Dawnraze's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dawnraze smelled the rot before she saw it. She had run this dream path a thousand times, a ribbon of moss and starlight that led to a sleeping woman she was slowly teaching to listen. Tonight the ribbon ended twenty paces early. A flat sheet of pale mist hovered where the path should be, hiding nothing underneath. The grey expanse had reached her road. She was a wolf spirit, and she had made herself the last bridge between the dream world and the waking one. Humans used to walk into her country every night. Now most of them slept behind a wall she could not open. One woman still heard her, faintly, and did not yet know what she was hearing. Dawnraze meant to guide that woman, and then more, until people dreamed together again and woke into something better. She could not do any of it if the roads dissolved under her paws. She stepped forward in her traveling shape, small and quick, saving her full form for later need. The mist parted around her legs and showed grey nothing beneath. She jumped back. Ahead, a tall dark pitcher plant had grown where the path used to run clean, its purple throat open, its vines curling into fog. The path was still there inside the plant, half-eaten, half-real. She could feel it under the leaves like a rope fraying in water. She could cross, maybe. She could also fall through. A hyena shape watched her from a patch of firm ground past the plant. Pale eyes, grey coat, quiet. "Path's going," Xander said. "Honestly, most of them are." He did not move to help. He had his own ground to hold and she knew it. Dawnraze pulled a blossom from her ruff, a small blue and gold flower she carried for moments like this. She set it at the edge where the mist began. The petals brightened and stayed lit. The path under the pitcher plant firmed beneath the mark, just enough to name it, not enough to walk. She placed a second blossom on the far side, past Xander's feet. Between the two lights, the road existed as a memory she could return to, even after the grey took the rest. She turned back before the mist could close behind her. The sleeping woman would not hear her tonight. Dawnraze had traded reach for record: two lit points where a road used to be, proof the grey could be marked if not stopped. She ran for older, deeper trails, the ones she had not checked in a long time. If the expanse was eating the near paths, the far ones were already thinner. She needed a route the grey had not learned yet, and she needed it before the woman stopped listening.