He angled his finger toward her. She stood staring at him, clutching a blanket clotted in blood like a shawl over her shoulders. Again, this was not the Gloria that he expected: she was an older girl, the skin of her face driven into rippling wrinkles, her hairline peppered with starbursts of gray. "You think I'm still yours? That like some -- some coveted memory, or some worthwhile bauble, you have a right to dictate what value I mean to you?
"If you came here by choice, because you had something you must say, then -- then I implore you to say it, and be gone. Who do you think I am, Elliot Brown? What rules have you broken down recently?"
She was bright, hot, a Glass Sun that had somehow been poured into a bloody, woolen dress, leering back at him down the length of his pointing finger.
Behind him, the Elliot Brown she had formulated whispered to the interloper, "This is not a wall you can shatter with a few well-placed hammer-strikes, yeah? You vanished. She tried to fit herself into your shoes, not for you, not for anyone else, but for her. You're looking to unravel that little pocket of her already-dull mind that tried to keep you safe, secure, and familiar. In a Myrken Wood where minds get altered, broken, and raped, do you think your being here is something she can perceive as anything but a farce, a trickery?
"You're an invader. To her, you're the herald of someone trying to slip into her brain and turn her against herself. You're nothing more than someone's clever apparition. A mind-meddler's fortuitous ruse. She's no Marshall Emory," the shadow said, as if it had tapped into his conscience to draw out the words -- but if this was her dream, what wasn't accessible to her? "She's no Sylvius Duquesne. She's a frightened girl trying to keep herself whole in a world that constantly reminds her that she is wrong."
In a breath of vapor, the echo of a Dream-Elliot vanished, and the intruding image was left to look upon the aged Jerno, surrounded as she was by a thriving corona of poisonous vines and stinking hemlock. She turned down her chin, regarding the tips of her feet as they peered out from beneath her hanging skirts.
"I don't know the -- the laws of this game, the way it's meant to be played," she said. "I simply miss my friend."
(Tennant's touch was a warming balm against her trembling feet. Her toes ground down into the sheets, the edge of an uneven toenail tugging at an errant thread on the bedding. Her head turned, closed eyes trying to angle themselves in the direction of his voice. Lovely, he'd said, and then her name, her name, a comforting and infuriating conflation of ugly sounds with beautiful ones. She knew even in sleep that her name belonged nowhere behind that adjective. He turned to leave. A fortress of shivering fingers clenched her blanket-edge, tugged at it--
Drugged and slumbering, she mumbled vague noises she believed she only said in her dreams.)
"I'm cold," she said, within (and without). The seas fell calm. All went still.
"I hate being alone."