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She was walking through the umbra, a wolf patterned in sun and shadow. This was not the near Umbra she knew. Another realm, perhaps. She looked up as a very large creature approached, walking without making a sound on brush and dry leaf alike. He was vaguely like her, but not a wolf. Coyote.
He spoke to her in what sounded like fluent Garou, though. "Greetings, niece. What brings you here?" She squinted as he drew close. Something was wrong. Why were his eyes closed? Even other than being closed, they looked wrong. He didn't move like he was blind. Sunken. As though closed over empty sockets.
He laughed infectiously and she found herself laughing with him. He jumped, high enough to look much smaller, and when he came down his eyes were open and bright, looking at her intently. "You cannot learn my eye trick, niece. Only my own children can learn that."
"What eye trick?" Diane asked, feeling that she was missing something important.
The coyote tossed his head back again, and his eyes flung themselves into the tree, landing lightly in one of the topmost branches. She stared. They appeared quite capable of seeing, swiveling intelligently independently of any connection to their sockets. They looked right at her, seeming to lean down from the branch on which they rested.
"That eye trick," he told her.
Diane shook her head, both to indicate no, and to clear it. She knew somehow it was some other eye trick she needed to learn. "Something," she mused, not quite realizing she was saying it aloud as well, "that will keep eyes from changing color. They should stay in the head."
Laughing again, the coyote shifted form to appear human. Nuwisha, then. Of course he would be. That or a spirit; and the shift didn't completely rule out spirit. He might even be both; a Nuwisha ancestor-spirit perhaps.
...she woke up with his laughter ringing in her head. It was, oddly enough, a very pleasant sensation.
Diane thought about her dream as she lay, eyes wide open to the darkness. The laughter still echoed. What had it been about? What had she meant by keeping eyes from changing color? It had to have something to do with Mouse, maybe, whose eyes shifted color constantly... no. That wasn't it. Maddeningly hard to remember dream logic... she drifted back into a light slumber, and another dream...
A wolf looked at her through a screen of trees. Coal black fur, burning green eyes. Diane thought it must be Canth. The Black Fury was usually only seen at night, but this was Umbral twilight and surely not a problem for her. She crept closer under the watchful eye of the black wolf.
When she got close, she heard it whisper in a wolf-throated English - rather like the cat had spoken, she thought, then thinking that she hadn't known Canth could talk that way - "Diane. History screams but no one hears. What flows downhill will up again." The voice was more hoarse and distorted than the cat's or Canth's human one, but Diane did not consider this at that moment. She was trying to think what Canth meant. "Pain is infinite - no end, but it had a beginning. I was not always as I am. Look at my eyes."
Diane looked into the glowing green eyes. The world turned topsy turvy for a moment as the green floated out to surround her and in the green she saw twisted fang, gaping wound, indigo mist and balefire... images bombarded her, both nightmarish and unearthly strange... deep in the green eyes, in place of a pupil, there spun a spiral of darkness that mesmerized Diane.
She slipped into darker sleep and thence to awaken again, this time to no laughter, but silence. Again her eyes opened to darkness, and as she stared she had two thoughts: the wolf in the dream had not been Canth. And she had to find some way to make the resemblance between the lupine Canth and a black spiral dancer go away... the eyes, the glowing green eyes...