Faded Red Velvet

The soft hush of the pounding rain had lulled her into a state that was rather close to sleep. Even so, she could hear Storm's soft rustlings as he shifted position at the foot of her bed, rearranging his little wings so as to be comfortable. Nastusia didn't truly have the energy to move, so when Lycortih landed, making a huge thump in the process, Sia just covered her head with a skin, her unusual eyes screwed tight against the noise of her dragon making himself comfortable, just like her firelizard had done.

When the dream started to click away in her head, she was partially aware that it wasn't real. It had that slightly unnerving quality dreams tend to have, while still being close enough to reality to be unsettling. While Nastusia had been warm before, covered in skins in her own bed, now she was cold, shivering, laying on the ground covered in nothing over then her clothing. And while her clothing before had been good fine wherhide, now it was tattered rags, some of them still sowing patches of the faded red color they had been before. The rain was still there. She'd remember the rain.

Nastusia sat up, her damp hair swinging in front of her face, creating a shield through which she could just see the huddled shape of her half sister. She was asleep, but looked cold. They were both cold. Always cold.

"Rai?" To Sia, her own voice sounded strange. Her voice sounded younger, as though instead of seventeen she was eleven. She remembered being eleven. Nastusia remembered a lot of her "former" life.

"Raiden?" Once again there was no answer from her sister. Sia flipped herself over onto her hands and knees, and crawled toward her sister. Sia poked Raiden gently, before shaking her sisters shoulder to make sure nothing was wrong with her. There wasn't.

Sitting back, Sia tried to remember what had happened the day before. Even though the rain, she could tell it was night. That weird sense of time that she and her sister had always had told her so. Something was wrong with her memory. Nastusia could remember chiding Lycorith for being a dimglow and a selfish brat, as well as laughing with Raiden about something Storm had done to Lulin. However, these faint images were mostly faded and the ones that were implanting themselves over the "old" images were ones of begging, scavenging, and being violently sick.

Something was wrong here. Wasn't she at the Weyr? Wasn't Lycorith snoozing a few feet away from her, his great body heating the cold room? Wasn't Lulin awake in the next room, endlessly pouring over scrolls as he tried to study? And where were Cloud and Storm? Weren't they here? Sia could remember the pair causing havoc, but when she actually thought about it, her brain turned up the question "Who is Storm?"

She'd forgotten about dreams.

Dreams were important.

Sia crept back toward the place where she'd been asleep, searching the ground for her bag. It had to be around here somewhere, did it? She'd never left it lying about as though it were a piece of junk. Her bag was her very life, or perhaps the savior of it. It held all the scrolls the pair had ever re-written from the originals. Nastusia and Raiden were healers, of a sort.

When she'd found it, Sia looked inside for Storm, or even Cloud, sheltering from the dripping roof, or just from the cold, but the brother flits weren't there.

What was going on?

What had happened?

The only answer to Sia's question was "Nightmare."

Sia hugged her knees close to her chest, not wanting to move because it made her feel vulnerable. There weren't any dragons around to talk to, and Rai was asleep, so she didn't know what was going on.

Nastusia, the girl who was both ironically on the verge of death at every given moment, and the one who was beyond death itself, shivered.

She'd just remembered something else. Her mother had died two days ago.

Death and sorrow seemed to follow the pair everywhere.

Slowly, Sia closed her eyes again. If she thought about it, she could just remember the Weyr, and that was the worst part.

Nightmare indeed. Being thrown back into her life before, being reminded that although she now was the esteemed rider of the only Spite dragon on Pern, she was still mortal, whatever her name meant.

Eventually, all things died.