Jenny: The Last Frontier

The Guttersnipe lay with her back to Domitia, staring at the wall and Champion's perch. After the dream, Domitia's words seemed hollow. The dream had been lovely, like reaching back to a higher plane that they had all fallen from, oh, long, long before she had ever been born. Looking back on it, there was about the dream a sort of bitter aftertaste to the sweetness, for it was only a dream. The pure, high heavens were only in the deepest parts of her mind, to be plumbed in dream alone; the poppy-strewn greensward was a landscape locked away where she could not willingly approach. The bitterness stung all the more in her throat at Domitia's words. It was a thing far off, unreachable save by death and a long sleep. And as she lay beneath her dear Eryri hills, sleeping, dreaming of her fields and white-gold skies, the world would turn on, long and long and bitterly long, and the whole of the groaning world would echo in her dreams as she slept beneath them all, and that, too, would make the dreams bitter.

Down the dank mouldering paths and past the Ocean's streams they went, and past the White Rock and the Sun's Western Gates and past the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals, make their home.

"Where is Artos?" she asked without turning.