The Gates of Night: The Dreaming Dark - Book 3 Read Online Free PDF

still damaged, but her finger was fully restored. She wiggled it in wonder.
    “I … I didn’t even notice,” she said. “I think it’s been back since I woke up. I knew something felt strange.”
    “How is this even possible?” Daine said.
    “I don’t know,” Lei said, shaking her fist happily. “And you know what? I’m not going to think about it until I’ve slept for, oh, a few days.”
    “Well, I don’t feel right about leaving an injured woman on the hard floor,” Daine said, carefully laying the dark elf down on one of the blankets. “So I suppose you and I will just have to share.”
    “Or
you’re
going to have to sleep on the hard floor,” Lei said. But she was smiling, and she let Daine pull her down to the other blanket.

    Lei and Daine slept. The wounded elf still lay unconscious. Pierce studied the patterns on the walls. He always felt a vague discomfort when his companions were asleep. Even though he knew the experience was both harmless and necessary, it was completely foreign to him. The only time a warforged lost consciousness was if it was critically damaged, wounded so badly thatit would need to be repaired before it could awaken. Early in his life, Pierce had assumed that sleeping humans were injured, and he’d been concerned that his companions might never awaken unless treated by a healer. He quickly learned better, but nonetheless, watching others sleep had always made him uncomfortable.
    Now Pierce found there was another emotion at work. He knew Indigo would say that sleep was a weakness, one of the many flaws that made the so-called “breathers” inferior to the warforged. But watching Daine and Lei sleeping side by side, he felt a strange envy. The battle with Indigo, Lakashtai’s betrayal … he wished that he could escape it, if only for a moment. He wondered what it would be like to dream.
    You were not made for dreams
.
    How would you know?
It was a strange sensation, trying to communicate with Shira. There was no sense of a separate presence, just thoughts that appeared in his mind as if they were his own.
    Because you were made for me
.
    You are thousands of years older than I am
, Pierce thought.
That makes no sense
.
    It makes no sense
. It felt as if he was agreeing with himself.
It is still true
.
    Memory flooded through Pierce. A time of war. Shira’s people were endangered on two fronts. They needed to escape their homeland before an impending cataclysm destroyed it, and they were fighting a fearsome enemy to claim a new home. He saw the creation of warforged … no, not warforged, but creatures much like them. These were soldiers, but they were also
vessels of hope
. Shira was the first of her kind to attempt the transition. Her essence had been fusedto the sphere, where it could be bound to any vessel of hope. But only days after she had merged with her first vessel, she had been captured by the enemy. Her vessel was destroyed, and she was sealed away in the darkness of the vault.
    That doesn’t mean
I
was made for you
, Pierce thought.
It sounds like any warforged would do
.
    Would they?
A new memory emerged, but this was one of his own. Harmattan speaking to him at the door to the vault—
    This is a relic of this ancient land, a key of a most unusual nature. Only a warforged designed to interface with it can make use of it. Hydra, Indigo—it will not interface properly with their auras
.
    What makes you think I can use it?
Pierce had asked.
    Because
I
could, if I still had a body. And you are my brother
.
    The memory faded, and the next thought was Shira’s.
It may make no sense. But it is true. You were not made for dreams. You were made to escape them
.
    Pierce let this thought go. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about Shira. Her knowledge and analytic powers were certainly useful. Even now, as he glanced around the chamber, Shira identified the symbols carved into the walls as one of the languages of giants, translating each word that he looked at.