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Hours later.
...
“You are confident you can take care of it while I’m gone?” Valerie asked. I knew he was just being wary, but I also knew I could do it. I’d gotten a feel for it, now.
“Yes, Valerie. Just give it to me.”
Taking it slow and steady, Valerie cautiously let his grip on Renee slip away. His magnetic influence dulled, then stopped entirely, melting into the background. For a moment the skein reared its ugly head again, worse, and I could see the tension in his body as well as I could sense it, but I was right. I exerted my own control, and mine alone. The skein stopped tearing and went back to its deep, quivering rumble.
I let out the breath I’d been holding. My control was… well, controlled. I looked at him, and despite his usual composure, he seemed satisfied. He stood up next to me and turned to Beau, sitting across Renee’s bed from the two of us, and she begrudgingly nodded as well. “If you’re both sure it’ll be fine.”
“I won’t do any more drastic work, but I can keep her safe,” I assured her. “It gets much easier after a while. After acclimating.”
“Mm.” Valerie stepped halfway out the bedroom door before saying, “I’ll be back within the hour. I’m sure nothing will go amiss, but if it does, Ms. Weaver, please get Dr. Rode in here immediately. I’ll be back.”
He slid the door shut, leaving the three of us alone. A mortal, an immortal and someone stuck in between. Beau sighed, then clicked her tongue. She started doing that when she was deciding what to say. I stifled a yawn and waited.
“Everything alright?” she asked. “Need some more water? A… I dunno, a blanket?”
“I’m okay. Thank you.”
“‘Right then. ...It’s sorta difficult to tell, y’know. You folks just get real quiet and real intense. Seems like you forget I’m even here every once in a while.”
“No offense,” I said, “but I do sometimes. It just takes a lot–”
Whatever I was saying evaporated from my mind as Renee stirred, just slightly. The fingers of her hand curled as she let out a long, hollow, unconscious breath, and Beau inhaled sharply and leaned in towards her. She wasn’t awake, but after the better part of a day of work, she seemed peaceful. Like she was simply enveloped in a very deep sleep.
Neither of us were expecting much at the moment, when all I was doing was keeping her steady, but… it was good to see. Renee settled again, but Beau didn’t take her eyes off of her for a second. The look on her face tugged at something in me, though not for any reason as dramatic as the skein.
“That can only be good,” I said quietly. “It’s not a breakthrough. But it’s good. She’s… she’s going to be fine. Soon.”
“I know she is,” Beau said. She reached her hand into the long beam of golden, early-evening sunlight seeping through the curtains and brushed a lock of hair from where it had fallen into Renee’s face. Her touch lingered a long time.
“Not like Joseve, right?” she added.
“...You know about that?”
“Word gets around, doesn’t it?” she sighed. “His dad was a friend of the family, let’s say. ...When I first heard the rumours about all this, even when it happened to him, it’s one of those things that just feels… distant. Not quite real. Not ‘til it comes into your house and, I guess… makes you recall the stakes.”
I hesitated, somewhat taken aback, as I considered the thought. I understood a little more than she knew. But I wasn’t sure I could tell her that.
Instead, I assured her, “This is better. Much better. We’re making progress on the skein itself, the core of it. But I… I’m not sure how much it does to their heads, too, you know. Their minds. It might be a while.”
“That’s what you saw with him, huh?”
“...Mhm.”
“Yeah. I did, too. But I’ll be here for her when she wakes up. So I guess you can keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
She looked up and saw me staring at her, and whatever expression must have been on my face, whatever I was giving away, she met my gaze and flashed a faint, apprehensive smile. “What? What is it?”
“You just remind me of someone,” I said.
She glanced down at the scarf around my neck for just a fraction of a second, and the corner of her mouth lifted just a tiny bit more. “Yeah. You too.”
This time I couldn’t suppress the yawn, and unconsciously I stretched out my arms and leaned back into my chair. My grip on the skein barely wavered. It would be fine, I knew. But it really did take a lot out of me. Valerie would have to make up for some of the slack when he came back, all refreshed, I was sure. Probably with Marcel and Senna, too.
Beau clapped a hand on her knee and stood up, stretching out her own back. “You can say you’ve got nothing to desire as much as you want, Miss Adeline, but I’m gonna step out for a moment and bring back a bite to eat, if that’s good by you.”
“That’s fine. We’ll be alright.”
She nodded, slid the door open and left, leaving it open a crack, where I could see the whirring monitors hooked up to Renee and whichever doctor was watching them now, the others still flowing back and forth in and around the house and the town outside, unseen but there on the fringes. I might have heard her open a cabinet a couple of rooms over, but it might’ve just been my imagination. If she was insisting, I thought that something to eat right now would be perfect.
I closed my eyes, letting the room dissolved around me until it was just me and Renee. The fading sunlight warmed my skin. I immersed myself in the calm, at the centre of the storm.
It was going to be a long...
...long...
...night.
I opened my eyes, and everything was black.
