A Warrior’s Second Chance novel Chapter 372

ROMAN

I was lying there, not quite asleep, not fully awake, when it began–the voice. Low at first, almost like a whisper brushing against the edges of my mind, pulling at something deep within me.

It was a language I had never heard. The sounds twisted through the air, curling into shapes I could almost see. Strange consonants, vowels stretched unnaturally, syllables that seemed to echo both near and far at the same time.

I tried to turn over, tried to tell myself it was nothing, that it was just my imagination running loose, but the voice persisted. And then, slowly, fragments began to make sense. Just pieces at first–words, ideas, commands that flickered in my brain like shards of glass.

My limbs refused to move. I tried to lift my arm, to reach for something, anything, but it was as if the bed itself had swallowed me whole. My hands hovered above the sheets, frozen, useless. My chest tightened, and I felt the strangest kind of weight pressing down on my lungs. I wanted to scream, to call out, but nosound came. My voice had been stolen.

And then I saw her.

She was lying on a stone surface. Cold, and ancient in its stillness. I couldn’t make out much at first, only the curve of her body, the way her hair fanned out like dark water across the stone. Her arms were stretched out, wrists bleeding, though I didn’t know how it had happened or why. The air around her seemed to thrum with the voice’s rhythm, vibrating through the room–or whatever place this was–like it belonged to the stones themselves.

I wanted to move toward her. I wanted to save her. I tried again, tried with all my will, but my body

remained frozen. I could see her, I could feel the weight of the scene, but I was trapped in a bubble of helplessness. Every instinct screamed at me to act, to run, to grab her, but my limbs refused.

I floated there, suspended between panic and paralysis, and the world around me started to distort. The edges of the stone table blurred, the shadows stretching and bending unnaturally. The air thickened, sticky and heavy, and every time I tried to focus on the woman, the chanting grew louder, more insistent. It filled my head, echoed inside my skull, and I felt my teeth clench against the rising panic.

I could feel her pulse–or maybe it was my own–thumping beneath my ribs, going with the voice. The sensation was overwhelming. Every instinct I had wanted to reach her, wanted to pull her away from whatever danger she was in, but I was tethered in place, watching, powerless.

I wanted to run forward, to pull her off that stone, to shake her awake, to tell her she wasn’t alone. But I couldn’t. Every instinct to act was trapped under the weight of the strange hold, leaving me a spectator to the impossible scene unfolding before me.

Her eyes met mine.

The world around me seemed to tremble. The stone, the shadows, the voice–all of it pulsed with a rhythm that matched the panic in my chest. My mind tried to grasp it, tried to reason, tried to make sense of why I was frozen, why she was there, why the voice sounded like something it shouldn’t. But no logic existed here. Only fear. Only helplessness. Only the eyes of the woman I knew and cared for, locked on mine, asking silently for a salvation I couldn’t provide.

I opened my eyes.

It was a dream.