“Hey, just so you know,” Logue says on the first day, casual-like, while they’re hunkering down for the evening.  “If you have weird dreams down here, I wouldn’t worry about it.” 

Meleph stares at him.  So does Lithium at the center of the campfire, tumbling from one lick of flame to the next.  Burbling. 

“Weird dreams?” 

“Yeah.  Lots of Coursers get ’em.  Not sure why — something about the Moors, I guess?” 

---

The damnable thing about it is that Meleph believes him. 

Must be something about the Moors, he thinks in the morning when he wakes, dreaming of a bloodstained flag flying from a standard.  Pentacles with a courser inscribed inside.  A distant roar coming closer — not thunder, not natural. 

Weird dreams.  

He can almost feel the damp, sucking mud of the Moors on his hooves when he closes his eyes.  The cold bite of the wind. 

“Everything alright?” Logue asks.  He’s tying off their packs across his shoulders, rope between his teeth. 

“Everything’s just peachy,” Meleph says, and goes to unearth Lithium from the ashes of the fire. 

---

The details come to him night by night. 

There is the press of other Coursers on either side of him, although he cannot turn his head to look, and in the recognition of the restriction, the dreams provide the sense of leather around his ears, thin straps across his throat, his cheeks.  

A cold bar in his mouth, flat across his tongue — (he wakes up that morning with the taste of it still lingering, the same sharp metal as blood)— 

There is something astride him, alive, moving, fidgeting. 

The distant roar.  

There is something coming—

---

“Hey,” Meleph says on the fourth night.  “Do you get the weird dreams?”

“Haven’t in a long while, I’d say.”  Logue looks at him, soft-eyed, sympathetic.  “Why?  You got ’em?”

Meleph thinks of the fluttering banner.  The taste of blood. 

He thinks of home — only a day’s journey away by now; the mouth of the Moors leading upward to the Earthen Furnace and then to the Overgrown Caverns. 

“Nah,” he said, kicking Lithium out of his spot in the  grass and turning around to sleep.  “Just wondering.” 

---

That night it comes. 

He dreams of fire — blue-hot in meteoric streaks across the sky, raining downward.  Of something black seeping like a rot across the grass, eating across the wet moorland, leaving jagged scars of magic along the veins of water, mineral, earth. 

The weight on his back has gone.  He cannot remember when it fell but he remembers how it fell — the strange slackening of the hold it had had on him; the way the weight tipped slowly and then all at once away from him; the unnatural tug of it falling free of leather and metal—

The impact it had made.  The wet, dull sound.

---

“Suppose I did have weird dreams.  What happens after we leave?” 

“Oh, usually they go away.”  Logue’s eye is still too soft.  Too knowing.  “And when you come back again, they usually aren’t so bad the second time around.” 

“Usually?” 

Logue is quiet.  Nudges his shoulder against Meleph’s as they walk, narrowly avoiding squashing Lithium between them. 

“Yeah,” he says.  “Usually.”