Vampher hadn't said a word since waking.
Not when the golem vanished over the horizon—wailing about Act II: The Pebble Within.
Not when Dee Megus tried to offer him "dream-leaf tea, probably safe now."
Not even when Hiro asked, gently, if he'd seen her again.
He just sat on the same log, staring at his clenched fist.
The ash flowers had turned white.
It wasn't until the fire crackled low that he finally spoke.
"It's slipping," he said. "The dream. Like fog draining out the ears."
Dee, poking at the coals, glanced up. "Was it Myla again?"
Vampher nodded slowly.
"She was crying," he said. "She said… the prophecy changed. Because of what you did. With the thread."
Dee blinked. "I burned the weave-path, yeah, but that shouldn't—wait. Wait. She noticed that?"
"She said we weren't supposed to dream it yet," Vampher continued. "That the new prophecy… it wasn't a map. It was a trap."
Hiro had moved closer. "Did she say anything else?"
"She spoke in riddles again. But I can't remember most of it. Only pieces. Phrases. It's like it's sealed off somehow."
Then, with a furrowed brow, Vampher opened his hand.
In his palm was a torn piece of dream-paper.
The ink shimmered faintly, like starlight in fog.
Only one line had survived:
Find the child who walks with none.
Dee stared at it, silent.
Hiro leaned in, the firelight dancing in his eyes. "That was in her last message too. In the riddle she gave you before."
"No," Vampher said. "That one was… different. It said, 'Find the child who walks with none, born of dusk but crowned by sun.' This is… what's left. What the dream let me keep."
He paused, then added quietly, "Before everything shattered."
Dee exhaled, running a hand through his hair. "Okay. So now we've got a crying echo breaking prophecy law, leftover riddle fragments, and a cosmic child with no entourage. Also, the golem left a note. Kind of."
He nodded toward Vampher's pouch.
Vampher looked confused—then reached in.
There it was. Folded. Damp at the corners.
He hadn't remembered placing it there.
He opened it slowly.
The handwriting was Myla's.
Where the fifth seal breaks, the seventh shall wake.
The door within opens both ways.
One bears the wound, one holds the key.
One forgets—and must not see.
If ever the Grinning Hollow speaks aloud,
You are already too late.
They read it in silence.
A different kind of silence this time.
"The echoes are converging," Dee muttered. "Dream logic and reality logic are bleeding into each other. That's not supposed to happen yet. Something's accelerating the sequence."
"Or someone," Hiro said.
Vampher folded the paper carefully, this time with reverence. "She said the prophecy's a lure. That we're not characters. We're knives."
"...Being sharpened," Dee finished, almost too quietly.
The wind picked up, lifting a few pale petals from the ash flowers around them.
Somewhere in the far-off dusk, the golem's voice carried again—less operatic this time, more like a hymn.
The sound of something vast and lonely.
And for the first time in a long while, none of them had anything left to say.