aeneas.
I had the dream again.
It happens every night. I don’t know why it still surprises me. In my parade of memories, the dream walks sunken in and grayscale; it is there behind my father when he called me son in a way that melted my heart, or in the background of the first Halcyon spar I watched. It nestles alongside the evening I went to my mother at midnight with a nest full of terrors in my mind, keeping me from sleeping. It’s there in between the highs and lows of each day, of each definitive task, as if waiting—
It is the dream of the white stallion on the black beach. I can’t remember what he says, the next morning—only that he visited me again, and in that visit told me something important. There are days I can remember pieces; sometimes he even asks me about my life, as if he is a voyager, and I tell him snippets of my day, the mundanities of it. He says, every time, “I cannot imagine living without war. It heartens me to know that my--”
This morning, though, there is nothing when I wake. Only the knowledge I had dreamt again, that damning dream. My mouth is dry as a salt flat where my father took me to see mirages. The memory (that memory) is happy, and pleasant; but the association of salt and bitterness and the dream stains it crimson, too.
I wake up with the raging, red energy that seems electrical. I do not mean to burn through my tutor’s book on geography later that morning, but I do: a sudden flare of energy incinerates it, and Mrs. Murdock leapt. I apologised to her. And to my mother. And then the priest told me to go to the garden and meditate, I was not fit for studies today—
So I am in the garden beyond Terrastella’s citadel, where in summer (I have been told, at least, not being yet old enough to have witnessed it myself) the Court enjoys festivities and orchard picking not far beyond.
But today, it is cold and grey. I sit nestled in a trio of evergreen trees, beneath a statue of Vespera.
I am breathing, and that is all.
In, and out, focusing on the flow of energy around me; how I can feel myself, not a conduct but a blockage, in the world. You have powerful magic, the Priests say to me. And it is very sensitive to all that you feel, and all that you feel around you—
There is the cold.
I am that, too. And the sun behind soft winter clouds. I hear the ravens cawing in the trees above, and the distant shuffling of citizens as they walk to and fro their jobs.
But my energy stays dark, and clogged, and chaotic.
In, and out.
I wonder if this is how my goddess feels, sometimes; mama and the priests say it might be so, when I ask, when I say:
The world is trying to tear me in half.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.
