The Whispering Trees
The scream lodged itself somewhere behind Lunach's teeth, trapped there even as her body convulsed upward from the mattress. Her hands clawed at the woolen blanket, at empty air, at anything solid enough to prove she had returned to the waking world. For a moment she could not tell which world she occupied at all. The ceiling above her, familiar and water-stained in the corner where the roof always leaked come spring, seemed to waver like something glimpsed through heat.
She gasped, dragging air into lungs that ached as though she'd been running for miles. Sweat had soaked through her nightdress, pasting the thin linen to her spine, and her hair clung to her neck in damp ropes. Her heart hammered against her ribs with a violence that frightened her nearly as much as the dream itself.
*He was there again.*
She pressed a trembling palm to her chest, willing the thundering beneath it to slow. Outside, the world had not yet decided whether it belonged to night or morning; the window showed only a bruised, uncertain gray, the kind of light that came before the birds remembered to sing. Below her, she could hear the faint creak of the bakery ovens being stoked, her mother's soft…