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You found this place for a reason. I don’t think it’s an accident that you’re here, reading this, at exactly this moment in your life. This is a space for the ones who feel things deeply, who are drawn to stories that don’t look away from the dark. I’m glad you came.💜
This chapter was one of those writing sessions where you look up and realize you’ve been somewhere else entirely, somewhere cold and close, and it takes a moment to come back.
Chapter 22 belongs to Isaak.
By this point in the story, we already know something is happening to him. We’ve watched it begin. The descent I’ve always known was coming, the one that lives in the very bones of this trilogy. Isaak is someone who feels the darkness more than anyone else around him. Not because he is dark. Because he is good. And goodness that walks too close to the shadow gets tested in ways that cruelty never does.
This scene is one of those tests.
He’s chained to a chair in a forbidden room. The one he hoped he would never have to enter again. Across from him stands Thrae, a Sage who was once someone to be trusted, now hollowed out by something older and hungrier than either of them. Thrae has a book. He has a spell. And he wants something from Isaak that Isaak is not willing to give.
Isaak gripped the chair’s edges and heaved against the iron links. He knew it was pointless, yet he pushed until sweat rolled from his hairline in heavy drops.
“It will be much easier if you don’t fight this,” Thrae spoke in a low growl that didn’t belong to him.
What follows is not a fight. There are no swords. No rescue. It is something quieter and more terrifying than that.
Thrae gets inside.
Not metaphorically. Inside. Into the space where Isaak’s thoughts live, where his memories take shape before he can stop them. The spell works like black water rising, pulling answers toward the surface, and Isaak has to hold against a current he cannot see or touch or name.
He holds.
Not perfectly. Not without cost. But he holds.
He was suddenly unable to move. His tongue froze in his mouth. Thrae drew closer, his abyssal crimson eyes all-consuming before Isaak. A void drained of all light engulfed Isaak like ink flooding his lungs, and he stood alone in a cold emptiness.
Thrae’s deep growl reverberated through the vast blackness.
I want to tell you why this scene matters to me beyond the story. Because I think you already know this room. Maybe not with chains and sigils and a corrupted Sage murmuring in the dark. But the room where something outside of you tries to access something inside of you that belongs only to you.
The room where the world gets loud enough that you start to wonder if your own knowing is even real anymore. Where the weight of what is happening out there seeps in here, into the body, into the quiet places you used to be able to find. Where exhaustion becomes the atmosphere and you breathe it in whether you want to or not.
The world is unraveling in ways that are not subtle. We are watching things we trusted dissolve. We are being asked, daily, to hand over our peace, our clarity, our sense of what is true. The pressure is constant and it is loud and it does not stop. Most of us are holding on. Keeping something true inside ourselves that the noise has not yet touched, while also just trying to get through the week.
And still, something holds.
…Thrae hissed. “Were you trying to communicate with Eva?”
In response to the question, Isaak’s thoughts began to swirl and take shape into an image of that night in the cellar. He willed them to stay put, but it was no use. The spell was too strong. Just as the thought was about to be fully formed, there was a small nudge at the back of his mind, and the thought disappeared. It stunned Isaak, because he was certain this phenomenon hadn’t come from him.
That is what I found at the end of this scene. Not a victory. Not a rescue. Something subtler. A nudge at the back of Isaak’s mind, just as the thought he’s been protecting is about to be taken. Something intervenes. Something he didn’t summon. And the thought disappears before it can be stolen.
He doesn’t know where it came from.
Neither does he understand yet that this moment is the beginning of something.
I believe we all carry something like that. The part of us that will not fully give in, even when every other part is over it. The small fire that keeps burning, not because we tend it perfectly, but because it is the nature of the soul to burn. We don’t always get to choose the darkness that finds us. We do get to choose how we respond to it.
Sometimes, responding looks like thrashing against iron chains. Sometimes it looks like going still and finding silence inside the noise. And sometimes it looks like something so quiet we almost miss it. A thought that didn’t get taken. A nudge from somewhere we can’t explain.
Thrae stood, clearly shaken. He stared at Isaak uncertainly, his expression communicating the same question Isaak now asked himself.
“Something helped me break free from the spell, but what?”
Isaak doesn’t give up in that chair. Not because he is a hero. He doesn’t see himself that way. He holds on because something in him refuses to let the darkness have the final word.
That is always the reason, isn’t it? We know we’re strong enough because we carry the inner flame that simply will never and can never be extinguished.
Author Note: I’m deep in the final stretch of the rewrite now, moving into Chapter 30. Follow along on my Substack and be the first to know when Book One is ready.
View The Raven Dreams Trilogy Portal for a Table of Contents for each chapter shared!
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This is a great description of daily life these days. "The world is unraveling in ways that are not subtle. We are watching things we trusted dissolve. We are being asked, daily, to hand over our peace, our clarity, our sense of what is true. The pressure is constant and it is loud and it does not stop. Most of us are holding on. Keeping something true inside ourselves that the noise has not yet touched, while also just trying to get through the week.
And still, something holds."