The skiff groaned as the black current seized its keel, spinning them out into the cavernous dark. Here, the air smelled like wet ash and expired pennies. Below the rotting timbers ran the Mnemos, a subterranean torrent that surged not with silt, but with liquid grease of discarded regrets. Tiny luminescence drifted beneath the dark skin of the water—scraps of faces, sour smiles, childhood bedrooms rotting in perpetual twilight. "Keep your oars dry, Zofia," Igor called over the rushing slur of the current. His theatrical grin had cracked somewhere between the ballroom floor and the descent into the rift, leaving his face pale, sharp-angled under the lanterns. "Dip a knuckle in, and you'll spend three hours weeping over a bicycle you broke when you were seven." "I didn't own a bicycle," Zofia muttered. She wedged her work boots against the floorboards, bracing her balance. Her apron had been traded for boiled leather, but she still gripped her copper-tipped pole like a temperamental portafilter handle during a morning rush. "I owned three eviction notices and a dead toaster. Push off from the basalt spur. You're drifting us into the eddy." Igor drove his paddle down. The wood didn't touch stone; it sliced through an oily veil of sound. A chorus of wet, gasping sobs hissed up from the riverbed. The cavern arched into an obsidian vault hung with petrified roots. Mist gathered along the hull, clinging like mold. As it touched Zofia’s sleeves, the scent of scalded whole milk hit the back of her throat, thick enough to choke on. The neon glare of an all-night diner. Her mother’s cracked knuckles counting out crumpled zloty notes on a greasy laminate table, the grease pencils scratching down what they couldn't afford. Her stomach knotted. She swayed toward the gunwale. "Hey. Eyes here, barista," Igor barked softly. He snapped his fingers. A gossamer dome flared out from his palms, pale lilac, smelling faintly of dried thyme and burnt sugar. The Somnian veil settled over the skiff like a glass bell, blunting the psychic scream rising off the foam. The suffocating diner memory dissolved into a dull hum. Igor exhaled, a bead of perspiration tracing the curve of his cheekbone. Maintaining the collective delusion cost him; the cords in his neck pulled taut. "I warned you. The Mnemos feeds on unhealed splinters. We give it an appetite, it drags the keel under." "Impressive trick," she admitted, steadying her pole. Her chest burned with the phantom shame of her mother’s debts, but her voice stayed level. "You do this for all the girls you invite into sewer systems?" "Only the reincarnations of apocalyptic autocrats." Igor tried on a wry grin, but it fell lopsided. His knuckles went gray against his paddle. He glanced at the swirling depths outside his shimmering bubble, where ghostly forms hammered soundlessly on the barrier. "Krystian did a thorough job back there," Zofia said, watching the tension in his shoulders. "Telling the high court your family vaults are empty." "He wasn't lying. That’s what stung," Igor said. He didn't look at her; his gaze remained fixed on the churning black rapids ahead. "The Belinski estate is three mortgaged townhouses and an attic full of ceremonial daggers nobody has the silver to polish. My father spent his last lucidity funding expeditionary teams into the deep rifts, convinced he’d dig up some scrap of the Astrologer's favor to stave off the debt collectors." He pulled an amulet from beneath his tunic—a cheap brass hoop holding a cracked piece of river-glass. Not heirloom craft. Pawnshop scrap. "When the summons arrived for this farce," Igor said, voice dipping low, stripped of its courtly cadence, "my three older brothers drew lots. I rigged the pull. Because if one of them came here, they’d fight for glory and die in the first hour. I came because I know how to smile at monsters while they measure my throat. My clan is starving, Zofia. If I don’t win a seat at your side, the Aegis will repossess the roof over my mother’s bed by winter." Zofia studied the rough wire binding the glass in his pendant. It was crude work, bent with pliers by someone who had to hurry. She knew that terror. The counting of pennies against the cold. The performative swagger required to keep creditors from realizing your pockets were lined with lint. "You should have opened with that," she said quietly, her palm steady on the cedar thwart. "Desperation I understand. It's the poetry that pisses me off." Igor looked up, startled. For a second, the mask was entirely gone. A genuine smile touched his mouth, tired and crooked. "Noted. Next time, straight to the bankruptcy declarations." A roar split the cavern roof. The glowing dome shattered into crystalline