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.

Comments

[alan_shore]

“It's going on the back of your card,” Alan murmurs, in the thick of those eyelashes—eyelashes whose color you'd find upon peeling back the bark of a tree, or in a last mouthful of scotch, a brown poised to either evaporate or ignite. He holds his amusement protectively close. It's a glib answer he's given; yet it takes to the air with fledgling tenderness.

The number, whether arrived at, anticipated, or recollected, is tucked away for safekeeping, leaving Alan to make a study, cautiously treading the line between interest and intrusion, of each change undergone by Mycroft, every shift in hue, texture, definition.

“You,” he says, sighing as he lies back (and it's quite particular, that “you”—even more so, perhaps, than a name), “need to find a new question to ask me.”

[diogenesis]

Mycroft watches Alan recline, blades of grass bending under his weight, sunlight sliding across the fabric of his jacket and the planes of his face. Though the distance between them has barely increased, Mycroft feels the space stretch taught, and the desire to reach across and close the gap pulls at him like gravity.

As one does daily with gravity, he resists it, though it gradually erodes his immaculate posture into something willow-like. With curved neck and shoulders, he eases the pull by centimeters, millimeters, and the scent around them shifts to petrichor.

“In that case,” he says, “tell me why a raven is like a writing desk.”