Selene was always burning in her dreams.

Sometimes she woke up in a cold sweat, clutching her covers and mumbling incoherently. She would return to sleep, always going back to a bed of hot coals or a burning house or that podship, over and over again. It ate away at her legs and arms and neck and hair until it engulfed her face and made so much smoke she couldn't breathe. Selene would never forget, more than anything, the feeling all those times of dying by fire. Dying by smoke and heat and searing, searing fire.

Selene threw herself in and out of fitful slumbers, never quite awake and never quite asleep. She didn't know where she was in the blurry room. She didn't what what she was doing there. Sometimes she couldn't open her eyes. She could hear voices occasionally through her thick, buttered hearing, murmuring things she didn't understand. Once she thought she saw Winter, and she reached out to touch her, but it was someone else who didn't know her. She was sad. Where was Winter? Did the blood get Winter? Did the wolves get Winter?

Selene knew there was something wrong with the wolves. Sometimes they were there beside her bed, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes the blood came spotting through the ceiling, and sometimes it was white and beautiful and oh, that Ceiling made Selene cry. It was familiar. That was a very familiar ceiling. Where did she know that ceiling from? It made her sad. Selene cried a lot. She held something warm in her hand a lot. That one came and went, too.

At first she thought it was a little star, like the ones she'd seen in space when she flew around between Luna and Earth. She saw it once, and it was warm and fuzzy. She couldn't tell what it was. It looked like a star. It was very bright. She had to squint, and still it hurt her eyes. She tried to catch it once. It didn't work. But then, as time went on, she realised it was not a star, but a starfish. That's why it left-- a star could sit forever in one place, blissful and unchanging, but a starfish needs to eat and live. That's what she told herself. She figured it out! Selene wished she could see a starfish. There were no starfishes on Luna. It made her sad. She cried about that, too.

But most of all, Selene cried about the splitting pain in her head. It bored deep into her skull. She didn't know where it came from, or why it happened. She didn't know why this was happening to her. She could remember-- she could remember a time when there were no wolves and blood and starfish. She could remember a time before the pain. Sometimes, when she was lucid, she wondered when it would end. She wished very hard upon the star in her hand.

More than anything, Selene thought, squeezing more tears out of her agonised head, I just want to wake up.

a/n -- 

i think i'm going to take a short hiatus from writing this story, just for a month or two... i want to try and finish one of my personal novels this summer, when I can successfully sequester myself at my desk all day. I have two (2) backlogged chapters remaining, after I've been chipping away at them for months, so after part 53 I'm taking a bit of a break. I'm very sorry to all of you who love this story, and I hope it won't be too long before I see you again!