The Dream Breaker

POV: Irios

"Some stones sleep. Others dream. A few remember." — Inscription inside the 13th Pillar

I try to breathe and inhale only dust. My lungs seize. Not from pain, not from breathlessness. Just the shock of trying at all. For a long moment, I hang there—not standing, not lying, but suspended in some crooked, tilted place, my mouth full of grit and silence.

I cough, or try to. What comes out is a dry, crumbling sound, like a stiff wheeze straining to give air. It echoes in a stone throat. Then, motion. Slow.

Unfamiliar.

My hand twitches first. Fingers like sculpted marble, stiff and ridged with fine-carved veins, flinching against the cold surface they rest on. My wrist aches as it turns. Not pain—no, more like a remembered motion, waking up. My arm is heavy. Heavier than it should be. And pale. The color of bleached granite streaked with faint silver. No skin, no flesh. Only the shape of it.

'I'm made of stone.' The thought doesn't settle easily. It's too big. It drags half a dozen other questions behind it, 'Why?', 'How?', 'Who did this?' I push with both hands against a surface at my back. There's give—or maybe I shift instead. My shoulders grind as I lean forward. Chipped flakes fall from my elbows. A sound escapes me, half-groan, half-growl.

"Hrrnnghh..."

The wall behind me is smooth, warm. The shape I left in it is unmistakable. An imprint—curved shoulders, bent arms, head tilted to one side. A tomb fit to my back. I stagger upright, catching myself on a jagged outcrop. My legs threaten to buckle, but they hold. Just barely.

Light glimmers faintly above. Pale white, soft as breath. It spills down from a hole high in the stone ceiling, dust motes drifting through it like falling snow. Everything else is shadow. I see shapes: broken pillars, weathered carvings, collapsed stairs. A long-dead sanctuary, swallowed by time and silence.

The light, it beckons.

I take my first step. It feels like grinding tectonics—stone shifting against stone. I gasp again. My voice rasps. My joints creak. But I move. Another step. And another. I will reach that light. Whatever waits above, I have to see it.

But first, I need to understand what I've become. I pause near the base of a crumbled stair and examine my body more closely. My skin is not skin. It shines with the texture of ancient marble, veins of quartz running beneath a surface smoothed by time or intention. Not uniform.

There are grooves along my chest, almost ornamental. The muscle beneath is shaped with impossible precision. My ribcage rises and falls shallowly, a motion I don't fully understand, yet feel compelled to continue.

I trail one hand across my torso. It’s strange. I feel it, in a way that’s not quite touch. Like the memory of sensation. Cool stone against cooler stone. The carvings continue down my arms. Muscles taut with frozen tension, not quite flexed, not quite at rest. I see etchings where veins should be, a lattice of delicate channels that shimmer faintly in the cavern light. Not painted—inlaid. Metal, maybe. Silver or something close to it, woven so thin it glows when the light catches.

My hands are massive. Each finger ends in a slightly squared tip. The nails are sculpted into place, not grown. The joints are functional, but I can feel the strain of their first use in... how long? I flex them again. They creak.

I look lower. And grimace. "Well," I mutter hoarsely, voice raw and scraping, "whoever made me wasn't shy." The proportions are... generous. Anatomically reverent, if unnecessarily optimistic.

I cover myself with one hand and take another step toward the light, shaking my head. "Guess modesty wasn't part of the design brief."

I climb a gentle slope towards the wall opposite me, towards a shaft like tunnel that serves as the only exit I can see. Each step forward brings new aches—not of pain, but disuse. My legs drag behind my intent. My balance tilts sideways, unsure where gravity lies in this fractured tomb. My foot strikes a loose stone and I stumble, catching myself with both hands against the wall. My palms scrape, but there’s no blood.

Only the dry hiss of stone on stone. I blink. Did I just think about blood?

I stand still and listen. There's no heartbeat. No breath but the motions I force. No pulse, no sweat, no thrum of life. But something within me moves. A heat. A pressure. Like a buried coal under my sternum. Not a heart. Not flame. Something else. Something... waiting.

The shaft above opens wider the closer I get. It’s angled like a throat swallowing moonlight. The dust grows thicker. It clings to my shoulders, my face, settling in the cracks of my joints. My arms are dusted in ash so fine it turns the pale stone dull, like age itself laid upon me again.

I pause at a jag in the climb, hand pressed to a ridge for support. The surface vibrates, subtly. A hum, a resonance, faint enough that I feel it more in my bones than I hear it. Again I think of something I'm not "Bone's". I listen, still as the wall. There’s a rhythm buried there. Like breath slowed to near-stillness. Like memory itself vibrating.

The sound is familiar. Comforting, in a way that aches. I shake my head and keep moving.

I rise through the broken tunnel, jagged stone scraping against my arms, my legs, my chest. Each scrape feels like an echo of pain that no longer exists. Muscles flex in their still form as I haul myself higher—stone muscle, sculpted to move as if living. The rhythm comes easier now, my weight distributing as if the statue I inhabit remembers being a man.

And then the ceiling gives way. I reach the edge of the shaft and pull myself into the open.

The world greets me with silence and color. Pale purple sky stretches above, the hue soft as bruised lavender, darkening toward the horizon where it fades into blue, tinted with drifting gray. The dust is everywhere. It hangs in the air like forgotten ash. The ground under my feet is soft and white, a blanket of powdered stone. The air is cold, but it doesn’t bite.

The first thing I see is the light. A pale white glow, suspended in the sky. Far above. Faint, yet unmistakable. A presence. Small. Distant. Just enough to cast soft halos on the ruins around me. I cannot make out a shape. Just the glow. Just the suggestion of something watching, or waiting.

Something inside me aches again. Not physically. Deeper. There's a voice, faint as a whisper. “Dad?”

My throat tightens. I am not alone. The ruins stretch before me—ancient, half-swallowed by the dust, broken by time. Stone stairs curl around collapsed buildings, their tops long since sheared off. Sculpted reliefs adorn the remains, too worn to read, but elegant in design. Everything leans subtly, as if gravity itself forgot what direction it meant to pull.

And they move. Statues. Dozens of them. All the same size, all the same shape: boys. Carved identically in the image of a child. Every one of them. They wander slowly through the field. Not random. Measured. Like sleepwalkers. Their movements are fluid, silent. Some walk in circles. Others in arcs. Patterns I do not yet understand. None look at me. None react.

Except one. It stops a few paces ahead. Turns toward me with no face, only a smooth head cleaved flat just before the cheek bone. Then it bows. Low. Deep. Like it remembers something I don’t. It straightens again. Turns. Walks on. And I follow. The light above waits. Pale. Silent.

The statues drift like shadows, their stillness heavier than the dust settling at my feet. The figure that bowed is gone now, swallowed by the haze, leaving only silence behind. A quiet question gnaws at me—, 'Who made me? And why?' The answers twist just beyond reach, tangled in the dust and stone.

But the voice lingers. Faint, fractured—a child’s whisper in the dark. 'Dad?' I turn my gaze back to the pale white glow, soft and distant. It calls me. And I move forward.