Wren's POV
The dream starts the way it always used to, before I trained myself to wake up before it went too far. Smoke first, thick enough to taste, curling low along a floor I recognize even in my sleep, the front hall of the house I grew up in, before the fire took it and turned every corner of that home into something I could barely stand to walk through.
I know this floor the way I know the ache in my own wrist. Third board from the door, warped just enough to catch a bare heel if you're not careful. I used to run across it barefoot as a child, my mother calling after me to slow down before I split my head open, and even in the dream some small distant part of me registers the wrongness of hearing that same warm, exasperated voice now, tonight, with smoke already climbing the walls
