Shush was dreaming.But it wasn't like her other dreams.
If there was a moon, it cast no cool rays upon her.
If there was grass beneath her, it did not spring - there was no sweet scent of swaying blades.
Her nervous hooves found only hard purchase. Slipping shifts, the faint grind of stone on stone. The air was not wet like the Swamp, nor fresh like the plains. It smelt like...nothing - as if this place were nothing, nothing for miles around. Except for one thing.
It had no scent, it made no sound - even as her ears pricked this way and that - it did not even, in the strict sense of it, radiate a different temperature, and yet...her blind eyes knew just which way to turn to face it.
It drew her. She didn't know what she felt from it - alien sensations pricked at her mind, but she would not know to recognise a curve from a line, nor the very notion of a curve or line at all. Yet, she felt something, the sense of largeness, the sense of many, the sense of one. There was a thing that drew her, that she turned her face up to, that she stumbled, over slipping shifts, grind of stone on stone, up to, all these myriad senses. And when there was nothing else between this thing and her, when the entirety of it engulfed her awareness, when she moved into it -
- pain, white-hot, lanced through her body. Pain, like the first time her mother had turned briefly away from the little blind foal, and young Shush had had her first encounter with a sharpened edge. Her mother had gasped and cooed and cuddled and cried, and the memory of that - that it was nothing more than a memory now - hurt more than the pain, and that was what sustained her as she fell.
Now there was grass. Now there was water - everywhere, around her hooves, in the heavy air - the chirp of cicadas, the hum of fireflies' wings. But she was still dreaming - and she knew, because once again she felt compelled to turn her head to where she knew it was. Whatever it was - beyond the pain, the touch had felt like stone, stone with deep groves upon it in forms she did not know. But she moved to it no longer, because she could not.
Like a creeping vine - a flowering corpse - she felt it, snaking roots into her chest. The sickly damp, the mouldering stench, the old, familiar feeling of despair...she was frozen. Arrested. Paralysed. It rots - it rots, it rots, it swallows her whole.
...The slippery sac, so fragile and small, the little body stirring beneath the membrane, and then so still. She had been so afraid till it had moved again. When she had to leave the sac behind...
The sickly damp.
... She willed him, she whispered him, one breath in, one out, one breath in, one out - only silence. Then there was only silence. Only silence...
The mouldering stench.
...She was red. Everything - everything - everything she'd told her was red, she was. Mama, you are red -
"MAMA!"
The sound of her own voice, high and desperate as a child's, awakened her. Her fur was soaked with tears. It was the Swamp. It was still night. Mama was long gone. Unsteadily, she rose to her hooves and ventured out, not knowing how or where, to find the one Kin who had ever been near as kind.
END