Sorrel Skysigh was born under a sky that couldn’t commit.
Her satyr clan lived where the hills turned to moor and the moor turned to “maybe,” a place travelers only found when they were lost enough to deserve it. They played their festivals loud, loved their pranks louder, and treated weather like a background character, something that happened behind the dancing. Sorrel didn’t. Even as a kid she could feel pressure shifts in her teeth, could hear rain coming the way some people hear a fiddle warming up. When thunder rolled, she didn’t flinch, she listened.
On the night she chose her name, the elders brought her to the Dreaming Hollow, a bowl of land where fog pooled in layers like blankets. Tradition said you stayed there until you dreamt a true thing, then you left a ribbon on the thorn tree to pay the Hollow back for the vision.
Sorrel fell asleep to crickets and soft pipe-music.
She woke to silence, the kind that means the world is holding its breath.
Standing at the edge of the Hollow was a figure made of cloud and moonmilk, crowned with stormlight, with eyes like the inside of a pearl. It didn’t speak with a mouth. It spoke with weather. Warm wind for welcome. A cold draft for warning.
And then it offered her a bargain.
Not power. Not immortality. Not even a dramatic destiny.
It offered her relief.
Because the Dreaming Hollow was crowded. Not with people, but with dreams that didn’t belong to anyone anymore. Broken promises. Forgotten lullabies. Nightmares abandoned at the edge of waking. The Hollow had been collecting them for generations, and it was getting… heavy. The storms had started coming to wash the place clean, and each cleansing made the dreams spill out into the world, hitching themselves to whoever happened to be nearby.
“If you don’t carry some of it,” the storm-thing implied, “the Hollow will drown the waking world in sleep.”
Sorrel, soft-hearted and curious and far too young to understand the full weight of “some of it,” said yes.
The bargain sealed itself with a single drop of rain, falling straight down through a cloudless patch of sky and landing on her tongue like a kiss that tasted of copper.
That’s when the flock arrived.
At first she thought they were sheep that had wandered into the Hollow: small, white shapes in the mist, blinking at her with steady little eyes. Then one stepped forward and its hoof didn’t sink into the grass, it sank into the fog itself. Another bleated, and the sound was wind through reeds. Their wool sparked softly, the static raising the tiny hairs on Sorrel’s arms.
The Dreaming Hollow had given her its burden in the only language she’d understand.
A flock.
Cloudlings. Dream-lambs. Weather-sheep. Names changed depending on who was telling the story. They followed Sorrel from that night onward, gathering behind her like a gentle storm forming its opinion.
They were not dangerous, not unless the dreams inside them were frightened. They fed on moonlight, dew, and the last warm breath of campfires. When they were calm, the air around them smelled like crushed clover and rain on stone. When they were upset, the temperature dropped and everyone within a dozen paces started remembering regrets they’d buried.
Sorrel tried to go home.
But the Hollow had done what old magic does. It had written itself into her.
Wherever she walked, the weather leaned closer. Mist hugged her ankles. Distant thunder stalked her horizon like a shy admirer. Stars flickered, sometimes rearranging themselves when she wasn’t looking. At first the clan thought it was charming, then inconvenient, then alarming. You can’t have a festival when your guest of honor keeps accidentally summoning drizzle that makes the drums sound like wet cardboard.
So Sorrel left. Not in disgrace, exactly, but in that soft painful way communities have of pushing out the person who makes reality bend too much.
She became a druid the way some people become sailors: because the thing that loves you is also the thing that can drown you, and you’d better learn its rules.
Circle of Dreams fit her like a second skin. Sleep, sanctuary, the thin veil between what is and what might be. Sorrel learned to tuck nightmares back into their Cloudlings when they escaped, to soothe frightened villagers with lullaby-magic, to lay a hand on a fevered brow and call up the cool hush of a midnight fog. She didn’t cast spells like a scholar. She coaxed them, like guiding a skittish lamb away from a cliff edge.
Her staff, a crook carved from lightning-struck ash, became her anchor. Wind-chimes hung from it, and they rang even when there was no wind. She pretended not to notice, because noticing made the storm-thing pay attention, and its attention always came with a price.
That price showed up in little ways.
Sometimes Sorrel would wake and find a new Cloudling in the flock, smaller than the others, eyes too old. A dream that had nowhere else to go. A child’s nightmare from a distant town. A dying soldier’s last wish. A monster’s hunger that didn’t know how to be anything but a monster. The Hollow’s burden didn’t stay the same size. It grew.
And then there were the people who sought her out deliberately.
A mother whose daughter hadn’t woken in three days, trapped in a sleep so deep it looked like death. A priest convinced Sorrel was a demon because his chapel always smelled like rain when she passed. A fey noble who smiled like a knife and called Sorrel by a different name, as if they’d met before, as if she’d promised something in a dream she couldn’t remember.
Sorrel was kind, but not soft. When you spend your life shepherding the half-real, you learn a certain steady courage. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. When she spoke, the wind leaned in to listen.
Her Cloudlings became her compass. They’d drift toward danger, wool sparking, and she’d follow. They’d bunch together in a tight anxious cluster when someone nearby lied. They’d refuse to cross ground where the veil between waking and dream had been torn. Once, in a city, they all stopped at the edge of a noble’s garden and stared. Sorrel went in anyway, and found a greenhouse full of sleeping people arranged like flowers.
She started leaving ribbons on trees again, wherever she camped. Not because it did anything, but because it felt like balance. A way to say: I’m still paying.
And every so often, when the moon was thin and the air tasted like storm metal, Sorrel would feel the Dreaming Hollow watching her from far away. Checking the ledger. Counting the flock.
Because the bargain wasn’t finished.
One day, the storm-thing would come to collect what Sorrel didn’t realize she’d offered. Not her life. Not her soul.
Something worse for a Circle of Dreams druid.
Her ability to sleep.
Until then, Sorrel Skysigh walks the world like a wandering bedside story, herding little weather-dreams across the edges of reality, keeping nightmares from spilling into the morning, and teaching the sky, patiently, how to be gentle.
And if you ever wake from a bad dream to find the air suddenly cool, and the smell of rain lingering in your room, and a faint little bleat somewhere just outside the window?
Sorrel was there.
She just didn’t want to wake you.
(Images and story courtesy of ChatGPT 5.2)
