Chapter Text
Ezra’s breathing was slow, deliberate, and maybe it would be calming, too, if he wasn’t absolutely certain he was about to die.
The Force-suppressing cuffs around his wrists were cold and uncomfortably tight. He was almost—almost—getting used to the sensation of being cut off from the Force, after so many weeks spent in the cell.
He didn’t regret anything he’d done. It was the only way to save Lothal; the Force had made that clear.
But the Force had also said he would survive, and it was quickly becoming evident that he would not. The troopers outside his cell hadn’t bothered to lower their voices as they talked about what Thrawn had planned.
The fact was, Ezra had no use.
He wasn’t just accepting his fate, of course. He’d come up with several dozen escape plans over the last weeks, but for every one he thought of, a voice whispered, not yet.
It wasn’t like the Force had been, when it guided him, before he’d been cut off. Those were vague premonitions. These were words, echoing and deep, that sounded inside his own head.
Wait, Jedi, it boomed silently. Wait for help.
He’d doubted, but the voice was so certain that he had to listen. So he did wait. But he knew now that no help was coming, and he’d missed his last chance to run.
No.
A fearful whisper echoed around him, not the same as it had been before. It was higher, clearer, but muffled beyond recognition even though he knew he should know it.
Ezra kept his eyes shut and tried to ignore the new voice.
Not again, no, please — I won’t — can’t keep —
His jaw tightened as the voice got louder, and the segmented sentences it spoke overlapped one another. They were loud, too loud, and that, combined with the Force-suppressing cuffs and the fact that he knew he should know the person speaking, was starting to give him a headache.
— this place — Gateway —
The tone of the voice fluctuated between resignation, realization, and horror.
— should be able to — why isn’t — no, no! Not — stop showing me — no point — I can’t — please!
Even through the Force-suppressors, Ezra could feel the pulse of fear that went through the room as the voice went silent.
He opened his eyes, realization finally dawning.
That was Sabine.
Cautiously, he swung his feet off the bench and stood. She wasn’t here. She couldn’t be. But it also couldn’t be something he was hearing through the Force because he couldn’t hear the Force.
Ezra slowly turned in a circle, looking around for where the sound could have come from. It was almost inside his own head, but not quite. Almost from behind him…
The wall at the back of the cell rippled.
He took half a step back, then two forward, squinting. Wraith-like, a mirage of color was visible behind—inside—through—the durasteel panels.
I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.
Ezra barely had a chance to wonder why Sabine was saying that, because the cell door slid open and he spun around, only to be greeted with a flash of red, and then—
— EZRA, NO!
Nothing.
———
Sabine was painting in her room (not being an “anti-social recluse,” Alexsandr, and anyway, nobody asked you) when something punched her in the chest.
The force of the blow knocked her off her feet and she fell back, dropping her airbrush with a clatter, leaving a splash of paint on the floor and her shoes.
The sensation was extraordinarily similar to how it felt when she was a little too slow to dodge and a blaster bolt hit her armor, knocking the wind out of her.
Sabine looked around, bewildered. There was nothing there. She was alone in her room. What had hit her?
There was a little knock on the door.
“Kid? You okay?”
“It was nothing, Rex,” Sabine lied, taking a breath and standing up straight. She looked at her boots and grimaced, seeing they were covered in red paint. “I just dropped my brush.”
Somewhere far, far away, Ezra Bridger died.
Six months later
“Hey, catch!”
Sabine snatched the purple fruit out of the air without looking up. “I hope you paid for that.”
Her companion laughed, striding to catch up with her in the bustling marketplace.
Sabine didn’t know his name. He hadn’t offered, she hadn’t asked. He’d arrived on Lothal a few months ago, looking bedraggled and like he needed a couple decades of vacation time to make up for lost sleep. He was human, or at least near-human, with tanned skin and graying dreads and a sarcastic smile and a gold stripe across the bridge of his nose.
He was also a Jedi.
It hadn’t taken her too long to figure it out. He openly carried a lightsaber, for goodness’ sake.
Somehow or another, she’d become friends with the old Jedi. He was a lot different than Kanan, but somehow felt familiar, too. If Kanan was like a father—and he definitely was—then the old Jedi was like a crazy uncle who only showed up at the family reunions he specifically wasn’t invited to, because last time he lit the grill on fire and incinerated the steaks.
