Heat.

  Blinding, relentless heat.

  David stood beneath a sun that felt close enough to touch. Mountains ringed him, jagged and wavering behind curtains of rising air. A circle of mesquite enclosed the space ahead, ancient and deliberate.

  A table waited inside.

  Mesquite pods rattled in the wind.

  He knew this place.

  Had always known it.

  Morgana stood near the table, luminous against the desert glare. When she smiled, the world steadied.

  “M’chroi,” she said. “You’ve come home.”

  The word settled into him, old and familiar.

  The table was heavy mahogany, etched with the Vesica Pisces and quartered by a cross. Symbols layered upon symbols, inner and outer rings alive with pale fire.

  David’s friends—Francis, Chris, and Rowan—sat at the table. They wore their truer aspects.

  Francis, radiant in turquoise silk. Chris broad-shouldered in armor, green light whispering along his plate. Rowan, small but fierce, a massive book open before her, pages turning on their own.

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  An empty chair called to him.

  At its side sat a great grey wolf, tail sweeping the ground, eyes bright with recognition.

  Then David saw her.

  She was already watching him.

  Raven stood where his reflection should have been. Dark hair. Blue fire in her eyes. Power held, patient. Waiting.

  Beyond the grove, the world burned.

  Battles blurred together. Steel and sorcery, rifles and runes, past and future colliding in thunder and light. A glowing ring held the chaos at bay. Between it and the trees stood beings of legend, watching him as if they had always been waiting.

  A voice rose. Not spoken, but known.

  Hecate.

  The tide turns, she said. My children wander, lost.

  Avalon in mist. Atlantis beneath the waves. Camelot fractured by time and forgetting.

  They remember Father’s names and forget the price of blood paid for them.

  The images shifted. Smoke-choked skies. Rivers swollen and fouled. Cities clawing at the earth beneath them.

  They call it progress, Hecate said. The elements call it theft.

  Then possibility.

  Atlantis rising, changed. Avalon touching the modern world without fading. Camelot reborn, not as memory, but as choice.

  Teach them.

  The word struck like a command, not a plea.

  Remind them who they are.

  The future is not written.

  A raven’s call cut through the silence.

  Sharp. Insistent.

  The vision shattered.

  David bolted upright, moonlight slanting across the room. Lobo’s tail thumped happily against the mattress.

  David laughed under his breath, heart still racing.

  “Well,” he said, rubbing Lobo’s ears, “that felt important.”

  He lay back, staring at the ceiling.

  The echo of the call lingered, just out of reach.

  “Guess I’ve got a meeting coming up. I have a lot of questions.”

  Lobo stayed awake long after David didn’t.