The Being of Old named Thomas cocked his head, and those inside-only teeth showed again.

“Would you object to the opportunity to leave behind your family, your current life, and everything you consider ‘home’ right now, and go seeking the wild unknown?” he asked, in an almost whimsical tone.

Ktsn heard the words, and toyed with them for a while in the box of her head. “I would neither object to such an opportunity nor accept it without careful consideration,” she answered. “I feel like you are being very forward asking such a thing. I feel like I am very nervous despite my curiosity.”

What was she SAYING? Where were these words coming from? Did she actually feel any of this? No, she didn’t. She was like her pickax; swung by a hand, and not that which did the swinging.

“What if I told you that you could receive a gift of highly irregular value, but with the added benefit of making yourself an invaluable asset to those around you - and which would almost certainly change lives and save things worth saving?”

This time, Thomas was actually standing before her and she looked up at him. The… human (and what kind of name was that?) looked reciprocally down, those sideways eyes glowing at her with a strange and haunting light. He had one of his one-thumb hands pressed to his torso, fingers flung outward in a splayed arc, and he didn’t appear to be breathing.

“What do you want of me?” she replied.

“I want to give you a little forewarning. For what good and ill it will do.”

Thomas bent forth, then, and before she could protest or claw out his eyes or even clip his finger off with her sharp outer teeth, touched her directly on the featureless part of her head just above her lip.

Things changed.

Ktsn suddenly fell to the ground, every part of her limp, flogging the world with her weight. Her claws lacerated soil as her raiments picked up dirt and refuse. Her eyes flickered, went dark, then sharpened once more. A little shiver ran from the crevices under her arms and legs, up her trunk, past her neck, and met at her jaws. Her inner teeth ground across each other, turning the air into paste. Hands convulsed as a little gulping grunt-moan came out.

A certain something extra dwelled at the back of her mind, sensed but not truly evaluated just yet.

She turned herself to the task of getting upright, rather than dwelling on how she had been placed on the ground. Dream-grass - the kind of grass in a dream, not the psychedelic - folded under the bottoms of her feet.

The farmer shook her head, and felt up around her mouth for the point where the human had touched her. It was familiar by slow tactile exploration, but no feature or lack of feature seemed to differentiate that part of her head from how it was structured before.

“Terribly sorry,” said Thomas, voice weird and low and contrite. Glancing up, she saw his face had almost folded in half, and one of his hands rested in a clothing pocket as he leaned toward her.

“I’d like to extend you a little bit of courtesy, then.”

Thomas walked a bit closer. Ktsn watched him, placid, wooden.

“Don’t distrust Eihks Richard when you meet. He has good intentions and a bad illness and a gap inside of himself where he hopes to fit a companion.”

Thomas kept his distance, crouching down just enough to put his eyes on a precise level with her own.

“I… apologize again for the scare. For scaring you, I mean; not for actually doing the thing that ended up scaring you.”

He bared his teeth again, and somehow the woman intuited that this was some incredibly cross-grained display of bonhomie.

“Now, that wasn’t just a scare, by the by. I’ve given you a gift.”

Those lips (uuuuuuggghhh, lips without teeth in front of them) drew down, hiding the little chisel-pointed things inside the human’s mouth.

“A gift that I do not lightly give… because I interfere in the matters of folk such as yourself only rarely. In your case, though, it’s necessary.”

He paused, and that head turned to the side, one eye squinting at her.

“It will be very interesting for you, I’m sure, but it’s going to be more so - vitally so - for those around you. In due time, though. In due time.”

“What kind of gift?”

Chinks in the thick soft armor of sleep-thought. She began subtly shaking off the haze of the illogic behind dream rationale. If things had been normal, Ktsn’s tongues would practically be licking each other with her desire to stay well out of… whatever this was. But that was the sort of begged coy question she couldn’t have kept from asking if she’d had a knife to her neck and rope around her wrists, let alone in a dream.

“I’m afraid that’s part of the issue; it’s-”

Suddenly the white chisels came back.

“-the kind of gift that won’t work quite the same if I tell you about it. Not just yet, at least.”

“I do not know…” began Ktsn, before stopping. That was an endless pit of possible ponderings. Best not to fall in. Unknowns all the way down.

“That is just fine,” answered Thomas, those teeth going away ever so slightly. “Don’t worry yourself overmuch about the future; it’ll happen as it happens. One day, and then the next afterward.”

He stopped, and hunched over in her direction like a gpsl nuson stooping to feed.

“Or will it?” he muttered. “Retrotemporal slippage or parallelization, that’s a real possibility for you in the next few years.”

He stood up, face scrunching into a wrinkled vaguely horrifying desert of squishy dunes.

“Well, I can - and will - tell you that you’ll find the experience enlightening.”

He abruptly twisted on a foot in a way that ought to have sent him stumbling and flopping to one side, with how unstable he had to be on two feet. As it turned out, she was absolutely wrong.

“Just make sure you remember about Eihks Richard!” he said, one hand waving in a circular motion. “You’ll be a boon to him in time, and he to you… you’ll see!”

She began to call out to him again, just before Thomas passed out of the clearing, and he abruptly vanished at its edge.

Then, Ktsn Wdondf Daephod didn’t remain sleeping.