drunk and driven by a devil's hunger; any

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

He holds her in a way that she cannot unbind from.

She has felt this kind of fast fix before. She has been this helpless before—time and time and time again; infinitely still and beholden—but it does not make it easier to stomach. Each time, it is like a claw reaching all that much deeper, to find more things to feast on—on and on and on—until there is nothing left but a husk of fractured bones and half-lived dreams, half-dreamed realties. Single-minded seeking, a ghost tracking down her last earthly business before she can finally rest.

(If he will not go, then, perhaps, that makes him real. As he had said he is. 
But if he is real, why does he mean to frighten her so?)

She knows the escaped things, dreams and walks with them; she does not remember (nor dream of) the native beasts. She represses those—horns curved back, in her sleep they are only symbolic constellations set in a final and forever blackness; the powerful coldness that numbed the left side and pulverized, forever, her ability to leave freely. She has no friends, but the furred and feathered beasts of this very forest, but they are old friends and often the raise their hackles at her; she has no connective tissue to this woken world, but for the two, Irisa and father, and she has not seen either for years.

As he shifts to that equine form, she begins to unravel, lulled more and more by the curious bait he sets for her—he is real, and that makes him an unknown, but he continues to show her forms like honey, gentling with each transformation. She begins to accept his flesh and blood as something like hers (probably; much more than she knows), and his sharp, green eyes as kind, though they bore and contain a strangeness she cannot grasp. 

Nyxia is a cautious creature, so like the deer her father browbeat into nursing her, but she is lonely and soft as a babe, over-willing to visit friendly shores wherever she can find them.

“I-I… I dream of dreams. Is that the same t-thing?” her lips quiver as she talks, her golden eye still working slowly on moving to him, “s-sometimes, I-I… I am d-dangerous when I d-dream.” She blinks a tear, dropping her head and shaking it mournfully. 

“I dream of dreams and d-dreams follow me w-w-when I wake. So… I don’t think I dream. I just f-f-float.” Her vioce is airy and dazed, having never shook the cobwebs of all the in-between she has visited, each one muddling her more than the previous. “I live,” she concludes, “under the waves of my mind, I think. I d-didn’t always.”

“I was just a girl once.”

She inhales, her bright eye finally resting on his face, and in it she sees something enticing—in the flat spaces under his eyes and the the round places on his chin and nose. She frowns and blinks at him, the realization surfacing in a muddy way, “Woolf.” She’s met wolves before—father kept all things at bay—but never Woolf. “I’m… N-Nyxia.”

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.