Time is slipping away on the currents of this dream sea. It feels like drowning, and swimming, and flying all at once. Her heart turns into a hummingbird hanging in the air of her rib cage. At her side her wings, cut up with stone-holes, flutter faster as the sand reaches up to wrap around her ankles. She catches one of his golden feathers between her teeth as she starts to sink into the sand. The oasis water laps against her belly like a hungry monster seeking a meal.
Warest trembles in the dream. But in the real she shifts from cat, to horse, to star fast as a meteor falling.
Time slows down. It starts to crawl, and slither, and sink into her flesh like worms. Wing turns to claw, and crown to teeth, and bone-white to black-as-night. She opens her mouth and only a hiss comes out. Her eyes blaze with something that looks like screaming, and begging, and sorrow. Over and over she tries again but only snarls come out from behind her mouth full of carnivore teeth. Tears pool in her eyes.
But there is that moment between the dream and the real where she starts to leak star-blood. It drips down her face like lines of a wounded constellation, and it puddles at her paws like tide-pools as the dream sea washes out to the deep. She leaves paw-prints on the sand as she claws her way back to him-- tugging, tugging, tugging on his golden wings like a lifeline. She tries to hold on hard; she tries to say.
She tries to forget that it's not the cosmos she's waking up too.
Before she slips into the tendrils of sand pulling her from his wings, and golden-glow. Before she disintegrates back into the would--- her tongue discovers the way to language with a bellow that sounds like the dying of the universe.
She screams, find me and then sand crashes over her head and fills her lungs.
And when she wakes up alone beneath her halo of tropical foliage it feels like falling, and dying, and dimming. But here, in the sunlight she does not cry.
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