The forest was silent and Hannibal was running.
He could feel his shadow behind him, shattering like glass with every step he took, and falling away in the wind like dust.
He left a trail of darkness wherever he went.
There was a girl in front of him.
He couldn't see her face.
She blinked. She had the eyes of a deer. She blinked again. The eyes of a wolf.
She blinked.
She was human.
She was standing still.
Her shadow stepped out from behind her, stepped through her.
It grew a head, grey fur and amber eyes, long ears pressed flat against a wolf-like skull, teeth bared and muzzle wrinkled.
Shoulders sprouted, muscled and strong, and claw-tipped fingers formed out of human hands.
The barest trace of a chest, and it stopped.
It froze in front of her, incomplete, unwhole, a transparent painting hanging on the air itself.
A challenge.
He could feel his shadow behind him growing and changing. A mirror image, reflected through broken glass. Antlers where there were ears, a skull where there was a face.
Glowing yellow eyes to counter the amber-orange ones glaring back at him.
Something shifted in the wind.
Like a sickness they overtook her, thorns, tumbling from the trees and mist, reaching toward him and wrapping around her until all he could see was her shoulders and face, but even those were blurred through the creature standing in front of her like a semi-translucent statue.
Time slowed.
The beast snarled.
His shadow howled.
Silence fell like a weight.
He ran, and his shadow leapt out before him.
The thorns advanced.
The beast stood its ground.
Hannibal ran, the wind shoving against him, turning his movement sluggish and impossibly slow. Still, he ran, and his heart beat loudly in his ears.
He could see the wind moving past him, trying to hold him back. Streaks of grey surrounded him, frozen in place, but not stopping him. His slow, slow steps carried him through several when he dodged around a tree stump.
He could see her eyes past the eyes of the beast.
He could feel her breath rolling out of her lungs.
He could see the thorns wrapped around her throat.
He could see the blood that dripped from them.
Sword, needle, knife, he wasn't sure. Something silver glinted in his hand.
He lunged.
His shadow broke apart like a fractured mirror the moment it touched the beast.
She didn't move fast enough to dodge.
The blade punctured her stomach.
Her scream was the last thing he heard before he was jolted suddenly awake, and it rang clear as day in his ears long afterward.