She knew she must have reminded him of someone, too; there was a distant dullness in his eyes, every now and then, when she rolled her eyes at his antics or was in the middle of some story about herself and her old family, almost like he was seeing someone else.
(One time he'd called her Aayla.)
He knew quite a bit about Mandalorians, and she was pretty sure he’d served in the Clone War, from the number of stories he liked to tell about it. Recently, she’d been trying to improve her saberwork, and he’d agreed to give her some pointers (because he was quote-unquote “bored.”)
It was where they were headed now, out to the empty plains near the comm tower.
Lothal was thriving, now that the Empire had been permanently kicked out. Sellers called out in the marketplace, advertising their wares, and children chased each other around, laughing.
One child in particular caught her eye—a little boy, probably seven or eight, with big blue eyes and dark hair. He was kicking a ball around with his friends, clearly having a great time.
“You know him?” the Jedi asked, and she startled a little.
“Oh. No. Just… reminded me of a friend.”
“The friend?”
She nodded once.
They walked through the marketplace in silence for a while, leaving her to her thoughts.
Ezra would have been about that little boy’s age when he lost his parents. Did he ever have time to run around and play? Or was it all he could do, just to survive?
She allowed herself a second to think about a galaxy where that didn’t happen. Maybe a world where the Empire never rose at all. Logically, she knew that that would mean none of them would ever meet, but… what if they had? Kanan and Hera might still run into each other, somehow, that wouldn’t be hard to imagine, especially because Hera said her father worked with Master Windu, and maybe Zeb would show up, too! Ezra would be raised in the Jedi Temple and—and even if Kanan refused to train him, he’d probably still latch on to him until he had no choice.
Sabine laughed softly, the sound muffled by her helmet, as her mind supplied a mental image of a fourteen-year-old Jedi-in-training Ezra following Kanan around, introducing himself as Kanan’s Padawan to everyone he saw, and the resignation on Kanan’s face when he eventually slipped up and referred to Ezra as “my Padawan.”
For some reason, she could easily picture Kanan looking like an old-fashioned Jedi, but when she tried to think of Ezra as a Jedi—Initiate, that was the word, she’d heard Kanan use it before—she could only imagine him with bright orange Jedi robes.
Which, to be fair, was something Ezra would totally wear.
“You gonna share the joke?” the old Jedi drawled as they reached the end of the market, where their speeders were parked.
She grinned. “Nah.”
“Suit yourself, kid.”
He hopped up onto his speeder, the folding lawn chair tied to its side rattling loudly.
“You sure that won’t fall off?” she asked, just like she did every time they headed out to the plains.
“Of course it won’t,” he replied, as always.
She started her vehicle and sped off into the long grasses.
A flicker of movement in the corner of her eye drew her notice, but she ignored it. There was nothing there. There never was. She’d seen it nearly every day, a dark shadow haunting her. After the first seven months, she’d managed to put it out of her mind.
When it first appeared, she’d thought it was one of the wolves, but the notion was quickly dispelled. The wolves had vanished a week or two after the liberation of Lothal. The only time Sabine saw them again was when Hera brought her newborn son Jacen to Lothal, just a few weeks ago. A white wolf came, alone, and Jacen grabbed onto its nose.
(Sabine had a copy of the holo Hera took. It was adorable.)
But the wolves were no longer needed, now. There was nothing to wait around for.
Well, except Ezra, but they would come back when he did, of course. The wolves hadn’t left permanently. Just like he hadn’t.
Sabine clenched her jaw and continued to ignore that awful gut feeling that said she was lying to herself. It was only paranoia.
The trip out to the plains wasn’t very long, and they arrived at the little clearing in front of the comm tower before long. Sabine and the Jedi dismounted the speeder bikes in a strange synchronization. He unhooked the lawn chair and walked it over to the shade from the comm tower, unfolding the ugly red chair and dropping down into it.
She rolled her eyes, taking her saber from her belt.
“I thought you said we’d try actual saber combat today.”
He hummed. “Get warmed up. Try starting with Form IV, you’re pretty good at that one. I’m just gonna—” he yawned loudly. “Catch a few winks. Wake me up in five.”
Sabine laughed in spite of herself and flicked the saber on. Taking a slow breath, she moved into the first stance of Form IV.
