Heron Lake Plateau shadow, my sweet shadow

She slept the sleep of the dead.

Perhaps she did die a time or two. There was a strange light in her dreams that made little sense, and sometimes she thought she heard her father's voice somewhere in the distance, calling to her. It was at those times that her breathing slowed, her heart grew quiet, and a dangerous stillness came over her frail body. She was dimly aware of her mate's voice, his frantic shaking and nudging, but those sensations were ephemeral and far away. Was that the dream, perhaps? It was difficult to discern the boundary between the sound and the silence, what was real and what was not. That warm light beckoned to her, though, its blinding brightness filled with the laughter of her parents and the promise of reunion with those she had lost.

Yet there was an even brighter light that burned within the confines of the broken body. Four, in fact, and they shone like a constellation of suns, drawing her back to the earthly plane and giving her breath where her tired lungs could not draw it themselves. There were shadows in their midst, however -- three stars burned out, their darkness colder than the hollow notes of a funeral dirge. And it was these shadows that lingered in her mind when she finally found her way back to consciousness, and tears glimmered in her golden eyes as she stared up into the face of he whom she loved, @Quixote.