The dream fades as she blinks the sleep from her dark, worried eyes. Looking around at a world untouched by fire, a world with birds singing and bright blue skies, with the swish of swaying grass and the bright flash of swaying flowers, she finds it a little easier to breath again. Her heart beat slows, grows steadier with each passing breath, but she isn’t sure that her memory will ever fully let go of what that felt like, isn’t sure that it’s a wound in her heart that will ever heal.
She has so many of those, lately.
But awake, and with renewed clarity settling over her as the cool spring air breathed new awareness over her, she remembers what it is the fairy had wanted from them in the first place. Remembers the whole purpose of why she’d come at all. The flowers. One each of red, white, yellow, pink, and orange.
Her chin lifts, those dark, beautiful eyes half hidden beneath the furrow of a curious brow. It’s easy enough to find the red flowers - except now they are wilted and withered.
She heads deeper into the Pampas, struck again by the intense beauty of a world with so much movement and so much color. Such fragrance. The color is nothing like home - though home is bright and beautiful, it is mostly just white beaches and teal oceans. There is nothing quite like the emerald and gem-strewn brightness of this galaxy of flowers. The movement seems familiar though, the sway and ripple as the wind sweeps through the tops of the tallest plants. Not too unlike the waves in her oceans.
Her pace picks up, and she is surprised to find that adrenaline still thumps in her veins, the memory of a world without Merry, without Dustov and Dark, without Dovev and Kharon and her family - even the strange beast of a man who lives in places so deep and dark - has left her so ill and uneasy, so eager to return home. She wants to find each one and remind them of her love in a kiss against their foreheads. Hold them close if they’ll let her.
A flash of color catches her eye and she slows, her gaze scanning the meadow to find another meadow of flowers with one of the colors the fairy had requested. She goes to them quickly, but then pauses a yard or so away to pluck the flower with a tendril of her twilight magic, using a strand of twining light to sever the stalk and bring it to her. It is red, so soft and delicate, so pure amidst all this color.
The flower is braided carefully with the help of her twilight magic into the tangles of her dark, twisting mane. She could have taken them in her mouth probably, but that trust had not yet healed, and away from her nose and tongue felt safest.
With a sigh she turns back. Checking that the red flower is still safely in place, she takes one last look at the Pampas, feels one last echo of the world she had dreamed into existence, and then she turns to go. In comparison, the journey back to the mountain is uneventful, no beasts, no fires, no nightmares. Just a world touched by plague and part of a cure tucked away safely in the strands of her mane. One single red flower. When she has made it back, she comes to a halt on the mountain, plucking the flower carefully from her mane with tendrils of light, and laying it so gently at her feet.
