Seaside Moors i want y'all to just get down.

dream sequence <3

these days when sleep visited val, he didn't dream much of past lives, or even the silvery sprite which visited him so many weeks ago.

he dreamed of eyes.

a pair of them.

yellow.

unblinking.

so much, that he felt fear strike his head the moment he was aware of them, and no matter where he turned (be it shadowed shrub, or some ancient jungle long forgotten) they would reappear as distant laterns, so that he would turn left and then right in the pathways of his dream subconscious, and never be able to escape them.

today's dream seemed no different at first. he was not aware of the shape he was, or even if it was night or day -- it seemed some middle ground between the two, where if he was just observing it seemed sunny as any day, but the second he stopped to really scrutinize his surroundings it was as if everything became indistinct by shadow.

he was in a patch of netherworldly clover; blackened again save for little rippling of scarlet any time the leaves were disturbed. no wind met him, nor were there any bird-calls.

just him and silence -- and somewhere, a pair of terrible yellow eyes.

experimenting with fun incoherency. feel free to laugh at me, i already am

oh shying, landfill heart,
r
                         
e  lusive soul;
       c

i have seen nothing
and i am even less

geogaze waxes listless; pair of saccharine jewels in the sewers, rot.
dreamless sleep was like shooting dope. the things hidden behind the flitter of black lashes couldn't reach her there. an escape she paths.

( seek me through confusion,
and in quiet seek me more. )

she opened her eyes, bruised lemonfruits
but not to waking.
a willowisp limned in a silver glow awaits her, flutters with the hymn of the fiddling zephyr. she feels warm as it enswathe her in a breeze like a chemise, disheveling her ruff, and then she remembers in a sense of deja vu.
the darkness is alive, slumbering, and she feels its chest distend around her with a sick hairpin in her gut. 
the wisp mantles blush, its ever-lustring iridescence shrugging into a shift of some kaleidoscopic prism. do not be scared, it seems to mean. she doesn't know why she gets this message in her head without words. 
phaedra shifts slightly on quiet slippers
(don't wake your own darkness), and only then, phaedra sees. 

the window with chiffon curtains, ruched edges gently rustling with that sourceless yet inviting breeze. warmth spilth from the other side. when she tries to recall her last passage through this scalpel-precise incision, she is struck with hissing stanza,

the dream is

                                                                                             
worse than dead.

                                                                           
the dream is

 
worse than gone. 

                                             
it simply never was.

it simply                                                                                            never was.


the wisp bade her through the doorway with an airy croon. she hesitates through and is plumbed in darkness again. not her darkness, the alive type. regular darkness, and she thinks she hears the sound of a sigh whisper against her ear, but when she turns there is no one there; a strange moment of cryptomnesia, and then her feet find root in clover. the clover. she digs her toes into the primrose path and


                             breathes                        

                                                     
in,
a lodestone collecting each scintilla of light into herself,
until she is birthmother of all that is light here
a circle of condensation that grows and shrinks
as she breathes in and out.

                                                                 

 and suddenly a 

gasp

of 

voluptas' bliss



all the sonnets and all the limericks and all the masterpieces taken together could not capture an estimable description of the fleshly pleasures that were unearthed in the discovery of this nights of taking passion forth into an abyss!

she digs her toes in deeper, turning the clover amethyst and sunwarm, diffusing petals outward, blowing 

them 

to

h i m?
( i know that you’re there,
‘cause i could point you out
in ten thousand galaxies )

 

one flashbulb spark​
a second's worth it all
to give this dream breath

god i cant do your post justice. its like u making a 5 course meal and me showing up with a cat hairball in a ziploc baggie

he was only distantly aware he was dreaming; there was the real world and then there was this world - with its frayed edges and deepening shadows. it felt just as real as the other world, were it not for the way the edges nettled and blurred when he turned his gaze. if it were not for the illogical inconsistencies of his dream world, he might have been lost in it forever.

there was a stirring -- out from that sooty darkness a wispy light emerged, billowing out cherry-soft petals. valravn's eyes widened as he saw the clearing ripple, the shadows chased away revealing the clover's true colors -- bright cherise, deep hunter green; loamy, viridescent veld.

