e thinks he can see the desert - when he squints his eyes and tilts his head and peers at the hazy horizon line. He knows it’s there, just out of reach, hiding on the other end of the plains. Somewhere, all this gently waving grass gave way to desert dunes, to rolling white sand that sang out at night when no one was around to listen.
Behind him were the trees of Viride.
He stood there staring at another world, while the light faded all around him, knowing he should return to sleep beneath the canopy of his home.
And yet -
And yet, there was something daring about being here in the open, just out of the boundary of his court’s land (your land, the trees whispered still to him, reaching out their branches as if to pull him back to them, don’t forsake us yet.) There was something exciting about doing something he knew he shouldn’t, as he began to wade through the sea of grass and distance himself from the forest. There was something that felt inherently right to him, as he made his bed in a field full of flowering larkspur and bluestem, where the trees were nothing more than a dark line to his west, and the desert nothing more than a pale horizon to his east.
Beneath a sky wider than any he had seen before - with no moon around to drown out the light of the stars - he slept not as a sovereign, but an orphan.
~~~
There’s a voice in the sun - I can hear it, warning me, watching me. Perhaps it is laughing, too, I would understand if it did. A part of me wants to laugh, to cry, to beat my hooves against the ground even as I stand quietly, stand tall, stand proud in their midst.. I feel like a colt again, and I can’t forget, won’t forget, the way I was left to die by the same feral people who circle me now like coyotes closing in on their prey.
This is wrong, it should feel wrong.
But I smile.
And I take the spear that is offered to me, and I let them paint my cheeks red, and drape a pelt lined with teeth and claws around my shoulders. "This was your mother’s," an old woman tells me, her face sun-tanned and lined, as she ties a leathern pouch around my neck. Was. It presses against my chest, but I do not ask her what’s in it. I already know without asking it will be something important, something I will need.
I can sense another scarred woman at the edges of my vision, lurking just out of sight, darting away every time I look in her direction. But I know it’s her, without needing to see her face. It’s always her, the girl who dances between the dunes. She had promised to dance with me, once; before she had any scars, before her skin turned white and brittle like bones left too long in the sun. And tonight, I know that I will dance alone.
"It is time," they whisper, a hundred voices that are as dry as the desert sand beneath our hooves. “I am not your king," I tell them, but even I do not sound sure about that. My brother bares his teeth and laughs, and the sound of it makes me want to laugh alongside him, laugh at myself, at who I used to be. "Don’t you know," he tells me, as the others fall away and he pushes me towards the Mors, towards the desert that is waiting for me, "That you would have ended up here eventually?"
I did know; I knew it every time my hooves touched the sand, every time the sun felt hot against my back. That boy who had stolen away from the desert had only ever been buying himself time, time that would one day run out.
Today was that day. Today I would hunt.
Today I would become the man I had denied. And if I died instead, I would die knowing they would burn my body.
Often Dune entered dreams to find there was a special role, waiting for him to step into. He suspected that the dream adjusted itself to better absorb his intrusion. Not that he was ever particularly wanted in dreams; it seemed more of a mechanism to limit disruption. To wrap him up in the landscape, and by doing so minimize the shock to the rest of the dream. Blur the other, smooth the edges, shift the lighting until the interruption just seems to... emerge from the dreamscape. Like something natural.
In this one he had a definite role, although he did not yet know what exactly it was. He wore a hooded cape of sorts, which kept the sun from his body and his features in shadow. There was a sense of ritual. The relief, the safety, of belonging to a pattern, a routine.
There was a dagger strapped to his forearm, and an anxious urge to look at the sky.
There was a sovereign, which he would not have recognized but still he knew, with that peculiar kind of dream-certainty, was Ipomoea of Dawn Court.
There were voices-- ghosts-- and sand and a certain heaviness, a sense of something inevitable drawing closer and closer. The sky was wide open, cerulean, but it held all the tension of a thunderstorm.
