Çiçek drifts more peacefully into sleep than she has in months. Kudzu is warm against her, his milky-sweet scent blended with bright green leaves and damp earth, and the weight of her neck across his shoulders keeps him blessedly still. He watches her as she rests, hazel eyes bright and curious; minutes pass, and as his hunger grows, he runs his muzzle searchingly across her breast, but the golden mare doesn’t stir beyond a twitch of her skin and a sigh. His restlessness rises in tandem with his frustration, yet he doesn’t pull himself out from under her. The world outside his mother’s womb is so new, so vivid and loud and overstimulating, and if he can’t get back to that warm, ambient den of safety he’d become so accustomed to, the best spot to be is here, nestled by her side.

This is as close as Çiçek can be - but, unbeknownst to her newborn son, though her body may be near, her mind has floated away, up over the masses of tangling vines and into the places he cannot follow.

At first her sleep is dreamless, empty… and then, like the morning sun chasing away night’s all-encompassing darkness, it changes. Images rise like bloated corpses to the surface: Şevket bounding towards the snowcapped peaks of the Cove; Solomon comes after him in hot pursuit, tossing his striking emerald gaze back to her and smiling. She grins, sun-soaked and free, and as she runs, the landscape changes beneath her hooves, turning from white-powdered grass and grey pebbly soil to winding jungle and a symphony of birdsong. Faolain leads the charge this time, her küçük gölgelittle shadow twisting nimbly in and out of sight, and Rivaini’s cherry-red frame crashes along just behind. Her bezelye’ssweet pea’s throaty laughter bounces off the trees, unhindered by suffering, as if Çiçek had never taken her heart in her hands and broken it, unintentionally or otherwise. The heady perfume of flowers floods her senses, rainbows rushing past her in oversaturated technicolor blurs. Everything’s perfect; everything’s right, and whole, and nothing hurts, and the future stretches before her, endless and resplendent and joyous.

Then… it changes. The floral notes in the air fade to sickening rot. Çiçek loses sight of her Guardians, and the dappled light filtering through the canopy disappears along with them. The joyful ambient noise of the tropics falls silent, the rainforest turning… wild, unruly. Vines yank her mane and tail, whorled bark scrapes against her flesh, and as she gallops haphazardly down winding, mazelike footpaths, she realizes with cold, sinking dread that she is no longer the one doing the chasing. No longer the hunter, but the hunted.

She tries to evade them, but her pursuer gains on her, shortening the distance between them until she feels their hot breath on her mottled hindquarters. Outside of dreams, Kudzu rouses at the sound of hoofbeats and voices, sleeping light and unburdened by the troubles his dam carried like a yoke around her neck. He’s the first to see the red-brown foal’s approach, champing his toothless gums in a mirror of the same appeasement, but when the child gets too close for comfort, his ears lay back in warning. His curiosity flares, tempting him. The drive to protect what is his, though, is stronger.

Still unconscious, still trying - and failing - to escape the thing that turned her dreams to nightmares, Çiçek hears the snap of a twig behind her; In the waking world, it’s only another colt, a boy barely grown into young adulthood and stumbling into something far beyond his expertise, and as Kudzu whips his head around and stares at him, he snorts. Çiçek’s ear twitches back to catch it; she groans, shifting some, and her expression turns from one of gentle repose to a mask of full-throated grief.

She keeps racing down the path. She has to; in the prison of her mind, her life depends on it. But just as in reality, she cannot see the end until she is upon it, the kudzu-covered cliff face leaving her with nowhere else to turn but back, back to confront the danger nipping at her heels. Back towards a pair of jade-green eyes, a burning-hot fever, and the doom that tied it all together.

Çiçek jolts awake with a start, realizing that the voice crying out for salvation is her own. Her breath comes in harsh gulps; Kudzu levels his attention on her first, and though her long, pale lashes glisten with unshed tears she reaches to caress the drying plane of his cheek. It was a dream, she thinks to herself, using the now-familiar refrain to try and expunge the fear from her veins and steady her frantic heart. Just a dream, nothing more.

