. In the harsh bathroom lighting, the darkness behind my left eye seems deeper than usual, more active. As I watch, something shifts in its depths, like a pupil dilating.
Something looks back.