Sometimes, the dreaming happened fast, before you even realized you were asleep. You closed your eyes in one place, opened them another. Like crossing a line, or flipping a coin.
This dream was different. It was smooth, heady, intoxicating. It came on slow and certain. Bit by bit he sank into a warm darkness. Gradually, shapes (feelings, scents) took form around him. Within him.
The first thing Dune recognized with certainty was the water. It pulled him along gently; he had no choice but to give in to the current, let it sweep him where it may. Slowly his body took shape, and with it a sense of buoyancy-- it must be salt water in which he drifted.
Eventually the water washed him up on a grassy shore. But when he opened his eyes it was not the sky he saw but the ceiling. A cave? Willow trees dotted the ceilings, like old women hanging upside down. Their pale green branches swayed in a warm breeze that was at once spiced and sweet.
The closer he looked and listened and felt, the more details came into focus. He noticed tiny blue flowers dotted among the leaves, and colorful little razor-winged birds flitting to and fro with a delicate grace. The light had a strange quality to it, a bluish tint and a haziness at the edges like something not-quite remembered right. It came from what seemed to be glowing gemstones (or were they a sort of fungus?) that spread across the walls and ceiling in patches and swirls of color.
He did not see the dreamer yet, unless she had taken the shape of a tree or bird or stone. Untroubled by her absence (he is strangely certain it was a her, not that it matters) the intruder slowly begins to explore the cavern.
The dream began normally and there was no indication that it would turn strange at all. Neither was there any hint that there would be a stranger in her dream. Yet there was.
Sereia followed the water current in as it passed through the open mouth of the great cave. The water was as gentle and as blue and as comfortable as it always was. She would know, for this cave was very real. It existed outside her dreams too, but in the real world it bore none of its mystery and its splendour. The cave was a place of peace and solitude, it served as a home for her when the sea became too much, when her hunger grew ravenous and wild. Here there were no creatures for her to feast on. Here was another place where the sea met the land and together they birthed a private idyll. Never had Sereia known anyone else here, so, as her feet find the shore and her body shifts from sea-form to land-form she expects no one at all.
In dreams she is never ungainly when she takes those first few steps on land. She does not have the moment where her limbs feel long and spidery as a newborn foal. The water always dries fast too yet today she feels the way it drips from the angle of her ribs and taps down upon the grassy shore. Each droplet lands with a chime, striking different blades of grass and forming a different note. They gather into a tinkling tune, much like a lullaby her mother once sang.
Sereia walks, light as air - for there is never any effort in dreamwalking. The willows bursh their leaves across her spine in greeting. The glowing walls, and ceiling turn all into a strange, strange hue. But nothing is strange to Sereia, until she begins to emerge from the veil of an upside down willow and sees… him.
“Oh!” Sereia breathes, startled. She stops, half out of her veil of willow and gazes him curiously. “I was not expecting you.” The girl muses, gold eyes lowering to the floor and then back up, back on to him. Never has she dreamed a boy before and not once does she think that he might be a trespasser in her dream. A trespasser of flesh and bone and as much tied to the real world as she.
Sereia waits for a twist of hunger, for her kelpie to feel his pulse rippling the air with a vitality she feels as strongly as the waves upon the sea. But she feels nothing. Oh, bliss. Keen she steps out, keenly she covers the ground between them until she stands as close to him as she dares. Sereia pauses, waiting, yet still there is no hunger. Only a euphoric absence of violence fills up the kelpie-free spaces within her. She smiles, the smile of a normal land-girl, one who does not need to hide her too-long teeth.
It takes her a long time to study him. A very long time indeed. An impolite amount of time one might say. Yet study him she does, for this is her dream and never have her dreams made something like him. Never has she dared get so close to a land-horse. If she ever got this close it would be at the command of her kelpie and he would be just a tangle of blood, broken bone and mangled flesh. She is glad he isn’t.
