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Swathes of wheat part in her wake as Pearl wades through a gently murmuring field, heads bobbing in response to the barest whisper of an invisible breeze. The lighter streaks in her hair are cast strawberry red and spun gold in the last rays of dusk sunlight, the barest of freckles scattered across cheeks that dimple as she laughs softly, brightly, at words only for her ears.
Notes of bird song twine with the brush of stalks against her dress, a lone cricket piping up with a chirp only to settle into silence once more as she passes.
She can’t remember why she’s here, really. The thought slips past like sand filtering through her fingers.
It’s beautiful, she thinks wistfully, blinking at the sensation of something warm running down her cheeks. She wipes at them, absently, blinking as the back of her hand comes away wet. She keeps walking.
A figure stands in the distance, back turned to her, the wheat stalks blocking any view of which colours the cloak fastened around their shoulders is embellished in. Something glints atop their head, and she can’t be sure but from this distance it looks like a crown. She calls out to them, something telling her they should hear it, but her words fall on deaf ears. As if she’s not there.
“I’m here, though,” Pearl whispers aloud, but it sounds more like a question. Something clings to her cheeks like droplets of rain. There are no clouds to kiss the blue, blue sky that stretches up from wheat field to wheat field.
She presses on, but her footsteps are silent now, and that, above everything, gives her pause. She’s never quite walked with the catlike grace of gods, an imitation of immortality tugged between her roots in the earth and the humanity she can’t bring herself to shrug.
“I’m here,” she says again, and her mouth moves around the words but she doesn’t hear them. The rustling susurrations of the golden sea are gone now, with a dull ringing taking their place. It’s cold. When did it get cold? She shivers and rubs her hands against her bare arms.
It takes something as simple as a flower tucked behind her ear dropping to the ground for her world to start tearing apart at the seams.
She doesn’t hear it tap against the soil, but she feels it sliding free and the blur of it falling just catches the corner of her vision. When she bends to pick it up, it’s wilted. When her fingertips graze the dull yellow of its petals, it disintegrates into ash, and when she drops it, recoiling, her hand brushes the floret of a wheat spikelet, and it crumbles into dust.
She cries out, in alarm, in fear, and the dream shatters like a mirror into a million tiny fragments of gold and blue and a speck of horrifying black. Behind her eyes, she can see the vague outline of the figure amongst her field twisting in a lunge to try and reach her side, and Pearl cries harder at the grief in his shocked expression.
She wants to apologise, to tell him she hadn’t meant to leave, didn't mean to return, doesn't want to disrupt the peace of the lovingly tended to kingdom he calls home, but all she can do is sit up in bed and try not to choke on the tears running in rivulets down her face. The pillow she grips in a fist is wet, and in between shuddering breaths and dizzying lightheadedness she wonders just how long she’s been crying for. Her heart still beats in her chest but a piece of it lies buried with the hope in Sausage’s eyes when they met her own.