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The dream did not come gently. I was already crying when it began, though I didn’t understand why.

I stood barefoot in a Highland glen, mist curling around heather and stone. The air was thick with silence, watchful. The Rowan trees arched overhead, ancient and gnarled. They whispered, “Rianan.”

And she was waiting. My mother.

A woman, tall and luminous, hair black as peat water, streaked with silver. She stood just beyond the mist, cloaked in a dress the color of earth. Her hands were outstretched, palms up, the moonlight threading through her fingers.

I dropped to my knees before I knew I had. She moved toward me, slow and certain, wind lifting her cloak. She knelt and cupped my face softly, like I was a candle in danger of blowing out.

“Mo Ca’ra,” she whispered. Her voice trembled like a spell being broken. “Mo ghrian bheag. Mo Emrys.” My little sun. My Emrys.

A sob tore out of me like it had waited centuries. She pulled me into her arms, and I let her. The smell of her—honeysuckle and woodsmoke, magic and blood—wrapped around me like memory.

“You’ve been asleep too long, mo leannan,” she said. “But the world hasn’t stopped turning.”

She pulled back, eyes shining with something too ancient to be tears. “You have to listen now,” she said, her voice like velvet steel. “She’s found you. The old one. The ender.”

The name chilled the dream, like frost on breath.

“She wants what flows through you, mo leannan,” she continued. “She wants the end of our line. Murt na màthair mus fàs an solas.” Kill the mother before the light can grow.

My stomach turned. “But you’re gone,” I choked. “You’re already—”

The ground pulsed once, twice, like it had a heartbeat of its own. I felt it in my ribs, in my bones. A low hum beneath the earth calling me home.

She cupped my face. “The light lives on. In you. And someday, in your tiodhalc priseil. You must remember, your anam càirdeach. He will keep you safe. He is bound to your soul as you are bound to my blood.”

That word echoed inside me like a bell. Soul twin.

“Will I see you again?” I asked, desperate.

She smiled, soft and sad. “You never stopped.”

The dream began to fade, her voice the last to go. “Wake, mo ghràdh. Remember who you are. Remember what we are.”

I tried to cling to her, but the mist rose like a flood, stealing her warmth, stealing the trees, stealing the stars.

And I woke up screaming.

My pillow was soaked. My throat was raw. I couldn’t breathe. Because that wasn’t a dream.

It wasn’t a memory. And I’d been held by my real mother.

And now she was lost to me again.

I curled into myself, sobbing—from love, from the unbearable weight of having had her just long enough to remember I had lost her.

And I whispered into the dark, “Mo Ca’ra.”