Dune waited at the edge of his namesake for the other man to approach. And when Ipomoea was close enough to see the light reflected in those gentle, tangled eyes, he turned and began to walk, leading the sovereign deeper into the desert. Always keeping one eye on the sky.
He suspected, or maybe he even knew, there would be blood.
know now that my heart has only ever been an hourglass. I can feel the sand in it, weighing it down, filling my body with every beat. More sand, more time, more life trickles out of it with every breath.
I don’t have to wonder how much time is left in it. A part of me has always known it was running out, has already seen that I am approaching the end.
All I wonder is if this is what it has been counting towards.
There’s a mixed feeling of dread and anticipation rising like the sun inside of me as I take step after step deeper into the desert, and it feels as though there are two Ipomoea’s in me. One of them is desperate to turn back west, to run far, far away from here. But I can barely hear the trees and the grass calling to me now; and as their voices fade, so too does the flower-crowned boy in me begin to quiet. As if he and I both know he’s too far gone for the other Ipomoea to listen to. And as much as I may will myself to turn around, my body only ever betrays me.
I clutch the spear tightly to my side, hanging on to it as if it is my only lifeline out here in the sea of sand. And there is a moment, however fleeting, when I see the man waiting beside the dune and I think, Is this meant for you? I want to ask who he is, or what he’s waiting for, but I don’t. Because the man seems to be waiting for me - in his eyes is recognition, expectation. He doesn’t speak to me in words, but as he turns into the desert his hooves whisper a command to me from across the sand: follow me.
I do not hesitate.
The midday sun is louder than the morning one.
And I follow, my nose pressed hungrily into the summer wind like a wolf following a trail of blood. The forest no longer calls to me from afar, and I no longer ache to hear its voice. All there is, is sand and sun and scorching heat, and that desert beast in my chest coming awake. And it is calling for its pound of flesh.
The air is still, the heat heavy and dry. Dune never liked it in the sands. He preferred the closed-in streets of the city, the maze he long ago mastered. Out here there was too much of everything, and nowhere to hide from it. But this was not his landscape. And instead of waiting for the dream to unfold, he prods at its seams, leading the dreamer deeper into the golden mystery.
They walk a while, into a golden sea so vast they quickly lose sight of its edges. The sand feels very real beneath his hooves-- familiar-- and he knows the foreign king has walked the desert before. Imagined landscapes have a different feel than remembered ones. There is a sensation of, far below, a tension-- unfamiliar-- that comes and goes, comes and goes, as though there is something moving (pulsing?) back and forth deep below. Above them, the sky is a cloudless blue that’s hard to look at too long without feeling like it’s looking back.
As they crest a dune, two features materialise before them in an otherwise static landscape. On the right there is a massive, withered olive tree. Its trunk is slumped and colorless, a carcass sucked dry by the sun. A large vulture is hunched on a naked branch, eying the two stallions with an eagerness Dune finds unsettling. His attention closes on the knife conveniently strapped to his leg, although it does not give him much comfort. If the dream wanted him to die, he was going to die.
To the left there is an obelisk. Tall, white, and broad, several lengths across. As unassuming as it appears, something about it is deeply unsettling as well. It takes a moment for Dune to realize what exactly is so odd about the feature: it does not cast a shadow.
Dune stops, lets the dreamer draw abreast. There is the smallest of gestures, a marginal tilt of the head as his placid brown gaze meets Ipomoea’s. Behind the two stallions, and between them, and most of what else is before them, is endless sand. It still trembles from time to time beneath them, with rising intensity.
would tell myself over and over and over again, when I reflect back to this moment, that I did not know what would happen next. That I did not know where this man was leading me, or what unspeakable things would happen in the desert. That up until the moment I watered the sand with blood, I did not know what it was like to be wild or fierce.
Some lies are so convincing, even we who speak them to life begin to believe in them.
The desert is so big, so endless, it’s hard to imagine where it ends or what lies beyond it. It’s hard to remember the leafy halls of Viride, and the watercolor meadows of Illuster. Perhaps it is better that way; perhaps it is good I have the desert sea to baptize myself in, to wipe away the memories of the person I no longer am, to be reborn in sand and heat. Perhaps it will make it easier to do what I need to do - at least, I hope that is true. I hope it will remove the guilt.
