Her dreams were a haze of scattered sensations. Her dreaming mind told her she was dying, and the long legs of her sleeping body kicked and thrashed instinctively. The dagger pains in her shoulder pierced ever deeper and blood began to stain her fur. The pain both familiar and unfair kept her trapped down deep in dreams. As intense as the pain was, the sudden release was more disturbing than anything else. Her heart lurched, and her unconscious body gave one last scramble to find purchase. Then it all stopped in an instant.
She jolted awake from the darkness of dreams to an even darker reality. No light penetrated this deep underground. Strong scents of earth and musk filled her lungs in order to compensate for her lack of sight.
Nothing here, no threats, just the others. Sound echoed down these long circular halls, and every shift and every scratch had an added crack of intensity. Her mind processed each sense quickly looking for threats as she heaved lung fulls of dusty air. No threats down here. Safe. Safe and dark.
She was never quite sure of things whenever she awoke in the Warren. Did she come back on her own this time? Had this particular dream been a fogged recollection of the day before? Each morning left her reeling, but each day a duty had to be done. She reached up with her paws to pull down one of her great ears for grooming. If today was going to end like every other, she was at least going to be presentable for the fates.
With her heart slowing from a frantic race to a more familiar and steady jog, she brushed her long whiskers around to feel for the others. They were near her, she could feel them, and their familiar scent calmed her. She had given up trying to talk to them lifetimes ago. They were the same as her as far as she knew, but they never returned even so much as a greeting. They were simply ghosts filling these countless tunnels in the dark. She had seen one or two of them above ground before, but they were just as lifeless in the light. They looked like her. They had the same ears and the same rounded tails, but their eyes were dark and empty like the holes leading to Warren.. She couldn’t help but shudder as they pushed by her in the dark. For the first time wondered if she appeared as ghostly to them as they did to her.
It took no small effort to push the thought out of her mind as she began her crawl down one of the Warren’s tunnels. At each branching path, she made sure to run her whiskers along the wall to feel for the claw marks she left on tunnels she had been down before. How many times had she made this journey in the dark? Trying to keep count, just like trying to communicate with the others, had been abandoned a long, long time ago.
Left. Right. Right. Left. Left. Right. The markings were fresher now. She had just begun exploring these exits to the Warren not so long ago. Several times she had to flatten herself up again the walls of the tunnel as one of the others shoved by her, completely unaware. It was quite uncomfortable but she didn’t mind. It was the closest she ever came to comfort in her life. Or was it lives? Another thought not worth having.
Finally, she came to an unmarked tunnel and quickened her pace. Barely unable to open her eyes to the sudden light, she left the labyrinth of the Warren behind and let the cold, clean air replace the damp dust in her lungs. She looked around her while wiping the dirt off her face with her forepaws, and any hope of today being different died away. A small patch of brown earth surrounded the hole she had just come out of, but beyond that? Nothing. There was nothing to see because, just like all the other exits from the Warren, nothing else existed.
The world around her was thick, swirling infinity. Blue snaps of light illuminated and dimmed in an unceasingly dense fog. She never understood how this part worked. It seemed like nothing was solid beyond her little dirt mound, but she knew she would be able to walk upon the fog as if it were solid land. Only this time, she didn’t want to. She knew the mists would take away her sight again as soon as she entered, and instead of her lungs being full of dry dirt they would be filled with thick humidity. And then? Well, she hated to think of what happened to her once she made her way deep into the void.
She didn’t want to head into the fog, so she didn’t. Her body was not tired, but mentally she was worn down to a nub. She lowered her belly to the ground and closed her eyes.
“Not this time,” she thought as she pulled her chin into her chest. Whatever cosmic curse had born her into this life had won.
The dirt underneath her began a soft murmur. At first, she didn’t notice. Her mind was too busy letting go and giving up. The murmur soon increased to a dull roar though, and her great ears sent a signal to her mind to dash for cover. Her eyes shot open in alert but her body remained instinctively as still as possible. The vibration was coming up from underneath her, and she knew that her only chance to avoid what was coming would be to dash into the same fog she had been avoiding. pulling herself to her paws she faced the tunnel entrance. She knew how things ended in the mists. Whatever was coming for her now could not hurt her any more than that.
At first, it was only one of the others that made its way up through the tunnel, but too many more followed. Dozens of them now forced their way up simultaneously, creating jams at the tunnel’s entrance that would then erupt as dozens more forced themselves up behind them.
This was new at least, she thought. But the goal of the others was soon made clear to her. The mound of dirt amongst the fog was quickly becoming so crowded that she was being pushed off of it and into the dark. She dug her ferociously strong back legs into the dirt and braced herself against the wall of bodies approaching her. The wave of bodies hit her with a fury and immediately took her breath. All was fur and chattering now as her grip on the ground began to give and she felt herself being forced back into the fog. It was pointless, she knew and stopped fighting. She tumbled away into the unavoidable.
There was no going back now. She had tried to return to the Warren before, but it was impossible to find once she entered the mists. It was a suffocating night, only broken by the occasional bright flash of blue. Hopping forward slowly, her stomach lurched. Why her? Why did she deserve this cursed life? No matter what tunnel she took it all ended the same. She tried to continue forward, to face things bravely, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know until today if she could cry. She could.
It didn’t take long. It never did. The fog around her began to swirl as massive gusts of wind swept across her. Normally she would close her eyes. This time she wanted to watch.
The fog were blown away by the massive wings of a great and terrible creature. Its unreadable face was covered like a mask by its feathers. Two enormously deep and hollow eyes were honed in directly on her, and its blade of a beak parted to release a screech that made her ears ring and ache. But it was the talon-tipped feet that she noticed the most. Those, she knew, would soon be sunken deep into her body.
So it went, just as she knew it would. The great beast lifted her high up into what she assumed was the sky. It was so hard to tell in this fog. As if in insult, the beast clenched even harder one last time, sinking the talons in even deeper, her blood beginning to flow like little rivers across them. She watched as it rained down below.
When her blood hit the ground below, the fog would evaporate in a wild rush revealing lush green carpets of grass coated in sunlight. Where more than one drop would land, trees would breach the earth and quickly climb high up into the air. More and more of the fog lifted as her eyes became heavy. Far below she saw valleys and rivers passing into and out of sight. Forests began to take shape now as her life left her quickly now.
She promised herself each and every time that she would try to make it back here, but every time she left the Warren it was nothing but more of the fog. She had no reason to believe this time would be any different, but she wished just the same anyway.
Her body heaved violently to let her know it was time. It never got any easier. She looked one last time at the green world below her and closed her eyes. Next time she would leave the Warren and look up into a blue sky. Next time she would smell sweet grass on the wind and get to taste it for certain.
Next time, but not this time.