Deirdre is absolutely exhausted.

But she hears something howling in the distance and it sets her every nerve on end. She steps out of the sandy riverbank and slides into the woods proper.

That is not a thing to be trifled with. It is a thing of predatory need and urges she can only imagine involve a lot of rending, tearing, and generally not things she wants done to her in any way, shape, or form.

And Deirdre wants absolutely nothing to do with it.

She slinks out of the river and through the woods, keeping the sound of the moving water within range just to keep her sense of direction in the dense trees.

Finally, she finds exactly what she was looking for: a nice, tall, dead tree.

The tree she picks was ancient before it died, and has been dead for a long while since. It is wide, and branches at a low point with a deep fork.

And, for her purposes, it’s luckily quite hollow.

Deirdre evicts an old possum nest and shoves the sealed document case in its place. A couple of heavy stones get hefted on top to prevent the possum from causing undue damage and then she stuffs the critter’s bedding back where it belongs.

Just in case something might happen to her, she marks the dead tree with a personal mark of hers. It looks like an open eye.

She marks it in the direction she plans to head and then gets on heading that way. But the going is exceptionally slow because the woods here are mighty dense. And she is mighty tired. And it has been a mighty long day and night and all of the above.

And all that extra caffeine from her tea is wearing off.

And dinner was so very, very long ago.

Deirdre decides she has clearly gotten enough of a head start on that silly puppy by now. She doesn’t hear anyone crashing through the woods and there is no baying at her heels. That’s sign enough, isn’t it?

Yes, yes, it is.

She picks up branches as she walks through the woods. As she ambles along, the longer ones are her targets, and she collects a good armload soon enough. A fallen log sits at what appears to be the start of a little deer trail through the woods, and that is just the right place to take a rest.

In fact, a deer has clearly used it for exactly that purpose rather recently. The leaves are dry beside the log, and flattened as though slept upon.

Deirdre configures a little half-shelter with her collection of twigs leaned against the log. She lays her outer layer of entirely too wet clothing out over the twigs to dry while she rests. The rest of her will just have to stay damp.

And then she lies in the leaves and shivers in the cold. Hunger gnaws at her ribcage and the ill wind through the upper branches of the surrounding trees provides a susurrus of calm that sounds almost like whispers.

And the whispers speak of things that Deirdre fears.

They promise starvation. They guarantee loss. They say that she will die here. They assure that none will remember she was ever here.

And yet, with all that exhaustion in her bones, Deirdre still manages to fall into an uneasy sleep.

And while she sleeps, she cannot see that which happens around her.

The ill wind makes a lap of the old log. Fingers of air reach into the makeshift shelter and caress her bare skin. Unseen hands tuck loose strands of her dark hair behind her ear.

The thing that invisibly watches her breathing has no name and no face of its own. It looks into her heart to see if there is one it can wear.

And the only faces it shows are of people she fears, people she hates, and people she feels she has disappointed. The thing of air brushes itself close against her and tries to look again.

There is not a person she loves that hasn’t already been taken from her. The being might have felt pity, if it could feel at all. Instead, it just digs deeper. It winds its way around her throat.

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The winds steal her very breath as she dreams. And it enters them to see what lies within.

In her dreams, Deirdre sits at a table with her mother. The plates in front of them are empty, but they go through the motions of eating from them anyway. The food that they do not consume does not sustain them. They are thin. They are unwell.

Deirdre doesn’t have to look around the room. She dreams about to know where it is or what it is. It is the single room that the family lived in when she was small. It has a dirt floor. There is a fireplace that rarely has enough fuel to burn. Her bed is a blanket on some dirty straw gleaned from an already harvested and picked over field.

It is a filthy and unpleasant way to live. She never wanted to be here, and she never wishes to return.

But nearly every time she closes her eyes, this is where she will be: Eating air with her mother in the empty home.

