"Good night, Zurna." Kaven rolled onto his back and lay there silently, staring upwards through the darkness. The tent was already silent except for the rustling of the fire, a constant crackle that, for a while, kept Kaven from sleep. He frowned slightly, trying to let his mind wander into pleasant memories. And as he mentally walked through the cool forests of La'marri, his eyes began to close...
***
Deep into the night, as the darkness stretched towards dawn, the tent looked peaceful. All the sleeping bodies were comfortable in their own piles of furs, only the occasional sigh or stir breaking the peace. The fire, burnt down to a soft glow, flickered away to itself, one curling spire of smoke hovering in the still air like a question mark. Kaven's body was still, his face contorted into a vague frown - but from the outsider's perspective, all was well.
Not so on the inside. In his mind, terror reigned and Kaven battled blindly against forces he could not understand. It was freezing cold in his dream, and Kaven's physical body began to twitch and shiver despite the furs he slept in. Murmers began to escape from his lips as he shook, and dreamed on.
He seemed to be standing on the egde of a great chasm, surrounded by blackness and buffeted in every direction by a wind stronger than could possibly exist in reality. Dark shapes, darker even than this fake night, swirled around him, forcing him to duck and fall from his precarious position... sliding down the edges of the chasm...
The dream changed and he was dimly aware of a bleak red glow around him. Streaks of crimson liquid pooled around his feet, running over the ground from the foot of a huge, dimly seen mountain.
A scream. The flash of a figure in the distance. He shouted out to her, trying to warn her. No good - a storm had picked up and she was falling away from him as he rushed through the thickening flood of red. "Nooooo!"
"Nooooo!" the same shout escaped his lips back in the tent as he began to toss more violently, his body and hair wringing with sweat, and he sat bolt upright, blind in the darkness.