She wakes a second time to the stench of smoke. Panic pulls her from dreams to consciousness, the word "fire" blazing across her thoughts. Eyes open, body lurching upright, she's halfway upright when she notices the bed that supports her. Blankets, now tangled into art forms, stretch across a thin feather mattress on hardwood floors. By the bedside sit two chairs, a table, several shelves of books and a lamp. The wick, mostly black, slumps into a dwindling pool of oil below. She reaches to touch it and the glass warms her fingers. Smoke still rises in lazy coils up to the wooden ceiling.

Someone lives here, she thinks, though the here is nothing she recognizes. The bed is strange - flat on the floor!, the lamp primitive - lit without magic?, and the wood smells different - musty and damp. A black curtain drapes across where a fourth wall should be; glimmers of light peek out from beneath and trace curves along the floor.

Taya's arms spread like crutches, supports to pull her trembling body upright. She stumbles two steps under the roar of blood rushing past her ears, grips the edge of the curtain, and draws it back. The curtain marks the edge of a loft and reveals a ten foot drop to honey-colored floors beneath her. The room below is empty but for a table, a couch, and several chests along the wall. A door opens out into the world and brings a breeze of brisk morning air to meet her. The air carries a perfume of grass, cherries, and pine that drives away the memory of smoke. Her eyes close and she thinks about the remnants of her dream. Did it smell like that...?

The room darkens as the door closes. It closes laboriously slow as someone tugs the swollen wood back into its frame and creaks a bar into place across it.

"Oh. You're awake."

Taya's reverie pops like a bubble. She turns abruptly and yanks the curtain closed. Her heart hammers against her throat and she scampers back to the strange bed, tripping on a crack in the wood and falling across the mattress. Pin-pricks engulf the nerves in her hands after the landing and she numbly wraps them around the blanket, ducking beneath it.

She waits. Gasps threaten to rip free from her throat and her heart pounds so loudly that it has to be audible to the stranger downstairs. She isn't sure why she's hiding when she was already found, but she isn't sure who's found her, either. She counts each agonizing second of silence until she notices voices - or maybe just a voice - rumble up through the floorboards as vibrations. She hears the tap of something solid against the floor mingle with footsteps and then silence again.

Where is she? Taya wonders. She's in a room. But she should be lying somewhere in the dirt. Her head aches and dulls the urge to remember but she knows she collapsed before reaching a house. She ran until she couldn't, then she hobbled, wheezing and wincing, until it hurt to move, and then she stopped altogether. There was grass there, sort of like in her dream. There was grass in her dream, right?

Regardless, she's in a room now. An unfamiliar room with an unfamiliar person wandering around. They must have found her and brought her back, but then... Taya cringes again. Enough questions. Too much thinking too quickly.

Too little air, too. Like a rabbit emerging from its burrow, she pulls the side of the blanket down and tastes the sweet cool air. Two glowing purple eyes stare inside her burrow from the other side. Black slit pupils widen and fix on her.

A squeak like rusty door hinges escapes her mouth and rends her throat with pain. She winces and coughs while disentangling herself from the covers and crawling away from those eyes. She crashes into the leg of the table and half stands, then winces after knocking her head against the edge. She stills and shrinks against the furniture without colliding with it. She covers her head with one hand while massaging her throat with the other. Coughs slip out like breaths, though quieter.

Everything is silent when she finally stops moving. The owner of the eyes continues to study her with an unblinking stare.

I'm being stared at by a beast, Taya thinks with horror.

Taya tries not to look back into those chillingly sentient eyes and studies the rest of the creature instead. The eyes rest on either side of a shortened muzzle that builds the center of a vaguely human face. The creature leans on two sinewy arms that are too long for her body and sits with her legs sprawled comfortably in a position that makes Taya's own knees ache in sympathy. She wears shorts too big for her body and a clingy top.

Other than watching her, the creature remains still.

Taya wonders if she'll be pounced if she moves. While she thinks, the curtains pull back and reveal the top of a ladder. The creature springs away and perches on the edge of the loft, bouncing and teetering forward and backward.

"Can I help ya?"

Taya starts when she realizes it speaks. The table does not jump with her and she presses both hands to her head shortly after they collide for the second time in five minutes.

"You could tell me why you're up there frightening my guest," came a soft spoken reply. Taya recognized the voice from before.

A tray emerges on the ground beside the ladder, followed by a long smooth wooden staff. The creature pounces the staff and grins, showing a glimpse of elongated incisors. Taya shivers.

"But she woke up you said an I wanted to see if she's okay. Isn't-" the creature pauses, glances at Taya, and corrects herself, "s'a lil' scared only."

"Koneko." The creature flattens her triangular ears against her head and teeters less gleefully.

