This time there was no suffocating darkness of the thick mud seeping into every orifice, nor the horrible burning sensation caused by it stinging his eyes; it was a blurred silhouette of someone leaning over him, the person who had apparently saved him from that endless nightmare.
"Are you alive?"
The voice came muffled but recognizable.
"This voice... is... is..."
Hawke closed his eyes tightly and opened them again quickly as a measure to try to see better, focusing his blurry vision. Now, clearer than ever before, he could finally see clearly who was there.
THE OLD WOMAN!
Sitting right on top of him without any ceremony, causing that strange and uncomfortable feeling of weight in his chest that he had mistaken for remnants of what the dinosaur's paw had caused.
Hawke, in a reflex start, threw her away with a brusque shove on the shoulders, his breath coming out agitated and irregular, his eyes still wide, processing the abrupt transition between nightmare and reality. 'That was... all of that was...'
He immediately looked at the old woman who had been roughly thrown back about two meters out of the tree, just to be absolutely sure she was whole, very much alive, real. She was already standing calmly, stretching and lengthening her spine with audible cracks as if absolutely nothing had happened, as if being thrown away by a frightened man was routine.
'A nightmare? Was it just a horrible nightmare?'
Still with his heart pounding violently in his chest like drums, Hawke felt profoundly relieved in a way he couldn't express in words. In a strange and twisted way, the old woman had pulled him out of that, that terrible and all-too-realistic nightmare, and he, in ungrateful return, had pushed her away without thinking.
He thought that apologizing was definitely the right thing to do in this situation.
"Sorry, old woman!"
He yelled loud enough for her to hear from a distance, but the old woman was busy with a finger stuck in her nose, vigorously scratching it, showing absolutely no concern for anything that had happened. She simply walked calmly until she disappeared completely from his sight among the trees without giving any response or even looking back; not because she was angry or anything remotely like that, she simply didn't give a damn about what had just happened.
'An old woman being thrown must be something frequent and normal in this crazy world... well, thinking about it, I think that would probably also have some chance of happening in the world I came from...'
Hawke's chest gradually calmed, his breathing slowly returning to a normal and controlled rhythm. He lay there for a few more moments reflecting intensely on the nightmare he had had, going over every horrible detail.
'Would I really abandon them so cowardly in a real situation? Would I run to save my own life selfishly in an extreme life-or-death situation?'Hawke found no satisfactory answers searching through his memory-empty mind; he didn't know what his true, deep personality was when all the masks fell. But he didn't want to believe it, he absolutely refused to accept that he could eventually abandon his companions in such a pathetic way, even though he knew for sure that sometimes his body seemed completely oblivious to conscious commands, acting on primitive instincts.
He shook his head forcefully, trying to banish the disturbing thoughts.
He stretched fully, hearing his joints crack, and yawned widely, his jaw making noise. It was only then that he realized he was completely alone there in the hollow of the large tree, exactly as had happened at the beginning of the nightmare; the whole group had disappeared, no one else was sleeping there.
This gave him an extremely strange and uncomfortable feeling, as if he were repeating everything again, a disturbing déjà vu that made the hairs on his arm stand on end.
'Why didn't they wake me up this time? What are they doing out there without me?'
He tried to think positively, to push away the paranoia.
'Maybe they just didn't want to wake me up or bother me so early so I could rest well after carrying the old woman all day...' the thought was also similar to that of the nightmare.
A loud scream reverberated inside the hollow of the tree from outside.
This time, to Hawke's enormous and instant relief, who released a tense breath he didn't even know he was holding, it wasn't a scream of absolute horror or agony; it was something far more excited and animated.
"I FOUND ANOTHER ONE!"
Even muffled by the distance and the wooden walls, Hawke immediately recognized Kuggi's characteristic voice, or perhaps Duggi's; the two had irritatingly similar voices that were confusing.
Hawke quickly got up, somewhat unsteady, and went outside the tree. The intense morning light completely blinded his vision, accustomed to the inner twilight, for a moment, turning everything bright white, until it gradually focused and finally revealed what the group was doing out there.
***
Kuggi had woken up shortly after Tairo in the early morning, and Kaira, Duggi, and Yuka had also been awake for some time, leaving only Hawke and the stubborn old woman fast asleep. The entire group was already actively hunting and collecting the dead insects from the previous night, those that had been attracted by the large bonfire and eliminated, gathering all the bodies found in a single place in the nearby clearing, forming a considerable pile.
Duggi had even briefly mentioned waking Hawke and the old woman to help with the task, but Kaira and Yuka had firmly insisted that they let him sleep a little longer because he seemed genuinely tired and exhausted. Tairo had used the technical justification that Hawke didn't have as robust and muscular a body as Kuggi and Duggi, so he needed to rest proportionally more since he didn't have as much natural energy as they did ; this was convincing enough for Duggi, who gave a few loud laughs before completely giving in to the requests without complaining anymore.
And now there was Hawke finally awake and out of the tree. Kuggi picked up another large insect from the ground and threw it onto the growing pile that already had quite a few bodies stacked on it, when he noticed Hawke standing there observing.