yet for all of its strangeness val did not feel fear. he was not afraid. his soul knew he had seen this a thousand times before, despite the naive freshness of his newest earthborn mind. that this light -- be it a star or faerie or wisp or soul -- had come for him time and time and time again;

the ground beneath her (for it is her, he knows it) was cut in a swath of brilliant sunlight -- but as he stepped towards her, he felt clovers turn to blackened vines and snare him. he went to cry out, but his voice was stolen from him. his mouth empty, dry -- bare as a skull bleached to white in the desert.

he could not advance forward -- as the seconds passed it seemed he only became more inmeshed in the writhing shadows, which now curled and furled around his legs like shapeless snakes, snaring, rooting, dragging -- meanwhile his eyes remained fastened to her, whose presence lit that gloomy glade in brilliant sunbeam whites. in hope.

first of all, false, secondly i am the worst lol sorry for the wait and also i'm not doin that mona lisa frank bs again it took my last braincell and makes me cringe sry. fyi marshtail is my made up equivalent of lemongrass since the latter is tropical <3

she'd upskilled herself in dreamcraft enough to moor her unconscious to lucidity and, had found, through frustrating cut and try, grounding techniques that worked and those that didn't. dreamer ministries did not seem to want or like their ātman to be aware of themselves on this sacrosanct rung, but phaedra was nothing if not persistent and strong-willed. to too great a degree, for even the dream realm yielded to her invocations now. but he,

he him him him him h i m 

was it, for true? this one,

was not so practiced, she gleaned. but the ability to master himself was there. it was naturally instilled in him. she was an even younger attā than valravn, though knew nothing of that, and her past lives did not visit her— perhaps her second sights preferred their earthly canvasses to her quondam breaths.

because of this gift, she has caintigern. do not beggar the largesse of past insight too. it would be a great risk to lose one for the other. it was known. she would not beg. she wouldn't even think to ask.

the willowisp blinked black and green and white, then lilted and flit around her head, insisting something of her. before phaedra was even on the cusp of emoting confusion, the nightfire blazed down the path of clover and petal and illumed the boy and his predicament.

phaedra seemed to understand, then, what was required of her.

presently she found his gaze anchored to hers and started back with surprise at that. she hadn't seem him but in shiftings of shadow before now. she wasn't sure what she scried in those pools of his, but the inumbrating clover troubled her. 

she bit her toes into it again deeper deeper deeper, straining to breathe light back into the tainted trefoil, and to the detriment of her waning extrasensories as well. she had to stop. her lungs never hurt, she felt no pain, but natheless a gasp splintered from her throat as her eyes opened and she realized just how far she'd pushed herself without intending to in trying to reach him. 

the wisp had returned to her by now, an undisplaced glow at her cheek, as if watching her or studying her or ... she couldn't grasp its want of her, not here, not intuitively like in her own dreamverse.

before she could ask what now?, the thing revisited val, this time bouncing light off the pythonic vines that coiled around him and pushing against a darkness borne at his end that curled up his legs like wreathes of black smoke. 

she was suddenly needful of muse and thought back to the mouth of her own darkness, in the next moment blurting out: "you— you're only dreaming!" i'm absurd, i'm the dreaming one "you're not stuck! it's only ... marshtail!"

she didn't stir, though desperately she wanted to. before, she thought she knew what to do, but that was only her ego presuming, and now she feared he would only entangle himself even more so, and diminish herself to waking. 

he needed to do it himself. 

"it's marshtail and marshtail is weak. just keep looking at me and remind yourself: it's only marshtail! then pull, you have to snap it. remember: marshtail is weak, and that's all it is." she imparted, nodding in an affirmative and gentling manner.

why am i rescuing my dream people? and why does it feel so important that i do?

why does he feel important too?

tenebrous coils of woodsmoke held him down. valravn struggled against the choking sensation as it pulled him deeper -- he felt as if he was about to fall through the floor and into the hungering jaws of the void.

claimed by terror, the boy began to fight back -- and with every punch he delivered into the darkness it seemed to only glow in oily response, rooting him deeper.

its only marshtail! valravn had forgotten about the wisp of light he'd seen moments before. he startled, looking up to the distant image of phaedra as black tendrils slid between them like crackling heat. what? what was a marshtail?

