he had never thought about what happened when she died. Whatever she had been expecting, this was not it. Estelle never expected to feel so much. The way her heart felt to her ribs like bark upon a tree. Each breath was raw with friction, each breath was like a frigid winter raged inside her body. Frost crept its fingers along her skin. When she was dying, the pain of its touch had turned her beautifully numb. But now, in.. what? Death? Her nerves had reawoken. There is something that charges in her veins whilst the frost creeps. She can hear the crackle of it in her ears. It is the sound of running, like wild horses, their footfalls landing with the crackle of static.
Yet Estelle is not the only thing strange in death. The world is, entirely, other. It is not as the talks of mortals ever suggested. There is no sorrow here, nor repentance nor even joy. There is only chaos. The world trembles and the ground reaches up with bolts of lightning, up, up to the sky that crackles and undulates like waves. Clouds crash against each other and each is struck through with silver moonlight. The sky rages and the rising lightning spreads like a web across the sky.
The earth is slick glass and atop it crimson snow blows by pushed by a wind that breathes in time with her struggling heart. One breath, another, another.. Each pause in between is as if she has held her breath. The snow pushes along like the blood. It is cold to her feet.
There is no green here, there is no trace of an earth she has ever known. All of this place is chaos and desolation. There is no sign of life, there is nothing but the light of ascending rods of lightning…
Somewhere Estelle’s heart had stopped and before it started a great magic twisted in her veins and pushed, pushed her through a gauze veil and out into a strange limbo, a curious dreamworld. A stallion looms out of the darkness. His skin reminds her of what the world should be, dark brown, familiar. “Where are we?” She asks him as lightning suddenly bolts for the sky from beside her. It captures the silver of her skin and the frost that branches across her torso, feathered like frost and alive like electricity.
“Who are you?’
@Dune - oh gosh this is /awful/ I have been fretting about writing her so much. The next will be better. Or else I despair.
THAT I MOVE SURROUNDED BY A TANGLE OF BRANCHES, A NET OF AIR AND ALTERNATE LIGHT AND DARK, AT ALL TIMES; THAT THERE ARE NO DESTINATIONS APART FROM THIS
It always starts with the back of his eyelids. It starts with the velvet darkness of that place, punctuated by the red-white-gold of blood moving behind skin behind light behind, in a word, the world.
It always starts with the black of the back of his eyelids, and this dream is no different. From the vast expanse of darkness light filters in bit by bit, like a massive puzzle piecing itself together. Tonight, when he comes to awareness he is upside down, mane dangling long and loose and just barely brushing against the red sand. As soon as he realizes I’m upside-down, he comes crashing heavily to the earth. He groans, knowing he’s not really hurt but feeling the physical pain of the fall regardless, because dreams were cruel like that.
His second realization of the evening is oh, that’s not sand. It’s cold, and where it presses to his skin it grows wet and- gross- sticky. He quickly rises to his hooves, and to his disgust the red snowmelt is plastered to his side like--
Like blood.
And then, well, you know how it goes, time and space goes bendy. He moves somewhere, or he stands and the world moves around him, and suddenly the dreamer is there, wherever there is, and he’s there too, and her voice is a gentle warm breeze in the middle of the icy-cold gale.
“Where are we?”
Lightning blooms, and for a moment the dreamer is illuminated in a clear white light. The shadows on her body are colored crimson where the light reflects off the bloodied snow. It’s those shadows, strangely, and not the brightness which remains imprinted on his vision long after the lightning has passed.
“You don’t know?” He tilts his head, curious. Usually the landscape was familiar in some way to the dreamer. Distorted, sometimes beyond all visual recognition, but always- always with some deeper vein of acquaintance. It was a pulse only the dreamer would recognize, something subtle and out of reach to the intruder, to whom (usually) all of it was completely foreign.
Dune looks across the blood-red landscape that moves thu-thump like a heartbeat, and he shivers with the cold. His expression has grown somber as he considers the situation. “Someplace terrible.” What else is there to say?
She asks who he is and he almost laughs at the formality. Most dreamers just rolled with it, wrote him off as some figment of the dream. Someone assumed- a friend or relative or lover, just hiding behind a different face. Or- maybe in their mind they saw him as someone familiar. He couldn’t be sure, not that he didn’t try asking. The problem was that Dreams had a funny way of changing as soon as they were aware of being noticed. To ask who am I? Do you recognize me? was to threaten the very structure of the dream.
But to be recognized as something other, and questioned, was unusual. It makes him smile broadly. “Name’s Dune. You?”
His attention returns to the shifting snow, and the way it blows in bursts with some pattern that seems biologically driven. The fabric that makes up his body wavers with that same pulse- he flickers in and out of being, there and gone again like the beat of moth’s wings. When he looks down and notices this, his expression unfolds to one of surprise. “If I may say so, Estelle, you seem… tense.” The question is in the rise of his brow: what's up?
