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.

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.