Blackfeather Woods The matrix of arcane energy stored within

Weeping Meadow

The man with two faces had not left her dreams. She'd taken to calling him Abel, because he reminded her so very much of her brother. Remembering brought an ache to her chest, but even so, Ana was glad that she had not forgotten his face. Sometimes she feared that she might.

Each night when she finally drifted into sleep, Ana woke just as soon. Always the same way; always with a start, always to find herself standing in a strange place with tears running down her cheeks. The cold wind in her fur. The deep echoing silence of winter nights so far inland. It still unsettled her. The world always felt too big in those moments, a vast emptiness all around her, and the cold gnawed down to her bones.

This night she woke before a tree. A twisted thing looming forward in great curtains of frosted tendrils; a sickly thing. The scent of it was off, somehow. Ana stared for a good long time. Slowly, the details trickled in. A clearing, she was standing in a clearing. Past the treeline the world faded into shadow. But from the clearing she could see the half-moon, slivers of stained ivory glimpsed fleetingly through the tendrils of the sickly tree.

Finally she looked for the man with two faces. Abel. But she did not see him. Instead she saw — she —

There were so many of them. All at once, overlapping. An indigo shadow and a statue of ice; a priestess bent in prayer with the bloodied body of her husband slung across her back; two children playing, twins until they touched and one lit like the sun while the other faded into the dark; a girl planting flowers that grew and wilted within seconds, until finally she cried out and her skin split and the rot poured from her in waves. All of them, all at once. They were all speaking. Laughing. Crying. Praying. Praying. But God never heard.

Her legs buckled under her. It was too much, too many, all at once. Ana buried her face in her legs and screamed.