There are shadows, thousands of moving shadows.
Sometimes they wear the faces of people she has known, and other times they are mangled, warped, shifting and becoming pixelated any time her eyes try to focus in on any one discernable feature. When they’re in disguise their hands, gnarled and clawing, always give them away. Sometimes they draw pictures into her skin until the gold is washed away by violent red hieroglyphics; two mermaids in a river, bathing, and laughing, and yearning to touch each other — there are variations, but the overall images are always the same.
There is a spire, wild and white and made of water frozen in place, while here or there the waves of it just out sharply like flames; a monument to something she can’t remember anymore. Horses made out of rivers charge the shore until their knees buckle beneath them and they disintegrate into nothing at all, never leaving the sand they die on damp.
Sometimes she sees the blue flames of his eyes right before a dagger splits her heart in half.
And then she wakes, coated in a sweat that leaves her wet and chilled for it, her heart aching like the blade is real and not a figment of her own wild imagination. The dream is different in small ways everytime that she has it, but some elements are fixed. The shadows are always there, the spire, the dying horses; she cannot shake them, not since she woke up the first time among the wildflowers, somehow changed.
She still doesn’t know what she is, what dangers are lurking just below the flesh — what her body so desperately does it’s best to cage (and still, not nearly well enough — here, a spiked barb splits the skin of her hip, appearing just to disappear in the fractions of seconds it takes for her to flinch from the sting.).
A wyvern.
What she does know, however, is that she is dying — that a sickness has stolen away into her bloodstream where it infiltrates everything left of her that is her own, that it takes her quickly, replacing gentle curves with jutting bones. Today, she is laying by the river watching the blood that drips from the edge of her nose as it stains the bed of blue lupines she has found for herself. She should be panicked, but she is only peaceful. The sickness has made the memories quieter.
Perhaps they are sick, too.
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Sid]