In the delirium, there was a dream.
Caewen found herself standing on a mossy path. All about her, tall grasses stood wetly under a thin, chill rain. She could feel it pricking at her skin, that rain. The outer fringes of her hair and clothing were growing wet, gathering little droplets of coldness, though as yet the damp had not reached her skin.
A rustling in the grass drew her attention. At first she thought was the wind, which drove and twirled the specks of rainfall. But then she saw the coil of muscle and scales, serpentine and flashing through the grass. The weeds seemed filled with snakes. And up above, other creatures drifted effortlessly on the high, bold winds. They were only silhouettes up in the cloudy sky, but the outlines were dragonish, though they could not have been much bigger than an eagle.
She walked the path because this was a dream and paths draw the dreamer along them. To refuse a path in a dream is difficult. The trackway took her to a small hollow wherein a number of standing stones lay strewn about: some upright, some tumbled. They were more white than the stones that stood in the real world: bonelike in their harsh and featureless tones.
As she watched, the stones moved. It was just a tremble at first, but then the surfaces rippled like muscle and each of them unfolded out into a shape something like a person. They grew crowns of spikes on their heads, and in a moment these had become antlers, spreading. Their eyes, when they opened, were filled with a wet blood, and their faces were more deerlike than human.
The stone men with the deer faces and the horned crowns got up and stretched themselves, languid. Then, slowly, they began to dance. In a circle, they moved together, stepping to a music that Caewen could not hear, unless it was the music of rustling and hissing that rose now from the tall grass that rimmed the hollow.
Caewen wondered if she should call out to them, or walk away, or join them: all seemed equally mad. Her thoughts were rushed and feverish.
A movement at her ankle caught her eye then. It was a snake, green and black and flecked with gold. It had come out of the tangles of undergrowth, and now it was coiling. She saw that it was about to strike. Caewen cried out. She tried to move away, but the fangs shone white as the serpent struck and she felt the hot pain… but it was not her ankle… her leg did not hurt. Her face hurt. Why did her face hurt? Had she been bitten on the face?
The dancers kept on their dance.
The world spun.
The snakes all slithered and hissed.
Up above, the small dragon-creatures circled like crows above a slaughter.
The dream stretched out thin and bled until all the mad colours and mad things trespassed on one another, all becoming one, snake and dragonet and dancing deer-crowned man-of-bone.
And then.
And then.
It slipped away from her.
Or perhaps she slipped away from the dream and the dream just dreamed itself on without her.
These things are difficult to discern, sometimes.