“I can get close to you.” Sereia says joyful, a breathless, incredulous laugh threatening to spill from her lips. Of course she would not need to explain her joy or her comment, for he is of her mind, is he not?
@Dune - I am so looking forward to this thread. She has written nothing at all like I expected her to!
She was brave and strong and broken all at once
~Anna Funder
03-30-2020, 12:03 PM - This post was last modified: 03-31-2020, 07:46 AM by Sereia
If someone, perhaps the fortune teller near the docks, had told him, “tonight, someone will dream of touching you,” he would have laughed bitterly and demanded his coin back.
And, later, as the prophecy came into fruition, he would feel like a complete and utter idiot.
But that isn't something particularly new.
- - -
He hears her first. Not her, but her repercussion. The melody of water, something he’s never put a name to; every drop a hymn captured in a single note; and together, together what a symphony! He finds himself with his eyes closed and smiling, the beauty of the caves overshadowed by the glory of the music that falls from the siren like water.
And then she is there in the flesh, or at least the image of flesh. Too close-- he is immediately a little uncomfortable-- and smelling something wonderful. Keen, is the word he would use to describe her. Almost childish, naive. Practically glowing. Overflowing. Too much of everything; he wants to bundle her up, tell her it’s not safe, the world is not kind-- protect yourself. Hide yourself.
But he does not say anything.
Instead he just looks.
She makes Dune feel old and withered. All the life beaten out of him. He lowers his ears uncertainly. She has a lovely smile, he notes. The kind of smile you get swept up in, nonsensical. It is too lovely-- he suspects it for what it is, an adjustment of dreams, and it causes him to wonder what it looks like in the waking world. What is it she hides with fantasy?
(The irony is: her teeth, in reality, are beyond his imagination)
And then she speaks. Oh what a puzzling creature! The stallion is wary; he takes a step back. But then, despite himself, because he’s in a dream, because her excitement is palpable, fleshy, like some kind of fruit that begs sinking your teeth into, he briefly clears his throat and says “yes.”
Just yes. The sound is foreign to him. It is the first word he’s said in months. It burns in his throat so hot he would not be surprised if it glows red-orange. He turns suddenly to the wall, where he finds he can carve letters into the gentle glowing fungus, because he is curious:
WHAT ARE YOU?
It's easier for him to communicate without speaking, like this. He glances over his shoulder at her, and then draws a strike through WHAT and rephrases the question:
It is a strange twist of fate that whilst he might have laughed that anyone would dare try to touch him, so she would have offered her own bitter laugh if a fortune teller had tried to tell her she would be able to get close to another this night without her kelpie baying for blood.
But her kelpie does not live in dreams. No, her kelpie is the thing of nightmares and this, this little imagined place is very much just a dream. A beautiful one.
There is a peace in this dreamworld of hers. It is painted from a part of her soul she does not yet know about, or that she ever really listens to. Sereia is more attuned to the twist and throb of scars and hurt. They seem to be louder, they seem to fill up every in of space within her mind.
Yet here, oh, here she is not scarred by the teeth of her kelpie. Sereia does not need to press her lips tight nor have to ignore the twinging twist of her too-empty stomach. Here she is whole and happy. The girl smiles and laughs and lives and gets closer to a dreamwalker boy than she might ever dare in waking hours.
Dune sees her smile and thinks of it as an adjustment of dreams. Maybe it is but Sereia is content here, in this place where she feels more beautiful and more simple. Might he ever be content with the happier imaginings of dreams? We could be anything we want to be, Sereia might whisper to him with that lovely smile upon her lips, if only we could never wake up.
But they would always wake up.
And then his warnings that the world is not safe, it is not kind would come into reality and she would be there with her teeth at his throat. Sereia would be the very thing he wants to warn her of.
But she is not awake and neither is he and so, for now, this world can be anything they want it to be.