momentarily distracted, valravn felt the obscurity reach out again, pulling against him. he tried to speak again, but his tongue was clouted and weighed down. he closed his eyes, feeling resigned terror seep into his nerves. through his nose. into his tongue. down his throat to his belly to his feet --

cannot i cannot speak. the boys eyes remained tightly shut.

its only marshtail its only marshtail im only dreaming its onl--

valravn felt his subconscious flicker, as did his presence in this plane;

in another world he was slowly coming to wakefulness.

its only marshtail im only dreaming its only marshdream im dreaming its tailmarsh im dreaming only marshtail --

meanwhile the boy's outline began to dim and flicker like flames against a smoky wind.

her own grip on lucidity became tenuous as his dreamrealm started to cave in like a cardboard alcazar in the rain.

some bodiless voice despaired: i'm sorry! i don't know what to do! though it had not been borne of her tongue, yet somehow she knew it came from inside her.

she felt helpless as smokey kiss-curls wreathed around his legs; she yearned forward but was stopped by some force with a sorrowing cry. her vision etherealized at its peripherals, and she abruptly saw what looked like an inkspill well over over her sights. she felt for the clover underfoot and dug her claws into it, grounding herself when she came to the notion that

i cannot see anymore

( and i cannot help him see either )

"i am still here, you do not needs be afraid. are you still—  ... h e r e  h here?" the question melted on her tongue like a popsicle on a hot day, and she felt anguish wash over her.

the willowisp flit to her and pressed against phaedra's forehead. like crucibles of auroral pharos against a starless tapestry, she saw: valravn had wrought his dreamland in a morass of shadow and traps and things of nether.

had

she

caused this?

she felt stirrings of wakefulness but fought the feeling.

then all at once, the clover underfoot beneath her turned to shifting sands and phaedra felt her back legs at once sunken by its gulping fauces, slowly consuming her entire, dragging her beneath the earth.

"no, what ... doing ... !" 

through the wisp's vision she saw the silhouette of the entangled boy and how he guttered and dimmed by the conscious breath that eddied around him.

his awakening was causing the dream to disintegrate,  her obviously still in it as well.

no distinct features could be plucked from his countenance; his face shimmered with malice, but it was not him, not much unlike like spectral veils of transparency turning before a mirror

changeling

the alchemist's hands busied themselves with the denaturing of every quality that belonged to valravn, some chthonic entity sowing unrest, interfering with kis— 

"w-water! it's WATER!" she cried out to herself, up to her neck in sand and slipping under ... then with all possible haste the particles began to winnow out and well and burble until in clumps all fell away from the girl and with a splash! up from the ground, a tide of virga.

stumbling backwards she gasped with fright. the child did not know what woud happen if she stayed and perished on this evesdropped dreamscape. could she still wake if her soul was not ensconced in its own mortal form?

yes.

the disembodied answer came before she could think to blink. backing away, dry despite the puddle swashing at her heels, phaedra reflected on what just happened as her peart dreamguide swirled around her with no fear at all, but as if saying time to go, she felt the invisible seam of the window to her own darkness drawing her back in.

but before she passed fully through the shimmery threshold of her own consciousness, phaedra hesitated and turned back to say something to valravn ... and forgot the second she thought it—  oh, what had she meant to say?

alas, she could not see the boy anymore anyway and traveled over without any parting words having left her tongue. 

what did i mean to say? ​

only the question would feast on her mind for days after she awoke.

she was fading

he was fading;

around him, his dreamscape began to crumble. collapsing in on itself with a roar so infinite and deafening it may as well have been the ruin of the cosmos --

and he was fighting against it as it rose around him, struggling to peer from that murky veil one last glance at the faerie -- the silverwisp pixie that had spoken to him of --

suddenly she was gone. the clover, the faerie-lights, the distant rise and fall of shadows all gone -- replaced by a damnable and unseeing blackness

he was falling, falling down through himself over and over; groundless, tumbling -- his mouth wide open in a soundless scream.

valravn woke with a start, this time his voice keened through the den like a blade through soft clay. he could not control the tremors that rolled up and down his body, nor the shaky gallops of his breath. when at last his mind calmed valravn placed his head upon his claws and studied the wall, feeling as if a survivor of some enormous misfortune, with no recollection of the trauma which defined him.

he did not dare return to sleep.