The first thing Sleepless did as she came into awareness of her surroundings was to glance beside her for Bitter End - the doe was not there.At least she won't be complaining about this, she thought, not without fondness, and perhaps the slightest tinge of wistfulness. Their last couple of dreams together had been so very interesting.
But this promised to be just as interesting, alone. Sleepless swept her eyes acoss the horizon - except there didn't seem to be one. No colour, not much of a landscape, merely unending sheets of pebbled stone: she narrowed her eyes, but found her gaze unable to focus. There was only the vague sensation of a distant blur. Only the obelisk, then. Always the obelisk.
"It's been a while, old friend," she murmured, staring up thoughtfully as she slowly circled the glowing stone, "I don't suppose you'll let me crack your secrets this time?"
Naturally, there was no reply. The symbols etched into its surface were just as she remembered - she'd scratched a few that'd particularly stuck with her from her last extensive dream-investigation into her rudimentary research back home - but no more enlightening. A few more revolutions as she studied the symbols as intently as possible, to add to her notes when she woke - should she wake - and she took a deep breath, knowing what always came next.
"Will this hurt like it did?" she asked aloud, a whimsical smile of sorts flitting across her lips as she raised her hoof and pushed it deliberately against the stone -
- perhaps it was because she had become more used to it in a way, from her many experiments with the obelisk the first time round, but this was not so clearly pain -
- a breath-halting shock, as if your heart had suddenly seized...or filled to its fullest -
- it is pain, or -
- she woke.
No, she did not wake. This was the Swamp - this was not the Swamp. The firefly lights, the thrum of cicada, the air, wet and warm in her lungs - it was all as it should be, but different, and when she turned, she was unsurprised to find the Obelisk, as always. And this time, as the Swamp ebbed, far far, away around her, and then slowly back, it felt impossible to take her eyes off.
For the first time, she felt it, the strange, unpleasant feeling in her chest. Like dead plants, left to wither for too long, that the next touch caused a wet disintegration. (Like that time, so early in her career, where she had not yet learnt to properly cure a carcass, and she'd spent the next few days unplannedly studying the life cycle of flies in repulsed fascination.)
The symbols burnt into her eyes. In the back of her mind, she idly considered that she would not forget them now. In the back of her throat, bile caught and spread, clawing up from the festering rot. She wanted to retch, but she could not move.
And yet, she was not...unhappy.
What is your purpose, thoughts she could not physically say raced through her mind, sparking a million possibilities, as breathlessly as if she'd gasped them – she felt as if she'd gasped, were gasping them, in making me feel this way? What is your purpose at all?
And even as the sickly miasma blotted out the edges of her mind, the symbols glowing hotter, ever hotter, as if this all would consume, there is still that trace of excitement as she thinks, and what is the purpose, if I were to end here?
But just thinking the word 'end' prompted the image of the doe to rise in her mind's eye: she could see her friend at this very moment, embittered, yearning, alone.
Her eyes cleared. She shook out her mane. For the first time since the fall, she'd thought of something other than the thrill of inquiry, and that seemed enough to break the spell.
"Curious," she muttered. She glanced about the dream-Swamp, but nothing there had changed – no phantom Bitter End to suddenly join her. She glanced again at the Obelisk...and found she could only withstand brief moments of staring before the rot threatened to consume her once more. She moved towards it to find the same.
"I don't think," she said to the obelisk, carefully averting her eyes and affixing the stricken image of her friend in her mind, "I should end here. Not even if that reveals your secrets to me. Not yet, anyway. Unfinished business and all that."
So she busied herself by inscribing symbols – risking short glances after every five – into the mud, till she realised she was staring down at a mass of illegible scribbles on her bower floor; morning had broken over real-Swamp.
END