In truth, she was neither an only child nor was her father absent. There were three siblings, but the two boys were usually out working with their father to earn enough of an income to maybe someday buy the land they worked and not have their harvest taken before it even filled their own bellies.

But that did not happen.

Deirdre doesn’t like to think about all the things that did instead.

But this is where she comes, where she dreams, and this is where the wind winds its way into her sleeping mind. It pulls her away from this one, crystallized memory, so precise, and toward things less real and specific.

She watches a hanging on the tree.

The dream entirely convinces her that the body that dangles and kicks is her own.

The dream thing pulls her away from this as well. It seeks something else entirely.

She spirals downward in her thoughts, suffering with each breath dogs her heels like the hound she knows to be there. She dreams of howling, of being chased.

Of far too many teeth in a maw that drools thick ropes of saliva upon the ground as a hound the size of a draft horse gallops overland. Of being sniffed by a snout that smells the very darkness of one’s heart.

This causes the thing of air to stop. And its sudden stillness steals Deirdre’s breath from her lungs.

Her nightmare frightens the being, and it pulls away before the second ghost that hunts this thief can catch the attention of it. It retracts, and in its haste to leave, spills some things it has stolen from others.

A thief has entered the mind of a thief, and dropped a few baubles on the way out.

Deidre dreams now of golden sunshine on warm skin. She sees a face she doesn’t recognize, but knows that he is loved. Warm brown eyes gaze at her and a slow smile spreads across soft lips. She would kiss them.

But she does not know who this is.

“Beth,” he says, and a hand reaches out to touch her face with great tenderness. The warmth of his fingers spreads across her cheek. A hand touches her shoulder. “Beth, wake up.”

“But my name isn’t Beth,” Deidre says, out loud.

And she wakes up. Her throat feels warm and her arm tingles where the beloved man in the dream touched her so gently. She sneezes, hard, multiple times. But whatever triggered the bought of sinus issues has already gone and it does not bother her again.

Something about the dream feels wrong, even though every moment of that golden glow of sunshine feels so very right.

Deidre sits up and finds that the wind has knocked her shelter over, and her toes are nearly frozen in her still-damp boots. The wind is a cruel beast indeed.

And then she hears it in the distance: a dog barking most happily.

Cursing as quietly as she can, Deidre grabs her clothes from the forest floor. She wriggles into the knit sweater and the woolen tunic. Her quiet cursing and aggressive movement startle several songbirds out of the trees overhead. And she can hear the dog approaching.

With so little rest, Deidre hardly feels like she has had any break at all. But the dream of the beautiful man keeps her moving. Somehow, it feels like that was more real than the nightmares she usually inhabits.

The sound of the very real hound on her trail again gets her back into action in a hurry. She kicks the branches around to make sure that the area is not too obviously a place where she has slept. That isn’t the most effective way to destroy traces, but it is all she has time to do before she gets out of there in a hurry.

Dodging between close trees and ducking under thorny branches takes precious time that she barely has. So Deirdre follows the little deer trail to move faster and with less chance of disturbing the environment to be easier to trace.

She jogs at a speedy pace, faster than the stumpy legs of the dog she knows is behind her, but not the dead sprint that she was capable of when better rested.

It isn’t long before the little deer trail passes a wider path.

Deidre sneezes.

She steps onto the path and sneezes again.

Her nose continues to run, but this gravel path is smooth and even, and the leaves that lie across it do not expose her movement as obviously as the undisturbed brush of the deeper woods. Small white stones line its sides, carefully placed by someone who desired very much to make this path as safe as possible a very long time ago.

Deirdre has two options here. She can take the path and suffer, or she can continue making her way through the woods on her own.

She looks across the path and spots multiple tall specimens of the tree known as the Devil’s walking stick - straight, narrow, and entirely covered in thorns.

Yeah, no.

With a running nose and watering eyes, she turns down the path and gets to running again.

With any luck, she’ll get to the other side of the woods on this narrow road and the safety that should exist over there.