Noon. The city hot and crowded, stinking of sweat and shit and hot flesh. He huffs, sides heaving, eyes rolling at the thought:

There’s no place like home.

Dune was hauling goods from the docks to some noble’s house. His shoulders sweaty beneath the yoke. Flecked with white salt like seaside cliffs. It was good money. Hard money. Tough & dumb money too. Naturally, his mind began to wander.

Dune always liked to imagine Solterra from above. Take the oasis, the way a bird would see it; pale blue seed with a halo of green, bobbing in a golden sea. The sunlight today would be slick and opalescent, like seen from underwater or through a haze.

Even in hindsight, it isn’t clear when the daydreaming begins. Dreams are like that, fuzzy at the edges. Slippery. In the moment itself, he is oblivious to the shift in reality: one minute he’s thinking of the oasis, plodding along on solid ground, picturing palms swaying in the warm breeze; the next he’s flying over the on massive black wings that gleam emerald-blue in the sun.

He lands on a rocky outcrop and fluffs his feathers. It does not occur to him that he doesn’t have feathers, he’s not a bird, the sun doesn’t really have that grainy, shifting quality. He tilts his head, narrows his sharp vision on the shifting creature in the water. He can’t tell what exactly it is. Sometimes it looks equine, sometimes feline, sometimes just a chaotic, pulsing blur of light, brighter than the sun.

He thinks it might be a woman.

Dune lifts those large black wings, shakes them, makes himself look as big and imposing as he can. “This place is mine.” Oh but it wasn’t, and he didn’t have the slightest idea! This was hers, all hers, and he was just passing through. At least he was not feeling particularly threatened, not yet.

The bird taps his beak on the rocks. One-- two-- three times. Sharp eyes inquisitive but wary. He does not blink. He does not need to blink, here.

The question in the tilt of his head is clear: “Who are you?”

A shifting, a changing. The world distorts, winding and unwinding all while staying the same. A dry breeze blows; he feels every feather on his body lean into it. A trick of the light, a twist of the mind, and she comes into sharp, sharp focus. The ridge of her back, scruff thick enough to burrow in, and the narrowing of her beautiful eyes. Every brushstroke of her posture, every gesture suggests violence. She flicks her tail like drawing a sword and he smiles suddenly.

There You Are.

But crows aren’t supposed to smile. Hundreds of teeth are shoved monstrously in his beak, long and thin as fishbones. Absolutely grotesque. Worthless in a fight, especially here, especially with her-- he’s just showing off, playing games, crows just wanna have fun. And if further evidence was needed, he hops backward, with a ruffle of feathers, the instant she steps forward. She’s a cat, he’s a bird… the math isn’t hard and he's proud to consider himself a clever boy.

(Oh, he’s died before in dreams. This landscape is not always friendly to intruders. But dying’s not something he ever got used to. Didn’t ever want to “get used to”; most tastes were better left unacquired.)

But he isn't afraid, not really. Just cautious. When you’re on the ground and someone kicks you, you break or you get smart. Dune got smart. Smart enough to live this long, at least. It doesn’t mean as much, though, in front of someone like her. Someone who’s obviously never been kicked, never been down, never had to look in the mirror to practice the baring of teeth, the look in the eye, the illusion, the mask…

Someone like her just has to be, and the universe folds itself around her-- or that’s the thought that comes to mind when he meets her gaze and her tail flicks again, a serpentine warning.

It must be the bird in him that looks at her in all her wild rampant glory and thinks mine mine mine. It must be the dream carrying him away, dark nirvana. He’s an addict for this-- in his body, a slurred smile rises stupid on his face. He plods along, surrounded by scents he long ago stopped smelling, yoke so familiar a burden it becomes an extension of the body. And he lets the dream sweep him down and out to where life is just a speck, a mote at the edge of vision; blink and its gone gone nothing left but the too-still oasis and the wings on his back that ache to sail through galaxies.

He squawks at her, something tender, something urgent, sweet nothings, and flutters down to the sand where her carves with his beak:

DREAM BIGGER

When the comet tightens its noose around his neck, he only stares at her. Because the dreamer is the only way through this. Because he doesn’t want to die another dream-death. He doesn’t want to return to the yoke on his neck, the heat, the smell of sweat. He isn’t ready to leave.

He wants to stay here, wherever they are, wherever they might go, for as long as he can. The dreaming was always better than its opposite.

So he stares at her, the calm serious in his eyes asking-- careful not to beg-- mercy and magic,

mercy and magic,

… And from the vacuous darkness between stars, there is form and color and sound. Atmosphere blooms around him, fills his lungs with blue. He can see now how the forests sway far below at the crook of her hocks, and the cresting of alien waves on an alien shore.

When she sings-- when she sings the universe responds. Dune begins to change. His wings spread longer and longer, and his claws lengthen, and from his shoulders burst two dark brown legs, almost black.

All the while his mind is caught on a memory, or something he thinks is a memory. His mother, humming. Backlit by the sun so he can’t see her face, but he can just place the outline of a tired smile. It was probably made up. A false memory, spun up by an orphan with time to kill, wondering what his mother’s voice sounded like.

It wouldn’t sound like this. Like war drums, like breaking bones. Like the swirling heart of the universe. Oblivion, in song.

