Dreams of Ash and Dust

Because SPCs have angsty feelings too.

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Moonlight spills down upon the silvery slopes of the Moonfall Mountains, which feel hardly any more like a dream now than they already did when he used to visit them as a boy so many, many years ago. The beautiful moonwolves still frolic and dance upon the hillside, leaving exuberant arcs of pawprints through the snow which seem to glow with a light all their own. He yearns as ever to be among them, among pack.

He slinks abjectly through the snow towards them, belly low, tail tucked. Surely they will let him join them, if he only comes close enough for them to truly see him. Surely they will see that he is part of their pack too. They will greet him with the joy of recognition, and then they will all dance together in the moonlight, wild and free even in their unity. But still he feels the need to slink, as if only by stealth and stratagem can he navigate the distance between himself and them.

Yet as he creeps forward each step plunges through the crust of snow, which seems to grow ever softer and deeper as he goes. He struggles, feels a noise rising in the back of his throat, frustration and pleading together. -I belong with you. I belong. We are kin, we are pack...- But he only keeps sinking deeper in this mass of stuff, powdery and losing its silvery sheen now as it becomes dull grey and sickly warm between his struggling legs.

The dancing moonwolves are fading from his sight as puffs of the stuff rise up all around, shrouding everything from him. But it's only when a hot gust of wind slams against him, pushing great clouds of it into his face, that he fully realizes it is no longer snow that he struggles through, but ash. Plumes of ash, flecks of ash, great whirling flakes of ash, smothering his breaths and pressing with searing heat into his vision. He feels it burn like a brand into his left eye, and just when he can no longer see anything before him, an image seems to rise from inside him instead, and imprint itself in the burning shadows of his dimming sight.

He sees himself -- struggling, puny, eyes slitted nearly shut, ungainly limbs and stubby tail, fur singed and mottled, coated with layer upon layer of ghost-grey ash. He is not a moonwolf. He has no pack. He is solitary by design, meant to wander alone over endless leagues of ash and dust.

If he were any kind of wolf at all the revelation would make him howl, and maybe still sound like music even in its pain. But from the throat of a lynx all that can escape is a strangled yowl, grating and torturous, and loud enough inside his skull to jerk him away from the realm of soot and char and back into a suite at Greyleigh Manor, where a fire blazing merrily in the hearth casts its heat upon his face -- and drops a sudden log that raises a short-lived puff of ash.

He awoke with what he always termed The Hangover, capitalized exactly so. It was not really anything like a true hangover, which he had not had since his time in Bjornfast a decade ago, when he had been taken off guard by how freely the Bari's mead flowed even during delicate negotiations -- perhaps especially during delicate negotiations -- and only later mastered the art of appearing to drink while allowing others the reality of it. The Hangover was something different entirely, but it carried the same regret.

He squinted his eyes open, saw the room that had been so pleasantly dim last night now flooded with the brilliant sunlight of mid-morning, and yanked the quilted blanket up over his face. What had he been thinking? Why did he always let that mood master him so? Why, especially, when he ought to be soberly discussing serious matters with her?

Of course she had thought him a fool, of course she did; the abrupt resumption of reserve at the end of the night, the sudden announcement of departure at the ridiculous tail end of all the foolishness, had spoken it more clearly than if she had told him so to his face, which she was too infinitely well bred to do. Her good breeding had stuck, whereas his -- yes, he, a prince, as against a mere merchant's daughter -- his had fallen away like so much dry sand tossed against a stone. All the jests, the endless sound of his own voice going on more ceaselessly than the tide, the appalling sight of his own face which clearly she had not in fact known about at all, the feeble excuse for tea, his own absurd enthusiasm, darting about the room in quest of trade goods which ought to have been presented with the seriousness the matter entailed, the humming -- humming, for God's sake!

The slippage.

It brought back to him inevitably that endless reminder, of necessity repeated low by his side time and time and time again over the course of a never-ending two years: "You are slipping, Your Grace."

He stifled a groan and rolled himself over on the sofa where he had flung himself down not so many hours before. The quilt slumped off him and onto the floor in the process, and he was confronted with a view of the fireplace once more. The fire was dead, he had found it dead upon his arrival back in his suite, and there was nothing in the hearth but a heap of dead ashes now. A heap of dead ashes, in which a small deformed lump of something golden still gleamed in the morning sunlight. Until last night he had forgotten entirely that that was where he had thrown the damnable thing and where of course it still was. Had she seen that too?

