[Pareidolia]

The space around her was inky black fog, and that’s how Eira knew this was a dream. She walked through it and it swirled about her in thin wispy tendrils. Her antlers glowed blue. In her dreams at least, they were not broken. Eira did not like her dreams, really. She felt trapped in them when they were occurring, and when she woke her nose often bled and her eyes were blinded with pain. Umbra told her that sometimes when she saw things she thrashed and wailed. Other times she was perfectly still, like a corpse. Either way, once a dream began there was no leaving it, not until it was over.

“Hello?” The hellhound said, furrowing her brow. And then, with a glimmer of hope - “…Amen?” No one answered, so she kept walking. The way seemed endless, with all directions the same void. Featureless. It wasn’t unusual for her, and she wasn’t afraid, not yet. Some dreams were more than dreams, she’d learned, and they began like this sometimes. Like the brain was clearing a palette before laying the images before her. Eira narrowed her eyes. These visions were always complicated.

She’d seen a river of death in a vision once, and Inaria had brought it to her. She’d seen a blue boy, and she’d traveled until she met him. The sound of Kekkai’s laughter. Sometimes she simply saw what was, or what would be. What she saw was what she got.

But she’d been fooled before, too - she had seen a royal boy with antlers like her own, silhouetted against an ancient forest kingdom, and she had thought it might be a home for her. But the Sovereign Gideon was not like her, and neither had he been a king. His crown had been doubly false, and Eira had been misled. What is true and what appears to be true are sometimes different things indeed. Gideon wore antlers upon his head. It did not mean his blood was hellish nor did it mean his blood was noble. Eira had wanted it to be true. But that didn’t matter.

Sometimes what she saw could not be true at all. A child reaching for a star that was impossibly close but eternally far. The moon falling onto a quiet valley, until the wolves lifted it up again and placed it back in the sky. A cover of roses that bent away and curled as though they were an animal themselves. Once she had seen a clean white skull with bright, living eyes that roamed about and stopped to stare at children if they passed. If there was sense in these images it was perhaps a different sort of truth, for they could not actually happen. Eira was a gruff girl, ill-educated and impatient, and separating out symbols was easier for those whose heads were not splitting with pain.

And then lastly - there were things she saw in her dreams that she could not say were true or untrue. She had once seen red fire spill from a mountain - not a place she had been, not a thing she had seen. What was there to make of it? Was it real? Was it an image that meant something else? There was no way for her to know. It seemed a fantastic thing, a world shattering thing, and yet the world was still here.

What would she see tonight, she wondered as she walked, until she spotted something small and red and gold in the distance ahead of her. There was only one way to find out. Maybe none of her visions were real at all, everything just a psychological rearrangement of symbols, of things she had heard once in passing, of things she hoped and feared. But she had not known of Gideon or Zenith before she had seen them in the black, chilly expanse of her mind. And so Eira believed the things she saw, even if she didn’t understand them.

“Hello?” She asked again.

[Pareidolia]

The blood in her veins was old. Her dreamscapes seemed to know that, lending her its power so that she could stride long and confident through an expanse of old-growth forest, her head fearless and proud, her verdant eyes hungry. Purple blossoms sprang up in the wake of every footstep, and though they smelled sweet, Pareidolia somehow knew not to touch them. Maybe it was only the memory of the bad-tasting bug that held her back.

How alike jacaranda and monkshood appeared!

Colorful vipers emerged from the petals and watched her from the sidelines, their tongues forked and curious. Exotic birds painted the sky and covered the canopy with their feathers. Doli was picking one of them up, a pinion with a deep indigo hue, a gift from a friend, but stopped and looked wide-eyed into the distance, frozen and confused, the feather prickling the inside of her mouth.

Something was happening to her kingdom. Like a galaxy pulled into a black hole, the world lost pieces and focus, swallowed by the chilly dark before her. She saw trees minced and obliterated by the approach of an intruder’s bleak headspace. She heard the thing talk to her, caught the eerie outline of its antlers against the black, and despite herself the princess was frightened.

“HEY!” barked Doli, the fur on her back rising, her tail puffing out defiantly. “Hey, you!!” She stomped her two front paws at Eira. “This is MY dream, so you better just go home, o-or — or my mom will have you EXECUTED!!!”

Whatever that meant. All she knew was that it was something scary. Maybe Eira would agree.