Except, no, not quite. I raised my hand in front of my face and could hardly make out its silhouette against the darkness; it wrapped around me like ribbons of soft cloth, gentle and comforting. But despite its depths, its weight above and below, it wasn’t whole. It was broken.
A deafening thunderclap wracked the sky, and it rippled and tore, and I saw the infinitude of tiny stars in the depths of an endless, dark sea. Lights hung suspended from long threads above my head (or where I thought my head should have been), twinkling and dripping between the gaps in the black curtains. My limbs dragged through the empty air like I was underwater, straining to part the black, straining to see.
I saw that one star outshone the others, so bright that it outlined the contours of the dark sky. Bigger, brighter than all the others. Closer, I realized. It was falling.
I searched for fear, but I didn’t find it. I didn’t feel panic or loss or curiosity. I didn’t feel anything, and somehow, that didn’t scare me either.
Then that star finally dropped from the canvas and dripped onto my nose, a tiny raindrop. It shone like quicksilver, icy cold against my skin, but somehow not unpleasant. It just was what it was.
It rolled and traced a rivulet down the side of my face. And more and more silver stars started to fall, to drip from the sky and rain down in a shower all around me, some grazing my skin and my hair, others missing, falling and melting into the pitch-black earth I stood on. A distant array of glittering stars became a field of raindrops stretching away in every direction, reflecting prismatic light that wasn’t there.
Then droplets melted together, into bigger drops, then into puddles on the ground, pooling and seeping around my feet, flooding across the void. I was standing on a silvery mirror, its reflection of the darkness shattered by ripples as more and more collided with its surface.
Then the rain of stars ended. The mirror calmed; its edges stretched beyond the nonexistent horizon, languidly smoothing into a single perfect, silvery line etched against the black. Free of distortion, there was no way to discern which way was up and which was down. Which was above the mirror and which was inside.
I looked down and shifted my feet, briefly sending another ripple across the quicksilver; and when it cleared, it was just my own face staring back at me. I reached up and distantly watched my hand brush against my cheek.
I reached down and laid my other against the mercurial surface. My reflection did the same. Her fingers intertwined with my own.
She climbed out of the pool, pulling herself up through its surface. She leaned her weight on me, but it wasn’t a struggle, not for either of us. I took her other hand with mine as it emerged, and it was cold, but the radiant droplets rolled down her – my – skin and melted back into the ground.
She stood up, and we faced each other as equals. We blinked together. I raised one arm and our hands stayed clasped together, her own rising to match. My reflection.
A shiver ran down my spine. It was cold, I realized. Cold and still and silent, except for us, our singular breath even and soft.
“Oh,” I said to myself. “I’m dreaming.”
My reflection opened her mouth and started to speak, but there was no sound. Her lips moved quickly, like she was forming words that just didn’t exist. I wanted to hear her, but I couldn’t. I tried to shape the dream, to change something and break the wall between us, but it didn’t obey.
I didn’t know why I thought it would. The weird blurriness still clung to the edges of my perception, twisting my thoughts into loops and frayed ends. It was hard to focus. Is this how it always was?
Is that what I think every time?
She stopped trying to talk; whether she’d realized I couldn’t hear her or had just finished whatever she had wanted, I couldn’t know.
It started slowly then, imperceptibly so, but something changed. And then everything changed. Somehow, I couldn’t definitively place anything different, but she was just… unfamiliar. Uncannily similar, still, but off. Like a ripple broke the perfect reflection.
Then, very suddenly, I didn’t recognize the face in front of me at all. The person. The thing. Familiar and unfamiliar at once, my self no longer. It hurt to meet their eyes, in a dreamy, distant sort of way; trying to fix them in my mind only made everything worse. Their hands were staggeringly cold. Frozen.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
They showed me something. It was just a blink, something that couldn’t have lasted longer than a moment, but when I saw it time felt stretched and dragged until I wasn’t even sure of that anymore.
It was a painful flash. Bright white. So bright that it was difficult to make anything out, at first. But the light was one I knew, even if the image was buried in the back of my head. They showed me a single moment of a falling star, cascading from the sky an endless distance above Home, heralded by splinters of glass hanging in the air.
The light disappeared, and it was dark again, and I was facing my not-quite-reflection. I staggered, stunned, but unlike in the waking world the pain was brief and muted. It didn’t make sense. But the fear I’d felt, for just a moment– that came back to me.
“I don’t… I don’t understand,” I said, my voice trembling. Neither of us moved. They didn’t even try to speak. “...Why did you show me that? Did you bring me here?”
They were still for a long time. Then they shook their head. “Then why am I here?”
They didn’t reply, but plunged me into another vision instead.
This one wasn’t anything I knew so well, at first. I found myself walking down a wide, grass-spotted street in daylight– startlingly bright, but after the star, it was nothing. In the distance, the only sound above my footsteps, I heard rusted metal, creaking and groaning and scraping in the wind. I…
I was in Roan. I didn’t remember exactly how I knew that, but it didn’t come as a surprise as much as an obvious acceptance of a natural truth. The image grew sharp, the edges more defined, my senses more grounded– maybe my mind stopped trying to resist and just let me fall into the performance.