All of the mistakes pulsed with the blood through his skull, setting off phrases from The Voice (also always in strong capitals) that seemed particularly apropos.

"Must you make that noise? You cannot carry a tune in a bathtub, never mind a bucket."

"Your voice is not so fine, you know, that everyone else is as in love with it as you are."

"I would not ever have thought it possible to experience such mortification while accompanied by a prince. Such antics!"

"I worry that somebody someday will be able to see what lies beneath that thin veneer and all its cracks. For your own sake, darling, you need to do better."

His heart beat in double-time to the cadence of the words, and his breathing felt constricted. The anxiety he had awoken with strengthened, surging with each pulsing of his blood. He tried to time his breaths, in and out in a calming sequence, but it didn't work; it never had.

"Breathe. Just breathe, darling. Allow yourself to relax. In-- one, two, three, four, five. Out-- one, two, three, four, five. This should be so easy; I don't know why you cannot just calm yourself down. Really, Your Grace! Can't you do something so simple as breathe?"

He couldn't do something so simple as breathe. This was how The Hangover operated -- the irrepressible rush of life from the night before transformed by morning into a pulsating tremor of blood, pumping ruthlessly through his veins the awareness of the slippage. His head throbbed, his pulse thrummed, his heart slammed against his lungs and throat, cutting off his air.

He slid off the sofa in haste, managing at least not to tangle his feet in the heaped up folds of the quilt, and made his way over to the shelves recessed into the wall of the room. At least one of these possible trade goods from the night before was worth its weight in lumps of gold, doing its small part to bring calm and good health, more valuable than one as balanced as she could ever know. Finding what he needed, he turned to drag the tapestried draperies roughly across the window, and sat down at his desk in the dark.

After the hour of the flame, the hour of ashes, he thought with weary cynicism. But tomorrow will be another day.

"Darling, can you not find a single flower out there?"

The voice floated across the meadow, clear and serene, if edged with a certain amount of disbelief.

"Of course I can find a flower!" he called back, attempting to fill his voice with confidence, but instead felt he only sounded petulant. "It is a meadow, it is spring, there are flowers everywhere." There should indeed have been flowers everywhere, but it was dark and all the colors were muted, everything drabbed down to one dim grey blur. How was he supposed to find a damnable flower like this, let alone one of a certain color?

Why did we have to do this in the dark? he thought in frustrated irritation. There are no colors right now. Would this not have been difficult enough in the--

"Was it really a good idea to do this at night, darling? I would really have thought the daytime would be better. Though I am sure you must know best."

He felt taken aback. Had it really been his idea to do this now, at this hour? It seemed, now that she mentioned it, more than likely that it had been. It sounded like just the sort of utterly foolish thing he would do. A subtle sinking sensation dug out a hole around his middle, which his heart subsided into.

"I am going to find one!" he reiterated, even as he felt his own doubts increase. He did not even want to find one, in truth. He thought he had had some other plan, something that did not involve scrabbling around in the grass like a simpleton, looking for a flower which he did not actually want to give to anyone. But with her eyes on him, he found himself unable to think, and all his movements felt awkward and clumsy. 

Desperately, he snatched at a dim blur that he was certain was a flower, but when he raised it up in his hand it was only a stick. He plucked another, and another, and another, but they were all sticks too. He had an armful of sticks now, and not one flower.

Consternation and anger filled him. Why should it be that now, when he did not need them, he should be able to find sticks everywhere, whereas when he had needed sticks before, he had scarcely been able to discover a single one? Why could he not find a single flower here, where flowers clearly abounded? Why was he doomed always to make a complete fool of himself?

"Demi, darling, those are all sticks," the voice called out helpfully to him. "You look like a peasant."

He dashed all the sticks onto the ground, but now they were all he could see. Sticks, sticks, heaps of sticks, everywhere. Do not call me Demi, he wanted to snarl at her. I am not a mere half, a lesser version of something. But instead he only answered in a mildly strained tone, "You know I do not prefer to be called that. And yes, I know they are all sticks." I am not such a fool as all that. But he did not say that either. She knew better.

"As you say, Your Grace."