His throat does not glow red-orange when he speaks, but she feels the rawness of his voice all the same. Her head tilts, it was not a noise she expected but nothing in this dream is normal and neither is the boy she finds here. He writes on the wall, the glowing moss gleaming about the shadowed words.
The question is dark but all around it the cave gleams like a million stars.The words are like the darkness of space, they will swallow her whole if she lets them. Sereia won’t, not in this dream, not in this place of perfect imaginings.
“I am a girl,” Sereia speaks her half truth as if it is the most obvious thing and gazes at him like the sun watches the ocean. Upon her lips is a smile as strong and soft and changeable as waves. It is seafoam laughing upon the shore.
But she spoke to quick and already he is amending it, already he is crossing out the What and replacing it with who. Sereia laughs, sheepish and moves to stand beside him, surveying his words upon the wall. Then she turns to look at him, “I am Sereia.” Already, she thinks, his eyes are familiar. They are as dark as the black pearl Anandi once bought her. They gleam with the glow of the firefly-walls.
“Where are you from?” The girl wonders. Sereia smells the air between them, “I cannot place you and I should like to. Have you come from the meadows or the forest, the sky or the deserts, mountains or mines?” Her gaze, full of dreaming and wonder, lift to drink in the cave around them. “I should like to know, so i can imagine it.” She says as if her dream is as able to conjure a world as a book is to transport its readers there.
And maybe it is.
@Dune - I love him too and the concept of this thread! i am so, so excited to see where it goes!
She was brave and strong and broken all at once
~Anna Funder
She says she’s a girl and he wants to laugh. Of course you are and Of course you aren’t run through his mind at the same time. He is suspicious-- nothing natural is like her, nothing he’s ever met. But he has nothing to fear here so he is intrigued, too, by this strange girl whose eyes hook into him like teeth.
Sereia, she calls herself. It sounds normal enough.But when she speaks of places-- mountain, forest, desert, meadow-- they sound like fairytales. Places ethereal, beyond belief. Nothing so uncomfortably hot, smelly, and crowded as where he’s really from.
He shakes his head gently. No, he can’t possibly explain to her in a way that does the desert justice. That’s the problem with words-- that was always the problem with words. Yet no one understood why he turned away from the broken mechanism of speech.
After a moment of hesitation, he takes a deep breath. It isn’t easy to change form the way he’s about to. This is her dream, not Dune’s, and his magic is but a weak flame. But challenges in the dream world thrill him, and he happily pours himself into this one.
It starts grotesquely. His body bulges and shrinks, shifts, becomes gelatinous and fluid. There is a terribly creaking sound, that of a tree leaning ang leaning, ever closer to snapping in two. Eventually his body takes the shape of a large looking glass. Through it, a vision of the Mors from the eyes of a bird. An endless sea of sand, enunciated by the gesture of swirling sand dunes. As the bird lowers and nears the canyons, details begin to take shape among the golden haze. Sage, juniper, saguaro. A hare darts from one rock to another, a hawk swings low and ominous.
They thread through the slot canyons, where the rocks grab at the sun and twist it into every shade of orange imaginable. A teryr passes overhead, casting a huge shadow. Lizards, sunning themselves, quickly dart beneath the rocks; so camouflaged they’re practically invisible until they move, and then they’re gone.
Then they turn toward the sprawling desert city. Day Court, crown of Solterra, the sun perched watchful over her shoulder. But they don’t fly toward the court proper, where the gardens grow and the nobles, heavily decorated with gold and steel, squabble over taxes and labor and political games. They soar above the outskirts for a while, the slums, and then they dip low into a neighborhood on the eastern end of the city.
These are the streets he knows in and out and upside down, and it shows in the overwhelming detail of the image he paints for her. (for it is not a looking glass before her, it is himself, twisted into a thousand little bits of light and color, moving in symphony) There is a tenderness hidden in the lines of the colorful slums, loud and smelly, a wild and vibrant assault to the senses after the barren beauty of the desert. It may or may not be clear to Sereia that she looks through rose colored glasses as they go deeper into the city.
