A single road ran from the gaping maw of the Changeling's tunnel into the depths of the iron forest. The tarmac boiled under the sun of the open Deadlands and stung Rain-Born's cloth-wrapped feet. Still, she and Jespar followed this great burning tongue as it wound its way through the skeletal remains of dwellings Rain-Born had never seen before towards the great iron trees that held her prize. Around her, large planks of iron jutted out from the ground and twisted in the air like grasping hands. Chunks of these hovels were missing – as though some great winged tyrant had feasted on their steel hides before returning to its nest. The walls of these houses that still remained intact were rusted and broken. The colors that had once clung to their hides had been battered into submission by the dry desert winds. They looked sad, Rain-Born thought, like the shadows of a decrepit civilization that had breathed its last breath long ago.

As they passed more and more of these strange houses Rain-Born noticed a pattern: each house was placed equidistant from its neighbor, and a small metal device attached to a plank of dead wood lay on the scorched grass before each open door. She scanned these hollowed hovels for signs of life – feeling like the rectangular eyes of their squalid husks stared at her and Jespar with hunger in their minds. Watching. Waiting for the precise moment to strike and take the lives of two from the new world they did not belong to.

Jespar seemed to notice her trepidation and whistled a song quietly into the air as they followed the road. His tiny voice echoed through the iron husks and the dead air, and its melody calmed her somewhat.

They stopped as the road spilled into a circle flanked on all sides by more and more destroyed houses, pieces of their rooftops scattered across the road, and the thing that rose from its center attached to what looked like a stone dais.

It was a statue. Of a human. Headless, holding what looked like a piece of parchment in his or her left hand. If this decapitated entity held any importance to the beings that once dwelled here, their message would be spread no longer.

"What is this place?" Rain-Born asked, more to the air than to anyone in particular. All around her, she saw potential threats: corners, walls where assailants could hide, and shadows moving behind the open windows surrounding them...

"It's a suburb," Jespar said, as a matter of fact. He, too, looked up at the statue with nonchalant eyes, evidently unimpressed. "Used to be plenty of them before things changed around here."

"You knew this place?"

He sniffed the air and turned up his nose at the scent. "Nah. Places like it, sure. I used to live in one when I was but a wee pup. I thought –"

He saw that she had drawn her bow.

At his look of confusion, she held up her hand and made several quick gestures. This, of course, only served to increase his confusion, and though she struggled not to chuckle at his cocked head, she pointed towards one burnt-out hovel.

Its door had just swung open.

The huntress within Rain-Born activated, and she crouched low, almost prone to the boiling ground. She tried to get a handle on her senses, but the Changeling's tunnel spilled her into a new world. She could not feel a connection with the great hulking, rotting iron giants she saw on the horizon, and she could not even feel the reassuring warmth of the red sands beneath her feet. The people who had made this place had made something unnatural, and it pained her to readjust to a new environment where the spirits of the land did not dare to tread.

But, she reminded herself, she had him. She saw him crouch low with her and issue a low growl as he crept forward by her side – like a shaman's familiar stalking prey with his bonded master. She was no master to any animal (and he certainly would not consent to such a comparison), but it still allowed her to stay calm and press on, keeping low, slowly making her way toward the front door and the shadow that moved within that house.

There.

She loosed an arrow and heard something yelp. The projectile found its mark on the broken door frame and twitched in the air. Whatever was inside was no human at all.

She nodded to Jespar to run left to flank their opponent should they launch an attack directly at her from the front door. He did so silently, without comment or wit. Could it be that even he understood the magnitude of their arrival here? That in this place, one false step did not mean the pain of a waking dream, but death?

She readied her bow and drew back another arrow.

And something shuffled within the confines of the house. The open maw of the iron hut growled back at her, warning her. And taunting her to enter its innards.

She took another step forward and dropped into a roll that took her through the entrance and prevented any attack on her upper body. She straightened up, one knee bent, and instantly readied her bow. Her finger twitched on the shaft of the arrow, and then – then she saw them.

Her arms fell to the ground.

"Chie-er-Rain-Born," Jespar called out from the door. "Backup's ready. I'm gonna open a can of whoop-ass on whatever nasty shit is behind this door."

In he came charging, spittle flying from his mouth and a vicious battle cry roaring from his lungs:

"Surprise, motherfuckers!"

Then he saw them too.

Standing upon four shaking limbs quivering in a dark web-filled corner of the house was a bug-eyed dog that looked as though it had been pulverized. Rain-Born noted its squashed face and the cuts that lined its torso. It did not make any movement to engage them but merely stood, posing no significant threat but nonetheless standing vigil over three mewling forms that suckled at its withered teats from within a newspaper-wrapped nest.

The puppies had evidently been enjoying the meal their mother had provided. And now they stared with fear-filled eyes at the warrior and the other dog, who had entered with fangs ready to strike.

Both Rain-Born and Jespar looked at each other in disbelief.

"Go and speak to them," Rain-Born commanded.

He looked physically hurt at the idea.

"I ain't moving a muscle. Look at her - I could catch something. And I don't do well with kids, ok? They stink, take up too much time, and they – hey!"

The mother dog had moved closer to him in the time he had taken to compose his rant and was taking an inquisitive sniff at his backside.

"Honey, back off," he said but gently moved away so as not to spook her further.

She cocked her head at him like he usually did when he didn't understand something, and Rain-Born didn't conceal her laughter this time. She had slung her bow and held her stomach with both arms as childish giggling erupted from her at the absurdity of all this – this world she had never known or heard of.

