birds singing in the sycamore tree

[baedalites]

As night falls on Baedal, the city is almost quiet. The streets have a few last minute workers returning home, but by now, most citizens have already gone by the temples and picked up their vurt, ready to lay down and dream.

After placing a not-feather in one's mouth, there's a moment where it fizzes against the tongue before sliding coolly down the back of the throat and pulling the user down into sleep. A series of impressions, more sensation than anything concrete, appears before the user and this is how one chooses which Dreamer to enter.

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[cailisairgid]

Somewhere in the darkness, perception shifts.

There are no eyes, presently, to open; instead it is an awareness in turning stars that twist in a new direction, a pattern that shifts and shifts again, mirroring and not mirroring the way her name underscores home and then loss, as well, and reunion if not, not quite reunification.

(His nearness was at the edge of things, closer but still distant and that is their doing, to be rendered deaf to him, it is some fault of their own that she hadn't seen as she believes she would have thousands of years before.)

You came.

There is no surprise; a lingering sorrow, a regret, a fierce joy and satisfaction. But no shock.

[sleaairgid]

Nuada knows very well that in this state, bathed as he is in entropy, he is not welcome among the dreamers, and so it cannot be said that the stealth of his emergence was an accident. Only longing for the whole has brought him, as it always does.

You knew that I would. Hardly a whisper. He is not struggling to repress, but repressing all the same, to give the impression of a mere shadow. It was not so easy this time.

[cailisairgid]

A sense-memory intrudes on a presence that doesn't currently have a body to sense it with; blood, golden, rolling down herhistheir skin and no air, impact, I knew that you were coming. It is a simple fact, as much a part of their nature as all else. He would come for her, and he has, and she has been waiting.

It may not have been so easy, but he has certainly been more prompt. Wryness colours the bond between them without the need for a conscious thought.

Then, You read my letter.

[sleaairgid]

It came to me in the ashes.

And so do his thoughts reach the princess, it seems, drifting like breaths of smoke—a memory of fragile paper, curling, crumbling in his hands, released again to the wind upon being read. He had turned, then, and walked in a new direction. Slipped into a shadow and was gone.

I know where you are now. Where you lay dreaming.

[cailisairgid]

(Where she sleeps, her hand curls into a fist.)

I do not hide.

Not in this city; not from him, now.

[sleaairgid]

You cannot hide from me.

By no means is this a threat—it is merely a fact, as inevitable as the passage of time, and it occurs to him naturally, with no sense of pride or posturing. But there is a sort of curling, perhaps, at the edges. The prince enjoys knowing this.

[cailisairgid]

I have waited for you.

Not only here and not only now but for centuries she has waited, the war-drum beat of his heart pounding in her own chest as a reminder and a reproach both; that she must know him in her own hands when once she could have taken his. She has waited, and waited, and waited and the words are ash, too, ash in her mouth, a regret shaped cold and bright in this shared dream.

It had been a mistake to wait. She should have acted. Where might they have been, if she had but acted.

[sleaairgid]

It is your way, the formless prince observes, by way of reassurance. And so shall it always be. Just as I will always seek out those things that come between us and put an end to them.

But this... this place. It has welcomed me. Never mind that he had to fight his way in; scars are old news to him and so he's already moved past these freshest ones. I like it much better than the last.