Ixadal
Month 5, 918, 9th Era
The dream filling Peach’s head is mostly a memory. She can’t remember how she and her mother arrived at this clearing in the woods beyond the Cadne ranch, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how Peach took in how her mother looked. How Miranda had stood strong and easily in armor she rarely wore but that Peach could picture in perfect detail, her mother’s long hair braided - tight to control her curls - then gathered into one long ash-blonde plait.
In the memory…in the dream, because it hadn’t happened exactly like this, Peach knew her mind and heart had brought in more detail than she could have actually noticed, especially as a child, but—
Miranda had crouched down to Peach’s level, and in the dream Peach remembers her mother fixing her hair, tucking Peach’s own unruly copper curls behind the points of her ears, smiling at her daughter and explaining the rules.
It had been a game, like much of Miranda’s parenting had been. A follow-the leader challenge, where Peach - then not quite nine - would need to keep up. To track her wood-elf mother through the woods, to prove that she could come along, that she could keep up.
And Peach had done well at first. She was agile enough, moving easily through the trees, keeping her steps light on the packed layers of leaves slipping underfoot.
But Miranda had still heard her daughter moving through the brush below, and this time, instead of darting ahead through the trees, Miranda simply froze. Peach hadn’t known it then, but the game had changed, and now, as young Peach looked for her mother, she found no sign of her.
From her perch in the tree, Miranda had tracked her daughter, instead.
Peach was easy to follow in the forest - that bright copper hair bouncing along like the bobbing head of a flower - and as the seconds stretched to minutes, Peach moved more quickly. Carelessly. Stumbling forward instead of waiting, instead of taking a moment to find her bearings. Peach had stopped looking for the signs Miranda had taught her, and instead the girl circled, humming a high, anxious note, then picked a direction and walked.
Miranda had sucked in her breath through her teeth and moved through the intercrossing canopy of firs and salt-cedar to catch up to her daughter. She dropped near-silently to the forest floor, straightening with the grace of an acrobat, startling Peach from panic into laughter. She had hugged Peach, then, before holding her at arm’s length.
Miranda was rarely stern, but she made herself very clear in the advice she gave her daughter, then:
“When you are lost, Peach Pine, don’t you dare wander off. If you don’t know where you are, if you’re scared and alone, you find somewhere safe, you hunker down and you wait.”
Peach woke up.
—and she had. She had woken up, though it still seemed like this place, this version of this place was the dream. Elements of her life pulled from her own memory, stretched and twisted and now colored deeply by, of all things, a paralyzing gut-ripping fear of angels—
But she had woken up. And now she would find somewhere safe.
And wait.
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