Time is slipping away on the currents of this dream sea. It feels like drowning, and swimming, and flying all at once. Her heart turns into a hummingbird hanging in the air of her rib cage. At her side her wings, cut up with stone-holes, flutter faster as the sand reaches up to wrap around her ankles. She catches one of his golden feathers between her teeth as she starts to sink into the sand. The oasis water laps against her belly like a hungry monster seeking a meal.
Warest trembles in the dream. But in the real she shifts from cat, to horse, to star fast as a meteor falling.
Time slows down. It starts to crawl, and slither, and sink into her flesh like worms. Wing turns to claw, and crown to teeth, and bone-white to black-as-night. She opens her mouth and only a hiss comes out. Her eyes blaze with something that looks like screaming, and begging, and sorrow. Over and over she tries again but only snarls come out from behind her mouth full of carnivore teeth. Tears pool in her eyes.
But there is that moment between the dream and the real where she starts to leak star-blood. It drips down her face like lines of a wounded constellation, and it puddles at her paws like tide-pools as the dream sea washes out to the deep. She leaves paw-prints on the sand as she claws her way back to him-- tugging, tugging, tugging on his golden wings like a lifeline. She tries to hold on hard; she tries to say.
She tries to forget that it's not the cosmos she's waking up too.
Before she slips into the tendrils of sand pulling her from his wings, and golden-glow. Before she disintegrates back into the would--- her tongue discovers the way to language with a bellow that sounds like the dying of the universe.
She screams, find me and then sand crashes over her head and fills her lungs.
And when she wakes up alone beneath her halo of tropical foliage it feels like falling, and dying, and dimming. But here, in the sunlight she does not cry.
we came passively, falling on the steps of melancholy,
falling deeper, with an ear sharp for the fall
Sometimes dreams ended sweetly. You slipped gently from one world to the other, woke fuzzy around the edges. Maybe a sweet scent would linger, or sound, or taste. The body peacefully welcomed you back home.
But this dream had teeth, and would not go gentle into that good night. It buckled and thrashed like a dying animal. When it stretched thin enough to see through, there was nothing on the other side. Not just darkness, or endless space, but absolute nothing. A complete absence that would drive Dune to insanity if he looked too long. So he looks to the dreamer instead, anchoring himself in her eyes as the tears begin to well there.
He wants to say “it’s okay” as she snarls and growls, words twisting and tangling and failing-- as words always do, eventually-- “you don’t need words”-- but isn’t it beside the point, to say such a thing?
(We should note that it hurts, it really hurts, as she digs into his wing and pulls herself up on sharp teeth, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. Like the crown on his poll, pain was a gift too.)
The words a solar flare blossoming in the collapsing darkness-- FIND ME--
He opens his mouth to speak as the world, stretched taut, finally snaps.
- - -
“How?” The question is exhaled whisper-soft; it fades away quickly into the midday heat. Solterra. Earth-bound. He’s come to a stop at the back entrance of the manor. Awareness of the yoke and its weight comes back in full force-- a good thing, then, he’s reached his destination.
“Bout time,” the gatekeeper spits roughly. Dune says nothing, like usual, but he thinks calmly to himself that the man is all bark and no bite. Men like him, sitting behind walls day after day, dim-witted with boredom, they can never handle themselves in a real fight.
He ambles forward through the gates and begins to unpack the cart, quiet and efficient. Paint, salt, bronze, mangoes. All pass from cart to porch without second thought. His mind is tangled up in “How, how, how, how,” the word coalescing in his chest like a stone.
My magic doesn’t work like that, like a sniffer dog. It’s not just a matter of effort.
And what was the mute supposed to do, travel the world in search of someone he met in a dream? He snorts to himself. I’ve hardly left the capital. And what would I do, even if I found her? She’d expect me to say something.
There will be no reprieve for him until the welcome distraction of sleep tonight. He must lose himself in another stranger’s dream, and wake up without the smell of stardust, without the memory of weeping eyes and golden wings. He must, because hope needed to be smothered.
There was no place for it here.
@Warset closed! please forgive the wait and lack of proofreading :| I demand another thread immediately <3
