This time, her first moments in the Dream were not swallowed by an endless tide of light — quite the opposite, in fact.
No light burned the backs of her eyes as she coughed and tried to sit up. Instead, they opened to a wide, blueblack void above her. The moon had built itself a nest in the clouds. Its white, barn owl face stared down at her lying in the snow, unblinking.
Pine trees stretched into the air above her, thick with needles and weighed down by the heavy coats of snow they wore.
And it… was silent.
The only noise was her own breathing, and the shifting crunch as she got to her feet.
She was still wearing the dress she’d been given, but to say that it wasn’t providing much comfort or warmth in this environment would be… underselling it, to say the least. Still, she reasoned that if she was still in the dress, and still in the snow, she must be right outside the cabin again, just where she’d left the Dream the night before.
Instead, though, there was no clearing and no cabin. From the looks of it, she was standing on a high, mountain-side cliff, thick with trees. Ahead of her there was a drop, and then another section of the cliff higher up, also caked with dense treecover.
To her right, moonlight shone in a soft white-blue haze through the trees. Familiarly, almost. Something about it all itched her senses, though she couldn’t quite place it. Something recent. Somewhere she’d just been.
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