"Hm..." Bonesaw rests her hand on his chest, paying attention to his pulse "Does your family like her too?"

He pauses to consider this. 

"I'm not married and don't have any children, and I haven't seen my parents in years, but my brother is a clerk at Mahogany Hall and his wife sings there and they think she's swell."

"Oh maybe we'll visit, I like pretty singing"

Bonesaw yawns.

"It's probably past my bedtime, it was already night when I showed up here. Instead of going to that Hall could you sing me a lullaby yourself? Pretty please?"

"Of course," he says. He doesn't know a ton of lullabies, but he can probably improvise? 

He only has the one bed but obviously she can have it, sleeping on the floor is probably loads more pleasant than whatever she has in mind for aversion training. 

She'll stay on the floor with him, cuddled up for comfort. Cuddling helps a little bit with the nightmares.

His singing voice isn't great for lullabies, but she's too tired to do anything about this. Maybe tommorow.

After a few minute she's asleep.

Literally nothing about this went the way he expected it to but, like, whatever, sometimes shit like that happens. 

She's a cute kid. Too knife-happy for his preferences, but hey, she didn't leave him a tomb-colonist, so as long as he manages to avoid this "aversion training" thing it could definitely be worse. 

It takes him less time to fall into a more peaceful sleep than you would expect from one of Bonesaw's Friends. 

Her nightmares that night are different from usual. 

The dream takes place back in her original family home, before the Nine killed everyone and took them away. But something's wrong. Her parents aren't there, and a strange silvery light illuminates everything, and everywhere there should be text of any kind is only the word NORTH. 

Bonesaw gets a full but restless night of  sleep.

When she wakes up, she remembers the dream. She could have made it so she would never dream, or even made all her dreams good ones. But the only change she made to how she she dreams is lucid recall. Every detail of every nightmare remains in her mind as if she experienced it while awake. 

Her nightmares are the only place where she sees her mother.



She shakes her Friend awake.

"I had a weird dream during the night."

He opens his eyes almost instantly; he's a light sleeper, and he couldn't forget what had happened yesterday. 

"Weird like how?"

"It said the word 'NORTH' everywhere," she says, fiddlign idly with one of the smaller knives she found last night. 

"Oh, yeah, that happens." 

Without paying much attention, she starts cutting into the palm of his hand, pealing away a window of skin.

"Something important in the North?"

He winces but stays carefully still. 

"I don't know, I've never been." He thinks for a moment. "There's a Northbound Parliamentarian." 

"Do they send dreams?"

She pinches the spider she saved from yesterday between her fingers, and stats to gently tuck it's legs into his palm.

"I don't think the Parliamentarian sends the dreams. Is that a Sorrow-Spider?"

"Where do the dreams come from?"

She ignores the question, but she uses her fingers to peal the spiders carpace aside for a look inside to see if there's anything sorrowfully about it. 

On the outside, it resembles a perfectly normal earth spider except for its size. On the inside, it...doesn't. Its organ systems are far more complex. It has spinerettes in about the right place, but they're far bulkier and more productive than any normal spider's, and that...and that...it looks as though the spider was designed to hook up to and agglomerate with other organisms, albeit not usually human hands. Its oxygen-processing systems are far more efficient, allowing it to grow much, much bigger than the square-cube law would usually allow. 

"I don't know, but probably not something human, and as far as I know the Parliamentarian is human. I suppose she could be a Snuffer."

She starts to hook up the spider to his hand - she can follow the design for now and add her own flare later when she sees what happens.

"Do the dreams you know about always tell you to go north?"

"No, there are lots of other kinds of dreams. Dreams about fire, dreams about chess, dreams about storms..."

"Don't people have dreams like that a lot of the time?"

This vein goes into to that vein, this one to that one. It's soothing to work while she talks.

"You can sort of tell the difference between a normal dream and a Neathy dream after a while. Normal dreams have weird transitions between them and Neathy dreams...they have a sort of logic that's a lot like dream logic, but not quite..."

She frowns "That's not a very helpful description, why'd you guess that mine was a Neathy dream?"

She finishes the circulatory system, and positions the fangs to poke out of his palm as she starts to sew his skin back over the rest of the spider with her clear thread.

"Because it had NORTH all over it, that's a pretty big hint."

"Oh, well there's no reason to go there just because a dream told me to I guess."

She has a lot of new places to explore, she can check up north later when she's more prepared for ominious things. 

"Are there any Bohemian art exhibits we can visit? Like a museum or something."

"I don't know about a museum, but there are galleries in Veilgarden."