The burning man.

wake

Morning light like a waking stain on the wood.

It is a chopping block, she reminds herself. And that is why it smells so thoroughly of blood.

"The first death follows another," he says, quietly, his voice warm in the back of her mind. She always remembers the shape of his mouth. "Everyone who says differently is a liar - "

--

The house casts a deep and slanting shadow over the sere yard. It is winter here; winter everywhere. Spare winter, always. Dry and broken grass, dirtied snow. The fallow garden harrowed but not yet seeded. The bitter wind drives away any hint of warmth that might radiate down from the wan sun.

The wood is soaked with blood.

There is blood on her hands, caked beneath her nails.

Someone will come, soon.

She tells herself it is a mercy.

In the dream, she always does.

Keisha

She hates these dreams, truth be told. Yes, they're dreams and she can wake up and everything fades away, but it doesn't really. Even if she weren't a Theurge and one of Themis the Dream-Weaver's supplicants, she's sure that it would stick with her. These mean something more, more so than most dreams. She knows that simply because she knows that she isn't alone.

She looks at that stump, the blood-saturated thing, and she looks at her hands. The sight of her extremities so soaked chills her to the bone, more so than even the winter would do to her. And she knows that someone will come. Before then, she crouches in front of the stump and reaches out to put blood-encrusted hands on a blood-encrusted piece of wood.

"Who were you?" she asks quietly. The words push through a lump in her throat, pass underneath eyes that are rimmed with the pain of seeing this. "Who did I do this to?"

wake

There is a shadow of smoke against the sky somewhere and the whisper of fir trees in the wind. A marching darkness to them, a certain irreducible sameness, a spare sort of immediacy, the richly textured shadows that pool around their trucks. The wood seems impenetrable, the sky so far away.

The house is lone; it stands alone. Intact, though it feels somehow both abandoned and impervious to time or ruin or rot: always here. Always failing, never fallen.

Someone has tacked up roughly planed wooden planks over the lower windows. Curtains - old, lace - frame in the dark view of the wavy glass in the upstairs windows, only shadows inside.

Keisha crouched in front of the stump; sinks to her haunches, already mourning. There are no answers, just the echo of her voice against the peeling clapboard. The mournful rattle of the windows in their casements.

The block is too small for a human head, she realizes, this close.

They have to leave something of themselves behind.

--

Someone will come, she knows. They always do.

Keisha

She runs her hands over the block of wood. It's not an adoring touch of course, but neither is it hatred either. It's a simple act of committing it all into her tactile memory. Her fingers trace the lines of the rings, catch the natural divots and edges and roundings of the object. And then she stands up from it, takes a step back. The chill has settled into her bones and she's driven by it, quietly propelled that step away.

She looks up and around. There's that smoke out there in the distance, somewhere in the forest. She wants to go to it, see who is there. Just like she wants to go into the house. Keisha needs answers, a conclusion to draw that could lead her to knowing why, why, why. But she doesn't go to either at this moment, because Someone Will Come.

And she wants to know who that someone is before she goes off into those woods. Someone who comes is someone who may have answers for her.

wake

So she waits.

--

Someone always comes. She knows that the way she knows his mouth, the way she remembers his smile, the way she wears the skin of the winter beneath and around her skin. The way she knows the wood now, knows the skin of its stained skin with the skin of her stained skin.

Someone always comes.

Someone always comes.

Someone always comes.

It might be days; it might be centeries but: someone always comes.

They cannot stay away. Someone strays, someone falls, someone rises: someone comes.

So she waits.

--

Waiting has its own rhythm and its own pattern and its own time and Keisha waits and waits and waits and the light does not change; the light does not move. There is the suggestion of the sun behind a scrim of clouds but the sun is, unmoving. We are always at the edge of things. We are always incised. We are always -

--

No noise but the sound of her own breath; no movement but the wind in the trees, except once - just once - the sudden flush of a wide and dark-winged bird from the depths of the woods.

The acrid scent of smoke creeps into her consciousness. First a few strange tendrils, then more, then more.

This is where the dead come. He is still wearing his winding cloth, his shroud. It is on fire.

He is burning.

Keisha

She's patient; she can wait. As much as her Rage wants her to push onward and take action, it is low in this one; she knows that sometimes it is the details that are left behind which are important. And in a dream, these kinds of things are significant. If someone will come, you should find out who because they are coming for a reason. And while this isn't your standard dream...

Well. It's still a dream. And so she waits, and things are static. Garou are creatures who hate stasis; even outside of the Weaver they are built for change, for cycle. The changing of the moon, the changing of their forms. Calls to action and the drive to prevent the Wyrm's Apocalypse from coming. The rise in rank, the rise and fall of Warriors great and small. And even for someone as calm as Keisha, this galls her a little. But still she waits.

And then the dead comes. She sees the bird, and she lets that go. Keeps it in mind. Dark birds, she thinks. Sparrows, crows, ravens. They are death but also knowledge; that which should not be known. But here, perhaps they are just death. Ferriers across into the Dark Umbra. She keeps it in mind.

And then the smell of smoke. The burning man. She knows that if he's walking, still wearing his shroud than perhaps the fire won't hurt him. He's already dead, after all. But she is someone who doesn't let harm come to others; she heals. And even the dead can be hurt.

She moves toward him, running quickly. Along the way she leans down, scoops up snow in one hand. It will be a poor substitute for water but it might help. And she moves to rip the shroud away, see if the burning is mostly on the shroud or if he is entirely engulfed himself.

wake

If he has a face he does not remember it she does not remember it they do not remember. Listen: the flames do not touch the wood; do not touch the low-hanging branches, do not scorch the trees as he passes through from the place where the pyre was laid to the place where the end comes but: Keisha throws her handful of snow at him and pulls it away and oh,

oh,

her hands burn.

He does not stop; he is walking, the slow-shuffling gait of a sleepwalker and beneath somehow he is spare, refined. Fading. Not burning but still - consumed, the way flames consume anything, everything. Transfigured, see.

He does not stop; her hands are burning and he does not seem to notice the gesture. The flaming shroud flares and then disintegrates itself into these heavy flakes of ash-like-snow, that rise to the sky and begin to fall. His path continues, through the snow, through the wood, toward chopping block.

When he arrives he looks back at her, over one shoulder although he does not seem to have registered her presence, not precisely.

Oh, he is ordinary, ordinary.

He seems so tired.

He is ready to go.

"Strange," he tells her, "The things you forget to remember."

Perhaps she opens her mouth but -

Keisha wakes up.

Keisha

The pain...it happens. Which isn't to say she doesn't feel it or doesn't care; it's her hands burning away and she is agonized by it, feels every bit of it. But she expected the pain; it is a necessary sacrifice when you're trying to help someone. They have to leave something of themselves behind and Keisha certainly does that.

And in some ways, though she is dismayed that it doesn't seem to help, it wasn't about the result so much as the act. Like protesters, it is the act that matters as much as the result. You always try to accomplish something, but the fact that you acted; that's important. And so she sears her hands and he doesn't seem to notice, but she tried nonetheless.

The things you forget to remember. That's important, too. It means something, something deep and buried perhaps, long forgotten. Something in the woods? Remember all this, Keisha. She knows she will, but still she forces it. She'll need it later.

And she does open her mouth to ask What, why, who and yet she's suddenly awake. And in her mind there is still pain in her hands, even though there aren't any burns.

She gasps for breath, and then sits up and runs into the bathroom. First to throw up (the smell, the blood) and then to run her hands under cool water. Tactile memory, it goes both ways.