Dream-walking, dream-walking, dream-walking was all she knew as her mind wandered lost inside itself. Somewhere in her memoires, Adrianna was a proud artillery technician of the Imperial Line, her brilliance and resourcefulness a boon to His Majesty, and a Bane to all who opposed him. Somewhere in the wandering fantasy-land she had perpetually lost herself in, the life she clung to still clung back...

She walked as though through throngs of soldiers at attention, surrounded by perpetual applause... though her feet kicked aside dust and the empty halls echoed of nothing but wind and timbers settling ever-gradually to the final destination of the ground. But for perhaps the first time in three eternities, or two forevers depending upon the metric, her pleading eyes pierced the shell of her comfortable insanity, evaporating the dream-walk to the dusty, dank, dreary corridor of disintegrating gray plaster on faded, rotting wood panel... where another eye stared back...

A lonely porcelain doll lay slumped in the corner, its dejected cycloptean attention having come to rest upon where Adrianna stood some geological ages ago... Time had forgotten where its other eye had gone... and for its trouble, deposited a gaping crack across its head. It did not beckon to Adrianna, but it waited, faithfully, with the hopeless patience only the inanimate could possess--that maybe the little girl that forgot it there would any minute burst through the cobweb-decked oaken doors when once upon a time they did not yet hang lopsided off their hinges.

As her ice-blue gaze melted before the doll, the silence imparted its untold volumes, and refused to relent to the soft shuffle of scuffed boots across exposed cement and cracked tile. Adrianna found herself in a different kind of dreaming... the way her body moved beyond her intention, to crouch down before the discarded toy and take it to hold, as gently as the steel abomination that replaced her right arm could manage.

...the doll was light, but its weight was truly the absence in its matter. How long had it gone without feeling the living touch of soft fur and warmpth? ... how long had it been since last eyes could gaze into it...? how long.. since someone cradled it delicately like the invaluable treasure it may very well once had been..? Adrianna slumped where it once sat, her dazed stare tarnished with the first flickers of loneliness... fear... regret.

A stirring in her long-numbed heart conjured the motion of a single delicate fingertip, running down the small, crack-webbed cheek...
She saw her reflection in the porcelain doll.