When I wake up, the piercing cold of steel greets my pawpads. I gasp, my whole body filling with dread as dark as an Obsidians' underbelly, but the smell of metal tinted by the faintest tinge of rust confirms my worst fears. I scramble around in the darkness of the Drowning Room, the pipes staring me down like all the ambivalent gods I once called out to for rescue. My paws shake with numb fear.

No. It couldn't have all been some kind of- some kind of test. My entire escape couldn't have been another ploy by the Obsidians, some other way to harvest fear, a new, insidious level of torture...

Despondent, I kneel over, sobs wracking my sick, weak body as I sit hunched over in the dark, waiting for the water to come. The noise echoes wrong, bouncing off my ears again and again, each time fainter and fainter still. The walls sound like they're mocking me.

From amongst my cries come a loud, vibrating sound that booms through the room and snaps me out of my panic- a familiar voice. "Look up."

Shivering, I turn upwards see that where there should be a ceiling lies an upwards spiral, leading up to a distant light. Standing over the exit, leaning down into my hole, is a sleek form with two long, thin ears. Iris is here.

"I-" I try to look less pathetic, the events of our escape spinning in my mind. "Iris. How do I get out of here?"
"You need to fall." she tells me. "Jump."

I jump and land back on the ground, my paws stinging from the impact of the hard metal.

"Close your eyes," she suggests.

"That... doesn't make any sense," I ponder. Regardless, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and jump. I expect for my paws to touch the ground again, but they don't. The air is knocked out of my lungs as I open my eyes to see the metal ground falling away behind me and choke out a yelp of surprise. I fly past Iris and whatever force was holding me up gives way. Iris leaps over the chasm and knocks me away before I can fall back in, tumbling away on one side of the hole while I roll away on the other, a mess of flailing paws and red fur and a new, strange substance.

As I get to my paws, head reeling from impact, I observe the substance that caught my fall. It is stickier than fur, though not coarser, and has the same coloration as our food, if a bit brighter. It carpets the ground like a pelt, flowing and green. Are we on the back of some enormous organism?

Iris's voice rings against my ear. "Torch."

"Gah!" I say, jumping back. She must have skirted around the chasm, which now lies behind us, pitifully small. "Uh... sorry, not used to close contact. So, are we out?" I ask. "Of the Factory, I mean."

Iris squints around, taking in our surroundings. We're surrounded on all sides by huge, hulking plants I recognize as trees. Their gnarled surfaces and imposing height are frightening, yet comforting in a familiarity I can not give a name to. They glisten with tiny leaves which stand clustered atop their branches- that's what this texture beneath us is, small leaves. Is this what they call... grass?

"Is this Dreamland?" she asks.

"I don't know." I reply, stepping through the 'grass' as I look over the forest. "I guess... in my head, this is how I always imagined it."

"Oh." Iris murmurs.

"Aren't forests supposed to move a bit? With wind, or something?" I ask.

A slight breeze ripples through the forest like a sigh, reluctantly giving in to the demands we place upon it. It stirs the leaves and grass before running over our pelts, tasting our very being and rippling my fur in a way I've never felt before. I shiver, but it's not an unpleasant sensation.

"Fresh wind, like what the Hellhound's followers spoke of," notes Iris. "It feels good."

I nod, looking around for more, but nothing comes. We continue on together, taking in our new surroundings, but no matter where we go the whole land seems to be the same. Nothing else greets our approach, nor comes to aggress us, nor even makes a sound. It's just as hollow and eerie as walking through the Factory. Somehow it lacks the warmth I had envisioned in my dreams of freedom. "There's still something wrong about it- it's so empty."

"How did you expect it to be?" Iris asks.

"Full." I say.

"Did you think about it a lot?" She tilts her head to the side, surveying me with that shrewd, cold gaze.

"Yes. That's not weird, is it?" I ask, feeling sparks flare on my back and a different kind of heat across my face.

"I don't think so."

We start walking again out of sheer desperation to avoid the awkward break in conversation, but the silence follows us through the forest. Nothing has changed and I begin to grow restless, even desperate.

I stop again between two trees. "Iris, are you mad at me?"

"No. Why would you think that?" she sounds upset.

"You're glaring at me." I say. Her ice blue gaze, unwavering, pierces my own.

"I don't understand."

She doesn't know that she's staring at me. I struggle for a way to explain the concept of facial expressions to her, then decide: "Tense your legs."

Iris's expression turns from piercing to confused, though she's still got her eyes narrowed into that unfriendly leer. She does what I ask anyways, lowering herself down into a battle position with her legs poised to pounce on anything that gets in her way. I'm scared for a moment until I remember that she's on my side.

"Untense them. Now, tense your face up, like that."

I see her face twitch.

"Untense it."

She struggles, but slowly the glare turns to a neutral, even friendly expression. Her bright blue eyes glance up at mine and she tilts her head. "Do I look... less mad, now?"