When we come to the tree, and the obelisk, and the vulture lording over them, it feels like the waiting has ended.
I know why the tree is white. I know why it is a skeleton, why it is here. I know, I know, oh I know.
I stare at it, at this dead thing, and I feel - almost feel - something stirring in my chest. For a moment I can see what it used to be, can see the leaves lifting, reaching for the sky, searching. All I have to do is blink and the memory is there: branches heavy with budding green olives, cream-colored flowers putting thoughts into my head, thoughts I did not know how to have.
But then I blink again, and all it is is a dead tree alone in the desert. I grip the spear tighter.
"I’m sorry." I almost don’t recognize the words, even as I speak them. I almost don’t feel them, even though I wish I did.
The pelt draped around my shoulders feels heavy with expectation - but not so heavy as the almost-forgotten spear I now lift. There’s Davke suns painted along its shaft, the same suns painted against my cheeks in red, red, red. I can hear the desert shifting behind us, the dunes rising, singing: yes, yes, yes they say, and now now now. The vulture raises its wings high and laughs, not with the voice of a bird, but that of my brother - do it, he commands, if it isn’t him -
it will be you.
So I ready the spear before me, and I turn away from the sun-bleached skeleton that used to be a tree, the tree that used to be me.
And with the obelisk looking on in judgement, I point the stone-sharped blade at the stallion’s throat.
"I have to," I tell him. It is the best - the only - apology he will get, and the last apology I will speak.
Dune had not realized he trusted the other man until trust was gone. The spear lowered, aimed at his neck. There followed a deep sense of betrayal, and immediately afterward a self-loathing for being so stupid. The obelisk, the tree, the vulture-- was it all a deception on the dreamer’s part, consciously or not, so that Dune’s sense of danger would be misplaced?
“I have to,” he said. I have to.
Dune pictures the other man asleep somewhere on a feather bed, surrounded by books brushed with gold, scented candles, fresh flowers. All that opulence, and in his dreams he couldn’t help but to guide his spear to a stranger’s throat and push.
The third and final thing he felt was anger.
His ears are flattened, his teeth exposed in a snarl. A low growl rises from deep, deep within the bay. “I pity you, king,” he spits. Dune would live and die in poverty, always hungering for more-- always hungering-- and it was terrible, and it was suffering, but he would never willingly change places with Ipomoea. Those born to privilege festered on their bounty; they grew so soulsick they spent each nights wallowing in fucked up dreamscapes like this.
He doesn’t pause to wonder “maybe this man is different. Maybe he was not born to this. Maybe he deserves a second chance, like everyone else--” Because he is angry, and anger does not want to leave room for anything else. It spreads like fire and in response magic trembles in Dune, all quivering silk. It wants to rage through the fabric of this world. It wants to bring the sky down, smother them both in creamy blue.
Alas, all his magic can do is run back and forth along the walls of Dune’s body. Spines emerge from the stallion’s back with a rip of flesh. His teeth grow long and sharp, the dagger at his side long forgotten. Dark, leathery wings erupt from his shoulders and unfold in the harsh sunlight, dripping red blood in the sand.
Dune knows this doesn’t matter. He knows this isn’t real, that death in this place will just bring him back to the body, gasping and greedy for air. When he speaks again, smoke trails from his nostrils. “Do what you must.” He steps forward and leans into the spear until blood is drawn, a promise clear in his dark gaze:
wonder now, as spines and fangs tear through the stallion’s flesh and something bitter and black rises at the back of my throat, if this is what I might have become.
If I had stayed, if I had let the desert turn me hard, if I had let it fill my veins with sand and heat instead of soil and petals, if I had become a Davke like my brother — maybe then my heart wouldn’t feel quite so heavy, filled as it is with all those “what if’s”. I wonder if I had stayed in the desert all my life if I would ever have learned to look towards the horizon and dream about things I could not see, about lives I have not lived. I wonder if the desert would have been enough for me (in the way the forests, the meadows, the rivers never are, in the way Delumine never has been).