Jespar smirked despite himself. "Least someone's enjoying this," he chuckled.

She recovered and wiped the tears that had built in the corners of her eyes as she walked back to the broken mouth of the hovel. The rest of the house, she noticed, was dilapidated and full of only the rubble of ancient days. But its roof had held through the storms of the Deadlands. And by the looks of the clouds that had started to hover above them, they would need its shelter.

"Bad rains are coming," Rain-Born said, noting the dark shadows that fell over the suburb and the statue at its center. She knew the darkness of those clouds heralded the water that bites. Water that she had danced in during her youth to the beat of the Hanakh's drums and song. The dancing had helped her ignore the pain.

The memory flashed through her mind of her fellow tribesmen, and she leaned against the door in sudden melancholy. On the other hand, Jespar was busy trying to stave off the female hound and her pups, who now followed him around the room while he protested in vain. Evidently, he had lost the ability to communicate effectively with his own kind. Either that, or they were just as mischievous as he was.

"We should rest within this place," Rain-Born finally said, enjoying watching the pups and their mother become more and more accustomed to her partner. "Travel is unwise when the water-that-bites falls."

Jespar huffed, laden with five pups hanging to each leg, "Do we really have to? I feel like I'd take the acid over these munchkins."

The mother stealthily licked his face, and his eyes went wide.

"Your face is scarlet, Jespar," Rain-Born chuckled.

He looked at her with stern and tired eyes.

"I do the teasing here," he said before promptly falling under the weight of the yipping pups.

...

Rain-Born sat by the open window in the tiny upstairs room, watching the rain eat away at more of the outside world it had been nibbling at for who knows how long.

Jespar joined her after the family of pugs had relinquished their grip on his person and lay on a torn shag carpet to watch the rain fall by her side.

"You have made friends," she said, still watching the heavens weep on the soil of the dead world.

He looked back at the snoozing family, the pups tucked underneath the mother's torso. They had found a blanket to cover them and even shared some of Rain-Born's meager rations with the family. So now they slept soundly, more warmed and well-fed as they had been in months.

"I'm a single guy," he huffed. "I wouldn't fit in with them any more than you would."

"Do you not wish to be with your own kind?" Rain-Born asked suddenly.

"Ain't nothing on this crappy planet like me except me," he replied.

"It must be lonely," she said, stifling a yawn. "Not having a tribe."

"I had one once," he said.

"What happened to them?"

He grinned. "They had an overactive imagination."

...

As the storm thundered through the suburb, and rain blasted the abandoned houses, chewing tiny holes into cement and concrete like scavenging rats, Rain-Born awoke under the roof's safety that held its vigil over the house of the pugs. That was what Jespar had called the dogs with the squished faces, anyway. At this point, she generally believed everything he told her of the Old World.

As her eyes adjusted to the room with the soft mattress she had fallen into, full of old objects and papers smeared with grime and withered with age, she was struck by the remarkable oddity of all this. She was in a conclave of the Iron Forest, sleeping inside one of its smallest trees while the thunderous roar of the outside world banged on the roof and quivering walls all around her. She had always been more comfortable in the outside world. The plains of the canyon she hunted in were deadly, but they were hers. There was a familiarity there amidst the roaming Guthra and voracious carrion Stalkers. Here there was nothing of the world that she once knew. The small devices and ornaments she ran her fingers over, caked in webbing and as fragile as kitten bones, were so incomprehensible to her that the tunnel may as well have spat her out into another time altogether.

As she explored the room further, something caught her eye just beside the creaking staircase:

Jespar was bundled up in the pug"s cloth blanket, nestling his head on the mother's wrinkled back.

Rain-Born's mouth flew open of its own accord. Yet, why should it? All beings blessed with the serenity of the Great Spirit desired to bring new life into the world. But the fact that it was him. After all his complaints. He was more than simply another creature of the waste, of course. But he still felt the instinctual call for warmth with one's own species that all beings feel.

He really was a dog, after all. And yet, Rain-Born thought, something had made him special. Something from the Old World had made him more than what he was. Or someone.

As she sat and watched their little chests rise and fall in synchronized slumber, Rain-Born felt sleep come upon her again. Smiling, drifting off into the sound sleep of her dreams, she only barely registered Jespar's eyes fly open and behold her, sitting and looking at him with an impish grin that spread from ear to tattooed ear.

He slowly detached himself from the collection of limbs and squished faces that covered him. The operation was not easy - more and more of their paws fell on his face and body as he tried to remove each of his limbs individually, being as quiet as possible. Rain-Born kept her quiet laughter to herself and rolled back to her mattress as he came over to rest beside her.

"Look," he said, sounding appropriately sheepish. "That wasn't what it looked like."

"Mhm," she chuckled back at him.

"I just thought they looked cozy, is all," he said like a child murmuring a rebuke back to their Elder after being chastised. "Don't tell the other dogs about this. I don't wanna get a reputation, dig?"

"Your secret shall be safe with me," Rain-Born whispered, half in a dream.

"Uh-huh. Why does that make me feel worse?"

He spun around next to her and settled at the bottom of her feet. She shifted to allow him space on the mattress. His heavy breathing as he made ready to drift off again was a slight but welcome reprieve from the roar of the rain outside. She reflexively stretched an arm down to stroke at his neck. He let her do it.

"Goodnight, Jespar," she said.

She felt him chuckle under her hand.

"You know, you almost sound human," he replied. "Goodnight."

And under the stalwart roof of the abandoned house, both huntress and dog slept soundly that night. For the first time since their journey began, their dreams were truly their own.