Dune discovered a fondness for cats at a young age. At first, in a way, they were competition-- he begged alongside them at the docks for a scrap to eat or a spare coin. Or, on the worst days, the lost days, he would be happy just to get a shred of kindness; a look, a smile, a touch.

In the beginning the cats didn’t care for him, no doubt sensing that he had nothing to share with them. But as time passed they came to an unspoken understanding, maybe even a kind of kinship. Sometimes, on cold nights, a stray would curl up on his back and, purring, fall into a warm sleep. A great honor for Dune, one he did not take lightly.

Even later in life, as the boy grew up and graduated from penniless beggar to… well, simply being poor, he found in cats a companionship that he never had with other equines. Perhaps it was because they didn’t talk. He let them into his shop and found a comfort in the quiet way they shared the space. Cats were one of the only consistencies in his life, an anchor by which to measure the way the rest of the world changed.

So when he falls asleep and enters a dark dream, when he hears a girl sobbing and senses ghosts, coming and going, over and over in a repressive, devastating loop, Dune shapes his form without thinking. He becomes a little orange cat, scrawny but fastidiously clean. On soft little paws he trots over to the woman on her knees and butts into her shoulder with his head. His tail curls at the tip, pleased.

He begins to purr with a kind of urgency, like he might be running out of time. Like the demons will come back (there, can you sense them at the edge of your vision, taking shape again?) unless she turns her mind away.

It’s not new to him. The dream playing itself out, then rewinding, then repeating again. It was simple: The mind liked its loops, and the dream was the mind’s creation. And so a nightmare, for all its despair, could very easily become habit. It would never be comfortable, per say, but it would be… familiar. Maybe, even, a perverse kind of comfort.

But it’s always odd to be the newcomer to such dreams. To see them so clearly as what they are, and yet to lack the power to turn them off. Break the pattern. How he wished to dissolve the forest around them, to show the dreamer what opportunity lay packed beneath the repression of the nightmare. She could fly higher than the birds, swim deeper than the dolphins. Play hopscotch across the planets, or explore very deeply the color yellow.

Instead, he feels a flutter of claustrophobia as the roots settle around the mare.

All he can do is chirrup at her attention, purr in response to her words. As the rain stops Dune begins to gnaw determinedly at the roots that cage her. He pauses to meow at her with the urgent disapproval he had so often been subjected to by his cat friends. Help me,” he implies as he continues to gnaw away. “help yourself.” At one point he flops on his side and kicks at the bars of her cage, as though gutting a rat.

Eventually he stops, stands up, shakes the dust from his coat.

“You’re dreaming,” he says, in a voice not his own. It echoes in the trees that surround them, reverberating like a wave. A drop of water in a still pond: You’re dreaming.

You're dreaming, stranger.

so dream.

He had a soft spot for dreamers like these. There were so many of them, more than they could realize. And though he met them one by one, each in their own miserable world, he pictured them all together as a group of wild children. Orphans. Scattered, lost, trapped. He had no obligation-- he could easily come and go in their dreams and nightmares without getting involved. But he felt for these strangers, who nurtured wounds where no one else could see.

This dream was full of strangers to Dune, but he could feel the way the dreamer reacted to their faces. Her thoughts were on display here, although she couldn’t realize the extent of it. And although he pitied her for her demons and her cages, he was also distinctly envious. Dune’s life was a hard and lonely one. He had very few friends (who were not cats) and his most intriguing acquaintances rarely remembered him upon waking. Simply stated, there was no one who cared enough about the stallion to hurt him. There was a freedom, but also a great loneliness, in that.

When the nothingness comes, there is a relief. Dune can feel the understanding settling over the pied mare, and with it a lightening of the world around them. He begins to purr.

She has questions for him, of course, but he is resolute in his silence. He just rumbles away reassuringly, and bumps against her with encouragement as willow trees rise, wraithlike from the nothingness.

“Are you doing this?”

He answers the question with a shake of his head. There is a certain amusement in the gesture. If he could change the landscape, it would be brighter, stranger, bigger. Dune was not very imaginative by nature, but peering into countless dreams has given him more than enough inspiration.

He presses a damp nose to her skin as if to say “you. You’re doing this.” And then he trots off, tail curled like a question mark, to investigate one of the white figures walking around not very far away.