The Emperor’s Dreams — Power, Grief, and the Forgotten Balance

The night presses close, warm rather than cold. The chamber smells of wool, skin, and the faint resinous bite of embers burned down to grey. Heavy curtains of deep red wool hang slack at the windows, their dye darkened by years of smoke and winter damp.

Hildegard lies beside him, her back against his chest. Her shift is linen, softened thin by washing, warm where her body has held it. He knows her weight, the slope of her shoulders, and the small scar at the base of her spine from a fall years ago. She has borne his life with him faithfully — the journeys, the councils, the children, the long absences that leave no marks but fatigue.

She has never asked him to be other than what he is.

That knowledge weighs on him, even as he reaches for her in the dark.

They come together without ceremony. There is care in it, familiarity, the quiet competence of bodies long accustomed to one another. When Hildegard turns her face toward him, searching his eyes, he closes them instead.

“Charles,” she murmurs — not a reproach—only his name.

“I’m here,” he says, because it is almost true.

Her hand rises to his cheek, grounding and steady. He keeps his eyes shut. Behind the darkness, another presence forms — upright, contained, unmistakable. Fastrada does not move toward him. She never does. She stands as she always has, gaze level, unsoftened.

The moment overtakes him before he can master it. His breath breaks, a sound dragged from somewhere too old to belong to a ruler. He clutches at Hildegard as release takes him, shame flooding close behind. He turns his face away when it is done.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“For what?” Hildegard asks.

He has no answer that would not wound them both.

She says nothing more. She rests her hand on his chest, feeling the uneven slowing beneath her palm, then turns away onto her side. He listens to her breathing until sleep takes him.

The mist returns.

The ground yields slightly beneath his feet, neither stone nor earth but something that remembers heat. Above him, wings move through the fog — vast, deliberate. He wants to look up, but never does — though he has dreamed this place many times before.

Morning arrives with a knock too careful to be ordinary.

The messenger stands rigid, eyes lowered.

“She is dead,” the man says. “The Lady Fastrada did not wake.”

The words arrive complete. No illness named. No cause offered. She was present. Then she was not.

Charles inclines his head once. “Leave us.”

The day moves on, as days must. Councillors gather. Voices rise and fall. Wax seals press into parchment. He answers when addressed, his voice steady, his hand sure. Somewhere beneath it all, something has gone quiet, as if a counterweight has been removed and the structure left leaning.

By evening, he withdraws.

The crown rests where it always does, on a low cushion of faded purple wool stitched with a border of worn gold thread. He looks at it longer than usual. It seems heavier there than on his head.

Hildegard finds him seated at the table, hands flat against the oak, fingers spread as if testing whether the wood is still solid.

“They’ve lit candles for her,” she says gently.

“Yes.”

“She was… difficult,” Hildegard adds after a pause.

He exhales once, almost a laugh. “She was exacting.”

“She did not bend,” Hildegard says. “That unsettles people.”

“And how will you remember her?”

She considers. “I think she stood where she stood because she could not do otherwise. Not because she wished to challenge you.”

He looks at her properly then. “No,” he says. “She never did.”

Later, grief arrives fully — not as tears, but as an emptiness. The room feels slightly wrong, as if its proportions have shifted. For the first time, authority feels incomplete, a thing handled rather than inhabited.

That night, sleep takes him again.

The mist is thinner now. The wings above him pass lower, close enough that he feels the movement of air. Between two great forms, something moves — back and forth, unhurried. Neither side diminished. A deep longing stirs within him upon waking; a yearning he does not quite understand. He knows it is connected to the dream and somehow also to Fastrada. But before he has finished rubbing the sleep from his eyes, the dream impression has receded.

Louis comes to him the next morning with a question about the training yard.

“What is the proper distance for the men?” the boy asks, earnest, exact.

Charles begins to answer — the measurement already formed — then stops.

“What do you think?” he asks instead.

Louis frowns, thinking. He steps the space out with his feet, gestures with his hands, and adjusts his count. Charles watches, not correcting.

“That,” he says finally. “Yes. That’s enough.”

Louis beams and runs off, boots thudding against the stone.

Charles remains where he is, surprised by the quiet that follows. His authority was not diminished by listening. Instead, it is as if something eases back into place. His jaw loosens. He draws a long breath he did not know he had been holding.

Later, Hildegard joins him near the window. The light catches in the weave of her mantle — deep blue wool shot through with threads of softer grey, worked by hands that knew patience better than command. She stands beside him, not waiting to be addressed.

For a long moment, neither speaks.

“At court,” she says at last, “they are unsettled.”

“Are they indeed?”

“They’ll expect firmness from you,” she says softly.

He watches the lower yard as women pass carrying baskets of bread and linen, adjusting their pace around one another without instruction.

“Firmness isn’t the same as certainty,” he says.

Hildegard studies him. “No,” she agrees. “Sometimes certainty is knowing when not to press.”

That night, they eat together without ceremony. No attendants. No audience. The rhythm between them is unremarkable — and for that reason, strangely steady.

When sleep comes, it does not carry him into mist. This time, he finds himself on a mountaintop, far above the mist and clouds.

A vast, dark shape coils above him, wings folded, scales catching a muted, inner light. The dragon does not threaten. She does not bow. She simply is — immense, ancient, watching with eyes that know him too well.

He feels pinned by her gaze, as he once did in waking life, though her eyes hold neither judgment nor demand.

A voice speaks — not aloud, not within him, but somewhere between.

Sariel.

The name passes through him like a breath drawn too deeply. He stirs, unsettled.

He does not know why the name carries weight. Nor does he know why the dragon’s presence feels like a memory rather than an omen.

He wakes before he can ask.

The crown still rests on its cushion of faded purple wool, gold thread dulled by use. He does not reach for it.

Something still burns within his chest, like the embered gaze of the dragon in his dream.

But the structures that shaped him remain intact — the hierarchy of court and church, the authority of Rome, his own hand in forging order and discipline. Whatever stirred in the night does not follow him fully into waking.

Not yet.

The dream recedes.

The order holds.

This chapter forms part of the living mythology behind the Dragon Twin Flame Oracle.