leaves all sinking, fever dreaming; ANY

[Kagerus]

As the space between us continually lessons, I watch the way he blinks and then refocuses, sending his gaze across the minutest details of my face as if seeing them in earnest. The air around us grows taut with the promise of something else, something otherworldly. I have brought many others with me to the dreamscape before, and not once have I had my skin pricked up in the doing of it; the magic that sparks between us is not borne of me alone, but instead is a product of our intermingling souls.

Sometimes, it's not the true magic itself that lends an individual something more. I'd been born with but a cursed strain of immortality; the other gifts followed almost two decades later, and nearly all at once. The antlers and Panthera - she who even now roams not more than ten miles away from us, perhaps even watching now as I get closer and closer to Magnus - are more physical than magical. It's the dreaming that lends itself to my mystique and to my wonder; but I am only a spinner, the host, the gatekeeper between this world and the next.

Without question.
He speaks as if entranced, though unlike Ivar, I hold no powers in the realm of hypnotism. Still, he steps closer to me in turn, leaving us only inches apart. My heart trips over itself at the intensity of our anticipation, though I've returned time and time ago to the place which he so longs for. Something about the gold of his eyes; about the whiskey of his voice; it alights my flame anew.

"Then close your eyes," I whisper. Carefully, I pick my way around the log-strewn terra, coming alongside the stallion in near silence. Breathles, I lean my body closer to his; and when the sopping fur of his skin presses to mine, my skin twitches. Feeling erratic and utterly controlled by the electricity our union creates, the velvet of my lips finds the crease of his jaw. With the sound of my own words echoing in my mind, my eyes close, and the world drifts away.

---

It's a calm transition from wakefulness to sleep. Still, as our eyes open on the other side, our stomachs feel as if we're falling, only to realize that we are standing perfectly still. What he feels next in response to our surroundings I can only guess at; but as my eyes meet the grey nothingness that envelops us, groundless and skyless and without shadow nor light source, I feel at home. In our chests, our hearts are still; where we ought to hear the clanging of our organs, an eerie silence plays instead.

"Magnus," I whisper, the sound paper thin in this featureless dreamscape. My eyes search for his, and a pressure weighs down against the stallion's ankles, my attempt to ground him and to reassure him of this alternate reality. I blink. Simultaneously, it's as if we are still skin to skin, as well as two hundred feet apart. I look again for his eyes, and when I find them, I release his ankles from the weight I'd placed there.

"This is the Abyss." Where I conceived my firstborn son; where anything is possible; where the end of the world starts at its beginning. "I'm going to let your memories guide us back to the Jungle... I want you to experience as you would, not as I would." I tilt my head, swallow in a heartbeatless throat. "I will be right upon the cusp of your consciousness... And if I sense the dream becoming a nightmare, I will retake control."

Stomach rolling, I shut my lips; and, in the vastness of the Abyss, I nod my consent of his guiding our dream.

@[Magnus]