Read Novel Full Chapter 213 213: Dimensions were furniture she could rearrange when bored.
Chapter 213 213: Dimensions were furniture she could rearrange when bored.
Sebastian woke choking on air that didn't exist.
His body jerked upright before his mind caught up, hands clawing at sheets that were twisted tight around his waist.
Sweat clung to his skin in a cold film, the kind that didn't belong to summer heat or nightmares about falling. This was the old kind. The familiar kind. The kind that left his chest aching like he'd been running for miles.
For a moment he didn't know where he was.
There was a ceiling above him, pale and quiet. A window. Curtains shifting in the early morning breeze.
The faint hum of distant city life filtering through glass. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, drowning all of it out. He dragged in a breath, then another, forcing air into lungs that felt too small.
He looked to his side.
Belle was there.
Curled slightly toward him, hair spilled across the pillow in a dark river, blindfold still resting gently over her eyes. Her breathing was slow and even. Peaceful. One of her hands had drifted toward his side in sleep, fingers brushing the fabric of his shirt as if confirming he was still real.
The sight of her hit him harder than the nightmare.
Relief and terror arrived together.
He pressed a hand to his face and laughed under his breath, but it shook on the way out.
"They've started again," he muttered.
The words tasted bitter.
He hadn't had those dreams in months. Not since before the cave. He'd almost convinced himself they were gone. Another problem buried under newer, louder ones.
Apparently his mind disagreed.
He remembered the dream in fragments, because they always came in fragments. A kitchen flooded with sunlight. Belle standing barefoot on tile, humming something tuneless while she burned toast and pretended she hadn't. A table cluttered with plates. Laughter. His laughter. A life so painfully ordinary it felt like a miracle.
And then the end.
There was always an end.
A blade. A sickness. A battlefield. A faceless thing reaching from nowhere. He never remembered the exact cause. Only the certainty of dying.
The sensation of warmth leaving his body while Belle screamed his name. The way her voice cracked. The way the world went dark with her still calling for him.
He always woke at that moment.
Every time.
He looked at her again, checking for injuries that didn't exist. Checking for blood. Checking for proof that she was alive and not a cruel echo carried over from sleep. Her chest rose and fell. A strand of hair shifted with her breath.
Alive.
Here.
For now.
His throat tightened.
Fear wasn't new to him. He'd felt it in caves full of monsters, in the face of gods, in the quiet moments before battles that could erase areas. But this fear was smaller and somehow heavier. It wasn't about dying.
It was about her.
The dream wasn't subtle. His mind never bothered with subtlety. It shoved the message straight into his chest and let it sit there: you will lose this.
You will lose her.
He hated how easily the thought rooted itself.
Sebastian swung his legs off the bed and sat there for a moment, elbows on his knees, hands hanging uselessly between them. The floor was cool against his feet. The air smelled faintly of last night's tea and clean sheets.
He listened to her breathing.
He let it anchor him.
"I'm not letting that happen," he whispered.
The vow wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It settled into him with a weight that felt permanent. He'd made promises before, to friends, to teachers, to himself. This one felt different. This one dug hooks into bone.
If the dreams were warnings, then he would answer them the only way he knew how.
He would get stronger.
Not stronger in the abstract way people liked to say when they meant emotional growth or resilience. He meant power. Brutal, measurable, undeniable power. The kind that rewrote outcomes. The kind that spat in the face of inevitability.
He stood carefully, easing out of the bed so the mattress barely shifted. Belle stirred anyway. Her fingers twitched, searching. He leaned down and brushed a kiss into her hair.
"I'll be back," he murmured, though she couldn't hear him.
He crossed the room quietly, every step deliberate. The bathroom door clicked shut with a softness he'd learned from years of trying not to wake people who deserved sleep more than he did.
He turned the water on cold.
Steam wasn't what he wanted. Comfort wasn't what he wanted. The shower roared to life, and he stepped under it without hesitation. The cold hit like a punch. His breath left him in a sharp gasp as the water hammered against his skin.
Good.
He welcomed the shock.
It burned the last threads of the dream out of his nerves. It dragged him fully into his body, into the present. He stood there and let it punish him for a while, head bowed, water cascading down his face.
He pictured the nightmare again, but this time he didn't look away from the ending.
He watched himself die.
He watched a woman who looked too much like Belle scream.
Then he imagined standing back up.
He imagined grabbing the throat of whatever future tried to write that scene and snapping it in half.
The water warmed slowly as the system adjusted, but he didn't touch the dial. He let the temperature climb naturally, feeling sensation return to fingers that had gone numb. His heartbeat settled into something steady.
Training.
He mapped it out in his head with mechanical precision. Sword forms until his arms shook. Dualflow circulation until his veins felt like they were burning. Sparring. Endurance. Control. He'd push until the line between exhaustion and damage blurred, then step over it and keep going.
He wasn't chasing improvement.
He was chasing safety.
For her.
The thought steadied him more than any breathing exercise ever had.
When he finally stepped out, his skin was flushed and his muscles already felt awake. He dried off quickly, movements efficient. There was no laziness in him this morning. No lingering. Every second he wasted felt like theft.
He dressed in training clothes, dark fabric that wouldn't cling when soaked in sweat. He paused at the door, hand on the knob, and looked back toward the bed through the crack.
Belle hadn't moved much. One arm lay stretched across his empty space, fingers curled loosely in the sheets. Even asleep, she reached for him.
His chest tightened again, but this time it didn't feel like fear.
It felt like purpose.
"I'll outrun it," he said softly to the quiet room. "Whatever it is. I'll outrun it."
The dreams had come back.
Fine.
Let them watch.
He stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him with care, and headed toward the training grounds with a stride that carried no hesitation. The morning air was cool. The sky was just beginning to pale. Most of the world still slept.
He didn't.
He carried the image of the nightmare with him like fuel, and every step was a promise carved into motion: he would not die helpless, and he would not leave her screaming into an empty world.
If fate wanted a fight, it had his attention now.
Sebastian paused halfway down the corridor.
The training grounds were the obvious choice. Wide space, reinforced floors, equipment designed to survive people like him. His body kept moving in that direction out of habit, but something tugged at the back of his mind. A quiet correction.
Belle had built a room.
Not a public hall. Not a shared arena. A room for them.
He exhaled, turned on his heel, and headed back.
The apartment was silent in the early hour, the kind of silence that felt padded and fragile. His steps softened automatically as he walked, instincts bending around the knowledge that Belle was still asleep a few doors away. He slipped back inside without a sound and crossed to the wardrobe.
The black tracksuit hung where he'd left it, folded with an order that definitely wasn't his doing. He pulled it on in quick, practiced motions. The fabric was light, elastic, hugging his shoulders without restricting movement. It smelled faintly like detergent and something warmer underneath, something that reminded him of Belle's side of the closet.
He flexed his hands.
The material whispered softly. Good. No drag. No resistance. His body felt tuned, coiled tight under skin that still remembered the cold shower.
He rolled his shoulders once, twice, feeling the joints align. The dream flickered again behind his eyes. He didn't shove it away this time. He let it sit there like a blade pressed against his back.
Motivation.
He stepped into the hallway and moved toward the far end of the apartment, where a door that hadn't existed a week ago now waited. Belle had carved the space out of reality the way she did everything else, casually, as if dimensions were furniture she could rearrange when bored.