On one of the rare occasions the old Jedi said anything educational, he’d told her about the different forms of lightsaber combat—how Form IV was all about going on the offensive, which fit her for sure, but it relied more on the Force than some of the other forms. That might have been an issue for her if she hadn’t managed to make up for her Force-blindness with her armor and (especially) her jetpack. The old Jedi was right; she was good at this form.
She counted off the positions in her head.
One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Her chest heaved for breath as she moved faster and faster, vision narrowing beneath her helmet. The hair on the back of her neck raised as a strange coldness swept over her, despite the warmth of the summer day.
Kanan!
She whipped the plasma blade through the air. The tips of the grasses sizzled as the saber skimmed across them.
Keep counting. One, two, three, four.
She was moving too fast and too slow, all at once, and her heartbeat roared in her ears.
Ezra, get out of there!
Memories that she thought would only resurface her in her sleep flashed behind her visor, blocking out everything but the empty holes in her chest, the ones she thought she’d finally forgotten about.
It’s up to you now.
Swing. Block. Slice.
Who are you?
The words seemed to come from inside her head, echoing over themselves, though she could barely register them over her roaring pulse.
Distantly, she heard her own voice reply, I’m your new Padawan.
Shadows flickered at the edges of her vision and she spun, swinging her lightsaber at them. They vanished before she could fully turn.
Who are you? it asked, and again, her own voice replied to the question without her speaking a word.
I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.
She whirled and struck, only to find her saber blocked. A figure stood in front of her, face expressionless, holding her lightsaber in place with a bare hand.
Who are you, Sabine Wren, it demanded, and what will you become?
“Sabine!”
The illusion vanished, and the creature became the old Jedi, who had risen from his chair and was blocking her strike with his own lightsaber.
Slowly, the pounding of her chest was replaced by soft birdsong and the rustling of Loth-cats playing in the grasses.
The old Jedi stepped back but she remained in place, humming lightsaber held out. He took two backwards paces and dropped down into the lawn chair.
“What the heck was that, kid.”
It wasn’t a question.
The young Mandalorian retracted the blade, hanging the hilt back on her belt.
“Sorry.”
The old Jedi shook his head and leaned forward in the chair, adjusting his dark sunglasses.
“Seriously. You were completely gone. And, you were glowing in the Force.”
“Oh,” was all she could think to say.
“Did you… see something?”
“Sort of.” She sat down in the grass, removing her helmet and letting the breeze play with her hair. “I see a lot of things. Never happened when I was awake, though.”
The man sighed, clasping his hands.
“Yeah. Nightmares are nasty things. It’s haunting, y’know? Doesn’t matter how long ago, how far away…”
“You still hear their voices,” she finished. “You still miss them.”
They sat in silence for a time, the Mandalorian and the Jedi.
Quietly, she unhooked the saber from her belt and held it up. She’d had it for less than a year, and each day it felt more out of place. It radiated warmth and comfort when she held it, but it just wasn’t hers. Every now and then, she wished she still had the Darksaber. At least that sword felt right in her hands, no matter the unwanted title that came with it.
“They're different now.” She flicked the green blade on and stared into the center until her eyes burned. “Before, it was just memories. Now I'm seeing… other things. I dream about the Temple a lot.” She paused, realizing something. “I think I saw part of it just now. One of the figures from the Mortis family mural, the Father. Or at least, it was like him.”
“That could mean something,” said the man. His gaze was empty as he stared off into space, but she knew he was listening.
“Repressed trauma?” she joked weakly, dropping the saber to the ground. It turned off with a fssvsh noise. “Or is the temple comming me through the Force?”
Now he brightened, eyes lighting up. “Well, why don't we go find out?”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Sabine whispered, staring up at the towering dome. “It was gone. Vanished! How—”
“I wouldn’t question it.” She shot the man a look, and he shrugged, hopping off his speeder bike and starting towards the Lothal temple. “The Force works in mysterious ways.”
“But why would it come back?” she demanded, staying on her bike. She didn’t like this. It might be some sort of trap.
“Maybe it returned now that the Empire left Lothal. Look,” he said, when she frowned harder, “It disappeared because you and your Jedi activated a fail-safe. Maybe the vanishing was a temporary thing. Maybe it only turned invisible. Maybe an ancient eldritch abomination reassembled the temple while you weren’t looking. Weirder things have happened, let me tell you. Hey, you ever been to Dathomir?”