At least until something shifts in her periphery, and Kudzu tips his head towards it, prompting her to follow suit.

Groggy and deeply fatigued, with her vision blurred by tears and her sinuses thick with mucus, she can’t recognize her bezelye’ssweet pea’s standing above her. She sees a horse, muscular of build, cloaked in blood-red fur trimmed with a silvery mane and tail. Their striking eyes stuck, like glue, to the prone forms of her bebekbaby and her. Caught between worlds, driven solely by instinct and starved of common sense and deductive reasoning, Çiçek springs into action. Her ears lace back until they disappear into the tangled mess of her mane, and she leaps unsteadily to her feet, Kudzu jostled and bleating in protest. She snorts, tucking her head in close and coiling her thin body like a spring.

At this point, Rivaini had been lost to her for longer than she’d ever had her. She’d spent so long trying to snuff out her hopes of seeing her Guardian again, sure that she’d been forgotten - or worse, actively despised, moreso if word ever got back about what Çiçek had done. To her, there was only one other option, one other soul with a chance of tracking her down: the creature from her nightmares, the man whose ghost haunted her relentlessly, who - with her help - had brought her whole world crashing down around her and left her broken in the rubble.

”Rougaru,” Çiçek spits like acid from tight-clenched teeth, leaping forward to seize his throat between her gaping jaws.

Just before she reaches her target, though… he changes. The strong, straight lines of his body turn to sloping curves, and a jagged white stripe cuts through the deep mahogany of his coat at the shoulder. Her eyes, wild and rolling and feral, lock onto his - and to her surprise, they’re not that cunning, washed out green, but blue, a sapphire as rich and fathomless as the ocean. This close, she can’t ignore the scents wafting like fog around her: crushed-up flower petals, sea salt, and - mare’s milk?

Çiçek squeals, angling her body at the last second so that she lands beside her. Her. Her! She skitters back, drinking the humid air in gulps; her pulse roars against her eardrums, and as she looks, shock-ridden and frozen into place, at the mare poised like a statue before her, her heart drops with a dull, lifeless thud into the pit of her stomach.

She speaks, and her voice - only moments ago powerfully, righteously furious - comes barely over a whisper, as if saying the name it carried would make its owner vanish into obscurity.

”R-Rivaini?” Çiçek squeaks out in disbelief, feeling more exposed than she ever thought possible.

Looking at her bezelyesweet pea is like looking at the sun. She can only do it for a few seconds before the sounds of shuffling draw her away. Panicked, her gaze snaps to the ground; Kudzu peers up at her, smacking his gums in fear of the demon she’d become and struggling to stand on spindly, wobbling legs. Movement flashes in the trees behind him, and embarrassment shoots icy-cold down her spine as she reads the alarm in the strange colt’s eyes and knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he’d been there all along.

And then - finally, as she pivots to face Rivaini, to take the punishment she rightfully deserves - she notices the boy, no more than a few months old, positioned like a fire-ringed carbon copy at his dam’s side.

”I -” Çiçek finds her once-Guardian’s eyes again, choking on her words. Her whole body trembles, and her ears swivel uncertainly atop her poll, trying in vain to clear the haze swirling around her addled psyche. Guilt crashes over her in waves, followed by embarrassment, confusion, and overpowering shame. ”I - you - I thought -”

She could try to explain. She could beg for her forgiveness, for Rivaini to absolve her of her many, many sins, for her to understand the hurricane wreaking havoc inside her throbbing chest and to know that she was sorry for every sharp-edged bit of pain she’d caused. She could - but it’s no use. If their last conversation hadn’t snapped the ties that bound them, this outburst had surely severed it beyond repair.

Plagued by her mistakes, disgraced and undeserving, surrounded by the ruins of the happy life she’d chosen, over and over again, to destroy, Çiçek’s last resolve crumbles. Tears spill unbidden down her cheeks, and wails tumble, one after another after another, from her soft pink lips.

With no one left to help her, Çiçek breaks apart, the messily-cobbled bits of her fractured soul falling to the ground, forgotten.