in the gloaming

[goddessnanshe.livejournal.com]

The thin hours before dawn, Tuesday 23 March

Excolo has been still these past weeks. Around the feast of Lupercalia there was a small ripple of unsettled dreams, dreams of desire and frustration and longing, but they passed. Some magic there, of a tainted sort, but a small kind, passing out of mind. But for all the quiet I think that something new has come to be. That Wanda has had her child I now know, infant glimpsed in dreams. The child herself has started dreaming. I have gazed into them, but not crossed the threshold. I do not yet know how much of her mind her father watches. Like most infants, her dreams are all noise and colour, no narrative - but there are things I glimpse in the dreams that no infant should know. Things of shadow and of light.

I create another crossroads, but this one is a room with staircases that will serve as paths. A rug lies in the centre of a tea room, and on the rug stands a table crowned with flowers. There are smaller tables nearby laid with napkins and silver, and I seat myself at one of them, pouring tea into a china cup. It is amber and smells of faraway. Perhaps someone will come and drink with me.

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[westin-sagert.livejournal.com]

The wrods are not the worst, the noise--it is a squealing laugh, and I am reminded of slaughtered pigs, of the teachers that had students learn on such animals before approaching cadavers. There are sounds as of pages falling to earth, and I step closer to her, further from whatever they may be.

"You to help me learn," I say, and I am swaying a little on my feet. "I to be able to do it again. Doesn't it--don't you see how it compares, then? I chose it, yes, but I couldn't expect you to. You didn't understand." Young and stupid and blind, but still she awoke such understanding within me, so I cannot fault her too badly for it all.

I rather wish I had kept something of my most recent work behind, to set beside her jawbone. It is a foolishly sentimental thought, and yet... I fins I am reaching out to touch her jaw again, fingers painted in its glow.

[goddessnanshe.livejournal.com]

He touches the jaw, which warms under his fingers, warms and then glows red-hot.

"You have no genius that lasts," says the jaw. I can smell skin burning, and the jaw becomes dislodged and falls to the floor, where it shatters into pieces.

The light from the bone goes out, and we are left in the dark.

[westin-sagert.livejournal.com]

The pain is a searing orange, in my hand and up my arm, and I remember the tower, Morningstar, the pain then and not again not again! I am recoiling, and I fall to the ground as the jaw does, shattering like coal, the unearthly light of its fragments going out. There is a glimmer in my hand as one might see when blowing on a fire, banked ember under a coat of ash, and my hand is crumbling...

I am screaming, this time. I cannot stop.

[goddessnanshe.livejournal.com]

I watch him coldly as his hands turn to fire and ash, and then I turn on my heel and leave. He can leave the dream himself, if he can find his way out to the waking world.

Nightmares are no real justice, but it is all I have to give.