She would notice there is no empty space. Among the tilted mud and sandstone buildings, market stalls are crowded beneath thatched palm roofs. Mats woven from fronds are rolled and unrolled to create floors for temporary stalls wherever opportunity allows. There is very little decoration, except for things that are also functional: Clay jars are painted in astounding colors, patterns skillfully cut into their sides; rugs and tapestries are finely detailed and carefully made; works of Solterran steel, most often on display in curved blades of varying lengths, are hosts to ornate handles.
There is love in the details of the people they fly past. Many are smiling, some even laughing. Others are stoic and serious, faces carved across with dusty lines. There are beggars, children, eyes round and dull.
The city. Dune’s city. Painted in all its massive, chaotic, ugly beauty. Heartbreaking and ugly and perfect. The vision circles near the bell tower, then down a crooked alley to a little workshop. There are no windows, just a large hole in the wall (the impression of a window) with bars of wood to protect from loose hands. A door sits crooked on its hinges. It opens and Dune steps through, and then he’s stepping through the looking glass. The surface of it wraps around him and dissolves into his skin.
He smiles briefly. The light here is dim and otherworldly compared to the bright sunlight of Solterra.
He wants to laugh and Sereia may see a whisper of it along his lips. It encourages her own smile and it grows wider and more lovely yet and such a far cry from her too-wide smile in her waking hours.
There is nothing hungry in the way she watches him. There is no part of her that rises, monstrous, from within her - a crocodile launching out to catch its prey. She closes her eyes for a moment and relishes being just a girl beside just a boy - even if he is imaginary. Sereia is content, she is delighted with the conjurings of her mind. But dreams are always strange things, are they not? Even when they give you the happiest of moments, they always take something and make it strange. They twist reality in the most unexpected of ways.
That is when the boy begins to change. It is a curious and grotesque thing to behold. Sereia wants to look away but dreams never let you, do they? The girl stares as the boy’s body morphs. The dreamworld seems to tremble around him, the air fill with a scent, with a power that is like nothing she has seen. Sereia’s heart stutters in her chest, it feels alive and sorrowful at once. Her eyes grow wide, filled with the awe of this strange becoming. The smile upon her lips, lovely and vribrant as it was, is gone, twisted down into an apologetic frown.
She steps closer to him, to this changing piece of her dream, “Oh, no, no- I am sorry. I quite liked you as you were…” She watches as he continues to change and wonders how she can change her dream to make him return to how he was - oh to be able to transform him back. Yet her dreams are untameable things! They are like the sea-dragons she and her sisters tried to ride and to tame. They were too big and their self-appinted trainers so small they were but fleas upon a dog’s coat. The dream does not head its mistress and the boy continues his sad change.
“I am sorry, I cannot -” Sereia had begun to say, but all at once the boy has stopped his change. He is not a boy anymore but a great looking glass. It is not the forming of the glass that stops her, but the pictures it shows. A world stretches out beyond the glass, sand and stone laid upon each other until they form great, broken walls. Canyons stretch as far as the glass will let her sea. The world glows hot beneath the sun, oranges and golds blending beneath the sun. great towers, the last remnants of ancient stone cliffs are all that remain, pointing up to the sky like fingers heralding the gods.
But then the glass is sweeping her away upon the wings of a bird. She watches lands shift beneath her, canyon into desert, rolling dunes that shift as waves and then on into a sandstone city. Trains of caravans camp beyond its walls, camels and horses gather at its stone gates. Sereia presses in, closer, closer, drinking in sights she had only ever been able to imagine. Before her gaze lushious gardens, rich with greenery lay out like patchwork quitls and the palace is gilded by the sun who watches on, bathing all in light and warmth.
The mirror carries her away from the greenery and down into the slums where homes are made with walls of corrugated iron and roofs are cloth tied to sticks. Then on to places where houses are small stone squares with open windows and open doors and citizens mill in thick crowds upon the streets.
