Heron Lake Plateau And ain't it always the way

Through the night following her demotion, Niamh hardly slept a wink. She was exhausted, and she did sleep- but her mind was running so quickly the whole night, and her dreams so realistic, that she ended up getting next to no rest. At one point, she slid from slumber and into wakefulness- but her body didn't. Overtired as she was, her brain wasn't ready to allow her to drift off into peaceful dreams and instead she ran through the scenario over and over again, though it warped and changed into something very unreal and haunting, so when she realized she was awake, but that she couldn't move, she felt terror grip her. It wasn't just the fact that she couldn't move that filled her with fear- it was the fact that she could see something else in her den. 

She couldn't make out what it was, but it was there. She wasn't even sure if her eyes were open or not, but she knew she was awake- at least, awake enough to have conscious thought- and she was very aware of a dark shape inside her den. It made a low, scowling sort of sound, which she recognized as the sound a cougar made when it was pissed off. She wasn't quite conscious enough to be able to tell herself that a cougar wouldn't fit in her den, and too terrified for rational thought anyway. It drew closer, and had sort of the vague outline of a large cat, but she couldn't see any of its features...Only...Only it had shining golden fur about its shoulders, and when its eyes did come into focus, they were cornflower blue. 

She tried to scream, but could only wheeze for quite some time. The cougar- or whatever it was- seemed to take an eternity to get closer to her, and she continued to try and scream out the whole time, but couldn't make her vocal chords work. It was only when the dark thing slowly, deliberately, bit down onto her upper foreleg and she felt searing pain that she was able to vocalize at all- but nothing left her lips except for a high pitched whimper. She continued to try and scream, but all she could make was the same soft, haunting hooooo......Hoooo.....Hooooo... Over and over. 

Eventually, she would fall back asleep as the presence of the dark thing lingered for what felt like hours, and eventually she relaxed and the pain her brain had manifested went away. When she came to, feeling even more tired than she'd been when she'd gone to sleep, all memory of the entire incident was gone. 

She only remembered having some sort of bad dream when she later left her den and wandered to a stream to get a drink, hoping it might either wake her up, or the weight of something in her belly might help her go back for a better nap. Something had been haunting her and made her shudder- but for the life of her, as she drank, she couldn't remember what it had been- not even the fact that its fur had matched Ambrose's. She drank, her vague gaze cast out over the glittering water, deciding that once she was done, she'd likely just slink back to her den and try to go back to sleep.