Her wings brush against his. He remembers how earlier they brushed against the oasis floor, cutting a line in the sand. what side are you on. But her feathers against him only feel like feathers. Not a blade. Not a finality. It might be the softest part of each of them. And then with a grin the stallion touches ground with four hooves. He liked these wings. He was keeping them.

He does not stay grounded for long. With a soft grunt he swings his legs into a buck. Clouds scatter at his heels. The itch to move, once scratched, only grows, and with a bouncy lope he careens toward her endless horizon. Testing the bounds of his cosmic leash. A few lengths ahead of the dreamer, with a soft snort, he glances back to see if she would follow. Something like a dare in the jut of his chin. He was not sure how far he could get by himself.

She sings a song without beginning or end. It is the thread that runs through this world. The water, the earth, the trees, the clouds... She sings, and they fill with being. And as they do, Dune feels a thousand eyes pinned to him. Watching, wondering eyes, keenly aware of his otherness.

He is distracted when she cuts herself. The dreamer bleeds without blinking. Thick, weeping blood that drowns the creatures and the cities far below. The sight makes him feel less like they’re gods and more like night horrors. He extends a dark wing to sweep feather-light across the trail of blood, then folds the blood-tipped appendage closer to his face with a small frown. It is quicksilver. Moonlight on water. Blood, but… not blood.

It occurs to him with agonizing slowness that she is otherworldly. Logic comes slowly in dreams, particularly dreams such as this. Not that it matters where she’s from. What she is. They have this moment and this moment alone: chances are slim he’ll stumble into her dreams again, even slimmer they’ll meet in real life. And even if they did, there’s nothing he could say or do that matters. The real Dune is here and now; the invader of dreams, the crow-winged intruder. And my, what lovely teeth he has.

Her touch might frighten him, if this were not a dream. The heat of her breath makes him think of the way a star dies. The flash of light-- the darkness that follows-- the vacuum, the question mark. It's said nature abhors a vacuum, but that's not true, not really. True nature is love. It embraces all things, even in their unbecoming.

“I did not create you.”

Her humming vibrates through her lips, a siren song, a sun with such gravity he has no choice but to revolve around it. With his eyes meeting hers, he gently shakes his head no. A sly half-smile curls toward her. He looks forward again, debating if he should say anything. What he should say. Finally he clears his throat, and the sound sheds golden sparks where their skin touches.

“Does that bother you?” The question does not resonate with Dune’s voice. The sound is bigger, richer. More nuanced. It sounds like laughter. It feels like shedding a skin; and as soon as that thought crosses his mind, black feathers fall away from his wings and golden ones take their place.

He looks across the landscape she made. All the things she's created-- or is this a memory? The two taste slightly different, in dreams-- at least, they usually do. This one he's uncertain of. This one is new, and it thrills him. He hungers for more.

Slowly he begins to beat his long, powerful wings. The force builds technicolor storms in the landscape below, crushing forests, flattening plains. When he kicks off, without a sound, stardust billows at his heels.

He smiles (a normal-toothed smile, this time) for this is a good dream to be in.

The dreamer rises, pure glory made flesh, and soon overtakes him. They twirl higher and higher with the graceful abandon of hawks; masters of their universe. The silence expands, palpable as fog, and perhaps for the first time he resents it.

Before he can brood too much over the absence of her song, the silence is broken by the pok! of tiger’s eye crashing through their outstretched wings. He looks at her, nothing more or less than a steady look. And then an ethereal rain begins to fall, the light dancing off it a rainbow of shimmering color.

She’s spinning round and round, she’s dancing and spell-casting, and he just watches, not daring to blink. He watches her cast a golden noose, and without struggle he lets himself be caught. But this noose settles sweetly on his brow instead of tight around his throat. It takes too long to realize it is a crown, to match her own, and when he does Dune stirs up stardust with a molten rumble of laughter. She would have no idea how sweet this moment is, and he does not know how to begin to show her.

It is so beautiful, so beautiful to feel like a king, even if only in dreams, after a lifetime of destitution. He feels his soul rising just as his body-- with gold-winged grace.

A sapphire falls into his rich brown cheek, where it remains lodged in a crimson embrace of blood. A ruby hits his spine and his dream skin stretches to absorb it. Amethyst strikes his shoulder, and sinks in deep. So the sky falls around them and so he transforms, bit by bit, until he wears a body not of flesh and bone but ore and precious stone.

And feathers, of course, golden feathers that brush against her inky black.

Somewhere far away, another Dune sweats in the mid-day heat, trudging ever closer to his destination with a flutter of growing panic. Not yet, he thinks, this clever boy who taught himself to cleave the mind in two. So deeply entangled in the daydream, he can’t smell the city around him. Escapism at its finest. I’m not ready... He clings to his dream crown, and his richly ornamented body, and the cosmic rain.

It’s a slipping sensation that seizes him. A visceral understanding of the grains of time slipping through the hourglass, the fabric of this universe slipping away beneath him. Time was not reversible; not here, not anywhere. Dune swallows the lump in his throat, stretching his wings toward her with an urgency that approaches feverish. He wants to say something, but he doesn’t know where to begin.

When he speaks his voice is pure Solterran. Sand, grit, countless shades of heat. Fearless. “Can I see you again?”