Nightingale's Lullaby: Main Chapter

Flashes, incoherent and jumbled into a twisting kaleidoscope of color and sound that made no sense in the moment. Maybe that's what it was, just moments flying by far out of reach before she could even process what happened there. Running, she remembered running...panting breaths and whispered wind. Her roommate shouting, glass breaking...a scream... Anger, that was the feeling. The only one she could process among the shifting moments, so out of order she wondered if the pieces fit together at all. Howling wind and pounding rain, the sky opened wide and suddenly she was falling...tumbling through the still howling wind with no sense of direction and no energy to care. The ground was hard, uncomfortable...that was the last thing she remembered as her weary body finally came to a stop.

.....

"Are you okay? Hey!"

The voice was loud, unwelcome as consciousness slowly returned and she shifted slightly to try and block it out. Even that simple motion felt off but the stray thought wasn't enough to clear her groggy head.

"This really isn't a good place to sleep."

A cold, wet nose pressed against her left cheek, the equally unwelcome sensation finally enough to rouse her aching body back into action. It took several tries before she finally managed to get her eyes open enough to distinguish the shape of the speaker hovering above her and then all she could do was stare. A...dog? A dog was talking to her, maybe she'd finally cracked or knocked something loose when she fell. Her heavy lids slid closed again unbidden and the nose was shoved into her side this time, hard.

Her body reacted instinctively to the perceived attack, a low growl rumbling in her throat and a clawed paw slashing at the annoyance. This was new...wrong, different, her sluggish thoughts couldn't keep up with the wrongness of it as her eyes opened again to glare at the dog currently shielding itself with an outstretched wing and still managing to look unfazed. Though there was something she couldn't quite place, its gaze seemed to be partially tuned to something in the distance, her vision was beginning to swim from lightheadedness. Colors became clearer than the shapes they belonged to and something was very wrong.

"I'm going to take that as a no." The dog's focus jumped back to her as she tipped forward and suddenly her face was buried in his shoulder fur, "Just get on, it's about time to be anywhere but here." A deeper roar reverberated from somewhere to her right, the sound somewhere between a cry of pain and a scream of anger, and somehow she found her way onto the dog's back. Not exactly comfortable or secure but it hardly seemed to deter the dog as it sprang into the air away from the sound without another word. As they set off in the direction of what looked like a city her blurry vision zeroed in on the danger, a dragon quickly being left behind. Towering and angry surrounded in a muted red glow that reflected the swirls of its eyes, the image burned in her mind as consciousness slipped away into blissful silence again.