Private Tales Dreams Shared With Ghosts

[Saella]

She saw it now, at the fringe of perception; the hazy edges of the amalgamous thing conjured before her. It flowed with the Pursuant's voice, riding the ebbs and eddying her trepidation. She managed to breathe, and reached out a hand. Gingerly at first, she sought to challenge the conjuration, to grapple with the Loch as its shape tapered into something solid.

It was slick against her gloved palm. She could feel it, the smooth flesh and film that held its membrane distinct from the chilled breeze.

The book slipped from her lap.

"I don't understand," she said, voice muffled beneath a whisper to her own ears. She was shaking her head, eyes yet glued to the thing. She yearned to grasp for it, to feel for some imagined string, to draw herself deeper into the pull. Maybe...

She felt her hand wander, fingers stretching for the octopus's leg.


Bebin Theros

 

[Bebin Theros]

That she held her composure beneath the depths was testemant to her mettle. Able to maintain her focus. Able to act. Able to question and resist.

Promise, to be certain.

But only time would tell how much of that promise would come to fruition.

"What do you doubt?" he asked. The octopus pulsed its mantle, legs a-stream behind it. To the undulations of the curents.

Yet did it stayed near. Drifted about the sphere of their imagination. Near. Yet at the edge. Just out of her reach.

"Your own eyes?" he went on. "Your own ability?"

 

[Saella]

An answer found her before she managed to process the question:

"Both," she said, and the word tripped from her tongue as realization of its weight dawned on her. She clawed for it back, teeth slamming shut and tongue clicking as she again averted her gaze from the Pursuant. No. She said it. She had felt it. Recanting now served no end but to make fool of her—more a fool than she had already succeeded in painting herself.

She returned instead to watch the octopus, fixing her eyes on a point behind that flowing mantle.

"I'm not comfortable enough with either," she said. "It's distant, something like watching a puppetshow, or trying to see through stained glass, perhaps?"


Bebin Theros

 

[Bebin Theros]

"Are not all things, new to us?" Bebin asked, with a smirk fixed upon his lips. "Gone from our mother's wombs, we forget how we swam in dreams born of her blood," he bowed his head, and shut his eyes, and the octopus turned to murk, "Pulled from the waters of her life, we scream, blind to all the world, and desperate for breath," and something lurked in the distance.

Just beyond the sphere of clarity. Just beyond the murk and bend of light which passed through stained glass, doubly thick, a wall of glimmering scales.

A current, that wound and streamed about them.

"Our first steps, are rarely made in comfort,"

Saella

 

[Saella]

Curiosity crooked the better of her, deterred her from engendering the caution of passive thought; she reached out and plucked the thread dangling from that wall of shimmering scale.

Reality bled, ruptured the glass fiction that bound her to their meadowed plane.

The octopus writhed, drew nearer.

"And the second?" She remembered to breathe, though it came upon her in stilted, shallow gasps. Her finger pulsed, a sliver of a tentacled arm wisping from her nail.


Bebin Theros

 

[Bebin Theros]

A proud huff.

"I can speak only of those stumbles I have made myself," the Pursuant fed.

The current went on with its churn. Down in that dark mirrored space. Where up was down, and down was North.

The tentacle of the octopus ebbed and flowed. Whirled and danced. Bound by the streams of thought that drove about them. The churn of the subconscious mind. The dynamo of dreams.

Where one scale had been plucked, countless more shimmered in its place.

A body. There in the dark. Slithering. Serpentine. A hood, like fins, speckled by stars, thirteen. That burned through the silt, in winks and stares.

Saella

 

[Saella]

"Oh," she said, eyes fixed on that fluttering, translucent tentacle. She dared not blink under its scrutiny; the churn of motion cast her about on numbing eaves, and when her focus lapsed for but a moment she felt a capricious yawn teasing at her jaw. Swallowing it down, she leveled her palm, letting that thread of fiction wind itself around her.

The noose tightened, and she slipped under that hypnotic hood.

A question escaped her, meandered to her beturbaned teacher: "Did you stumble? I don't know, it's hard to imagine."


Bebin Theros

 

[Bebin Theros]

A nod. Simple and singular. "We all stumble," he assured her. "And I have had more than my share of stumbles and falls, well after my first step,"

The currents about them coursed on. There in the solitude of the loch. There amidst the coils of the great serpent that shimmered around them. It unwound, and slowly, began to swim away.

"Tell me, why is it hard to imagine?"

To her eyes, the world beyond the space they inhabited must have seemed a thick soup. Clouded, save for the familiar that found its way to her fingertip.

Could she even see him, sat before her? Or was her mind so lost in the dream, she could but battle to stay awake in its depths.

The Pursuant could but wait and see.

Saella

 

[Saella]

Frustration sighed from clenched teeth. Saella, stifling the urge to throw aside her book and leave the grove and carry on with her daily chores, took a heavy breath. When she spoke, her voice trebled out empty, devoid of inflection. A deadpan scatter of words chosen with little in the way of hesitation.

"I don't know, Pursuant," she said.

Her gaze, occluded by the amorphous cluster of Loch that hovered in the air between them, cast downward, away from her mentor's querying return. She did not want to meet those eyes, to answer beyond the ken of her own embarrassment.

"Maybe, I don't know, maybe I just lack a point of comparison?" She cut a hand through that swirl of sonorous amalgam, broke away inked with a shroud of magic; it coated her palm in grit, a consistency likened to a swell of mud following a midsummer squall.

She shook her wrist and the spell dissipated in turn, splotching away back to the ether above.

"It feels right, but describing it? Where do you even begin?"


Bebin Theros