“Yep. Zero stars, would not recommend.”
“Creepiest place in the galaxy, hands down. The girls are cute, though. Now c’mon, let’s go.”
“But we can’t get in,” she said, swinging her leg around to sit sideways on the bike and leaning on the handlebars. A white Loth-cat jumped up into her lap and she absently scratched behind its ears. “It needs a Master and Padawan to open.”
“Sure, for the main entrance. But that mural you keep seeing, that was underground, right? So, we're gonna sneak in the back.”
The man beckoned for her to follow him.
She shook her head and slid off the bike. The dry grass crunched beneath her feet and the Loth-cat jumped from her lap with an irritated yowl, vanishing into the plains.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought.
But… she had done crazier things. Frequently. Willingly. Enthusiastically.
Instead of approaching the temple from the front, the man led her to one of the smaller conical towers surrounding it. He felt around, searching the surface for—
“Gotcha,” he grinned, and pressed his hand to the grayish stone. For a moment, the rock seemed to glow from the inside, and then it broke apart. The ground shook, a low rumble that Sabine could feel in her bones. He entered the dark, narrow crack without hesitation, and she followed reluctantly.
The light faded fast, and they walked downwards in a spiral. Her hand twitched towards her helmet, but no, she hadn’t fixed the broken night vision yet. Instead, she let her fingers trail along the walls to guide her in the dark.
“How?” she asked.
“There’s always another door,” he said. “Might not be where you think it is, and it might not open the way you expect, but there’s always another door.”
“Is this a metaphor or a lesson on Jedi architecture?”
“Both.”
His voice was getting a little far away, so she hurried to catch up. “But how did you know about that entrance?”
“I came here near the beginning of the Clone War. A mission to evaluate which Jedi temples were most important to keep out of possible Sith hands. I think the Council was trying to find an excuse to keep me away from the front lines.” He lowered his voice, muttering in a drawling accent, “ ‘Vos, you are an incorrigible old terror.’ Joke’s on them, though, ‘cause I might have done a bit of unauthorized exploring along the way. If I remember correctly, it’s a long walk down, then a straight shot into the temple, then a long walk up.”
“Sounds long,” she muttered, mentally registering his name: Vos. First or last, she wondered.
“Then let’s find something to talk about. Unless you want to walk in awkward silence, that's fine too.”
She tripped over a low rock, catching herself on the wall. “Honestly? I don't really care. I just want to find the mural and figure out why I keep seeing it.”
“Okay, so, do you wanna hear about the time me and my buddy broke into a Hutt’s house, or about the time my ex helped Ahsoka Tano evade the Coruscant police?”
Sabine almost fell over. “I’m sorry, your who did what with Ahsoka?”
“So you do want to hear that one?”
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Fine, whatever. Shoot.”
“Great!” he said. “So, it all started when someone planted a bomb in the Jedi Temple…”
She tried to listen because that sounded like quite a story, but she could barely even think past the knots in her stomach. It was getting harder and harder just to breathe. The place felt wrong.
“Hey,” Vos said, pausing his story after they’d walked a few paces more, “You still got that saber?”
“Yeah, why?”
“We're walking in the dark, it's a glorified glowstick, and I think I forgot mine on the speeder. The clasp keeps busting and I haven’t fixed it yet.”
“Oh. Sure,” she said, unhooking the saber from her belt. “Here, you take it. You're walking in front.”
She lit the saber and held it out, blade pointing upwards, and saw Vos was grinning brightly. “You know, Sabine, I've got a real good feeling about this.”
As he was speaking, two scarlet pinpricks of light appeared in the air behind him.
They blinked.
He reached out and grasped the hilt above her hand. The lights—the eyes—vanished, her chest tightened, and she gasped as memories tore through her mind.
Nightmares, waking up screaming, grasping for anything. Flicking on the saber and staring into the brilliant green. Letting the clawing fears replay until they faded into nothing. I’m counting on you.
“Stars, kid!” yelped the Jedi, yanking his hand away. The saber clattered to the ground and went dark. “No wonder you wear gloves all the time! Geez, you could've told me you were psychometric.”
“What was that?” she demanded, ignoring what he said. “Hey! Answer me!”
Vos wasn't there. Not a sound, not a breath, not a footstep.
