Chapter Text
Adora danced a dizzyingly proficient series of sword katas in a glade which sparkled under the gem fall of a sudden sun shower. Sunlight heliographed off of the water beaded blade as the bearer abandoned her exercise regimen in favour of bisecting individual droplets of light-fired rain. Just as abruptly, the sky darkened, thunderheads towered menacingly. Lightning tore the darkness, and the water on the blade flashed crimson as the soft summer rain of only moments earlier was replaced by searing, smoking flames.
Adora’s katas now wove her in between the hissing deluge of blazing missiles as she worked her way towards a huge fan of Queen’s Canopy1 regally posed at the heart of the inferno gripped glade. Under it’s cover, the fringes of her impossible leaf shelter ran with shimmering curtains of liquid fire through which Adora could see that everything but her guardian plant had withered and burned away to reveal a dead landscape shot through which a diseased geometry of crimson veins which were drawn to the only standing structure, a lone metallic tower thrust up against, and wreathed by the lightning, soot and flame of the sullen sky.
From the zenith of the spire, a hand splayed white and angular fingers lined with the same jagged red traceries as the land. The palm and fingers altered smoothly through a darker grey infection garbed in a fingerless glove ; settled into the red shot tawny palm and clawed digits. Adora raised a sword which fell away from her grasp to plant point down in the rich loam to transform into a living wooden parody of a sword. Her empty palm stretched fingers pleadingly towards the spire, and its taut, upthrust, infected hand. The dreamer cried out one word in her sleep.
Adora awoke crying out the name to a room wrapped in the loneliness of the darkest hours of the night. She stumbled from her bed, pulling off soddened sleepwear to cool her nightmare sweated body on the the balcony overlooking the gentle luminosity of the woods surrounding the castle. Her eyes went to the red stain of cloud shadow in the distant east which marked the presence of the Fright zone ; a forlorn expression mingled tears with the beaded perspiration.
Her expression and body language were only slightly less wild than her dream as she called out to the darkness, "Catra!"
Behind her, within the darkness, a pale sphere of light picked out the tousled head of Glimmer. She rubbed at her sleep glued eyes with a non-glowing, spectral hand.
"Adora?" She slouched over next to her friend ; in only her nightshirt, she shivered in the cool night air. "Wha'cha...?"
Adora threw an arm around her half asleep friend, pulled her into a tight hug.
"I love her, Glimmer ; I'm going to get her back!"."
"K."
The hugged girl sighed sleepily, murmured something indistinct ; fell back asleep. Adora looked fondly down at her gently snoring friend ; picked her up ; turned to carry her back inside just as the door to Glimmer's bedchamber banged open to reveal a perturbed queen.
"You I knew would be awake, but Glimmer..." She crossed the room, ran a concerned hand through Glimmer's hair. "She woke?"
Adora passed the gently snoring princess load to Angella who flew her child up to her bed, and tucked her as well as she could into the mussed bed.
Adora flung her arms up melodramatically. "Just long enough to catch me brooding buck naked on the balcony!"
"That's my daughter : too stubborn for even magical laws!" The aerial monarch landed next to the nude hero. "I presume that your one hour of sleep was..."
Adora found that the dream had eroded down to only two particular elements, one of which was, unbeknownst to her, actually a distortion of the dream.
"I dreamt that the Fright Zone filled the sky with fire as I sheltered beneath a giant blue leaf in an open field i. the middle of the Whispering Woods."
Her face carefully neutral, Angella thought, That sounds apocalyptic! Out loud she declared, "Queen's Canopy is a good omen : it means perseverance!" What she kept to herself was, It means something’s going to happen to her ; we’ll have to persevere!
****
Catra sat on the throne. She was exalted : the Fright Zone rang to her name. Legions spread before her view ; she felt no success, zero victory. She looked out upon her ascendency and uttered one, lonely word, "Adora!"
She awoke, swore ; tore her bed to shreds.
****
Shadow Weaver shackled in her cell far below the blasted surface of the Fright Zone, was visited by something that was more than a mere dream : the stylized form of a blue woman coalesced out of a chaotic dream of shattering masks and silently screaming scarred faces. The figure held the fragments of a mask which she fused back together with a pulse of carmine light ; held the whole, familiar item. In a calm, uninflected voice it announced, "You contained chaos ; you will do so again."
”For whom?”
”The Optimal Etheria.”
Shadow Weaver awoke. The mask was there in her cell : intact. She smiled, the twisted and frozen muscles of her face disappearing behind the smooth features of the mask. She wasn’t sure whom the other was, or what an ‘Optimal Etheria’ meant. It was an ally now ; a puppet later.
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1 Queen's Canopy is a symbiotic vine that throws out huge blue-green fan leaves to feed both itself and the host tree. It occurs only in the Whispering Woods.