Shimmering Sands the ironwood

anu had yet to lose hope, despite the dwindling of his energies. anti was still by his side, his stalwart, his bulwark -- the guardian to his life and dreams, and soul-tie to this world and the worlds beyond. anu would go, wherever anti went -- and anti would do much the same.

and so anu slept against the flank of his companion, his doe-like eyes closed, his black eyelashes twitching occasionally as he fled down into the world of slumber. he slept, deep and far from this waking world, and dreamt of things like his kurra, becoming adula just as his father had tgbefore him.

he was visited then by a lean ghost, redfire in fur with hungering yellow eyes. she stepped forth from the darkness a burning pyre, smoldering and cut hard as the jagged peaks of a mountain. anu felt his consciousness wheel, his heart skip -- he knew not her face, yet he knew her intimately. she was a priestess of some other faith, a dagger for a hungering god's malevolent will. besides her simmered an exotic beauty, of shapely face and long, lissome limbs.

sisters. queens. tophet-makers, cairn-weavers. the fairer of the two stepped towards him in ardent strides, her thin muzzle pulled to his ears which strained to hear the words she whispered. around him his vision darkened, and he realized just as it all faded to black he had been standing in an ancient pit littered with sunbleached and shattered bones.

anu awoke with a start as the dream sped away, and knew what he must do. they would stay here no longer, where fate had abandoned their cause; they would go west, to the land of destiny -- and would seize fate by the throat.