There and Here

They had been gone a while, though it was impossible to know just how much Time had passed amid the vicissitudes of the slumbering Dream.

It pushed them under. It pulled them in. At times, it objected vociferously to their presence, and at others, only watched. It spun, like an idle spider minding a tremulous web, an uncountable number of distortions and refractions, picking and unpicking psychotic patterns in the web as it bent the light of reality along the glistening threads of the now and then.

Time passed differently here. Forwards. Backwards. Cavorting through transient days and weeks and hours that may have lasted as long as years, with no discernible rhyme or reason beyond that which the Dream necessitated. Time surged forth upon the waves of the collective subconscious and receded again on its ungovernable tides within a storm of thought and memory. In the perpetual twilight of the Dream, night became day and day night, but never in the same manner twice.

They stopped to rest.

So as not to invite the passage of more time, they sat together quietly and held very still. No longer were they venturing. What they had risked themselves to journey this far into Her realm to find, they had found. At long last, the old words resurfaced. Their foundations rose through the muck of the dead, departed, and misremembered. They had enough to rebuild with. They could go back. By all measures of mortal grasping, it was a triumph, except…

Upon its finding, the path Back had unceremoniously closed behind them, and sometimes it seemed that there had never been a path at all, or a world before this one to which they might return, or should, or have any impetus to do so beyond a niggling feeling, like a dream scarce recalled in the first bleary seconds after waking.

Then they would remember themselves with a start. And the day would begin anew.

“The Dream has calmed.”

“Yes. We escape its notice for now.”

Today he was a young man, ageing in reverse, his eyes as bright and clear as they would be when he was much older. He was handsome, she thought, not because of any one physical trait or feature, but because he was kind and familiar to her. She had begun to forget, as well, what a man should look like, and so took less umbrage with his naked lack of scales. He could have been the first man. Each morning was a genesis. She shut her eyes and thought of home.

“Priestess,” he murmured. “I’ve been thinking. In the event that we don’t make it back…”

For all his careful wording and diplomacy, he was soon interrupted, his misgivings swiftly dashed upon the rocks of his companion. She straightened in her silks. “We will,” said Chakmar, her voice resolute. “We must, Dolaron. Because…” She struggled to fix on the reason. Another year passed in furlough while she thought to herself.

“Because they are waiting for us.”

Far off in what the Dream declared the distance, they could hear, softly trilling, the melodic song of a lark.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Summary: Lost for relative decades in their Lady’s realm, two wanderers chart their next course.

Penned by my hand on the 14th of Valnuary, in the year 998 AF.