Nesira had a better nightmare than usual.

She was in complete darkness, but, somehow, could still see her environment. She was in a square stone tunnel, with seamless walls of black stone. She crawled forward on her hands and knees, walls against her shoulders and ceiling brushing on her head. She was naked, cold, shivering, her joints aching, her hands and knees raw and bleeding from crawling on the floor that glistened like obsidian and scraped like pumice. With a rush of vertigo she realized that she was far, far underground, with miles of stone above her pressing down, and miles below threatening to swallow her whole.

As she crawled slowly forward for a seeming eternity, scratched and scraped from all directions, she realized that the ceiling was sinking, very slowly, lower, hairs breadth by hairs breadth. When she could bear the pressing no longer, she shifted, and instead of crawling on her hands and knees, slithered slowly forward on her chest and stomach across the grating surface, inch by agonizing inch, arms stretched out ahead and pulling her along. The ceiling continued sinking, until it was flush to her back again. She couldn't even breath, but she tried, halfheartedly, to continue crawling forward. Until she could not, and simply fell limp, pinned from all four angles.

A pair of hands grabbed her by the wrist and began pulling her forward again, inch by inch, rending her flesh against the abrasive stone. She screamed, echoes bouncing between walls and pounding her head like a hammer on an anvil. She sobbed, begging the hands to stop, but they only pulled her faster. As fast as a crawl. As fast as a casual walk. As fast as a run. She continued screaming, leaving a trail of streaked blood and echoing cries, self-sustaining like footprints in the dark. The walls continued to close in as her body wore thin. The hands pulled her faster. As fast as a galloping horse. As fast as a white-water stream. As fast as a falcon in free-fall. Faster. Faster. Faster than a human had ever traveled before, down a thinning corridor that stretched and ground until she was a thread of flesh miles long in the deep screaming darkness.

She opened her eyes and stared up at the full moon.

Nesira preferred when her sleep had no nightmares, just timeless silent darkness from nightfall to dawn. But, all told, this one was of middling severity. Hardly the worst.

Her heart hammered in her ears, and her entire body ached from shivers and stale adrenaline.

Hardly the worst dream you have ever had, she reassured herself. Her first dream had been worse, when she had been eight, a nightmare fire and glass so severe she had sworn to never sleep again, an oath that lasted not quite twenty four hours.

Well, I'm certainly not getting any more sleep tonight, she thought to herself as she stood and stretched, and began to pack up her belongings. A few bags of clothes, some food, some money. A few tools. All of it old, worn, handmade.

She gave Ash a whistle, and he slowly stood up. He was nearly as old as Nesira, the spots and stripes of ruddy-brown and white turned to a uniform gray, finally living up to his name. Velvet hung from his antlers in tattered strands of brown and red, marking the fading of sumer and the coming of autumn. It looked like he had gored another animal, though the blood was his own, harmless. Nesira slung her packs over his back, causing it to stare at her with those warm, glossy eyes, letting out a disgruntled snort-grunt noise that sounded like an old door creaking in it's hinges. It squirmed, scratching the nearby tree with those antlers, the bark already stripped away and the wood beneath streaked with velvet-blood, black in the faint moonlight. She cupped his's face in her hands and kissed him on the forehead. "I know, it itches. As soon as we get to town, I'm going to give you a good brushing."

Most of her belongings were slung over the back of the deer. The only things on her other than her clothes were the reassuring weight of the knife hanging at her waist, the spool of thread in one pocket, and the leaden weight of the book.

They continued walking in the moon-lit forest. The wind had picked up, and the trees hissed as they danced with it, swaying and thrashing against the sky. There were birds everywhere, unseen but distinctly audible. The twittering choir of the nightingales mingling with the pained croaking of the heron.

Far ahead, she could hear a human voice, though she could not tell what it was saying. She increased her pace, very slightly, Ash doing likewise.

"Hello?" Nesira called, cupping her hands around her mouth.

"Hello!" a voice returned to her. It was a mans voice, almost sounding like-

"Irix? Is that you?"

"Yes. Irix." The voice was unmistakably his, though he was too far ahead to see in the half-light.

"Irix? What brings you all the way out here?" She asked. She scowled, "I told you I was leaving. I have things to do-"

"Hello Nesira. How are you doing?"

"Not very well, seeing as my mother fucking died last week." She snarled, now trotting towards Irix, who she still could not see in the darkness.

