Would going out at this hour seem strange?
At four in the morning, after Alice failed to fall asleep again, she checked the time and seriously considered the question.
Of course, there was actually no need to think about it. Anyone would have given an affirmative answer.
So Alice gave up thinking, changed clothes, and headed out to look for a taxi running the night shift... no, a carriage.
Inside an utterly ordinary-looking house in Backlund's Empress Borough.
Charlie King abruptly sat up in bed, gasping for breath as his body trembled uncontrollably.
Only after a long while did he calm down. He got dressed, lit the lamp, and walked over to the bedroom mirror to look at himself.
The mirror reflected his face, pale with fear. His eyes still held lingering terror, and he knew why—he was having nightmares again. Ever since sending that letter of accusation to the Church of Evernight, he had been having the same nightmare over and over.
In the dream, he kept going through the same thing—running away, getting caught, then dying.
Over the past two or three days, he had experienced dozens of ways to die, from inexplicably and absurdly falling to his death, to being crushed or buried alive by suddenly collapsing walls, to all manner of disasters falling from the sky...
He remembered the all-consuming terror as he fled, the vivid fear before death arrived, the agonizingly real pain of dying, and even more so, the despair of falling out of one dream only to sink into another.
Nor could he forget the sound that rang out before every one of his deaths:
"Rumble..."
The only thing he could not understand was this—if it was a revelation from Fate, what was Fate trying to accomplish?
Charlie King felt there was