Does he know?
Does he know I can hear the desert whispering to me as clearly as I can hear his voice? Does he feel the way my heart is trembling, the way the sand trembles alongside it, the way the sun stares down on us both like it already knows what my decision will be, like it had already made up its mind all those years ago that I was too weak to bother with? Or that he looks like the forest, like the rich soil I grow flowers in, that he looks like my adopted home and that is why the Davke demand I kill him (and by extension, that part of myself that lives in him)? I want to tell him that some days I feel like my destiny has already been written for me, that every day I can feel my rights being siphoned away as surely as if there shackles chaining me. Every day I feel more like a puppet, every day I feel more of myself slipping away —
There are so many things I want to tell him (as if I could make him understand, as if I could make him forgive me for doing the unforgivable if only he knew why I did it) —
But there isn’t time enough. The desert has only ever been an hourglass.
All the bits of sand are moving now, sweeping us together, sweeping my spear towards his throat and I can hear my brother laughing. And in the instant before it pierces his skin I see —
I see his eyes, staring back at me in defiance. I see his face, which ought to be the face of a monster, but still he looks at me like I am the monster of this story. I see the promise in his gaze. I want to tell him he is wrong, that by killing him I am giving myself back a home that was taken from me, a family that had forsaken me. By killing him, I am taking back my birthright, my destiny, trading in my crown of flowers for a place among them.
But I know he is right.
I know I will never be Davke.
And I am not sure if that makes me feel better, or worse.
The sun is still laughing, the desert is still whispering, and for once — for once, I do not want to prove them wrong. Not like this. Maybe that is why I cannot make myself bury this spear into the earth-colored stallion’s throat.
In that twisted dreamscape where time ceases to function as it should I watch the way the spearhead quivers against the man's skin, as a single drop of blood falls to the ground and turns all the sand red, red, red. It comes to a stop, the spear, the snarling, the whispering of the desert — it all stops, and I —
I alone move. I alone make the final decision to shift my spear from the man to the vulture, to pull it back close enough to kiss the gleaming edge of it. I alone launch it into the air at the bird that sounds like my brother.
I miss.
The vulture laughs again, it flaps its wings and transforms into a coyote leaping down from the bone-white branches it had been perched upon. And before I can blink, before I can take it back or begin to wonder what I have just done, the sands start to part like the sea. And from the depths of it rise the horde that had surrounded me from before, warpaint lining their cheeks red and spears tipped in gold.
@Dune "speaks" next post will be his "waking up" one!
There are a thousand thoughts rushing like a river behind the king’s eyes. And like a river Dune does not know what they mean, what they say. He only knows there is movement, and history, and a message that struggles to express itself.
But oh, Dune cannot make sense of this man. He cannot unravel the mysteries woven into the dream fabric. All the symbolism here, all the meaning behind the spear pressed to his neck, it isn’t for him. It’s all for the dreamer. Dune doesn’t understand and it is insufferably frustrating that all he can change here is himself. His pity flows to rage to sorrow to frustration to fire, pure fire.
And in that moment he feels like Solis might be there among them, watching. Laughing. Dancing along the sharp tip of the spear. All Ipomoea has to do is push. One fluid movement, easy. But he doesn’t do it.
The instant the spear is no longer at his neck, Dune steps back and shakes his head and feels the fire leave him as quickly as it had come. The pity, though, and the derision, and the sense of broken trust is still there. “Gods, your aim is terrible,” he comments cheerfully as the spear goes sailing through the empty air, quite happy to see it discarded. Then strange dream-things happen-- the vulture beats its wings and then it's no longer a vulture but a coyote, in a way that will only seem unnatural later, as they wake.
As Dune watches the coyote, the horizon shivers and trembles, heat rising from the earth’s skin in a shimmering curtain. And when the sands part it is absolute terror that rises from the ground. Spear-wielding, war-painted terror. “Fuck,” he mutters loudly before trailing off into quieter, private curses. This did not seem good.
