Robin has other premonitions- other than the first, that is- that flash through her shattered psyche in the dead of night, but she never tells a soul.

"You can, you know," the girl says once, legs crossed right over left and hands laced together perfectly in her lap. Robin's not quite sure how she's sitting in mid-air, but then, it's hard to tell if there's anything anywhere in this white void. "You belong to them now, just like they belong to you. They won't judge you. It's okay."

But the tactician shakes her head. Her hair crosses her line of vision as she does so and she blows it away from her face. "They wouldn't understand. And I don't quite remember what it is..."

"Alright," the girl shrugs, clearly unhappy with that answer but willing to let the matter rest. She stops for a second, tilts her head as if in response to some unheard command, and then nods. "It's time for you to go, now."

"Wait-"

But white dissolves into black and then into the colours of a sun-dappled forest, entirely heedless of her request. Robin sits up without fanfare- she has no need to rub sleep from the corners of her eyes, not on this considerably-later-than-usual morning, although she does draw her coat a little tighter about her shoulders. She raises an eyebrow at Lissa, who smiles and points at the snoring Chrom over on the opposite side of the fire's ashes.

"I convinced Frederick to let him sleep a little longer," Lissa confides, smile stretching into a triumphant grin. "Five minutes later, to be precise."

The tactician blinks. There is no trace of the wary fellow anywhere in the camp. "Where's Frederick, then?"

"Starting a fire," Chrom mutters, half-asleep, and he rolls over. Robin and Lissa glance at each other and share a startled laugh.

The fading scraps of her dream do not linger.

(Much.)

"Why do you wear clothes like mine?" Robin asks the girl, who thinks about it for a while.

When the silence begins to stretch and Robin almost opens her mouth just to break the silence the girl taps her hood, a replica down to the smallest detail of the attachment to the tactician's own coat. An enigmatic smile crosses the girl's face. (That's just as well, really. Lips and a finely-crafted chin are just about all that Robin can see with the hood obscuring any other notable features.)

"I've always thought this was kind of neat," the girl says. "Don't you?"

"There's something special about it," Robin says honestly, arms crossing to touch the points where the sleeves of the coat were sewn on. "Like... it was a gift, maybe."

The girl hums. "Always a possibility."

"Do you know something?" the tactician asks. Her arms drop to her sides. And maybe the girl sees the hope in her eyes, because her posture shifts from ramrod straight to bowed head and slumped shoulders.

"Nothing that I'm allowed to tell you." And it sounds like it hurts her to say it, it really does.

Hm. "What do you mean?"

"Always prying, aren't you? I mean just what I said. If I know anything, there's little I'm allowed to tell you. That's how the universe works. This one, at least." Again with the wry twist of the lips from before- she opens her mouth, like she's going to say something else, so Robin stays her tongue. "...No, never mind. It's time to wake up, Robin. You have a big day today."

"You know my name-?"

The world dissolves in a flurry of grays. Robin tenses, disoriented, until her vision refocuses and she remembers.

The walls around her are Ylissean. Today, she has an audience with the Exalt Emmeryn.

"She's taken a liking to you," Chrom had said, with a truly boyish smile on his face and a light in his eyes that Robin doubts anyone else but Emmeryn will ever be able to spark.

As she slides out of bed, she wonders what the Exalt thinks of chess.