When did she stop breathing? When she first swooped between the two great canyon walls? Or when the saw the poverty at the city’s edge? Or maybe when she saw the throngs of people laughing on the streets? The stalls with wares so richly painted, - has she not seen the sea-worn ancestors of those pots before when she picked they up from the ocean bed? Then there is the boy, the boy she first met at the start of her dream. He emerges from a doorway, stepping toward the looking glass, through the glass which melts into his skin. Sereia staggers back, away from the disappearing glass she had pressed up to. Only the boy remains and all of her sacred cave seems so dark and dim and lifeless. Except this strange boy her mind has conjured (for still she does not think, nor even know to believe in boys who can walk into her dreams) he stands as plain and yet so wonderfully strange that she cannot take her eyes from him.
She stares, unmoving. The girl turns to stone in the heart of her dream, she hears its beating, but it sounds like the wings her flew her through Solterra on. It sounds nothing like her own dream should. “Dune.” Sereia repeats his name, letting it fill her lungs and tasting it upon her tongue. It rolls like the sand-waves she had just seen, it seems fitting for his name to be thus. “It suits you.” The girl says with a smile, delighted with her dream.
“Dune.” Sereia says again. This time she says his name boldly. This time she is a girl too hungry to ever let a dream’s conjuring be enough for her. “Solterra,” The sea-girl breathes with the reverence of a prayer. “You only make me want to go there more.” And Sereia is sighing, wantonly. Her eyes wander over his skin, as if it might turn clear again and another world would gleam within him. “I should like to dream of you again” She says, even as she steps forward and reaches out to touch him, wondering what his dream-skin is like - glass, or sand, or skin, just the soft hazy, nothingness of dream material?
“Dune” is the kind of low-class name common in his rough and tumble neighborhood, an epithet completely without imagination; he was acquainted with dozens of Suns, Sunnys, Rockys, Sandys, Sols, Sages. Desert children born of parents pressed too thin to attempt something original; they looked up and stated the first thing they saw.
His name didn’t bother him-- he had enough problems, real ones, to spare concern for anything so trivial-- but the way the dreamer says his name catches his attention. It does not have the sneer the older (and, often, richer) children used when laughing “Dune the Loon!” It does not sound tired, or pitying, or full of scorn. No, it floats the scant distance between them something light and gentle. The sweetness of it almost shatters him; he was so very unaccustomed to kindness.
She says it suits him. Perhaps it’s meant as a complement but he treats it with skepticism, brow furrowed with uncertainty-- What does that mean? How do you know?
Am I like so many grains of sand?
He does not reassure her you can dream whoever you wish to dream and he does not reveal that he is not, in fact, a figment of the dream but an intruder. It doesn't matter. He's still thinking, perhaps with too much self-absorbsion, how his name suits him, until she steps forward again.
The ponderous expression snaps into one of surprise. The boy inhales sharply as she reaches out, but he doesn’t step away, not immediately. Tension mounts in his limbs, ready to spring away like a wild animal, but he lets himself be touched.
The dreamer would find Dune terribly normal to the touch. Warm flesh, firm muscle, no magic here, no element of dreaming. He doesn’t think to reinvent himself here, to present something… more to the dreamer who had given him the seawater cave with its strange lights, stranger trees. Gone were the days of starvation, but the body clings to its trauma; he would always be lean, almost gaunt, even after long years of labor sculpted knotted layers of muscle beneath the skin. Her touch on his shoulder draws the attention to the stark differences between them. She is so open, so delicate, so (seemingly) innocent. He would be shocked to learn she is his elder, if only by a season. Between them lies a sea of difference: she was born and raised a princess, he a pauper.
