The sorceror-king has syncretised, more a formless looming dream-impression of Beast, of Eater, now than anything shaped like a man. Faerie is digesting him, leaching the foreign nutrients of haecceity from him, assimiliating.
He is still enough himself to fight it, to seek escape; to seek it through Eislyn, whether as petty revenge or to bolster the work through symbolism: the very paladin who trapped him here, purposed into the medium through which he hatches anew.
Fighting against water, against cold and slippery footing, against terror, Eislyn remembers. She is a paladin, and a paladin of dreaming: this is her fight. This is, if not her Monarch's land, a close cousin. She is an ambassador, an invited guest, and a warrior.
The drowning pool snatches away its bed from beneath her feet, again, and she allows it. She is a Knight of the Blue-Winged Monarch, and she walked the width of a dreaming ocean bed to come here; why should she fear water now?
The sorceror-king is a foreigner. They do things differently here. He howls for control of her, grasps and hates, and Eislyn moves as a dreamer in dreams. He fears to lose himself here, even as he does, because he asserts his singular nature. Unchanging immortal tyranny is a dream; iron control of other people is a dream. Of course faerie reduces him to one of its props; he climbed upon its shelf himself.
He drowns her, and she is like a fish. He wraps darkness around her like a vise, and she is like a star. She changes, and is changed. She is a dreamer; she is alive. Distance stretches under her feet, like some navel-gazer's assertion that one has to travel separations by halves at a time, and as distances may be infinitely halved, so all journeys are infinite; and Eislyn refutes it, thus, by cheerily disbelieving its assertions: her own steps stretching to match, hop hop hop, to Annen's side.
"Annen," she says, hands on cold underwater cheeks, not looking at the hole torn in Annen's chest but at her eyes, staring beyond the roof. "Annen, you are not dead. He has not killed you, however it feels. I need you to believe you are not dead, merely dreaming of being dead. You are not bereft of mind or breath; you are not immobile. You are not doomed."
Annen's fixed and vacant eyes do not move, but her blue-tinged lips do, trembling, as if straining to speak. Eislyn bends low over her, her own heart fierce within her, to catch whatever words the seeming-of-a-corpse says.
"I am not Annen," the sorceror-king says, and hammers his hand through Eislyn's ribs.
