what the woods say when you are sleeping

[i2eve]

Fandom: Homestuck (Faestuck AU)
Words: 805
Ships: slight Rose/Aradia
Characters: Rose, Aradia, mentions of Roxy
Rating: G
Spoilers: n/a
Notes: I'm actually going to try using this journal for something um. crossposted from tumblr. Faestuck is a Homestuck AU between Rikku and myself wherein trolls are faefolk and everything is self-indulgent.

 

It’s that dream again, the one that tastes of spring and firelight.

You’re in the meadow to the east of the river, except you can still see the house and the gardens and even the little kissing gate that screeches in the wind. The colours are all wrong, though. Too bright, too bitter, too saturated. There are stars strung in a copper sky and a low moon slung like a salesman’s oily grin. (It reminds you of your uncle and the day he knocked three times on the heavy wooden door and took you and your sister away. You liked that house. You liked the winters you spent there, curled up in the living room, just Roxy and you, a book across your lap and a palace made of pillowcases and clothing line. You were alright just alone. Just the two of you.) 

For a moment everything tastes of firewood and you see blankets draped along the branches of a silver oak and your sister’s ankle peeking from beneath the sheet (you know it’s her, because she’s got a scar along her tendon, shaped like a child’s crooked crayon jolly roger, the one she got when she fell out of that tree) but then the field brightens and is clear as daylight even though it is still night (somehow) and there are flowers you’ve never seen before, and ones you have, but they’re all out of season, out of synch, out of time with the blue-lit, silver-bathed field.

You’re reading a book, or at least something that looks like a book. The words are all nonsense, backwards letters and digit vowels, dream language, sleep speech, sweet poetry you will forget immediately upon waking.

The pages flutter and coo like doves and you look up to see a creature standing at the forest’s edge.

You set the book down by your feet, careful. It takes to the sky with a whisper sound. Bluebells sprout in its wake.

The creature smiles at you from afar, and, then, just like that, she’s right where you are.

She’s got cloven hooves and hair like ivy (the way it twists and grows and takes over everything) and two twin horns that curl with the elegance of an instrument. She smells like the woods, which is a place they told you never to go (so you did, in secret, with your sister trailing behind you, then stumbling in front, glad to be rid of the cold walls, narrow halls, closed windows), and maybe that’s why you take her hand when she reaches out, even though her teeth are sharp enough to cut stones.

The deercreature (because surely, that’s what she must be, although her shape keeps changing as you walk. or maybe it’s the forest that’s changing. you think you see an owl fly from a tree, only it has too many eyes and when it blinks there is an ivory rabbit in its place) leads you to the woods. She’s talking to you but her words are all babble, a bubbling brook, river running over stepping stones. She speaks too slow but it sounds like honey, so you listen anyway.

(You think you hear her call you sunchild, while her hands run through your hair. It makes you uneasy, somewhat, but twin suns shine through the thicket. Daylight is safe. It will be okay.)

It’s only when you reach the edge of the forest that things start to go awry. Wake pulls at your ankles like the tide rolling back upon itself and the deergirl’s grip around your hand turns to cold hard stone. She seems insistent on getting you into the forest. (You can hardly see it now. There are dream eyes at the back of your head and the meadow is eating away at the edges, giving way to nothingness the way smoke dissipates.) The sky hasn’t changed but it seems so much darker. On a different pane, there is dark cloud, lightning, tendrils dipping from the ozone that seem closer to creatures than sky. The rabbit sprouts wings and turns into a serpent as it flies away. You see the tree your sister fell from grow in the place of a violet. The deergirl still won’t let go. The forest seems hungry.

Then it all breaks. 

You swear your see frost creeping along the meadow, turning all the flora inside out.

(Instead of poison, you think of spring. Things must sleep before they can grow again. That, or they die.)

When you wake you find yourself slumped against the floor beneath the window, five feet from your bed. There are handprints etched in the morning frost. Six fingers, and something that looks like blood.

You shiver but you don’t really feel the cold at all.

(Try as you might, you can never remember a face.)