Chapter Text
Senja knew she was dreaming. The images before here ever shifted, the moons and sun hung above her head as she floated in a light turquoise-purple shimmering mist. Yet, somehow, there was a strangeness to this dream. No dream, but not the waking world either. Her feet hit solid ground, the mist lifted. She stood in a darkened chamber where moonlight filtered through an opened window. The edges of her vision swam. Blue threads shimmered in the dust that floated in the chamber. They shifted and drew her to a bed with a woman and a newborn in a cradle nearby.
Sound of crying, full of grief and loss, filled the still air. Tears blinked on Senja’s fingertips in the moonlight. A headsman's block appeared to her feet. Fresh blood had pooled around its base. She wavered on her feet. The blue of the threads shimmered in a too familiar colour then. Stormcloak blue. A cry got stuck in her throat as she regarded the woman and infant in front of her with wide eyes.
Cecilia Varo . His voice reverberated in her bones. Not the one she knew. It was dissonant: familiar and foreign all the same.
The source of the woman’s, Cecilia’s, pain.
She found herself sitting on the bed.
“He brings us a lot of pain,” she murmured smoothing a few stray locks of hair from Cecilia’s face. “Yet we love him all the same.”
If Cecilia could hear her, she did not know. But she’d offer comfort in any way she did know. The threads weaved through Cecilia’s hair and veins on her skin. The headsman's block flickered before it disappeared.
She bent down to press a brief kiss to Cecilia’s cheek. “Tomorrow’s sun will be bright once more. This I promise,” she murmured. “Farewell, Cecilia. You are strong enough to see this sun.”