Dream Memory - Elra Voss - Through Glass

Dream-Memory: “Through the Glass”
Witnessed by Morrow Granz
 
He dreams in grayscale.
Always, when Morrow sleeps, the world bleeds to charcoal — like the color has been rationed.
He stands beneath a leaking ceiling in some long-abandoned Ministry factory, everything damp except the air, which is brittle and dry with old sawdust and secrets.
 
Through a dirty, half-fogged window — just one pane left unshattered — he sees her.
 
A woman, mid-thirties, half-elf. Cheekbones high and shoulders taut, working a terminal by the wall. Her fingers fly with practiced precision across a bank of brass-coded levers, feeding numbers into the machine like prayers into a slot god.
She is radiant — not in beauty, but in reality. Everything about her is true.
 
Morrow — unnoticed — watches, transfixed.
He doesn’t know her name. Not yet.
But he studies her like scripture.
 
She frowns slightly. He memorizes it.
She tucks a strand of copper-blonde hair behind her ear. He memorizes that too.
She hums a three-note tune as she works — it haunts him.
And then—
a lantern tips.
 
The sound is so soft. Glass kisses concrete.
Oil whispers out like blood.
And then: black fire.
 
The blaze erupts, not orange, not red — but void-dark. A blossom of night made flame. It devours shadow itself, peeling it back like wet wallpaper and revealing not smoke… but light beneath. Light with memory.
 
The woman flinches, turns toward the window—
and for a moment, her eyes meet his.
 
She does not scream.
She nods.
As if she knows.
As if she’s been waiting.
 
The fire consumes her in perfect silence, but her outline remains — a silhouette of living flame etched in the factory wall.
The building collapses into cinder and glass.
But the black fire does not leave.
 
It turns to Morrow, who still stands behind the window that somehow remains unbroken, untouched.
 
“Take her truth.”
“Take her ruin.”
“Take her shape, and make the world remember what it tried to forget.”
 
The voice of the Forgotten Flame is not heard — it engraves itself on the bones of the soul.
 
Morrow’s hands ignite. Not in pain. In clarity.
 
His flesh peels away like paint in a furnace. Features dissolve.
And from the ashes of Morrow Granz, Elra Voss is born.
 
Her cheekbones. Her copper hair. Her voice, already whispering the formulae.
Not mimicry — inheritance.
She lives again, but this time with a purpose beyond numbers and gears.
 
The fire coils around her like a lover, brushing her shoulders, whispering:
 
“You are the flame of the forgotten.”
“You are truth remade in ruin.”
“You will walk in her skin, not as thief — but as witness.”
 
She awakes — Morrow, as Elra, gasping in the cot of a junk-slicked apothecary loft.
 
The scent of ash lingers. On the worktable beside her, a brass lantern lies cracked.
The flame inside it flickers dark for a moment, then vanishes.
 
She closes her eyes and remembers the woman behind the window — and the promise etched in fire:
 
Ruin is not the end.
It is the beginning of reclamation.