Sabine stumbled, suddenly feeling like she was stuck in an overpressurized airlock.
She reached up, ripping off her helmet and tugging frantically at her collar. There was too much air but she couldn’t breathe—
Beskar crashed against stone as she fell.
We could make a good team, you and I.
Sabine froze, crumpled on the cold rock floor. She swallowed, throat constricting. That voice—it was familiar, somehow.
“Who are you?” she croaked. It was pure darkness around her. Nothingness.
Would she even know if she had gone blind?
There were once a few of us, boomed the voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Then, there were none. Now, I remain.
She slowly pushed herself up, the ground strangely smooth beneath her hands. “I don’t understand.”
You will. Now stand tall, Mandalorian. Cowardice does not suit you.
Sabine ignored the insult and tried to feel for the tunnel walls, to guide herself out of the pitch black, but her grasping arms met empty space. She lowered her hands again and her fingers bumped into something cold and round. Snatching up the hilt, she lit the saber and held it high, finding that it no longer felt so… wrong; its weight was a comforting familiarity.
Her vision blurred, then cleared.
She lay on a path of darkness, bordered with light. Sabine gasped softly as she looked around herself—above, below, on all sides, glimmered billions upon billions of stars.
Her body felt weightless and she closed her eyes again, trying to push away the sudden sick feeling in her gut.
I’m curious, child. What do you want? Why are you here?
“I'm here because I saw something, and I want to know why,” she choked, wondering why her gut instinct insisted that the voice already knew the answer. “If you can tell me that, then I’ll go.”
You cannot do that. You have come too far.
She staggered to her feet, snatching up her helmet and settling it back over her head. “Then I’ll keep going. A tunnel has two ends.”
A throaty laugh, deep and dark, resounded through the empty space. Sabine spun around, trying to find the shadows that shifted just out of her sight.
I like your spirit. But… the end. Do you really want to see the end?
“What do you mean?”
Something shimmered behind her, and she turned around. A circle within a triangle, and within that circle, a picture.
Kanan, on the fuel container, holding back the flames.
“What is this?” she demanded.
Another laugh.
The beginning of the end. Come.
The voice whispered from her right, and she started down the wide dark pathway. What else could she do? The sound was a beacon, her only guidance in the maze of darkness. Her limbs felt heavy and light all at once, and her breaths sounded loudly within her helmet.
The path ended abruptly in front of another screen.
Ahsoka, stumbling through the depths of what must be the Sith temple. Even through the distant picture, Sabine could see the sweat bead on her forehead as she struggled to keep the structure from caving in on herself.
She failed.
Ahsoka Tano collapsed with a final, agonized cry, and the rubble covered her over.
One of the last Jedi, buried in a Sith temple, the voice mused, darkly ironic. This way, now, child.
To her left, another path came together, weaving itself into existence as she walked. It curved downwards, but somehow the gravity of this strange place seemed to be always directly beneath her.
A third image.
Her heart clenched, dreading what she would see.
Hera flicked switches and mashed buttons desperately. Terrified chatter came through the comms.
“I’m preparing for takeoff—” she began, but one voice came through clearly: Mon Mothma.
“It’s too late, General Sydulla.”
Hera looked up, out the window, and her eyes widened with fear. Chopper rolled over to her side and reached up, grasping her hand with one manipulator.
The world exploded.
The Death Star. First Alderaan, then Yavin—both turned to rubble.
A new scene, replacing the last.
Mandalore.
Tie bombers.
Sundari, a ball of fire.
Your brother was there.
“You’re making this up!” Sabine snarled, turning in a circle as if she could confront the voice face-to-face. “This is—this is a test. A trial! Ezra told me about this—Jedi temples test you, with—with illusions and made-up things! He saw the Grand Inquisitor in this temple but he wasn’t real, so this isn’t real, either! I’m not falling for it!”
Hm. What else could this be, if it is not a trial? But I’m no liar. This will happen, if it has not already.
“You’re LYING!”
The voice—the creature—the being, whatever it was—sounded delighted at her rising fury.
Let me ask, child… what else did your friend Ezra tell you about this temple?
Before she could reply, a new image appeared.
A boy with green hair and pointed ears, probably ten years old, standing between Kallus and Zeb, swinging a saber as stormtroopers advanced, sending blaster bolts flying back at them. They were backed against a wall.
