Arrow Lake like a stone

In the thicket, Aurëwen dreamed.

She dreamed she were in a gilded land with her sun-and-stars, thriving beneath the myriad cast of eternal autumn — a fallscourt. She dreamed of how they were meant to be born at sea, and so she then dreamed too of lying with her night-of-life. She dreamed of veiling herself upon him, melding and refiguring, in their place of stoppered stardust. She dreamed of blood-of-her-blood, and how he should’ve remained with her, and now they might’ve hunted their desecrator together. She dreamed of all the souls she’s looked into in this life; all of the hearts and voices she’s ached for.

The silver dreamed as her son once had: sifting and weaving reality with fanciful others. She dreamed of those of the cliffs and of the sound; how kru would’ve flourished in the harpy’s place. How the last of them still might. But Isilmë was there with a soft whine—

—and the Pionier opened her eyes.

In the weeks after her impairment, so too had the inconsistencies of Aurëwen’s isolation followed. Some days, she would take to communal slumbering and engagement; other days, such as now, found her roosting away in her previous birth-thicket. Most days, she didn’t know what to feel.

But the whine hadn’t been from her dreams, and she leveled a wary argent eye to the green entrance. Neither were the chords from which it were strung familiar. Whoever it was smelt of this claim, so... no harm, but certainly fowl? “You may enter,” the Pionier rasped, foreign tongue thick with sleep.