"Sorrysagesan." The staff is released and placed on the ground like a precious artifact. The creature nudges it toward the ladder where she found it.

Two hands and a face emerge at the laddertop. The smile he wears is entirely apologetic though brief; he spares no seconds in climbing the final rungs and scooping both tray and staff into his grasp. He gives the staff a little toss in his left hand without really noticing it while he steadies the tray across his right elbow. For a finale, he shakes his head abruptly, urging long marine tendrils of hair out of his eyes and safely over his shoulder.

Taya raises her hands to applaud his tiny performance; when his glance turns to her, she pulls her hands away sharply. Something lonely hovers in his eyes and makes her feel guilty for finding him amusing.

"Welcome awake, there. How are you feeling?"

She turns left. Then turns right. Then blinks. Oh, he means her?

Taya opens her mouth to respond. She tries to summon her voice and is overwhelmed by burning in her throat. The man winces and Taya wonders what expression must be crossing her face.

"Don't answer," he tells her. "You've been asleep for days now and your throat's inflamed. Drink."

Taya cups the drink he thrusts at her between numb fingers. She stares into her reflection set on a translucent green backdrop. Then back at the beast, who has moved to the foot of Taya's covers. Then at the young man, who kneels down beside her and offers her another short lived smile.

"It may taste a little off, but it's good for you, I promise." His gaze settles on Taya until she gives the cup another glance. "If you drink, I'll explain my half of what's going on. You can tell me yours when you have your voice back, how's that?"

Reluctantly, Taya tips the cup back. The flavor brings a scrunch to her nose and a twitch to her fingers while giving her throat the sensation of rubbing against burning gravel. She coughs. Her host swallows down a laugh.

"Keep drinking, it will get easier," he insists. "My name is Sage and I'm a doctor of sorts, which is part of why you're alive. The other part would be Koneko finding you before the local wildlife did."

The cup shakes in Taya's trembling fingers. So there really were hungry monsters roaming the outside. And she was out there, lost, stumbling blind, right through their homes? Stupid, stupid...!

Sage studies her for a minute, then folds his hands around hers. The cup stops trembling. "Relax,” he tells her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

His hands are warm and lightly calloused and his fingers are long and slender like a musician's. Without knowing why, Taya's cheeks feel warm.

"It's all right," he repeats. "You're safe as long as you're here. I may not be very used to patients landing on my doorstep but I am a healer. I would not knowingly let something happen to you after taking the time to put you back together again."

Taya eyes Koneko again as she bats her blanket from paw to paw, then looks imploringly back at Sage. She pouts when he openly laughs at her.

"Koneko won't hurt you. Despite what you’re probably thinking, she’s very nice once you get to know her. And if you must know, she's stayed here night and day to be sure you were all right."

"S'okay Sage-san," the subject in question interrupts. Taya would have dropped the cup were Sage not steadying her hands. "Is a Pao, an Pao're scared of everything, so I think."

"What, really? I thought they at least acknowledged your tribe. You are neighbors, aren't you?"

"Nn-nn. Don't think we think, think we eat people. Don't let us try 'n explain."

"Oh, how awful."

"Mm!"

"I knew they were conceited about magic, but that's simply ridiculous. You can't deny a species." Reassurance completely forgotten, Sage pulls his hands from Taya's and waves his hands around for emphasis. "Nyamals are second to elves as acknowledged humanoids."

"S'true."

Taya slurps the noxious drink. She doesn't see what's so wrong about being unnerved by a giant talking catbeast. Maybe they were a little backwards back home, but everybody meant well. Perhaps getting the hint, Sage closes his mouth over what he was about to say and takes the empty cup from Taya's fingers. He flounders for a change in subject.

"...in any case, she's nothing to be afraid of. And as long as you don't use your magic very much, none of the real monsters will come near you."

"Not so tough even if," Koneko amends. She retracts four white claws from the threads of the cover. "Lower on the food chain."

"Well, yes, but you're going to scare her if you put it like that."

"Understood that already."

"Just clarifying."

Taya rubs the side of her neck. Not even an hour in the outside world and she already feels more incompetent and ignored than usual. Sage must think she's a hick - even the catgirl thinks she's ignorant. Though at least she knows why she survived, now; not even monsters like magi-mutes.

She hesitates and pulls her hand away. Warm bumpy ridges run a thin horizontal line across the back of her neck. She ponders that as Sage wrestles the blanket away from Koneko and changes the bedding. Koneko attempts to pounce each corner as Sage tucks them in, eliciting playful scolding from the healer. Taya traces the ridges on her neck, then pulls her collar forward and stares down the front of her shirt.

Resting against her skin, warmed by her body, hangs a delicate gold chain. Pulling the chain to leave tiny ridges in her neck is the amber channel she borrowed from Sandborne-Sensei.