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She dreams of a meadow warmed by sun and kissed by spring’s breeze. Time does not move the sky, does not command the day to turn or shift or change. Time can do nothing here. Still, in the waking world she knows Time and Time knows her and so she knows she’s never alone for long.
A rabbit comes from the dark wood that edged her meadow. She sits still, watching, waiting. She knows this rabbit, is familiar with its form and color and gait. He has come for her, as he has before, showing neither hesitance nor variation to his goal of reaching her.
She could have shouted, could have moved, could have cursed or threatened. She had, once. This is no place for dwarva, no place for anyone so sundered from the half-there void that calls to dreaming mages.
But she is here, and there is no changing that.
She could never move in these dreams, not until, at last, he touches her knee with paw. Even then, her body is sluggishly ill-suited to moving about so freely. It takes everything to move a hand, to reach down and stroke his soft fur in welcome.
He looks up and says: “It’s going to be alright.”
Nothing about this is right, she thinks, fingers tightening into fur as a wolf slinks from the dark wood, haunches low hunting them. Nothing about this is ever right.
“She is calling and ringing them in for supper. They want to answer; hungry yearning curious doubtful. Desperate. They want her heart. They all want her heart” the rabbit says, one ear pivoting to the wolf’s approach. “Work. Please work.” A furred belly warms her kneecap, a small head burrowing into her leg. It’s almost a nuzzle, the way he presses cheek to knee and rubs. Scent marking, maybe. “He wants to help. He needs to help. He will help her.” The rabbit jumps away from her, towards the wolf and says only: “It must work.”
Then the wolf moves and eats her friend. Tares at flesh and muscle, breaks bone and drinks in stolen life. It is gruesome, bloody. She can not move away. Can not stop the wolf, it does not listen to her, does not fear her.
She watches and worries and waits because that is all she has ever been able to do here.
The wolf is all fangs and growling defiance when it turns to her. It says: “At last, mine” and ancient eyes blind her as it lifts one paw, then another, and eats at the distance between them. She can feel its heat, smell death on its exhale -- Then the wolf gives a great hacking cough, shakes its body with such a force fur comes off as if water.
The wolf stumbles backwards, away, and makes an awful sound while blood pours to earth from pestilence tattooing bared skin. Intricate swirls grow thick and bloom. There is so much blood. So much. And there beneath it all is a twitching, a pushing, a clawing from within. When it stops, when the wolf lifts its muzzle and sneers in victory, the joints in its legs turn brittle and gravity wins its long game.
The wolf falls to ground. Dead. It is not a wolf anymore.
“It’s going to be alright,” the rabbit says, tearing its way from rotted stomach.
“He wants to help her,” the rabbit says, settling onto her knee, fur wet and matted with bile.
“Does she like him, still” the rabbit asks, as he always does, head burrowing into her and the fabric of her ruined leggings clasped with tiny claws as if despite to keep some part of her should she say ‘no.’
She picks him up, struggling against her own body stiff with incompatibility to Fade-life, and holds him close her. It is a succession of stop-move, as if she’s a half finished gear-wrought golem with only one turn left, as if death has set into her being. She doesn’t like to think about what it might mean. Not here.
Cradled in her arms at last, he is a trembling thing, head between arm and breast. Slime gets everywhere, but she can never quite feel it, not in the way she can feel him. He is real here in this place of nothingness where imagination is commerce and currency.
“He’ll keep her,” the rabbit says, after a long moment of simply being. Only in her arms he has shifted form and he too is no longer a rabbit; he is wider, longer, heavier. He is Cole and he is resting against her as if his fight had left him with very little.
He as fought many to get to her meadow, will fight more before they wake.
“He’ll keep her safe,” he says, and he does.