A Handful of Dust

As is known to anyone who has read any of my stories about her, Valerias Caan is not the most mentally sound character in existence. She is plagued by all sorts of things, among them, frequent nightmares. The contents of these dreams have been food for a good bit of my writing about her, so this thread will be a place for me to collect accounts of her nightmares that aren't otherwise long or poignant enough to make into full stories.

I'll be adding a few paragraphs or so, now and then, as her dreams often relate to what's going on RP-wise or to the current state of her mind. Consider it a strange take on an IC journal.

The third of November. Following the riots in the city, the elementals and the burning in the streets, and men crying the end of the world.
-

The snow was falling thick around her, while the wind gusted at her ragged fur cloak and painted the world a blinding white. The storm was one such as every traveller dreaded to have sweep up on them unawares; but more than the fury of winter, it was the voices that she couldn't bear.

'She's afraid.' Afraid. Afraid.

She opened her mouth to curse them, but when she turned, there was nothing but the storm sweeping across her own ragged tracks. She cursed them anyway, but the wind caught the words as they tumbled from her lips and sent them skirling away in a howl of snow.

How long had she been here? Her hands clung to the inside of her furs, long since numb, and a cold such as she had never known ran through her veins and touched the marrow of her bones. It might have been hours, or the entirety of her life. As she groped forward among the drifts, bending away from trees that loomed suddenly from the white to reach for her with cold fingers, she only knew that she had to run. The dark was gathering; the white of the snow was fading to a dingy grey and soon there would be nothing left to keep the voices back.

'It was you who made me afraid,' she tried to shout, but the mocking chorus whirled around her, as if they were at the heart of the storm itself, drowning her out. Sometimes she could discern a laugh that she recognised, or the tones of a voice; it was worse when she could name them.

'Kalec's little girl, can't weather the storm.'

'The ground shakes and she's running for someone's arms.'

'She's gone soft, the sight of death makes her sick.'

She closed her ears and stumbled forward, but her kin still howled in her wake. When at last she fell, it was against the low-sweeping branches of a great pine. It was almost night, and the branches were half buried in the drifts; her knee turned and she pitched sideways among the needles, deep into the snow, and the chorus laughed and wailed around her. She knew dimly that she should get up, but her veins had turned to ice and her limbs to wood, and when she struggled to take hold of something to pull herself up, the pine branches bent away.

'Not yet,' she tried to say, though her face was numb and she couldn't hear herself. But she was not ready to die. 'Not yet, I promised.'

And then, somewhere far distant, across the great, dark, snowswept landscape, there was a flicker of light. A torch, or a hearthfire, or a flame from someone's hand–

But she couldn't reach it. It was too far away; the snow was drifting around her shoulders, now; the voices were all around her, and there was nothing to hold onto.

'Not yet,' she whispered, as icy fingers touched her throat.

The sixteenth of November.
-

She stood at the crest of a peak, her feet settled almost weightlessly on the ice and snow that encrusted the summit. All around her, stars gathered - for the pinnacle was of such a height that any ground below was lost in mist and shadow. The mountain and all that surrounded it belonged to the heavens moreso than to the earth.

The air was so thin that each breath was like a knife to her lungs, and yet her eyes were drawn only the richness of the sky. The stars glinted brighter than any constellations she had ever seen, while comets rushed past with cold fire in their wake, and in the distance, the gold and amethyst rays of the northern lights burned across the horizon.

For a moment, the beauty of the heavens stabbed her more sharply than did the air itself. Was this, then, the fulfillment of the climb? Had she reached up for the ethereal threads of hope and found this - the vastness of these skies, so much greater than the works of man? For an instant, her heart soared, and she raised her hands toward the dancing of the stars.

It was then that she heard the singing. Its strains grew and rose around her, borne on the windless air: a lamentation that knew no words in any tongue. It was quiet, distant, and yet contained such a note of despair as she had never heard on the lips of a dying man, nor seen etched into the face of one wracked by pain. And as she raised her eyes to the heavens, she understood.

The aurora blazed on the horizon not in the throes of ecstasy but of agony. The stars shone with such brilliance because they had raised their voices for one final song, and as meteorites rained from the sky, she watched like one transfixed in time while the stars began to go out one by one, leaving great swathes of space in darkness.

The ice beneath her feet began to break apart, then, and even the golden fire of the northern lights flared and flickered and was extinguished. She tumbled from the heights, and as she fell away into the endlessness of the void, she joined her own voice to those of the dying stars, knowing that this, at last, was the end of all things.