Your Grace. He clenched his teeth and began to tear through the sticks that lay all around, hurling them away as he searched furiously for the flower that must be here somewhere. But every stick he threw aside seemed to split itself into a score more that hid everything beneath them, making his task even more impossible.

Doggedly, desperately, he dug down into the stubborn mass of them, which seemed to resist him as rigidly as a phalanx presenting a full line of spears. They gouged at his hands, sent flakes of bark flying into his eyes, slit gaping rents into his doublet and hose. This last squeezed a groan from him that no insult to his flesh could elicit, but he kept digging.

And at last, with his eyes burning and his clothes in tatters, his fingers closed around something that felt like a soft fragile stem. He snapped it, raised it up to his gaze. The blossom that perched there like a butterfly upon his bloodied fingertips seemed to catch every ray of moonlight, silver-blue and beautiful, like Niota painted onto silken petals. His breath caught in his throat, looking at it. If only he could capture such colors. If only he could capture such contentment as--

"That is not even the right color," objected the voice, sighing from behind him, wearily resigned to his endless inadequacy. "Not the right color at all. Are your eyes so dim they cannot even tell colors, little lynx?"

"It is exactly the right--" he began to exclaim back with suppressed indignation, but the words abruptly died in his throat. As he swallowed their remnants away, he could feel the skin on the back of his neck began to prickle. 'Little lynx'? She never called me so. The prickling increased, and spread down to his arms as well. Only in that curious cottage, derelict amid rotting beehives and the graves of small dead things... His heart began to pound. If he turned around now, what would he see? If he turned around.... He did not want to turn around.

When he did anyway, it was with a whirl and a snarl, an abrupt rush of motion in which his sword was in his hand as he charged through the grass, and in an instant there she was before him, a blur of honey gold hair and flawless skin, and crystal blue eyes behind which-- behind which something else looked out at him. Both That Woman, and something else at once, a coldly knowing serpentine gaze, and he did not know which one was chiefly responsible for the sudden jellying of his legs and the way his rapier clattered numbly from his hand. They looked at him, straight at him, through him, and in their gaze he knew that they knew that he would never manage to strike them. There wasn't even the tiniest pinprick upon her lovely full bosom, which was creamy and unblemished as ever over the heart which he was not sure she had even ever had.

Together, they smiled at him. Alone, he turned and ran.

Laughter rang out behind him, beautifully musical, as he staggered on bowed legs through the suddenly gelid air, until he gave it up, dropped to all fours, and bolted.

Bubbling with mirth, the voice followed him as he fled. "There is a reason the lynx is always shown coward, tail tucked between its legs!"

The laughter rose, shrilled, turned into a howl, gleeful and manaical, chasing him through the darkness of the stick-filled meadow and into the darkness of his room, which he woke into with a start and a gasp.

Demetrius stared wide-eyed at nothing, and his hands shook as he pulled the quilt tight around him as if it could somehow protect him. As if there were anything he needed to be protected against, here in his suite in the manor.

I am not a coward. He tried not to think of all the evidence otherwise, the many times he had fled. He had fled on foot, he had fled on ship, he had fled by retreating to the moonlit hillsides far above his family's country house. Sometimes he had fled simply by refusing to see what was in front of him.

No, he told himself, in spite of all that. I am not. It is only that there is no use facing certain destruction when there is another way out. One can only continue to fight if one continues to breathe. Ordinarily this seemed the greatest sense to him, but right now it sounded empty, the hollow protestation of a true craven. His trembling at a mere dream gave him away. And the skin was still crawling on the back of his neck. Breathing has never been your strong suit anyway, the Voice maliciously whispered. What is your strong suit, darling lynx?

He imagined he could feel the witch's eyes on him too, as he imagined he had felt them these last several days now. Was it not only his imagination? Eyes, watching contemptuously; ears, listening for the constricted wheeze of his breath; all of her, them, waiting for him to run away again. To run away, or to submit. To give himself up to being used, again. Again.

In that instant, he suddenly felt he had had enough of running. But no, not just of running. He was sick to death of being manipulated, used, used up, abused, of being someone else's tool or toy.

No, he thought. No. This ends here. I will not be used again. I will not.

He had to do this. He had to act, he had to do something, not just wait for someone to do something to him. He had to. There was no other way out of it.

I am going to kill the witch.

Or die trying.