Dreams of Ash and Dust

Because SPCs have angsty feelings too.

---

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.