“Nothing,” he started, out of habit more than conviction.

“Sure,” Dave said mildly. “You just stood out there starting to become a sculpture for ‘nothing’.”

He turned and gave James a hearty shove. “Spit it out mate.”

James huffed out a short breath. The words snagged in his throat, not because he didn’t have them, but because they felt too bright and strange in his chest. Like he would cough and sparks would come out instead.

“I had a dream,” he said eventually.

“Ah.” Dave smiled faintly. “And here I was hoping it was our current case, or a girl.”

James ignored that. “It was… different, this time.”

He leaned back, eyes drawn to the fire, in the cracks between flame and shadow.

“There was a… clearing,” he began slowly. “A circle. Forest all around, trees so tall I couldn’t see the tops. No snow. They were… wrong somehow. Not wrong like rotten, but… like they were listening.”

“Listening trees,” Dave murmured. “As you do.”

“In the middle of the clearing there was a fire.” James’s fingers flexed on the arm of the chair. “It was big. Not a nice little campfire, but this… sphere of flame, and from it an extrusion of fire upwards. Like someone had taken a piece of the sun and nailed it onto the air. Fixed in place. Frozen. It should’ve burned everything. The grass, the roots, the people around it—”

“People?”

“People, figures,” James said dismissively. “Hooded. I couldn’t really see their faces. They were going around the fire in a circle, in a rehearsed manner, like a procession. There were drums, too. The sound wasn’t loud, but you could feel it. In your bones. Reverbating. Resonating.”

“And it was cold.”