Iron Binds

.1. Black Steel

In her dreams, she is blackened and charred, disintegrating into ash and blowing away on the wind, but never quite gone. She stands on a burned, barren field and in the distance sees the hag: hunched and staggering, her rough laughter carried on a too-hot wind. She chases it, but it is always on the verge of escaping her, and the earth shifts and roils beneath her feet. She trips and breaks her fall with her hands, but instead of sand, her palms meet sharp-edged ridges of something stiff and chitinous, and the scent of blood blossoms in her nose.

"You madman," says a voice. She turns, but no one is there. Pain shoots up her right arm, from little finger through elbow to shoulder.

"You've done it," says the voice.

"You didn't think I could?"

That's a voice she knows. She's heard it before, in the dream and out of it. He speaks to her almost constantly, and it's much more difficult to shut him out when she's rattling about inside her own mind.

"Where are you?" she says aloud. "How do I get out?"

Sometimes, she cannot speak. Now, it seems, she can—though he will not hear her, because he never hears her.

The earth shifts in a long, smooth line underneath her, as though she is standing upon the tail of a great uncoiling snake. She falls, tries to brace with her hands again, but her right arm is gone and she topples shoulder-stump first. The pain is like fire. She screams.

"Easy," says the voice—the Medic's voice. "Easy, there." Calm settles over her like a thick blanket. He has done this before, whatever this is, in the times when pain and fear and the nightmares overtook her. It is as though tranquility has been injected directly into her blood, but it is not a drug; few of those have any effect on Astamil.

The earth stops moving. The scaly ridges settle back into ash and sand. She sits up, clutching at the stump of her arm. She remembers cutting into the meat of her own shoulder, though those later memories are foggy next to what came before them.

Time passes. Can she be exhausted when she is already asleep? A lifetime later, the voices return.

"Staring at her won't wake her up quicker," says one. "Eat something."

"Not hungry," says the Medic.

"Of course, you're not," says the first voice. She is reasonably certain that this is her Alchemist. "People who weigh fifteen stone don't need to eat. Everyone knows that."

"You're getting more sarcastic over time."

"I hadn't noticed."

It is a little less strange now than it was the first time, to listen to them bickering. She is still unused to being allowed—required—to hear idle human conversations. Sometimes, to pass the time, she tries to participate. They will not hear her, and so they cannot punish her.

"When can I wake up?" she calls out into the grey sky. The sky has been grey since she became aware of herself in this dreamscape. "I want to wake up."

Her desires are immaterial. The Medic will wake her when the Mentor commands it, and she must accept his judgment. It is more difficult to remember her place, in the loneliness of the dream.

The empty space that used to be her right arm aches. She keeps trying to clench and unclench her hand, only there's nothing there to obey her mental commands. And yet:

"Antare?" says the Alchemist's voice.

"I saw."

Other sounds: the clatter of a ceramic plate, the scrape of a stool across the floor. Then, sensations: something pressed against her back, or else whatever surface she must be lying on.