But, actually, between them lies not much of anything at all. She’s closer than sunlight now, sweet as date syrup, oblivious to the quake of his heart, filling his ears with ringing. It hurts his head, that pleasant smile she wears, and he takes a few trembling steps back. His muzzle lowers to his chest, the same gesture he made when introducing himself, and then gestures to her, reaching out to gently bump her satin skin before drawing back once again. As though her name was physically rooted there in the chest. Search for it, read it out loud-- what does it say, scrawled on the inside of your breast?
Suddenly, an eruption of birds from an upside-down tree. There is a flurry of angry chirping as the tiny creatures, iridescent wings sharp and jagged as broken glass, swoop and scream and scurry over the heads of the dreamer and Dune. He watches, enraptured but wary, attention lingering always on the periphery. If this girl, for all her sweetness, dreamed of birds with wings to cut, what beasts did she imagine feasted on these creatures?
There were dark shadows here, somewhere. He was certain of it.
He a boy of the dusty streets with a name of his stature.
Yet she finds his name beautiful. It is a name of the earth. Even those rolled up by sea waves grow grass and flowers and warm their backs in the heat of the sun. So that is why Sereia says it, why she lets her tongue learn the melody of it, the simple sweetness of such a name.
There are many things to fall in love with in her dreamscape and Sereia so easily succumbs to them all. To the way the flowers glow like fluorescent candles, to the way the walls gleam with unexpected light. The way birds fly with razor wings -
The way he is soft and warm to touch. The way he smells of midnight deserts, dusty roads and summer smiles. He may think that he is boring. He may think that there is nothing of note about him. Yet to her, to a girl used to craving flesh, and knowing all too well the sound, swell, wash, taste of the sea - Dune is nothing like any of those things. Sereia is glad, she is so utterly glad.
Not once does the sea-girl think her interloper could change his appearance. Not once does she think to ask her dream to change him either. If he asked her what he would change about himself, she would breathe ‘nothing at all’ against his skin.
But he is retreating and she is surprised. She reaches as if she can hold him just a moment longer. Yet he slips away as easily as water between grasping fingers. It might not have come as a surprise, if she had heard the way his breath snagged in his throat and his body quivered at her touch. However, Sereia missed the signs and the dropping of her heart within her breast, the tumbling of her stomach, deep deep with rejection feels so much like falling. She withdraws as fast as he, her nape arching, swanlike, beautiful. But the action is well rehearsed and ever so swift. In response her forelock falls across her lips, a veil to hide whatever monstrosity he has seen. Has her kelpie returned so soon?
Her lips are downturned, her delicate smile fled. The light teases along the soft of her mouth but it cannot draw a smile from the kelpie-girl now. She has not changed; she is still the master of her dream. Dune still smells of desert dust and too much sun and her kelpie is still far gone. Yet she fears and the anxiety is deep, her self-loathing creeping, creeping into her dream. It looms like sorrowful shadows in the corners of her resplendent cave. The dreamwalker looks for shadows and they come, as all inevitable things do.
“I am sorry.” The girl is whispering. Her earlier delight is nothing but a sweet aftertaste upon her tongue. She keeps her hair as a protective veil between them. She hides in her sunset gold and sea blue skin.
The girl does not startle when his muzzle bumps the curve of her breast - for what does a kelpie have to fear from a horse? She is the hunter here though she loathes herself for it. Despite she does not startle, it is now her breath that snags in her throat. It is her heart that flutters at the touch. She still dares not smile, but tilts her hear to better watch him beneath the arc of her lashes.
“Do you fear me?” She asks and dares not reach out to touch him again. The birds take flight, angry, furious. They cut like her teeth, they fight like her kelpie does as she drags her prey down, down, down. Her heart rattles in her throat, as if her worse self comes to catch her, to settle itself back beneath her skin where it belongs. “Can you not stay as you are?” She asks desperate, her eyes wide. “You are the first I have ever been able to stand near… I do not want to hurt you.” her lips are a down-turned bow, her eyes wide and pleading. The darkness is looming, her dream turning anxious, turning less than perfect.