“Kid, get out of here!”
“I’m not leaving, you need my help!” Jacen shouted back.
A scruffy hand snatched Jacen by the collar and tossed him up to a low roof.
“Go! Get to the ship, we’ll meet you there!”
A lie, of course. To the last, they protected Hera’s boy.
She clutched at her head, trying to block the sound from her ears, but it echoed in her own head. “SHUT! UP!”
Jacen again, maybe fifteen now, fighting a Dark warrior; almost like an Inquisitor, but not quite. Green clashed against red as the pseudo-Sith drove him back, step by step: toying with him.
For a second, it seemed that the young Jedi almost gained the upper hand, but then—so fast Sabine could hardly comprehend—the lightsaber was flying out of his hand and a scarlet blade went straight through his chest.
Too young to die, he fell anyway. Spectre Seven—the last of them.
Sabine fell to her knees, throat too tight to breathe. Maybe this was an illusion. A fake. A display of her biggest fears.
But it felt so real.
Some invisible force seized her by the chin, forcing her head back up to look at the picture as it shifted one final time.
Ezra was sitting in a cell, back to her. Still.
Too still.
The other scenes happened at a distance, but he was close, so close, less than an arm’s length away. If she could reach through this image, she’d be able to touch him.
Wait.
Wait.
Reach through!
“This place,” she realized aloud, everything all coming together at once. “It’s the Gateway, isn’t it? The… the World Between Worlds. Where Ezra saved Ahsoka. That’s what you meant when you asked what else he’d told me about this temple.”
I was beginning to think you’d never figure it out.
“Well, I did,” she said, drawing herself up, a wellspring of hope emerging. “And I know that I can do this.”
She pressed her hand to the surface of the portal, expecting it to slip through easily, but it didn’t. Sabine frowned, brow furrowing, and shoved at it with the palm of her hand, then slammed her fist against it, but it was like trying to smash through a brick wall. She looked at the picture and saw he’d tensed.
In the other glimpses she’d caught, the situation was clear, obvious, but this was… peaceful. It only made the sight more frightening, more urgent, because anything could happen, and at any moment.
“Let me through!” she demanded, voice rising in pitch as she clawed at the sleek surface with renewed panic at the idea of the unknown danger. “I don’t know what you are but please just—just let me get to him—he’s okay now, I can help him before it’s too late, let me help him—”
Ezra stood, turning around cautiously. He stepped back, then approached, brow furrowing, and his eyes fixed directly on her.
Sabine threw both hands against the portal, shouting desperately to be heard. “Ezra! Ezra, can you hear me? I’m right here, come, come now, hurry! Please, hurry!”
Something like confusion crossed his face, and then the cell door slid open, revealing half a dozen stormtroopers.
He spun around to face them, and was thrown back as a single blaster bolt struck him directly in the chest.
With a desperate scream, words that she couldn’t name, she drew her saber and slashed the portal in two. It was like cutting a shadow; nothing happened, except the vision faded away, leaving the sight of Ezra Bridger’s lifeless body burned into her memory like the worst of her nightmares.
She fell to the ground, saber clattering out of her hand. It was a numbness, a nothingness, in her chest—everyone, everyone, gone—and she’d thought, for just a second, she could change it.
The voice laughed once more. Such anger.
“Why are you showing me this?” Sabine choked, throat thick with an emotion that she couldn’t seem to feel. “What’s the point, if you won’t let me help them?!”
Tell me, daughter of Mandalore. What would you do to save them?
“I don’t see how that matters if they’re all already dead!”
What would you do? it asked again.
“I—anything, I’d do anything!”
Could you risk never seeing them again?
Her voice was steady, a resolve forming in her soul, as she rose to her feet and asked:
“If it would save them? Without hesitation.”
Good. You and I will make an excellent team, little Mandalorian.
“If we’re going to be a team,” she replied sharply, “Shouldn’t I at least know what you are?”
Haven’t I already told you? the voice thundered, coalescing into a single distinct murmur behind her. Once, there were few, and I was the last one.
She turned around and looked up.
The four-legged beast loomed over her, blood-red eyes flashing in a ghastly face. Ridges ran up its inky black spine and shining horns curved down towards its mouth.
A long claw extended, brushing against her forehead.
Sleep, murmured the mythosaur, and her eyes fluttered shut.
