A dream:

You can feel your feet pounding into the snow as your run. As before you don't seem to be sinking into the snow but instead just seem to step on the surface and push off. There are tracks in front of you in the snow you seem to be chasing or following. A single set of footprints each stride slightly smaller than your own. As you run you can see your arms and hands as they come into view as your pump them to keep your stride. Dark, purple blue hands going to black fingertips, you have seen these before. You feel yourself come to sudden stop, staring down at the footprints in front of you. They seem to move around in a small circle before continuing on. You raise your hand and with a bit of a glow you place it down on your other arm and you can feel a sort of energy running through you. You take off in the direction of the original tracks, faster this time, faster than you would think these legs capable of. Your movement certainly aided by magic.

All you can hear is the thud, thud, of the footsteps impacting the snow and every now and then a sudden thump of a heartbeat pounding in your ears. You do not feel the cold of the wind or the snow, there is a faint shimmer you can see, the indication that the magic that was cast is still working. You continue on at your magically augmented speed, through the pine trees across the flat rocky ground.

You maintain your pursuit of whoever has left these footprints. You can feel your vision focus, up ahead you can see the footprints are no longer moving in a straight line but instead seem to move back and forth to the trees, They are moving not only in one direction but seem to move back and forth, like whoever it was making trips back and forth from somewhere up ahead to a fallen tree that seems to have been felled some time ago, You begin to slow and you feel a wave of exhaustion washes over you and you head ducks down as you lean over and a single puff of air escapes your lungs forming a small cloud of white mist in front of you and slowly fades away.

You being to frantically look around, searching, searching. Up ahead you can hear some noise in the distance, a kind of shriek, softly echoing. You do your best to follow the sound as well as the mess of footprints to where ever their origin is assuming they come from the same place. You trip in your hurry and land hands first in the snow, same as before your hands seem to only land on the surface of the snow, making prints in it but not sinking into it, from the footprints that are hear you can tell that the snow is several inches deep at least, but you make no more than a small impression on the surface of the snow.

There it is again that screech, echoing in the distance, you find your feet just as fast as you can and continue on. The exhaustion from the prior spell has mostly past now but you can still feel its effects. Up ahead you can see it now, a cave opening in the side of a hill, the footprints appear to be leading towards it, you follow them quickly stopping only once you are about to reach the entrance to it. You slow your speed but do not come to a stop, peering aroudn quickly you see a few large feathers half buried in the snow, what kind of bird do they belong to? Too large to be anything mundain, larger even then some of the eagle feathers that you have seen.

Shriek.

There it is again, echoing from inside the cave. The footprints continue on inside disappearing where the snow dissapears at the entrance. Inside the entrance is natural stone, there appears to be a small fire pit just inside. You move over quickly to it and place your black fingers over the remants there, you feel no heat coming from them but when you wave you hand quickly over them you can see there is still a spark of fire in the coals. Looking around you see a pack that has been set and some small amount of gear has been laid out around the fire pit. You move your fingers up to your face and again you can feel the casting of magic. The once dark cave comes into a new focus, you can see all the corners and tunnels that lead back. The light streaming in from outside seems to have turned into a brilliant white spilling out all around you.

You can see it now, a thin coating of liquid on the rocks up ahead, with the colors of the cavern reduced to almost nothing all you can tell from the shimmer of the tiny bits of light is that is is still a liquid on the rocks. You move quickly over to it, kneel down and press your finger in it, the edges have begun to dry slightly but the wet center still smears thickly to the motion of your charcoal black fingers. You smear it between two fingers and feel the thickness of it. You peer closer at it but without the sense of color you seem lost as to what it could be. You stand quickly to your feet as the sound of something moving up ahead startles you slightly. Something is coming down one of the tunnels toward you, it sounds big, the clicking on the stone sounds like no shoe or boot you have ever heard. You gather your hands together to start casting a spell.

You wake.