YOU RESIST
STRANGERS UNTIL A STRANGER MAKES THE OLD HUNGERS
BRUTALLY WAKE
When Dune opens his eyes, everything is white and blue. The first thing he sees is the sky, a shade of turquoise so bright it gives the impression that the sun is on the other side of a thin blue shell. The first thing he thinks is this is a nightmare just waiting to happen. The blue is begging to be cracked open, skin peeled back like a hard-boiled egg. God (and maybe the dreamer, maybe not) only knows what lies on the other side.
The next thing he sees, as he lowers his gaze to the earth, is the city. It is huge and sprawling and made, best as he can tell on first impression, entirely of white sand. It is deathly quiet, and again he wonders what nightmares might be waiting here for him.
The young stallion steps forward into the white city, noting the smell of the sea despite the lack of a breeze or any kind of ocean sounds. He quickly finds that the streets he first thought empty are not-- there’s just no one alive. Instead statues line the streets, carved with exquisite detail. He leans in closer to one in particular. The stallion depicted is rearing up as though about to attack, face twisted in anguish and terror. Dune loses track of time as he looks at the statue and its remarkable detail, until the sudden awareness of another presence-- it must be the dreamer-- pulls him out of the spell.
The bay whirls around, ears pinned defensively and body coiled like a snake waiting to strike. Judging from his reaction you might think he was the dreamer, and she the intruder.
"Oh cruel Death, give three things back," sang a bone upon the shore;
Everything is salt.
There is silence, but she does not know it is silent; it is silent to her in the way dreams simply do not have sound, unless a song has traveled from the waking life into the sleeping one. This dream has no music. It does not occur to her that there should be a sea somewhere, or a wind. There is only salt, as if it has always been salt, but when she looks at the city and the people in it, she knows that this is not true. She thinks they might be alive, at first, as if she can feel their life and see their faces, but as she comes closer to each horse, they turn to salt, but they were salt before she got there, and she cannot make them un-become salt. A great feeling of wrongness pervades the dream, and as she goes from horse to horse - now she is running desperately, begging them to answer her - she can only scream, ”Who did this? Who did this?” No one answers. No one can. She is alone, and screaming, and in her desperation she cannot stop fast enough and skids into a statue, a cowering filly, who collapses on Saphira as if she had been a pile of table salt, held together by the grains beneath it, and not carved, as a statue. She sits in the salt, and thinks: this is the salt of people. This is blood, as salt, and skin and hair and sinew as salt. There is salt in her mouth. She spits and spits but cannot get it out. There is nothing to drink, and nowhere to scrape her tongue against. Her body is covered in filly-salt. She gets up and keeps running, only now, she does not stop to ask them who has done this. She still sees-not-sees their faces over the salt, as the salt, before they were salt and then after and now. Their bodies are blurs as she runs, but their faces are still clear, and in the distance she sees a man carved of brown salt and then he moves and she thinks, it is a trick, but he feels different - the wrongness pushes against him, an invisible force - and she slows, trotting to a halt before him. He looks as the others do, poised to attack, or defend. She waits for him to be salt, and she is still convinced that he is salt, when she asks, "Who did this?” She feels that she knows the answer, and yet it escapes her. She must ask, to dredge it up.
YOU RESIST
STRANGERS UNTIL A STRANGER MAKES THE OLD HUNGERS
BRUTALLY WAKE
Here comes the dreamer, straight ahead, plumes of dust (no, of course not dust. salt) stirred up in small white clouds behind her heels. She is white and blue, just like the rest of the world around them, and the dream- how to describe it- it leans in toward her like flowers to the sun. Just as he wonders if maybe she's not going to stop, she does. This close, he can see the nuanced color in her soft eyes, the expression in them torn and confused. There are no introductions in the space of time as she stares and waits for him to-- to what?-- until finally she says “who did this?”
Oh.
After a look of surprise, his features soften in understanding. He looks at her very closely and speaks very seriously, so when he says “not me,” the answer will be easy to find in what goes unsaid:
“you did this.”
He lets his words sit heavily between them, uncertain how to proceed. She reminds him of something wild and unattainable-- a crane, or maybe the wind itself. But she is also, he is almost certain, just a girl. Just a confused, and scared, and maybe a little sad, girl.
“It’s okay. What happened here? Can you remember?” Dune finds it hard to look at anything other than her soft, wild eyes.
A pillar of salt! It doesn't surprise her,
This slow dissolving into tears.
“Not me.”
She stares at him then, mouth agape, as if inhaling in order to continue a very long scream. She thinks: No. And then: No. And furthermore: NO.
“It’s okay. What happened here? Can you remember?”
Saphira closes her mouth, lips trembling. She shakes her head, just a little, and then harder, until she takes in a grating gasp and says: “I only wanted them to listen.” She looks at the horizon then, at all the corpses and their houses, and says, “But the ocean is gone. Where is the ocean?” She looks at the one living man in the world and asks, “Do you think it dried up?” But she knows the answer, very suddenly, though when her dream had started there had been no questioning of the ocean, because its concept did not exist. This world did not have an ocean. Now it had the absence of one.
Saphira starts to cry. Sparkling tears trickle down her face, prettily, and she only whimpers quietly. It is as one wishes they could cry, but they are also the tears of someone who is just a little tired, or just a little embarrassed, or just a little afraid. It is nonsensical, dream-sorrow. Should she not be wailing? Great sobs, lamenting countless deaths, the destruction of an ocean? Of a civilization? She asks herself these things, obsesses over them, and wonders if the last living man in her dream is asking them, too. “I don’t even know what I was trying to tell them.”
YOU RESIST
STRANGERS UNTIL A STRANGER MAKES THE OLD HUNGERS
BRUTALLY WAKE
Sometimes we are not ourselves in dreams. Sometimes it takes who we are and builds us up into something better. Stronger, swifter, smarter. Other times, the dream tears us down, removes our armor piece by piece. Times like that, times like now, we are left small and defenseless, simple as children.
Dune does not think this dreamer is herself. Not when her lips quiver, not when her head shakes. Not when she whimpers and cries.
This dream is no rapture, despite the landscape of soft, gentle whites and blues. It hurts Dune, it is physically painful, to be in this dream. The shadows are sharp and sticky, they gnash and claw and cling to him like tar. Sorrow and guilt and fear all twist at the edge of reality, tugging the psyche always toward bleak terror.
“But the ocean is gone. Where is the ocean? Do you think it dried up?” Dune shifts his attention to the horizon. White and still and featureless. Heat waves dance, triumphant and mocking. “Maybe,” he concedes, personally more concerned about all the horses turned to salt than the sea. Thankfully the dreamer returns her focus to them with a few pitiful sniffles.
Dune never felt comfortable in front of crying women; he averts his gaze to the ground and shifts his weight.
“Can’t you turn them back?” He knows she can, because this is her dream. Because here they could be flying, or swimming far below the sea, or existing without shape or form or feature at all-- turning salt back to flesh should be child’s play. All she had to do was wake up. But not actually wake up, because that would end the dream. She had to awaken a part of her that she might not know was there, let alone that it was asleep. It is not something that could be taught. Dune could maybe guide her, and he would try, but success is not a foregone conclusion.
The bay begins to walk among the statues, peering at one very very closely. Eyelashes made of salt crumble in a forlorn breeze. “I think you can turn them back,” he says this as though it’s something he’s just decided. He looks to her with brows raised in expectation, and resists the urge to lick the closest statue.
