She remembers this place, but only half. At a glance it was one of her old homes, a quaint two story skinny thing shoved next to a complex in a German suburb. For a moment Stormy believes she is dreaming in monochrome: the streets are slicked black, the snow covering everything and turning what it hides into muted colors as it soaks in. Even the trees seem to be ashen and sapped of life as more snow falls like sprinkles from the sky. But while the young hunter can tell what this place is, at the same time she cannot: the edges are blurred, the colors are wrong, the structures seem to be a bit dilapidated, and the most important part was that there was someone there with her where normally only sits empty air.

Not Thane of course, no, the dracolich hadn’t yet made it into her dreams (though a different one has before). No, it’s something small. Something just as familiar, but also as off. But unlike their surroundings, the figure seems to be sharpened to the point of being painful to look at, glittering gold like someone from an exotic land and yet with a face that looks just like her. The not-her walks in shuffling steps that do not leave the ground, her hands tucked in large sleeves. A gold haircomb glistens in a strange light Stormy can’t identify; the clouds cover the sky completely in layers of gray, so it can’t be the sun.

Then she realizes that maybe the girl is the sun. A sun that only has a faint amount of light in it, but a star nevertheless.

She stands rooted to the spot until the not-her stands not three feet from her. Identical in height, hair, and skin, but the eyes are different despite being the same color as like the others. One watches with quiet awe – one watches with quiet melancholy. On a scale of one to ten for her dream’s vividness, Stormy gives it a ten; but the content barely scrapes by with a three thus far.

“Do I know you?” the not-her asks, and she can tick off voice being the same as well. Soft and breathy and just the slightest bit plaintive.

“I don’t know. Should I know you?”

“I asked first . . .”

But that’s answer enough. The not-her now knows what Stormy does – that they are the same person essentially – which is curious because if this is her dream, why wouldn’t she have already? Unless of course this her was not part of her, making the not-her a not-not-her . . . But before she can ask, the not-not-her does it for her. “Are you real?”

“Aren’t we both existing while we’re in here?”

“There, I thought I was. There I knew. Here I do not know anything. Here I am not so sure.” The not-her’s light seems to dim as her face falls. [colo=gray]“What is real and what is illusion? I thought I was here to meet someone better than I, but what stands before me is someone just as small . . .”

Unsure if there is a veiled insult in that, Stormy presses on. “Where is there?” she asks curiously. “You’re asking a lot of funny questions for a dream.”

“What if it is not a dream?” she retorts quietly, crestfallen. “What if . . . What if I am not better in the other world than I was in Edric?” She fiddles with the inside of her sleeve and bites her lip, tentatively prompting, “What are you in your world?”

Is this really her? Insecurity they can share, but Stormy is not used to seeing actual emotion ascribed to her expressions. They stand in the foot-high snow of a false Germanic neighborhood where she used to roam and enjoy life as a child, and all she can see is a small sad sun wanting a spark of hope to light her up again. Her. The one called Stormy because she doesn’t want to come to terms with what her real name comes with. The one who doesn’t like to feel, who keeps to statistics and facts and trivia as her means of communicating with the outside world from within the shell she calls her body. The one who had fallen into such despair that she had almost ended everything.

And all she can do to give the teen hope is a quirk of her mouth and a simple answer. “I’m a Hunter, and we protect humanity from what they fear most.”

She isn’t sure why the girl looks close to tears and is even slightly disturbed by it. Stormy hasn’t mentioned that she is just a trainee, for instance, or that she is oftentimes face-to-face with death and serious injury from her own lack of common sense or pure bad luck, and that she’s been certain at times that her partner laments who he chose. But the more the Hunter looks at this not-her or not-not-her or whoever it was, the more she realizes that the details don’t matter to this Stormy. This Stormy only cares for what the real one represented: a hope for the people of another world. And that is enough.

“I was a peasant once,” the dim-lit version began, abashedly wiping at her eyes with her sleeve. “But my emperor and lord saw fit to make me a noble in the war. I had a chance to make him proud, but I failed. Everyone fought valiantly, but all I could do was cling to their sleeves and bring back a few flowers . . .” Stormy blinks as what looked like slightly crumpled petals blew past them (in a rather strangely Pochahontas-esque manner, she notes with a tiny amount of glee, which she knows is inappropriate for the situation but Disney. “And when I died, I died in the mud. I tarnished my own kingdom’s color with the same muck I had been born into,” the apparently noble not-her added with a trembling lip.

Awkward and out of her depth, Stormy keeps her hands to herself and waits patiently, her eyes averted to the curve of the girl’s shoes. Even with herself she is distant, the only real thought in her mind being that she is glad the dream didn’t deign to pull them into the mud for emphasis as well.

At length the not-her continues with a sniffle. “When my afterlife told me a story and said I was not real, it gave me a second chance. It brought me back to life, changed my silver to gold, and let me prove to my emperor that I was worth it.” Stormy saw her sleeves rub together; the not-her was holding her hands to her chest. Her voice seems to grow more and more distant. “Go to the Tower, find the objects, name the Voice. But the stairs keep going and going, and I ran as fast as I could, I swear I did, but they keep rising above me in an endless circle, and I see the door just ahead, but just before – ” She stops, her breath stuck in her throat as she shivers enough that even her billowy robes rustle.

There is a silence again, windless and dry in spite of the melting snow.

“Do you know what the difference is between flying and falling?” the noble suddenly asks, and Stormy softens.

“All depends on where you wanna go.”

The other nods her head with a wistful smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “The Tower fell apart around me before I could reach the top. I had been rising, flying . . . and then falling into oblivion once more. Even in the end when I could say goodbye, I kept my distance because I was ashamed . . . I might not be real, but what I saw, what I felt, what happened to me – all of it was very real.”

“Not everything you’re saying is making sense,” the real Stormy says slowly. She hesitates, then offers her hand. “I’m sorry about all that . . . It sounds like a good story.”

“Good? But I had no happy ending. I died and fell and died again, and all I could say was that I saw the emperor and his queen and two other nobles come together in the end.”

“All the best stories have a little bittersweetness,” Stormy says as a matter of factly, her hand still extended. “It makes it more realistic.”

The noble pauses to consider her words, and then swallows a hardness down her throat and takes her hand gratefully. “Do you like stories then? Will you remember mine, for what it’s worth?” she asks in a small voice, her sharp edges fading into a soft glow of gold that melted with the dream.

“Only if you tell it in full,” Stormy answers with a light smile. For a bed time story was a marvelous thing, but a story played out in your head was so much better. Her dream is suffused with gold light and the snow begins to melt. What is revealed by that-who-is-not-her, however, is not quite what she expects.

And the nightmares are still to come once the fragment fades. They wait on no-one after all - not even nobles.