"Yeah, but if you want to go all the way, I guess you could put out your tongue too and put your jowls up a little. Like this!" I demonstrate, beaming at her.

She pulls an honestly adorable expression of shock when she sees my face, and then, with slight hesitation, she sticks her tongue out. I try not to snort at her half-disgusted, half-confused expression, and her ears lower as she sees my reaction. "Thith is stupid." she says, in a tone completely unbefitting of her composure. She sticks it back in. "Is there a face for being lost in the middle of nowhere?"

"I don't think so. They're more of an emotion thing. You just kind of do them." I say, falling over onto the grass. It feels good beneath my fur, not half as piercing as I expected from the sharp blades. "I'm tired of walking."

Iris falls besides me with a whumf and we lie side by side in the forest, looking up at the tree branches overhead.

"Iris... do you have memories?" I ask.

"Yes." she says. "That is how you process the past, is it not?"

"No, but I mean- memories of things you haven't seen before! I kind of knew what I thought Dreamland would be like, or that there was somewhere besides the Factory, even though I grew up there. In fact, I basically just saw this, even though I'd never actually seen anything like it."

"I know things." she replies, looking up towards the trees. "I know the species of every being we've come across when I see them, I know these are trees and that is grass and what you produce when you spark is fire. I understand the mechanism that makes you do so. If I need information of some kind for context it is provided to me from a place I cannot understand. I do not think that is what you experience, though."

"Not at all," I say. "Do you think that has anything to do with your purpose?"

"Do you think your memories have anything to do with yours?"

"I don't think I have a purpose." I say. "I mean, maybe the Obsidians thought that they could just use me over and over again. Feed off me. It crossed my mind more than once. I wanted more than anything for that to be over, I guess. Now we're here." I pause. "Sorry. I'm rambling."

Iris stirs by my side. "It's okay. I believe I might have some of these... memories, too. Now that you mention it. I remembered the Hellhound from somewhere. I remember light. Not Obsidian light, but something larger and grander. I remember plants softer than grass, white with gold-stained insides, and reaching up to meet it. It was a good memory, but I know it's different because there are no words."

I get to my paws and my eyes widen in surprise. "Iris."

Iris stands alert. "Yes?"

There's a path made of plants stretched in front of us, scattered amongst the grass. They are small, white plants that when touched are much softer than the green blades to the left or right of them. "Is this what you were talking about?" I ask.

She nods, and begins following them. I scramble to meet her pace as she breaks out into a dead sprint and we both emerge into a place with no trees, where the blue sky stretches out overhead far as our eyes can take it in. The air is fresher, so clean that it rushes through the lungs with every breath, and overhead a magnificent ball of light begins emerging overhead.

"That's it. That's the sun." she tells me.

The light of a sun will shine upon our backs, in this life or the next.

Beneath us, a million white plants stretch skywards and Iris, too, extends one wing over me and the other far over the field. She lifts her head and takes in the light and the two of us stare into it. I get the sensation that this shouldn't be, couldn't be possible but I'm too busy drinking in the tremendous warmth, almost shuddering with pure ecstasy as it spreads across us.

"No matter what happens next," I tell her, "Or who we find, promise me you'll stay with me. We can be partners."

"Do you mean a pack?" she asks. "I don't know 'partners'."

"No, they're different." I say.

"Kind of similar at the beginning," she replies, then whispers, "We're not alone."

"No," I agree, because at the moment I don't feel like we are at all.

"We're not alone," she snaps. "Torch, get down!"

"What?"

At the other end of the field, a light more brilliant than the sun is staring at us. It is vaguely canine in shape, like the Hellhound, and just looking at it burns my eyes. The light tears into reality itself as it draws nearer, step by step, and the flowers- that's what they are, like the Sorrowful Lily- bend and fold away out of existence as she draws nearer.

"Iris, I don't think it wants to fight us." I say. Even though her presence is foreign, almost unwelcome, it doesn't appear to be aggressive. It's just walking here, like we are. Maybe it's lost, or perhaps it can tell us the way home to the rest of the Canira in Dreamland...

"Torch, get down!" Her voice starts as a high whine and ends with a snap, and then with a gaze so cold it makes something twist inside of me, Iris races at the luminous being with intent to tear it to pieces. It spreads its six wings slowly, like moving through water, but Iris is faster than lightning as she digs into it, tearing like a feral beast, like the Obsidian experiments who cracked.

Fear seizes me as drops of red stain the white flowers. I can't tell whose it is but an even darker dread fills my heart as an icy sensation creeps across my back. I look up to see that the sun has been devoured by shadow, and all that remains is an unfeeling black pupil in the middle of the discolored sky.

A voice of a being I don't know speaks to me, so loud that I can feel the thrum of it in my ribs: End this.