Chapter Text
Tonight, the dream forest was a twisted mass of shadow.
Ronan walked barefoot beneath the dark figures of skeletal oaks and ageless sycamores. The ground was scattered with dry twigs and leaves, ripe for crunching, but if he imagined himself lighter, he could slip across them without any more noise than a soft sigh. It felt important to be soundless tonight.
The mountain creaked beneath him like a glacier shifting, heavy and slow. He felt watched. Not in the way the trees usually observed him, with their ancient, breathing presence, but as if by something else, something that seemed to shift between the trees at the corners of his vision. Ronan ducked his head as an icy breeze sent a fresh rain of leaves to the forest floor and hurried faster, although he wasn’t sure of his destination.
Up ahead, a rocky stream shimmered in the starlight. Ronan waded into it, the water reaching halfway up his calves. It was an oddly comfortable temperature, like a shallow pond that had been steeped in sunlight, and the silt at the bottom was soft on the soles of his feet. Ronan bent down, letting the water run into his cupped hands, and splashed it over his face. Tiny minnows that seemed to glow from within darted past his ankles.
“Ronan!” His name was a hissed whisper on the breeze, and for a moment, Ronan wasn’t sure whether it was the trees or the movement of the brook that had called to him. Then his eyes caught on a dark shape on the bank. Crouching beneath a fallen tree that crossed the water was Orphan Girl. “Ronan,” she whispered again, urgently, and Ronan waded closer.
The girl’s arms were streaked with mud, and as Ronan got near enough to make out detail, he could see stripes of tears shining on her narrow face. “It’s here.” Her hand came up, fingers uncurling in a gesture that seemed to encompass the entire forest. She looked impossibly small next to the fallen oak.
Ronan looked around, eyes scanning the shadows beneath the trees around the stream, ready to defend, to flee. Nothing made itself known to him. “Quid est?”
Orphan Girl shook her head, pressing a violently trembling finger to her lips. The whites of her eyes shone in the moonlight as her gaze darted to the trees.
A twig snapped. The sound stabbed at the bubble of silence around them. Orphan Girl scrambled further under the trunk of the fallen log like a vole trying to escape the shadow of a hawk.
There’s nothing there, Ronan told the dream, the same way he turned wasps to ladybugs. Orphan Girl shut her eyes and covered her ears as another, larger-sounding branch crunched like a bone. It’s a deer, Ronan thought, changing tactics, but his pulse was pounding in his throat. Fucking Bambi, come on.
The current around his legs seemed to intensify suddenly, and he found he couldn’t move his legs. It wasn’t unlike when he could hear the night horrors coming for him, that sense of imminent devouring madness, when he’d lost total control of a dream and had to sprint toward wakefulness with everything he had. But this was different. This thing in the trees wasn’t his the way the night horrors were.
The girl was digging at the mud of the bank now, and Ronan could hear her heavy breaths. She pulled something small and round and glittering from the dirt. “Take it,” she whispered roughly, pressing it into his hand. “Praesidium.”
Although the sphere had come from the earth, it was completely clean. It felt alive in Ronan’s hand. For some reason he thought of his father’s mask.
And then he woke.