The dream came again.Roselin doesn't have it often but sometimes when the moon fully waned from the sky, when her father failed to show for their nightly rituals, when the stories that her mother shared had been too fanciful, she would have the dream. It is always the same. She is young and fleet-footed. She runs through Taiga and laughs beneath the cathedral Sequoias. Oren - her twin - is somewhere nearby and she is trying to find him.
There are shadow-dwellers and they are close enough to hear: It could take any shape it wanted. (Roselin always stopped running then but she could hear her mother's reprimand that it was rude to eavesdrop.) But she stays. She listens. It could be anything, says another shadow-dweller. Rose always looks around then, looks to the branches. Could it be a bird, she wonders?
Yes, something whispers.
She thinks of the wolves that she has heard on winter lonely nights.
Could it be that?
Yes, comes the voice again.
Her mind is racing now, though her hooves do not move. What do you call something that could be anything? This thing - this monster she later learns through the whispers - could be any shape. Would her eyes recognize the trickster, she wonders? The Northerners had a memory that was long as their winters (and they could go on for eons, a place that was always last be to kissed by the warmth of summer and the first to the feel the frost of fall). They recalled and they remembered and even though this was just a dream, it was a story planted around a seed of truth. (As time passed, it grew more fantastic and the 'monster' became many things.)
One of the shapes it took was the reoccurring dream - a nightmare - of a child.
This dream doesn't come often but she has had it more frequently here. Roselin often wakes in a room that feels too confined and the shadows dwell too close. She can hear the breaking of the waves from her bedroom window but it isn't enough. Rose was a girl who dreamed fare more easily beneath the stars. The nightmare would come and she would wake and so she would go, not giving the dream a chance to come back. (If she had been home, if she had been nestled beneath the might Taigan trees, her father would be there. He would wrap her up in his shadows and smile. He would tell her, See? They can chase the nightmares away.)
As was becoming a common habit for Roselin, she leaves her aunt's cottage while the stars are still out.
She greets the day as it rises.
But she doesn't go to the cliffs. She turns away from them and the seashore and ventures towards an unfamiliar direction. Roselin doesn't care where she goes; she just wants to leave her dreams behind her. They can stay in that little room and the cottage by the sea.
Instead of a coast, she finds a forest and Rose is happy. For the first time since she has arrived in Terrastella, she smiles. Fire-bright (familial for the women of the Legacy line) and yet hers has a secret lingering on the corners of her dark lips. She looks up and is baptized in this foreign wood. It is not like the one she was born in but it is close and for now, that is enough. Roselin breathes in the heady scent of pine and damp earth, of decaying leaves and broken branches. These are the smells of her childhood and so she becomes a youth again; she doesn't have the pretend to be the Guardian's daughter or the Healer's ward.
Up tilts her dark slender head and-
until a boy distracts her. She stops and looks towards him.
He has gold-tipped wings - wings like her brother Nashua - and he is antlered like her other brother, Yanhua. There is not much of Terrastella that she knows and yet this boy doesn't look out of place. He looks like he has always been here. "Roselin," she says slowly, blinking at the sight of him. "What are you?"
