"I don't know which spells would even help. My ideas - we should look in the places I haven't been. In the office. Try and see if we can find an internal staircase up or down."

Or jump down the hole. That sounds like nightmare logic.

“Fine. You’d know better than I. Gods, may the Sleeping Prince awaken from his slumber, I wish that I’d just gone through with the damn -“

Shaitiren does not, ordinarily, trip. Ruwien reds were already graceful by default, and he’d been unusually graceful on top of that, and he’d stacked on magic steroids like he expected to walk a tightrope as thin as spider webbing -

Nightmare logic doesn’t really care about ‘ordinarily’.

He trips, while he’s speaking.

Into the hole.

It's exceptionally strange, like falling through a coruscating mass of lights, like swallowing a rainbow of colors that don't exist, that're what's left when all others have been consumed and twisted into screaming shadows of themselves - that feels like mint and tastes like buzzing flies and smells like static and sounds like a thousand spiraling eyes.

There's something at the bottom. Something beautiful.

He stares.

The void stares back.

...Bina, meanwhile, finds something to anchor her scarf to.

Then jumps.

Lash tilts her head.

Smiles.

And vanishes.

Shaitiren doesn’t comment on these events, being otherwise occupied.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful - 

She manages to knock into him! "Stop looking at the weird dream eldritch abomination - " she shouts, trying not to keep falling. Luckily the scarf is being very cooperative in length.

He blinks, when she crashes into him -

And turns into a small python, and frantically coils his way around Bina’s nearest limb.

That'd be the arm not currently clinging desperately to a magic scarf, mostly likely. 

Bina doesn't look down, but does start trying to climb.

He tentatively turns into a parrot, once she seems relatively stably positioned, and hops up on her shoulder - snakes can’t close their eyes, and he’s summarily uninterested in being further bewitched by eldritch abominations.

”... thank you,” says the parrot.

"I'm sorry about dragging you into this," she says between deep breaths. "Did not expect the eldritch abomination. At all."

“I was also not expecting the eldritch abomination,” says the bird, “but helping with this is higher leverage than almost anything I could otherwise be working on, even if I hate everything about it, and am probably going to die. Don’t worry about it.”

"I don't think we'll - die?"

She's glancing off to the side. "...Is it me or is there a door in the void."

“I was being unnecessarily pessimistic. It isn’t just you.”

There's a door.

It's simple, and much like many of the doors in Veshiri - thin, cheap metal painted a brassy color, with sharp, geometric designs.

"...I can probably swing over there. Do we want to risk - that?"

“I think that we should go through the door.”

"Right." Deep breath, and she starts to wriggle enough to swing the scarf. Not looking down's hard, but she manages - 

And the landing's only a little bit rough. She stumbles, almost falls, but catches herself.

Shaitiren flits off of her shoulder, ceases to be a bird, and tentatively tries to get a sense of their surroundings from peripheral vision, without actually looking around. 

There's a small little ledge before the door - Bina tugs at the scarf, and it returns easily to her hand, then she opens the door - 

There's a hallway beyond. Plain, with sharp lines. Nothing like Bina's memories. 

... he's not sure why he's surprised. It could've been a swirling vortex of death and that would've been mundane, at this point, but an ordinary hallway is enough to make him raise an eyebrow -

"One of us closes their eyes, other person leads?"

She's peering very suspiciously down the hallway. "That might be best. Uh, you have better ability to react to danger, I'm just - apparently my advantage is in figuring out dream logic."

“You’ve previously failed to notice situational anomalies when presented with them, so it might be better if I lead, even ignoring other factors - remember the factory? You weren’t reacting to the voices or the tiles, and then you pointed out the eldritch not-dog, but the timing didn’t really make sense for that to have been what was distracting you...”

"...Yeah. So it's probably best if you lead? Since this isn't even my memory, so I lose my advantage there." She doesn't seem particularly happy about it, though.