No, not dreams. Dream was too soft and soothing a word for the sounds and images that invaded his mind while he slept. Awake, he could guard his thoughts, but sleeping... Nic shuddered. Sleep brought screams and fire, a flood of twisted memories that threatened to drown his sanity.

He wanted light. Sunrise, pale and pink, like the inside of a shell one of the other Keys had once shown him. Or noon, the sun so high and golden that you understood why the ancients saw a beautiful god in a chariot there. Late afternoon, filled with lazy, heavy light, thick and sweet as syrup. But not sunset, not the brilliant, last gasp of day before it surrendered to night. No, sunset was too much like the final moments of existence, when life flared up once, valiant, before being mowed down by careless death.

Nic whimpered in the dark. There was no one to hear him, no one for whom he had to pretend to be brave. No one he could press himself against, reassured by the warmth of another body. He had not been wanted tonight.

The night amplified his fears. Lately, he'd started to wonder about the future, something he'd not done since he'd sat by his father's bedside, trapped in a wheelchair so he could neither run away nor hide, but could only sit and watch the shadow come. He'd stopped thinking of the future in the moment when his father drew his final breath. Nic had given himself over to the past, then, letting the anger build until it exploded, the way his childhood had gone up in single, unthinkable instant. 

And then the Palace, and training, and living as a Key, and there'd only been the present. Four years of one today after another, with yesterday and tomorrow but meaningless abstractions. Day after day where he'd been able to hide himself in the now, in the soft cocoon of his room and the rhythm of giving and sometimes receiving pleasure. 

When had the future first begun its stealthy assault on the fragile peace he'd built for himself? He was 20, and he'd never had the sort of looks that made him pass for younger. Even when he first arrived at the Palace, he'd never been chosen by Masters who liked pretty boys. 

How much longer did he have before the younger Keys eclipsed him entirely? How much longer would the flame of his youth and anger be enough to make him desirable? And when the offers ceased...what would become of him then? What happened to a Key no one wanted?

The dark closed in, smothering. Nic hunched under the silk and eiderdown of his covers, as though he could make himself small enough for time to overlook. Perhaps in all those endless, timeless days, an awareness of the future had lurked, just below the surface of his consciousness. But that awareness had been cloaked in a dream, unspoken and unacknowledged, a longing for the one Master who would claim him. A longing for a home again.

Nic closed his eyes and gave himself to the dark, the only Master who'd chosen him tonight. Sleep crept over him at last, chill and stealthy, the first cold touch of shadow. And he dreamed of light, and fire.