For the first time in years, the dreams returned.

Blood spattered on pale skin, strawberry-red against the bloodless white. Screams weighted the air, accompanied by the clicking of Army-issue shotguns and the whirr of shotels flying. The metallic locks of restraints snapping into place, words like "Re-conditioning" and "tribunal" floating down to her. In the chaos, no one could hear the gagging coughs that racked her.

(Of course, it wasn't as if they got away with it. Oh, no. Each and every one of them got their due before the day was out. Each and every one....)

...the wind howled outside as the teams came in, surveying the damage. She whimpered, but not loudly; they didn't find her until the detectives came in to search for clues. And they found her first; the butchered body of a woman, neither young nor old, neck a mass of bloody tissue and chest purpled and broken but otherwise untouched and treated--evidently--with some degree of respect. It wasn't until they carefully shifted the couch that they found her in the small recess, most of her face a bruise, one eye crushed beyond all repair. They wasted no time then, of course; she was rushed to a hospital of fair repute, treated immediately, and then turned over.

(Hours seemed to pass, but this was the way with these dreams. Who knew how long she would sleep, how much past she would revisit? Who knew how much of her life would play before her eyes, bringing all of its horrors back like open wounds, begging to be dressed again? Who knew? Who could ever know?)

The first few years were her itinerent years, passing from place to place, orphanage to foster home, monastery to children's shelter. Always the new kid, always the stranger. The only thing that was the same was the wind, always loud in the South Plains, always straightforward and unforgiving. She ran with it when she could, never asking anything, only trying to prove herself. To ingratiate this strange ally, to leave her peers far behind.

(But the wind isn't always a friend. It doesn't always help you. Sometimes it kicks up dust so that you can't see or breathe... sometimes it yells so loudly that the sky could fall and you would never hear....)

Once, when she returned to one of the better foster homes, she was met by another detective. Inside lay her late not-mother and not-father, each killed by force, chests reduced to black-and-blue pillows of crushed bone but unbroken skin. The detective spirited her away, taking her in cars with tinted windows and through dark internal hallways to a sterile, unmonitored room where she was set in a plastic chair and told that she would need a new name, a new home. They asked her what she wanted her name to be....

She had taken a small book out with her on her run with the wind. She turned it over and over, eye boring into its leather binding. It was about the wind, and the storms, and the earth, and all manner of things. She set more store in it than she did in most books.

"Fujin," she said softly, like a zephyr through the tallgrass. She took a breath and tried to speak more loudly, and the name "FUJIN!" boomed out of her like thunder.

And the official nodded, and recorded it, and she was shipped off to the very last home she was to ever need.

(The dreamworld faded there, and it was a relief. But the back of her mind still mulled over it, reconstructing death after gruesome death--some from records she had found, others from rumors she had heard--no two the same, but all of them with one distinct similarity. And she couldn't help but wonder as the days went by....)