Yonca was awake during the initial dreaming sequence, and therefore has no first dream. She did, however, stage a daring escape.

Dream before the end

You are walking along the empty rail tracks, endless ties and stone passing under your feet. Unbroken walls of trees pass in a blur, hours marked by nothing other than the slow crawl of the traveling moon. You do not hunger, nor thirst, nor tire. It becomes meditative, the inexorable march to the East. Without a noticeable transition your mind slips off into a waking dream:

You stand next to a fire smoldering in the hollow of a great boreal tree. Snow paints the ground around you, a chill wind from the North driving it into drifts. The hollow shelters you. Looking South you see a wide open expanse of broken ground: fissures running between great boulders. There are many small mounds in this field too, the wind obscuring their cause.

Turning back, you realize the darkness in the hollow is not only absence of snow… no it is feathers, black feathers, packed into the roots, strewn around the fire. As your eyes adjust you find the corpses too: disemboweled bodies of crows tossed aside, out into the blowing snow. In the embers of the fire their organs spit and shrivel in the heat. There is blood on your hands.

Something inside you shifts, awakens. You recognize the bundle of knowledge that buried itself in your mind only hours ago when you held the blade. You hold the most primal of the divinatory tools. You are the haruspex. The one before you favored avian entrails. You know this as a certainty. You know too, what you must do in the coming rite: you are the last stand. Shedding blood for truth, paying life for truth, it can answer other questions should they falter. It could, perhaps, answer them all…

… the dream collapses around you as a call rings out up ahead. The world comes rearing back at you, clacking pebbles under foot, dull echoes clanging through the track. Someone’s seen something up ahead, poking out above the forest. A moon-drenched stone arch, still very distant, hangs just in sight along the horizon.