[P] I have lost my pearls

[Florestan]

the drowned prince In a sea of grass, he dreamt. He dreamt of dew-spangled petals and sun-dappled woods, rain dripping off verdant leaves and the sound of cicadas at dusk; he dreamt of hazy summer days and shorelines so vast they might be infinite. But most of all, he dreamt of drowning. The pale swell of his belly rose and fell fitfully, reflecting the restlessness of his sleep. His long legs were splayed in every which direction, seemingly without a care in the world—the silver-blonde curls of his tail spilled haphazardly over the stiff summer grass. If Florestan had been awake, he would have felt the itch of so many stiff stalks on his delicate skin, but conscious sensations had no effect on him now. This was his first true slumber in this strange land, and what a deep slumber it was. His entrance into Novus had been unanticipated and, quite frankly, traumatizing—one moment he had been bathing serenely in a tranquil pond in the middle of a sunlit glade, and the next he was sputtering out water from his lungs on the shore of a strange lake in an entirely alien land. The past few days had found him vacillating between utter panic and depressed acceptance—it wasn't that Florestan had left anyone important behind, but the very thought that even the smallest possibility of seeing his mother again had vanished was enough to envelop his heart in the cold iron hand of dread. He had always held on to the hope that she would come back to find him someday, that maybe she had left because she had some very important unfinished business somewhere far, far away and that she had always intended to come back for him. However, he knew in his heart of hearts that this was just baseless optimism: when she left him, he knew that it had been for good. And just when he had definitively resigned himself to never seeing his mother again, he smelled her scent on a breeze. It was heart-wrenchingly familiar—jasmine and lilac, with subtle notes of lavender and peony. No, it had to be part of a dream. Intellectually, he knew that she wouldn't have followed him; no, that she couldn't have. With some fatigue, he rolled gracelessly onto his other side in an attempt to disperse the dream's grip; it hurt even to dream her. Perhaps if he distracted himself enough, he would forget about her, about this thoroughly unsettling situation. Then, he felt a petal land on the soft pink flesh of his nose. Florestan's heart beat a hurried rhythm against his sternum—that was certainly not a dream. Florestan opened his eyes.