the dream was compelling; it winnowed heda to no resistance and laid her languid in her bed atop the greenhills. from an outside look, her eyes moved rapidly beneath their lids but she did not wake, only twitched tinily and gasped at certain intervals, a servant to the vision.
in it she watched her own body loom over the island, distended by pregnancy. heda, who had never been taught these things, watched with an instinctive horror, beholding this impossibly-sized self shriek and moan noiselessly over sweetharbor, blotting out the moon and the sun.
outside her body, heda wept audibly, tethered to the pain of that incomprehensible phantasm, a little sound that spiraled down to the green; if there were eyes watching in fear or in knowing she did not comprehend them.
and inside her mind, heda watched as this dreamscape avatar of herself, tormented by an agony that she did not know and yet she did, thrumming in agonized conjoined sympathy as the vision of herself birthed four moons, beautiful ones of scarlet and obsidian and alabaster, joining in a circlet to orbit her own head.
the dream-heda stared down into the eyes of the dreaming-heda.
look
and sat back at the end of childbear in something like relief, massive haunches touched and lapped and embraced by the sea as she knelt outside the island.
look
and heda did, and she knew, and the breath seemed pressed from her, pressed —
the young wolf came alive in her bed atop the greenhills; the scent of snow and salt and dried flowers and the good earth rushed back to her, so that she began weeping. not in anger nor fear, only for the sheer righteous beauty of waking upon this island, waking in sweetharbor.
and she knew.