Callista tossed and turned, tangled in her blanket, but sleep refused to take her kindly. Instead, it dragged her under like a riptide, pulling her into a world she did not want to visit again.

The battlefield was exactly as she remembered—cold, dark, and slick with blood. But here, in the landscape of her dreams, it was worse. The sky swirled with an unnatural, deep red glow, and the shadows stretched long and twisted, like grasping hands. The bugbears still stood, towering and relentless, but their forms were wrong—warped, faceless things, dripping with something thick and black. And in the center of it all, a broken construct lay at her feet.

Aether.

His frame was dented, his carapace cracked, his glowing eyes flickering dimly. She fell to her knees beside him, hands reaching, desperate, trying to fix him, trying to put the pieces back together. But the moment her fingers touched the jagged metal, his body crumbled into loose bolts and shattered gears, falling away into the dirt like sand slipping through her fingers.

No, no, no, I can fix this! But the pieces wouldn’t hold. They never did.

Behind her, the warden lay exactly as she had found him yesterday—but in the nightmare, he was cold. His chest did not rise, his heartbeat was absent, and no matter how hard she pressed, no matter how many bandages she wrapped, he did not wake up this time. Her breath came faster, hands shaking as she tried, tried, tried to fix what was already gone. Why wouldn’t he wake up? Why couldn’t she just replace what was broken? Machines had diagrams. They had schematics. They made sense.

People didn’t.

A low, guttural growl rose behind her, something shifting in the darkness. She whipped around, hands still bloodied, but there was nothing to fight. Just the empty, open wound of the battlefield, stretching further than it should, consuming everything. And then, the bodies began to move.

One by one, bugbears—wardens—Aether—they turned their heads toward her, their eyes hollow, empty. "You didn't fix us."

Callista screamed.

She jerked awake with a sharp gasp, bolting upright, her workshop coming into focus around her. The familiar clutter of her blueprints, the smell of old oil and burnt metal, the dim glow of her lantern—reality.

Her hands were still shaking.

Aether chirped softly from where he sat on her workbench, tilting his head at her. He was whole. He was fine. It was just a dream. Callista exhaled, shoving both hands through her wild, unkempt hair. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Go back to sleep, Aether."

She didn’t.

Instead, she reached for a blank schematic and began to sketch, tracing lines she wasn’t even thinking about. If she couldn’t fix what had already happened, she’d at least make sure she was ready for whatever came next.