She thinks it is just another strange dream when she wakes to the sound of a silent morning - wonders how she managed to sleep at all with so much broken glass in her chest. She knows it is there because her heart was shattered yesterday, because even though something still beats inside her, it must be an imposter. The wounds are too real to be anything else, her heart too empty to still be inside her at all.
It is there, though, and she knows it. Beating and aching and falling apart, wounding her relentlessly. Else she would be numb now, peaceful in the face of true emptiness.
It takes too long to realize that Merry isn’t there with her, too many seconds wasted as she is reminded of that strange plague-dream and the rumbles of a changed world. It isn’t until she shifts on the legs buckled beneath her, turns to sweep her muzzle across his little neck and kiss him good morning, that she realizes how terribly wrong she is.
Her heart is still whole and turned to thunder, her pulse crashing like a river through her ears, pounding and aching and making her vision hazy at the edges as she stands and moves swiftly to the doorway of their hollow-tree den. He is nowhere. Not just outside, not playing with the swaying tree-shadows, just gone. “MERRY!” She calls loudly, a voice somehow still soft as it rises above the eerie silence of dawn. “MERRY, WHERE ARE YOU!”
She bolts from their home, heads deeper into a forest that is absolutely different despite being entirely same.
@[Djinni]