but some dreams hang in the air like smoke
touching everything.
She asks him why in a way so like a dying thing that it makes him angry. And she steps closer, she steps closer even though he stepped away. It makes his skin burn. It makes his heart hurt. All he wants to do is touch her, to hold her. Dune smolders with everything he does not- cannot- have.
Why should she look at him?
"Because-" he tries to say- he moves his lips, but there's no sound- "Because-"
"I care about you."
It physically hurts to say, to open his chest like that; he's glad his voice fails him.
Warset flickers then, and glances to her own body like it’s betrayed her. He almost laughs at her expression, how it reminds him of the memory of the pegasus with pollen on her nose. (you are a girl!) But this place is not meant for laughter, or hope, or love. This place is meant to crush without mercy. To rip the wings from butterflies, then grind them to dust.
Dune grits his teeth. His unused to not being in control here, and the dream knows it. It tightens its grip, and the feathers melt from his back like wax. Perhaps like Icarus he flew too high, too close to the heat of a star he should know better than to even dream about.
“No.” He only thinks it, knowing how the dream loves to twist his words, but the sentiment comes out as a growl; low, back of the throat. “Not you.” He’s not talking to Warset, the girl, or Warset the star, or Warset the panther. He’s talking to the dreamer like god to a child, and the next time his eyes glow hot as the sun it is when he changes form to something shorter and longer, thick and tense in the shoulder. A big cat, but nothing like anything in the real word: its sides are dark brown, dappled chestnut, its tail long and thin and sharp as a whip.
If you are a monster, hell is a paradise.
Dune turns and scratches at the thick tar walls of the endless dream, sinking his massive claws into the rot again and again. The darkness fills the tears as soon as his claws pass through, like a fluid that can be displaced but never destroyed. Still he scratches and scratches, and still there is a growl in his throat, angry and rising as it shifts from plea to demand.
He knows that as strange as this place is, it is just a dream, and all dreams have boundaries, all dreams have light.
All dreams bow to him.
He will show her.
He bites deep into the darkness and he pulls with a violent shake of his head. The oil-slick gloom is all over him, heavy as an anchor, and the melted wax of his feathers burns holes through his dream skin. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters, but to show her the light.
@Warset