shards. A pillar of lead-colored force crashed into the river directly ahead, throwing up a geyser of boiling memory-sludge. The skiff tipped violently, water slopping over the sides. Zofia slammed against the mast, coughing as spray struck her chin. A memory not her own flashed: Igor, twelve years old, hiding inside a coal cellar while bailiffs took his sister's piano. The sheer, suffocating humiliation burned her lungs. "Look out!" Igor threw his weight against the oar, but a figure materialized upon the surface of the foam, walking on the black tide without disturbing a ripple. Elder Ignacy. The High Elder’s formal brocade had been replaced by funeral linen. His beard was drenched, his spectacles gone, eyes burning with a feverish, milk-white luminescence that had nothing to do with the clans' polite magic. In his right hand, he held a heavy ritual cleaver carved from dull meteor stone. "The tournament is fouled," Ignacy proclaimed. His voice boomed off the cavern vaults, rattling the teeth in Zofia's skull. "Every drop of blood spilled in these vaults was calculated by her! The cycle must rot from the root!" "Elder?" Igor staggered up, lifting his hands, weaving dream-strands into a barricade of shimmering mist. "You oversaw the rite! You sealed the pairings!" "I sealed a tomb for a spider!" Ignacy lunged across the foam. He swept his cleaver; the edge struck Igor’s conjured wall and ripped through it like wet paper. The shockwave threw Igor backward into the bottom of the boat, his head cracking against the oak ribbing with a sickening thud. He went limp, his paddle tumbling out into the current. Zofia lunged with her boat pole, driving the metal tip straight at the old man’s sternum. Ignacy refused to parry. He clamped one bare, calloused palm onto the shaft, wrenching it so viciously her wrists popped. He hauled her forward by her own weapon, catching her throat in an iron grip. "The prophecy was never a warning, girl," Ignacy hissed, his spit hitting her cheek, hot and bitter as sulfur. "It was an execution order. She wrote it to fail! She intended for the Svarognir to butcher each other in these caverns, so her purer construct would wake from the ash! A world cleansed of us! I have tended the archives for sixty years, deciphering her margins. You aren't our salvation." He pulled her over the edge of the skiff. "You are the executioner's bell!" "Get off me, you antique freak!" Zofia clawed at his wrist, driving her thumbs into the tendons of his forearm, but he had the fanatical strength of a madman. He drove her down. The icy surface of the Mnemos rushed up to meet her face. The water didn't feel wet; it felt dense, like cold mercury plunging down her nose, into her eyes, burning through her skull. She expected the café counter. She expected the unpaid heating bills, the landlord banging on the thin plywood door, the gray slush of November mornings trudging to work. Instead, there was marble. Cold, white, spotless stone underfoot. The sky above was violet, choked with unfamiliar constellations. A woman sat upon an ebony curule chair, fingers tipped with ink, quill scraping across heavy sheepskin. Zofia wasn't watching the woman. She was inside her ribcage. She looked down at her own hands. Slender, uncalloused, bearing heavy rings of black platinum. Across the terrace, four silhouettes knelt in iron collars, their heads bowed so low their brows grazed the floorboards. *The Aegis line is stubborn,* her own voice echoed in her mind, detached and dripping with poison. *We will breed the humility into them through the third generation. The Somnian house must be bled dry of coin, so their descendant has no recourse but to crawl to the altar. The Luminary boy will be burdened with just enough piety to make his guilt fatal.* She watched herself seal a wax emblem over a fresh scroll. A servant waited at her elbow, trembling. "My lady, the populace... if the gates open, millions will burn. The disaster—" "The disaster is necessary," she heard her own voice reply, smooth, bored, pitiless. "Let the sheep panic. When they believe the sky is falling, they will gladly deliver their sons to my threshold. Place the card behind the false panel in the study. Let them think they found a clue." She saw her own reflection in the bronze inkwell. Her face—not a tired barista’s face, but her face—curving into a cruel, triumphant sneer. Ignacy hauled her backward by her collar. Zofia broke the surface, thrashing violently against the hull, coughing black water from her lungs. She dragged herself onto the floorboards, shivering so hard her teeth rattled, staring at her own drenched, shaking hands in absolute horror. "I'm the villain."

The River of Lost Dreams