Some of the details weren’t right, though. Dredging faintly through my memory, I realized that much. The colours were too bright or too dull. Some of the smells laid so heavy on my nose and tongue that I could’ve gagged. I’d never given much thought to my gait, but suddenly it was as if one leg was a little too short, or one cobblestone out of place, and I found myself stumbling.
I didn’t fall, though. Part of me, somewhere, did keep a grasp on the fact that I was still dreaming, seeing an image patched together from memory. That part kept pulling me along whatever path I was on, until I barely felt my feet drift across the ground.
Then, before I knew it, I was standing outside a house I recognized. The Weavers’ house. I passed between the two moss-draped serpents slithering in long, coiling spirals around the front door, and I was inside. Through the hall, through the commons, through the final door.
Renee was lying in bed, just like she had been when I–
I was gone. I fell asleep. I was here with someone – it was Beau, Beau Weaver, her wife, her partner – and I’d just been trying to help, because what else could I do, and then she left and it must have been too much, too soon, and then I–
–when I left her there. Her hair was matted and fanned around her wan face, her skin cold and untouched. The thick blanket covering her rose and fell with shallow breaths.
Beau wasn’t there next to her. Neither was Valerie, or any of the others, and no third version of me, either. One and a half was enough already. There was nobody and nothing at all. Just her. She was more of an anchor than anything else; I looked around the room and all the fog seemed to melt away, all the strangeness in my senses mellowing. This is where I’m supposed to be, I thought. I knew.
Her eyes were open when I looked back to her. They met mine. And in reality, some part of me knew, I’d never seen them before, but they were as clear as sunlight. Deep, dark gold.
Before I had the chance to gather myself the vision waned, its colours smearing and fading; and then it was gone, and I was facing them again like nothing had happened. I clutched their hands, half-leaning on them as I recovered from what I’d seen and half-trying to pull them closer, but if anything they were more immovable, their face, if they had one, even more inscrutable.
“I was helping Renee,” I gasped. “The others couldn’t do it, but I thought that I could, so I had to. Maybe I still can, we were– I have to help her. I have to get out of here. I need– I need to wake up. Snap out of it.”
I tried to focus, to direct my mind and the glassy darkness all around by sheer force of will. To flex a muscle I didn’t have, to speak the words I didn’t know. Just–
SNAP OUT OF IT.
They blinked, cocked their head. I squeezed as hard as I could, though my grip was weak and their skin was frigid. “Whatever you are… you’re a dream. Or part of one, at least. But you showed her to me. If you want me to help her, to wake her up, I can’t. Not here. So please let me go.”
Nothing.
It was hard to feel anything, I found, when I was swaddled in the unremembered nothingness of the dreamscape, but I did feel something. Something hot and loud and seething bubbling up in my chest, clawing for me to let it out– not my power, not consciously, at least. It wasn’t anything so mundane.
I felt despair. Helplessness. Fear. Annoyance, indignance, frustration. Anger. Real, raw anger that nothing before had managed to pull from me. It clouded my dull senses, set my mind reeling, but it wasn’t going to be ignored.
“Let me wake up,” I demanded. “You have to.” My fingers dug into their icy skin harder than I thought possible. My voice was low but it rang as I put all my force behind the words, letting that anger pour into them– I wasn’t afraid of that anymore. It felt right.
“Let. Me. Go!”
They tore one of their hands from my grasp so suddenly that for a moment I was too shocked to react. They just stared at me, exactly the same as before. My other hand, my right hand, slackened. Were they going to do it? Could they?
But just then, they weren’t the one to do anything; it was the sky. It rumbled with another thunderclap, echoing against everything all at once, rolling through my body.
They turned their gaze upwards as the black clouds split open again. They raised their arm and pointed into the sky as rain began to fall, as if to draw my gaze, and they caught a single silvery drop on their outstretched fingertip.
The stars fell again, twinkling in their own light. They soaked into our skin, each drop eventually dripping from my hair or my fingers to the glossy, mirrored surface beneath our feet. Our reflections weren’t there – because we were each other’s, after all – but the mirror rippled and shattered, just like the first time.
It didn’t stop, though. The drizzle became a downpour, and the downpour became a flood.
Quicksilver rose around our ankles, and then in the blink of an eye it was halfway up our legs, and then pooling around my waist. It was thick and heavy and I felt like I was about to be pulled under… but it was dense, too. When my feet left the ground, I floated, ethereal.
I frantically clung to the hand I still had, anchoring myself to them, but they didn’t seem afraid. They didn’t float. They just pointed up into the sky, and their face lowered to meet my gaze again, and they said nothing at all. Neither did I.
And all the while the rain came down around us.
The silver rose to my shoulders. My neck. It poured into my mouth, metallic and terrible, but it was just a dream. Just a dream.
My head sank beneath the surface; and as hard as I tried to hold onto it, their hand slipped from mine. They disappeared, and then I did, too. Whisked away into the black by the torrential current.
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