As Osmar told her good night and left, Hanna slid the door closed. As she reached the foot of the matress the servants had rolled out for her she just let herself fall to her knees before falling forward and pulling her legs up into some sort of half-fetal position and let her tears run freely.
Within minutes, her pillow was soaked and still she cried quietly until there was no more tears and she lay there hulking and sobbing until weariness overtook her and she fell into an uneasy sleep, haunted by ghostly memories of her past and something else.
She was suddenly standing in the middle of a desert of some sort, she was barefoot and wearing a dirty black dress with it's skirt ripped to ribbons. All around her was mile after mile of grey ground in all directions, illuminated by a dirty grey light sifting through thick clouds above. She started to walk, hearing a crunching sound as when she had crushed the ice on tiny puddles when she was little and searing pain rushed up her leg as she put down her foot. She looked down, seeing her blood seep out onto the grund from beneath her foot when she realized that the dessert around her consisted of small rounded flakes of glass, grey, sooty flakes with lots of trapped air-bubbles. She looked to her side, seeing something beneath the flakes she bent down, pushing the glass flakes aside, revealing a human face, contorted in pain with unseeing lidless eyes, starring accusingly up at her.
She was suddenly jerked wide awake by a loud scream of fear only to realize a split second later that it was she who was screaming and she stopped. A few seconds passed as her senses probed the darkness around her, the dessert was gone and so was the dim grey light and the glass. She felt the matress beneath her feet and rear, remembering where she was, sitting in her bed, in a room in an alien palace. Some distance away she could hear hurred steps coming closer to her door as she hugged her knees, wagging to and fro, trying to calm down while fresh tears started to run down her cheeks.
