The landscape of faerie stretches pale under a cold sun that's as white as snowfall; and in the distance there rises a pall of smoke, black and roiling.
Subtle, it is not.
Eislyn's steps are slowed even before she reaches the twisting miasmic column; around the base of it, a field of armoured figures is in constant motion. They are silent, and precise as clockwork; Eislyn sees no hint that anything occupies the armour at all. They merely move, something like a country dance, and something like a battlefield, now turning in elegant formation, now clashing blades in perfect bloodless choreography.
They are many, and they are close-packed, and they are fast. Eislyn dodges past a few, initially, easily enough; then realises the trick. They are many, and in constant motion; once in, there is nowhere safe to stand, forcing her own constant motion to stay clear of trampling feet and swinging swords. The wind shifts, blows the first acrid overtures of smoke into her face, and her breath burns like a carpenter's rasp inside her throat. The very weight of her flesh feels as though it intrinsically presses in on her ribs, suffocating to heave against. She pants and stumbles, tireless blades nipping and harrying at her.
She is not the knight she once was.
She has a moment of frustration — does faerie think that she lacks the introspection to know this? — that she hasn't already had her agonies of doubt; but that her Monarch chooses her still? — but faerie neither knows nor cares. All there is here, she brings with her, inside her. This is her own sometimes-slumbering doubt.
She sways beneath a length of irridescent steel, and grips her reed flute.
That is mighty, Kada's voice says in memory, admiring, and Eislyn clings to that, wheezes a long note through the flute, staggers along with the flow of unwearying steel as best she can, and shakily plays.
Her legs are heavy, head spinning, breath hoarse; she is tired, slow and clumsy. But she is a Knight of Blue-Winged Sleep, a paladin of the Monarch; and she winds the might and soft suggestion of the dreaming realm into every ragged breath, spins herself into the dance, slows and stills the blades, softens the tempo of the feet; is passed by the elbow from mailed hand to mailed hand through a sedate country square dance until she stumbles from the inner edge of the crowd, falling upon soot-stained white grass on her knees, coughing wretchedly but unmolested.
Too much to ask that the air clear, even for a moment, before her next obstacle; the air is thick and dim, here, the wall of smoke looming opaque ahead. She heaves and spits painfully, drags herself forward on her knees until she catches enough breath to claw her way upright as she continues.
The great column of smoke turns endlessly, and like a cuckoo-clock marking the hour, Eislyn begins to feel a shiver in the world as it completes each rotation; a great bleak pulse.
The brutal gap in her dreaming chest is cold inside, cold as winter air, and she feels the rhythm not only outside her, but within it.
Annen wakes from another wretched night, after a day of following the changeling's rambling.
If it weren't a creature from the fae, she would think them lost, and that they travelled in circles. She holds her tongue; mostly, perhaps, from reluctance to speak to it at all.
For a short while, she drifts half-awake, and then comes to herself with the horrible realisation that it is seated beside her, staring down at her face with an utter blankness of expression, hand stroking her hair. She shrieks.
"What do you think will happen to me, when she dies inside a dream?" the thing says, without appreciable emotion, as Annen recoils from it. "Will I die, too? Will I be free?"
"She's not going to die!" Annen says, trembling, hating how weak it come out, and the barest sliver of a traitor thought crosses her mind as she looks at it: that if Eislyn does, then this counterfeit is the last of her face Annen will ever look on—
As if it knows her heart, the changeling grins, wolfish and sly. "I'll be as much paladin as you ever have," it leers, and Annen has a knife in her hand before she even knows it.
"And what are you going to do with that, thief of hearts," it says mockingly, and Annen pulls the edge fast and biting across the skin of her forearm, clenches her fist to furious tightness, and holds it up like a war-banner.
"I swear by blood you'll never have me," she says, tears creeping hot from her eyes, and the thing's face goes blank again, as unthinking and uncaring as a puddle reflecting the sky.
"The riddle of iron," it says. "Hot and quick within you, red and coiling; cold and black without, hard in its shape. Living and killing."
She is not sure, just then, if it even breathes; if it even needs to.
"Perhaps you have a spine for this, after all," it says, coldly cutting, least like the paladin she has yet seen. It smiles again, slowly, as if laboriously remembering how, as if having a face is an alien burden to it.
