Dawnraze's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Dawnraze ran until the near country fell behind her. She was hunting an older road, one the grey had not tasted yet. Her paws struck ground that softened as she went. Then she looked down and saw the trouble was not only under her feet. Grey mist clung to the tips of her fur. It had climbed her hocks while she ran. Where it touched, her wolf shape thinned and lost color. She shook hard. Some of it flew off. Some of it stayed, sunk in like damp. She understood what it meant. If the mist took her traveling form, she could not cross into the human world at all. The woman would sleep alone, and no one would be left to teach her. She stopped in a hollow where a blue tree grew from black water. Its branches held small lights like frost catching sun. Prayer marks, older than her memory. Around its roots, a low white mist drifted, calm and clean, nothing like the grey. She had come here as a pup, before she was a bridge. She had almost forgotten the way. She stepped into the pale mist. It curled up her legs and pushed against the grey that clung to her. The two mists met on her coat and hissed without sound. The grey did not want to let go. She pressed her chest to the tree's root and held. To hold, she had to give something. She knew that from old lessons. She let her full form rise, the daemon shape she saved for need. It came slow and heavy, too large for the hollow. Light poured off her ribs. The grey on her fur burned back in strips. The clean mist drank what burned off. She felt her traveling shape scour clean underneath, thin but hers again. The cost came at once. Her daemon form buckled. It had risen too fast, in the wrong country, for the wrong work. It folded back into her like a coat pulled through a ring. She knew, standing there, that rebuilding it would take longer than before. Maybe seasons. She had spent her weapon to keep her key. She stepped out of the pale mist as her small self, whole and cold. The blue tree dimmed one light and kept the rest. She could cross again. She could reach the woman, if she found a road. But she would cross as a messenger only, with no power to push back anything larger than a dream. Dawnraze turned her nose to the dark past the hollow. Somewhere out there, an older path waited, and the grey was already learning it. She had her form. She had no time. She ran.