White coat. White mane. White wings.

The stallion was beautiful, poised in the grass beyond the fence and practically glowing the light of a brilliant, bright sun. Without care or hesitation, he ducked under the stable fence and called out to the creature, warning it of his presence before running up with hand outstretched.

That's when it all went wrong. The horse whinnied and shrieked, rearing back on its hind legs and spreading its wings wide, wide like an avenging angel.

It struck him, hard, pain blossoming as he crashed back into the fence. Next thing he knew there was a woman, a beautiful woman -- Mother! -- pulling against the horse's bridle as it struck her again and again. Red stained the white hooves as it pounded again and again, his head screaming with pain like a shattered jar as the beautiful woman fell and then...


Alvis burst awake, biting his own tongue in his haste to cut off a pained cry. The last thing he wanted to do was wake his roommates. Again.

He pressed a hand over his mouth and the other to his forehead, curling onto one side in the fetal position as he focused on breathing through his nose. The pain would be brief, he knew, but that didn't stop it from stabbing him now, scraping against his skull like a knife. It was a bone-deep pain, the pain of broken skin and a rattled brain, pain he'd never truly known because that dream -- that memory -- was not his own.

Eventually, the pain faded. Alvis eased the hand from his mouth as the breathing calmed. He rolled onto his back, stared up at the familiar, blurry curtains of his bed in the Ravenclaw dorms, and rubbed the skin above his left eye. Familiar as the pain had become, he half-expected to feel a scar there. Two inches long. Maybe two and half.

It'd been almost a month now since he'd stumbled into Moira's nightmare. The dream hadn't come every night since then, but when it did it was always the same. Same horse. Same field. Same woman; not his mother, thank heavens, but a mother nonetheless, a mother who'd risked and given everything to protect her child.

When it first cropped up, Alvis had hoped it would be a one-time thing. It was odd -- uncanny really -- to even consider that he'd accidentally stolen a memory from his classmate's mind. Maybe the dream could have worked it out of his system. That's what dreams were supposed to do, process the information that flooded the brain and help to make sense of what would otherwise be nonsensical.

But the it came again, and again, and again, and now he had to admit defeat. Moira McBoid's worst memory wasn't going to leave his head. Not on its own.

He needed to talk with Professor Storm.