RORY
i told the stars about you
Rory did not sleepwalk, and that should've keyed him in on the fact that he was awake.Rory did not dream so vividly, and that should've keyed him in on the fact that he was awake.
But neither did, not really. He somehow transitioned from the depths of his heavy, exhausted sleep to being vertical again, goosebumps rising on his skin. The air inside the farmhouse was cool despite the banked embers in the hearth. Night pressed in around him. As he shivered, he wondered, in a sort of far-away, cotton-y way, why he was cold. He usually did not freeze in his dreams.
Hands, still warm from beneath the blankets, found an off-white tunic and tugged it over his head. It went about halfway down his thighs, preserving his modesty, but not by a wide margin.
Barefoot and barely breathing he slipped into the dark, lulled and lured by the haunting melodies wrapping around his heart. His breath pooled into the air and his eyes were bright, filled with wonder, yet the slow way in which they drifted told of the dreamlike state he was in.
His feet whispered over cold spring ground. The dream carried him past the barrier's scar; he had not been here when awake, eyed it as a curiosity, stepped over with no hesitation. Fire—the memory of it still living on his skin—fell with orange warmth across his night-pale face. He did not balk from it.
The path he followed led to the murmur of a river, and a crowd. Upon the river stood a woman, breathing fire, and a shiver tingled down Rory's spine. The cold air drifted up his legs in an oddly intimate way.
Somewhere between the forest and the gathering it finally clicked in his brain: he was not asleep.
This was no dream.
This was real.
He was instantly both terrified and unimpressed, and ducked off the path, to the side, drifting along the edge of the trees and hoping that no one would notice him—a ghost in an off-white goat's wool tunic, silent on his bare, cold feet, golden hair washed out to silver in the starlight.
