Changing Dreams
Summary: Feyre and Rhysand navigate the changing natures of nightmares, and of sleeping and waking dreams.
I awoke to darkness. To wind, and seething stars, and thrashing wings. To the tang of magic from another realm. I reached for my growing belly, a habit I had developed over the past many months. His hand still lay where he had held us before falling asleep, but they were claws, not fingers, I found there. Sleek, and hard, and deadly.
I shivered, hurriedly pulling away. It had been months since either of us had shifted in our dreams.
I sought the bond instead, let it soften the night between us.
"Rhys?" I whispered, though I knew it wouldn't wake him. The last time, his skin had been frigid where my fingers fell across him, as it had that first night I awoke him, before I knew we were mates. But he hadn't pinned me to the bed when I touched him, had only settled beneath my hand, seeming to calm within wherever he was held. I calmed in turn, wondering at a change I felt but could not name.
The night had raged a while longer before he warmed beneath my hand.
I dreamt of gold-green light and steel grey sea.
Tonight, he felt heated, not chilled though, and eternity was an ebony weight that condensed and buckled and slithered and spread.
The bond was taut. It had a quality I hadn't felt before, an almost-brittleness beneath the radiance I was still discovering. I sent out a hesitant inquiry, and found suppleness like woven tendrils of metal too fine to resolve into matter. Slowly, they spiraled one another; space around them glistened, and stirred.
It was such a contrast to the stars' seething light, to the inky thrash of innumerous wings, to the density of so much impenetrable energy.
I sent another thought down the bond. It hit his shields, but something of him came back. Carefully, I lifted his claws from my belly and turned, reaching through the darkness until I touched his chest with a slightly shaky hand.
His heart was distant thunder.
Through shimmering, blinding night, I became aware of light beneath my palm. I watched my skin become translucent, watched the lines of my bones appear through the absence of opacity, before the light seeped from between us and surged with the ferocity of undammed waterways across his body. It swept through his tattoos, turning the ink lustrous as the adamant that harboured his mind. I almost pulled away, alarmed at my unintended intrusion. Stay, breathe, open, the bond seemed to say, so I did. He slept on.
The stars began to fade. The wings that were not his, whose wild flurry echoed through the space between worlds, returned to energy. The darkness shifted, swirled, retreated from the corners of the room until it surrounded only us, still shifting, deepening, a force of such beauty I could scarcely breathe. Slowly, it grew peaceful. A fleeting caress against my cheek, my lips, it drifted along the curves of my torso and legs, pressed a sleepy kiss to my heel and disappeared into the quietness preceding dawn. My hand still lay across his shoulder. The emitted light had also disappeared. His claws became fingers. His skin was warm.
Later, when the sun woke us, I asked what he had dreamed. He peered at me, and something cleared from the violet of his eyes.
"I called to you."
I waited, but that was all, and I wondered at the space he had opened.
"I was safe," I murmured, "and free."
I traced the veins of the wing he had cocooned us in, watching the shadows change as he shuddered, as the golds and reds reflected on my hand. I had never managed to paint them like this. Somehow, their wild grace, their subtle luminosity, their very vitality, could not be shown that way.
"Do you think he'll have wings?" I asked him.
He shifted against me, pulling me closer.
"Hmm," he murmured with the laziness of another morning.
But he stilled then.
"Do you think it might be a she? That the Bone Carver showed us one, but maybe not the first?"
"I'd like that too." I snuggled into him, and turned my face up to see his eyes. They were bright, practically glowing with unexplored potential.
"Maybe they will have a choice, like we do. How delightful," and he purred into my ear, "to help complicate the species."