"Interesting. Tell me about this 'mother'"

Nesira stopped dead. She had left Irix behind quite a while ago, and she was well past hus usual ranging area.

Why would he be ahead of her?

The prickly itch of goosebumps and cold sweat spread across her body. "Is therefore is not, what of the what?", she asked. It was a trick her father had taught her. A human would recognize gibberish as gibberish, but something else, something that repeated without understanding-

"Is the is of the being of wasing of the is." It answered. The tone and cadence were the kind used for small talk, but the words were yet more asemic nonsense.

"Are you lost?" Nesira's voice responsed. Not Nesira herself, but umistakably her voice, coming from far behind her.

Dead silence, for an agonizingly long time. Nothing spoke.

From in front of her, came a long, smooth whistling noise, halfway between a flute and a wolf howling. A similar whistling call came from behind her, followed, after a few seconds pause, by a half dozen more in all directions.

"Enjoying your evening, out and about?" ,her father asked from the tree-branches above.

Nesira drew her knife and sprinted down the road at a dead run, Ash trotting to follow her. There came a chorus of hooting whistles, and an explosion of birds screaming and flapping their wings as they fled the scene. They knew what was up, and more then than ever before, Nesira envied them for their powers of flight.

Behind them there was a noise like the rustling of dead leaves mixed with the clinking of ceramic-on-ceramic, along with a renewed flury of voices. No more words, not in any language a human had ever spoken, just every separate phenome a human voice could make, and a few that they couldn't, churned and mulched into sound sludge.

She sprinted between dark and light, between bands of bright moonlight and the deep shadows, as she sprinted along the road. As fast as she could. Her heart hammered against her rib-cage as though it wished to break free. She ran harder. Her throat burned. She let out a long, hoarse scream as she sprinted. She was already discovered and chased by who-knows-what, maybe someone will discover her and try helping?

She sprinted around a bend in the road and slammed headlong into something, spining around and floping prone on the ground. Her ankle twisted around with an audible pop, pain shooting along the whole of her leg like a bolt of lighting. She tried to stand only to fall down again, and continued dragging herself foreward with two hands and shoving with one leg, the other hanging behind innefectively. She heard A screaming noise, the coarse, almost bird-like call of a deer in fear.

Nesira risked a backwards look over her shoulder.

By good- or bad- luck, the deer and it's assailant stood in full, bright moonlight. The creatures body was segmented, chitinous, almost but not quite like a centipede, while the head vaguely like a mantis, but with a long, thick probiscus, filled with holes along the sides, like- well, like a fleshy flute. This primary body was smaller than she expected it to be, perhaps the size of a large dog.

But it's limbs were not insectile. Its arms, more than anything else, reminded her long ink-strokes, thin and sinuous as a signature. But, evidently strong enough to hold both itself and a whole deer in the air.

The creature was laughing. Laughing like an excited infant, who had recived a new toy.

Ash was grunting and mooing, thrashing its head back, while the monster cooed and fussed over it, brushing it's strand-limbs along it's head and antlers. It let out a peal of laghter as it, seemingly with no effort, twisted one of Ash's legs around, bending a knee to a right angle in a wrong direction.

Crunch.

A peal of shrieking laughter.

Crunch.

Laughter

Crunch. Crunch.

It dropped the deer, silent but still writhing and jerking, to the ground, and descended upon it. Several more leaped from the shadows to join the feast.

Nesira tried to scream, but her throat clenched itself shut, as though an unseen hand strangled her. She wimpered weakly, and continued dragging herself along. Inch by agonizing inch.

Blessedly, the creatures did not follow her. She continued until she lost track of time, and continued still, dragging herself along the dirt road on her belly. She tried, at one point, to at least pull herself up and crawl on all fours, but her ankle refused her even that. So she continued to crawl.

Eventually, after several hours to judge the moon, she came to a clearing, where someone had made a small camp-site. She could smell the remnant of wood smoke and cooked meat, and could, vaguely, make out the form of a human sleeping beside the fire pit.

Nesira tried in vain to say something, anything, to wake him up or get his attention, but her voice refused to come. So instead, with great effort and pain, she turned onto her back, sprawled out, and fell into the abyss of sleep.

Blessedly, she had the good nightmare. A dream of darkness, silence, and stillness. A nightmare still, but a peaceful one.