she's still out there and the chasm grows; any

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

She moves at a run, on different limbs, but the gait’s similar enough. The world has erupted in new scents, things her equine senses had not been privy to. She can smell the forest all around her, the scent-trails of the animals that had been there before. She can smell the river, too, long before they come to it, a fresh scent that she cannot quite describe.
They spill out from the depths of the forest to the river’s edge, two rangy, wild things. The river itself is exquisite – of course it is, everything here is, mother built it that way, and Irisa has only begun to learn how to change it. The river crashes over rocks, and diamonds, a gluttony of magnificence that could not exist in the real world. The water itself is crystalline, and Irisa is rocketed with the memory of the water – she’d played in it, as a child, it had burst cool and sweet on her tongue, splashed against her legs and belly.
(Heartworm had never let her go too deep. Even in a land of her own making, caution clutched her by the throat.)
She halts by its edge, her strange paws sinking into the soft earth. She risks a glance at him – he seems at home, in this body, and she wishes she could give it to him as a more permanent thing, but her powers only exist here. In waking, she is all but useless.
Still – they have this. She will give him this, and whatever else he might ask for. She realizes this and something inside of her aches, and she forces her gaze back to the river, to the things that sparkle and shine beneath the water.

“We came here often,” she says, the words a bit slow – she’s still adjusting to this lengthened jaw, the sharpness of the teeth in her mouth – “I always thought it beautiful. She made sure most things were beautiful.”
She doesn’t remember a time when they weren’t. She only knows the dreamworld as it is – she was not present when it decayed, as her mother’s world fell apart. She only knows the beauty of it.
“It fits you,” she says, then, because she has looked to him again, his crimson fur, his gleaming fangs, “being a wolf, I mean.”

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm