"Oh cruel Death, give three things back," sang a bone upon the shore;
Everything is salt.
There is silence, but she does not know it is silent; it is silent to her in the way dreams simply do not have sound, unless a song has traveled from the waking life into the sleeping one. This dream has no music. It does not occur to her that there should be a sea somewhere, or a wind. There is only salt, as if it has always been salt, but when she looks at the city and the people in it, she knows that this is not true. She thinks they might be alive, at first, as if she can feel their life and see their faces, but as she comes closer to each horse, they turn to salt, but they were salt before she got there, and she cannot make them un-become salt. A great feeling of wrongness pervades the dream, and as she goes from horse to horse - now she is running desperately, begging them to answer her - she can only scream, ”Who did this? Who did this?” No one answers. No one can. She is alone, and screaming, and in her desperation she cannot stop fast enough and skids into a statue, a cowering filly, who collapses on Saphira as if she had been a pile of table salt, held together by the grains beneath it, and not carved, as a statue. She sits in the salt, and thinks: this is the salt of people. This is blood, as salt, and skin and hair and sinew as salt. There is salt in her mouth. She spits and spits but cannot get it out. There is nothing to drink, and nowhere to scrape her tongue against. Her body is covered in filly-salt. She gets up and keeps running, only now, she does not stop to ask them who has done this. She still sees-not-sees their faces over the salt, as the salt, before they were salt and then after and now. Their bodies are blurs as she runs, but their faces are still clear, and in the distance she sees a man carved of brown salt and then he moves and she thinks, it is a trick, but he feels different - the wrongness pushes against him, an invisible force - and she slows, trotting to a halt before him. He looks as the others do, poised to attack, or defend. She waits for him to be salt, and she is still convinced that he is salt, when she asks, "Who did this?” She feels that she knows the answer, and yet it escapes her. She must ask, to dredge it up.
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