Chapter Three: The Name in the Dream

Elara dreamt of the forest.

But it wasn’t the one that surrounded her cabin — not the familiar pines she painted or the snowy paths she walked. This forest pulsed with something older, something alive. The trees were enormous, their bark smooth like stone, and a violet mist drifted through the air like breath. The stars above weren’t just stars — they shimmered and shifted, as if they were watching her.

She stood barefoot on soft moss, her white dress clinging to her knees with dew. Her hands were stained — not with charcoal or paint, but with something darker. Blood? Ink? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she wasn’t alone.

He stood in front of her.

Not the wolf — at least, not the way she’d seen him in the real world. He was a man here, tall and cloaked in shadow. His face was blurred, indistinct, as though her mind couldn’t quite remember it. But his eyes — golden, glowing — were the same. Unmistakable.

He stepped toward her, and the forest fell utterly silent.

“Elara,” he whispered.

His voice sent a tremor through her bones. She tried to speak, to ask him who he was, what this place was, why her chest ached at the sight of him. But no sound came. Her throat burned with the effort.

He reached out — not with a hand, but with something deeper. A tether between them. The second his fingers brushed hers, she felt a snap, like a door swinging wide open.

Memories she didn’t recognize rushed through her. A silver blade. A ruined temple. Fire licking the edge of a sacred circle. The scent of wildflowers and ash. And always — always — that voice calling her name like a prayer.

And one word, spoken in the dream with the weight of eternity:

“Kael.”

She woke with a gasp.

The fire had died again. Shadows pressed in around the cabin, and the cold bit at her skin. Snow tapped gently on the window, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. She pressed a hand to her chest, trying to slow her breathing.

“Kael,” she said aloud.

The name hung in the air, fragile and strange. It didn’t belong to her — and yet it fit like something long forgotten. She didn’t know who he was. But she knew the name meant something.

It meant him.

She slipped from her bed and walked barefoot to the window. The clearing was empty tonight. No glowing eyes at the treeline. No silver shadow moving through the pines.

But she still felt him. Not out there — in here. In her.

She opened her sketchbook and flipped to the page where she had drawn the wolf. His eyes stared back at her, as if daring her to remember. Beneath the line she had scribbled in a half-trance the night before — “He remembers me” — her hand moved again, slow and certain.

She wrote: Kael.

The name settled like an anchor in her chest.

She didn’t believe in fate. Or curses. Or souls meeting across lifetimes. But maybe she needed to.

Because whatever haunted these woods, whatever called to her in dreams — it wasn’t just a wolf.

It was someone who once loved her.

And maybe still did.

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