Sometimes, people have lurking dangers in their own minds. The man with the metal and title and manacles and bloody drain in Stephanie's dream, the unknown darkness that put an edge on the Tibetan beauty of Tom's mind, the distant whine of insects in the Mermaid's. They are a memory, some facet of personality, and not so long ago, Benji was being educated in how to find these things and how to smooth them out, if only for the sake of good nights' sleeping.

This feels different. It acts different.

"Wolfgang?" she says, with more directness than she likes to approach these things, and then opens her eyes; she'd flinched them shut when the girl had brought the knife up, even if that only does so much to dim her senses. She still remains in the tree-- or a tree, a different tree-- and hesitates before making her way down, landing feet first in the crunching snow.

You should go. Except she won't. She isn't a coward

(which has less to do with Wolfgang and everything to do with feeling like something of a useless dreamwalker if she did, when her friends regularly step out into danger but no, that's some other life, now)

and doesn't want to leave when there's that taste of danger in the air. Though she remains within view as she is, a darkly dressed silhouette wandering almost blind through the snowy forest, she also extends a more invisible reach -- a near omnipresent awareness that smooths over the dream as if she were trying to find the flaw in a piece of fabric, that one thread gone awry, and she will go to it, remove it if it's small enough, the thorn from a lion's paw--