Sometimes, she dreams.
She sees a river, fast and cold and brown with mud, pale flowers - like stars - that drift on dark currents above pale fish that drift half-heatedly in dreamlike trances, carried where the river willed. Sometimes, she catches glimpses of a bridge through the white mists. It is warm stone and dark wood, lovingly smoothed by long-dead hands. It is a bridge that is shattered and broken, a bridge that lays forlorn upon the far banks of the dark river.
She dreams of a pale flickering light that is their campfire, where they burn their hard-caught fish, and she smells ashes and fish and sugar and sweat and death, and they meld, and they become the smell of home.
She dreams of snakes, and monkeys, and ice - and, perhaps, distantly, a whisper and a wind and a war hammer that never came to be.
She dreams, sometimes.
She dreams of honor, of renown, of power. She dreams of a day when life flows through her like water in the river, like the snow from the frozen skies. A day when she is safe, when she is real. She dreams of a day when she is full of life and color and song, instead of the numb whiteness that imprisoned her heart, long before she was jailed in the prison made of Sekki Sekki stone.
She dreams that she disappears, and she is afraid, because it is true. She is weak. She will fade.
She dreams that she will be the protector instead of the protected. She dreams that she will be strong. She dreams that she could matter. And she knows that it is just a dream, and that it will never be anything more than a dream.
She dreams of a midnight blue sky bejeweled with shining golden stars, where the scent of fresh evergreen fills her nostrils and air rushes past her sandal-clad feet as she soars across the sky, the lights in the windows of the houses bright far below her
She dreams of a river and a boat, and the only sound is the water as it laps hungrily at the sides of the barge and the oar that dips steadily into the river. The silent boatman stands behind her, black robes rippling like the river that carried them, and he watched without pity or pleasure as she unfastened her kimono and lets the black tunic fall into the dark waters.
Silently, the boatman offers her the white haori that she had dreamt might become hers, and, with pale fingers, she lets it fall into the river, too - and it floats in the water, for a brief moment in time, before it is claimed by the darkness of the river.
And then it is gone.
And she dreams of a broken bridge and a broken sword, of a broken spear and a broken heart, of a broken man and a broken voice, of a broken promise and a broken body - of a broken heart and a broken soul -
She dreams, sometimes.
She dreams.
