Down, deep down she falls. Darker, darker, darker, further she falls further she goes, dancing with the ghosts that linger at the depths of one’s young soul. She holds their hands, twirling in perfect symphony in a sightless dream, bodies clashing together, one’s fur belongs to another and another, lips don’t wag and feet don’t waiver. There she spends eternity, so long ago was she pushed through the gilded doors, and into the waiting arms of spinning eyes: eyes so blue. Blue as stone, blue as magic, blue waiting to swallow her whole. She met those eyes there and stared right back at them, matched their ferocity with her own and took up the dancefloor with that tangible gaze, twisting together at the cliff’s edge.

Oh but she was falling now.

A blushing stone rested against the ground, pushed over and at all the wrong angles. Something wasn’t right there. Tainted blue at one side, one side far too close to something beyond reach, mere metres away. The other undulating with the whisper of something known, a life, but only a life and nothing more.

The great blue eyes staring into her soul drifted away, further she falls further she goes. Suffocating, there was no air here, none that could reach down her throat and lay to rest the frantic beating of a faux heart. The confines of something rough and harsh and so perfect was pressing against her fresh skin, reaching past the dense fur and touching the fragility of a young girl’s body, no where to move away, there was no ballroom underneath her paws anymore, no glistening lights or blue haze. Wrong. The thing so long in the making pushed out, harder and harder, paws taking up all the space against the walls of her prison.

Crack.

Crack.

Shatter.

A splinter of her fractured like a million stars dying to supernovas at once, the disproportioned thing of a girl tumbled out and lay flattened on the ground, paws spread out as if she could convert herself into one of those fungal stars above. She gasped in the unfamiliar air around her, eyes blinking over and over and over again. Wrong. Yes, the blue haze was here, alive, tangible. As if it might pass its fingers through her fur, whisper in her ear "You're here now, and you're mine." Everything was rough on her paws, her skin, her fur too sensitive for the pushing of rocks, the growing of stones reaching out towards her, nothing as smooth as the darkness, so soft and comforting. The blue haze took its place, a comfort blanket, she could breath it in, devour the glow, that sensation so tangible she could wrap her teeth around it and suckle.

She wouldn't stop, too deep were her breath, dragging that sensation into her lungs, though her eyes had fallen shut it was too bright, too bright and she saw nothing of where this glamour was coming from. Though she could feel it filling her lungs as she breathed in deeper and deeper, trying to scrabble up onto four paws so unnatural, not right and blindly follow the allure of that air so thick with wobbly paws and shut eyes. Her nose stuck straight up in the air and her tail limps behind her, dragging against stones and catching corners, tugging her this way and that, but she could feel something in the air, something in was she breathed, her paws carrying her on a shaky path trying to find where it grew stronger.