[open] Strangers in the night - anyone

[Saedìs]

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”Awaken, little dreamer.”  Darkness; the moonlight is netted across the land in pieces, broken and timid. She closes her eyes again.  ”Rise, child!”  An unpleasant, involuntary instinct forces her to snap awake. The world comes slowly into focus and every bit of it is foreign, even the smell of late summer grass and the feel of the warm air over her haunches. Saedís shivers.  Have I really been asleep so long? She cannot remember. Her mind, once so keen to every whisper and secret of the Earth has lost its sensitivity; she feels blind even as each shape in the shadows is perfectly outlined, feels numb even as the dirt below her shifts with her rising weight. She is waking from a dream that used to be her life, and with each passing moment logic slips through her reasoning like rain through the leaves, and she becomes passive to the ensuing emptiness.  She moves and her body screams in protest, every nerve regaining life under the agony of thousands of needles, but Saedís does not react. Her gait is jerky and her coat is dull; the splendor of the ocean a memory so dry that only the salt remained. She did not try to remember them. She did not care. The only thing that mattered now was the dangerous coaxing of the earth in front of her, the rewarding relief that came with each step forward, and the ache on her tongue for water. But she passes over a stream without seeing it, oblivious to the icy water that slides around her legs, as indifferent to her as she is to it. She has not needed to eat or drink over this past year, why should it now be necessary? Delirium is a harsh master, and he drives her before him unrelenting.  But she is not all lost: still the light of youth and innocence glows, hopeful, within her emerald gaze, and increasingly her stride evens and flows, remembering a time when golden sand shimmered beneath her and the setting sun painted fire along her silver body. The others there, the places she traveled and the love she lost; these things will come in time. For your sake, little dreamer, may you pray these memories are never recovered.  At one time she would have taken delight in the quiet solace of the night; but now she is terrified of it, abandoned by all she has ever known including her capability for recalling what may have protected her. It is this that forces clarity through her mind and turns the mystified shapes of her surroundings whole; it is this that draws her attention, finally, to the world she is moving through. The silk-soft feel of the moon, the choir song of evening’s creatures… they are curses upon her loneliness, echoes of what motivated the blood in her veins. She has been long without contact and even longer without proper rest, so when the ghost scent of other horses reaches her, she actually begins laughing. "Saedís!" And she sighs, as though having a fond conversation with a dear friend, "How blind you have become."  SAEDÌS