It always ended in a tragedy.
“I am sorry. I am sorry.” She breathes, she weeps. He was perfect, her dream was perfect and reality presses itself into her dreams with sharp, sharp teeth and a ravenous hunger.
The dream swells like ocean tides. Unseen, but felt, the undercurrents of the dreamer’s mind: the uncertainty, the anxiety, the pulse of hidden nature. The joy, too, and the awe, and the lack of understanding. She doesn’t know he’s real, does she? She thinks he’s a figment of her lively mind, and Dune doesn’t correct her. He feels like a criminal for it, an imposter.
And despite all the unspoken information buried in the fabric of the dreamscape, he still isn’t sure what to make of this dreamer. He knows only that he feels bad when he draws back and her sweet smile fades. There is something then that festers behind her eyes, a self-loathing that he does not-- could never, really-- understand. It sets his hairs on end when she apologizes.
“Are you afraid of me?”
She asks the question with a delicacy that hurts his heart.
Dune immediately shakes his head no. Of course not. A small smile comes and goes at the very idea of being afraid of her. He had been beaten bloody by neighborhood bullies, thrashed in the fighting pit, almost turned to stone by a basilisk as a one-man regime took its vicious leave.
Why would he be afraid of a girl who smells like honey and salt?
And yet– and yet he can’t quite bring himself to reach out and tuck that veil of hair behind her ear. To make her look him in the eye. To tell her he's very real indeed.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, “I’m sorry,” and all he can do is shake his head no, no, no. Don’t be sorry. Don’t be sad. Don’t wake up.
Please, don’t wake up.
The birds are flying between them now, and as they collide with his dream-flesh the cavern fills with the metallic tang of blood. He’s sinking, bleeding, falling now, quickly, despite his efforts to scrabble back.
-
The dream spits Dune into his body without grace. He wakes with a raspy groan, head pounding from all that dream magic. Turning himself into a looking glass was a new trick, and he would pay for it with lethargy and pain for the rest of the day.
He turns to the window, where a crescent moon shines in with all the shy beauty of his dreamer. She’s out there, somewhere, beneath that same moon. She had seemed to him so very lonely. He bites his lip. Even if he could use magic to jump right back into the dream of his choosing (he couldn’t, the dreaming happened by chance) the shooting pain in his skull would not allow him to pass the gates of sleep.
What a strange girl you are, Sereia.
With a sigh he lights a candle, rummages for some paper and ink. There would be no more sleep for him tonight, and he did not like to waste his waking hours. Scribing was his latest pursuit; the pay was decent and it was far easier on the body than most of the other odd jobs he picked up. He would practice his penmanship until the sunrise, and there was no telling what the new day would bring after that.
The dream continues its frantic turn. Harsh reality comes pressing in with teeth and claws turning all to chaos. Wakefulness bleeds in through the ribbons of her broken dream.
Sereia’s control of her dream slips away as water does. It leaves her wet and numb from cold. She shivers, even as she watches the way the boy shakes his head. No, she doesn’t frighten him. Not even as her dream turns savage with a kelpie’s hunger? She is rousing, that strange and terrible beast within her. The kelpie’s magic can be like a siren’s song when it takes control of Sereia at last. So she looks to the boy as if he might be the last thing she sees upon her death (for that is what succumbing to her kelpie feels like… death).
The birds collide with the warm of his skin. He felt so real, so utterly real. But he is water now, slipping away from her grasp. She swims in water - it owns her - and she cannot catch him now. But it does not stop her lunging after him.
Sereia does, she falls forward like a child, reaching reaching reaching. But he is gone and she falls forward and down, down, down as the dream dissolves. The stone walls that hold his name, the floor that held her up and the bird wings that beat across her face - they all dissipate.
The kelpie tumbles into wakefulness. She rouses with a start, her cheeks wet, her breath a tangle in her throat. The girl gasps and grieves.
