Dream a Little Dream (Chapter 5a - The Other Side of the Door)

[Solerei]

Her knuckles are bloody now, from pounding on the door.  "In here! I'm in here!"  A fragment of her mind that isn't in full panic thinks how romantic it is...a hero come to save her. 

Then she feels the darkness coming closer.  Something that has been in the back of her thoughts for days.  Snakes.

"No!" She pushes the intrusion out and concentrates on the door, just in time to hear a shout to get back.  She scrambles back away as the door cracks.  Then there are screams and flashes and horrible sounds.  A frigid crackle at the door, and it flies open. 

She reaches out to the figure entering, the figure she's felt in her mind in the depths of the dark, grey sea that has been her life since the stables...and freezes.

A fiend!  It is a fiend! It has tricked her! Dark as pitch, rough and dangerous!  She looks around frantically for a weapon, even as her mind is telling her that this is her friend...soothing her, reaching out to her...it is speaking.

Well, she thinks it's speaking.  She stares.  It speaks some hellish devil-tongue!  Hand...it's holding out its hand.  It looks nervous? 

Larielle glances over the shoulder of her erstwhile rescuer, out into the hallway, just in time to be blinded by a flash so bright, the afterimage of a tall woman with a bow is seared into her vision for precious moments.  In a flash, the pressure that has been in her heart and mind for days recedes, driven away.  Far away.  Not gone, not completely, but she can breathe, she can think, she can...take that hand?

She pauses and thinks.  .oO(I asked to be saved.  I didn't specify how or by whom.  And he came for me. No matter what he is, he came for me.)  She grabs his hand, her own cold and shaking with fear...almost as much of these new creatures as the ones who have held her. It's time for the devil she doesn't know.

Her vision shifts, and for a moment, she thinks she is slipping back into the grey sea.  The horrible, thick grey sea. No! Noooo!  Then they're somewhere else.