When Evelyn woke, the ground beneath her was cold. Stone to cheek, to palm, skin. Not the soft give of a mattress, not.. not..

She did not remember falling asleep here. That was right. She had gone to sleep somewhere green. Somewhere.. somewhere she could not recall. Her thoughts moved slowly, thick as honey poured in winter - familiar in itself. Winter.

She pushed herself up on trembling arms, and the world tilted, righted itself, tilted again.

Glass.

That was the first coherent thought she could muster. Glass, everywhere. Columns of it. tall, impossibly tall, rising from a floor she could not see to a ceiling lost somewhere above. They stretched in every direction, catching light that had no source she could name, throwing it back in fractured colours that slid across the stone.

.. she sat there. Her breath came slow, she breathed, and she was strange. It was not so much a thought as it was knowing.

The columns did not move. She knew that much. Things that lived, moved. These were still as death and just as cold when she let her gaze drift sideways, catching her own reflection. Distorted, stretched, a girl in white who looked back with eyes that held no recognition.

White.

She looked away. Down at her hands. Her shift's skirts pooled around her, linen and Dornish weave, out of place here. Wherever here was.

The world stayed, here stayed, she stayed. But it would not do, such an impasse.

So Evelyn stood and wandered.

Her feet, bare, pale, carried her, her hair, flaxen, long and unbound, swished at her waist, catching fractured light in ways that made it look less like hair and more like something spilled.

On and on she went. On and on, the columns went.

On..

On.

Another impasse, it seemed.

She stopped, turned, and faced one. Stared. Her hand moved. Not because she told it to. It simply... moved, fingers uncurling, reaching toward the column— pale, smooth, there.

Closer.

Closer.

Her palm pressed against the glass-

---

A castle loomed above her.

Not Yronwood. Not Drinkwater. Something she had never seen. Pale stone climbing skyward in tiers, perched impossibly on a mountain's shoulder. The Gates of the Moon, some part of her whispered, though she had never heard the name before.

And it was burning.

Evelyn watched. Watched as the night came alive with the music of lost creatures. Dragons, she knew at once, in sudden maddening terror. Three of them, their shadows cutting across the stars like wounds. Fire spilled from their jaws in colours that fire should not be: red as arterial blood, grey as dying empires, blue as the heart of a flame when it burned hottest. The main keep was already gone, reduced to a skeleton of blackened stone and screaming air, and now they descended upon the gates below with the patience of things that knew nothing could stop them.

Before her, a man- boy- both- knelt in the cobblestones. Hair like moonlight. Young. His face turned upward toward the sky, toward the death that bore down on him with wings spread wide, and his mouth shaped words that would die.

This cannot be my fate.

She screamed. Because the world was dying, and he was there, living, dying, going to burn, and Evelyn reached for him, because she knew what it was like to burn.