The bay takes an uncertain step back and sighs heavily. “I’d say thanks, but...” It appeared to be a lose-lose situation. Or die-die. And it would be better to die at the tip of a single well-placed spear than to be torn apart by a dozen.
“Now would be a good time to wake up, yeah?” His voice is edged with panic. Dune has died many times in dreams, he has suffered a hundred violences but they never, never get any easier.
here is a voice in the sun. I’ve known it since my birth, warning me, watching me, judging me. I can hear it still, as my spear misses the vulture-that-is-my-brother and the desert shimmers with all those bodies rising from it.
I think I should recognize them, but I am glad — I think I am glad — that I do not.
The earth-colored stallion is still here, watching me. As if he, too is waiting for something, expecting something, wanting something more — more than what I can give. It is always more than what I can give. I turn to him, and for a moment (in that slow dream way, the way that always gives you more or less time than you deserve) there is only he and I, looking across the sand at one another.
Something in his eyes makes me pause, makes me wonder, that wariness that is more lifelike than dreamlike — but I will not remember it when I wake. “I—“ the horde is nearly upon us now.
And just like that my time is up, speeding up, gone.
“Who are you?” I whisper, and no longer is my voice dry like the desert — it rustles like leaves in the forest, like all those dancing flowers back in Delumine. I am not sure he answers (if he does I do not hear it) before I turn and face the Davke with my teeth bared. And as the first of their spears breaks the skin of my chest —
~~~
Ipomoea comes awake with a start, body covered in a thin sheet of sweat.
Around him the grasses tremble, untying the braids that had formed around him. And when he lifts his head above them at last, he sees not the rolling, shifting dunes or the desert, or the red-tipped spear lodging itself between his eyes; he sees only the prairie grass, stretching endlessly before him. And the sky, a deep bruise-blue, starless and moonless, beginning to lighten in the east.
He lets out a breath that he did not know he was holding, feeling his lungs tremble and his heart stutter like neither of them yet know they are safe. The dream echoes in his mind again and again, each time in a little less detail, each time shorter. And each time he still hears his brother laugh, and still sees the betrayed look in the eyes of the earth-colored stallion. It stays with him long after it ought to, crawling like ice down his spine.
Because on one side of Eluetheria the trees are shivering, and in their roots, he knows, is the same feeling of betrayal.
WE TOOK THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED
AND IT LED US TO A KILLING SPREE
“Who are you?” The king asks, and before Dune can say "no one" the Davke are upon them. There is pain, and blood, and the sun’s watchful, laughing warmth. There is broken flesh and battered bones.
And at the very end there is darkness.
Dune opens his eyes as the flush of dawn is just beginning to color the large piece of sky that seeps in through the fallen roof. For a moment his entire body is convinced it is still dying; it holds close the memory of the spear’s kiss, the rip and the tear and, in turn, his body’s warm embrace. When he blinks he still sees the dead tree and the vulture, etched in the swirling shadows behind his eyelids. And he smells the desert- the wild desert, undulled by the tang of the city. The scent of memory.
It all fades, of course- dreams always do. Reality was a force that did not like to be reckoned with. His heartbeat slows and the visions behind his eyes blur beyond distinguishing. The scent of home returns- the dust and bronze and cats of his workshop, the grit and filth of the streets wafting through the little window (and, of course, the fallen roof). Dune sighs, and prepares for another day in his tired little life.
Last night’s dream was not very pleasant. Not only had he died, but the stage had been interwoven with symbolism he had no chance of understanding- and he hated a puzzle he could not solve. A problem he could not fix. Still, if anyone were to ask him: would you rather live endlessly in dreams that always end in death, or trapped here in the real world? He would not hesitate to choose the former. Time after time, dream after dream, no matter how foul, he would always choose that world over this one.
But it was not a choice for Dune to make, so he turns kings and spears and death from his mind. He locks his shop behind him and ambles down the street, onward into the new day.
