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.
@
~Anna Funder
