Glimmers of a Dream

[Thalia]

Nimeda retreated a little, to lean against one of the desks in order to listen more comfortably. He spoke of legacy, and she found that fascinating – even though she knew such methods of entrance could not work for her. When her presence here faded, the body and mind she returned to would remember nothing of its time here; just as she recalled little of it, bar those few moments when she woke. Not that it dampened her interest. Jon treated this place with a profound sanctity that stoked respect in her. And he did seem to care that, as he put it, she was lost.

He suggested that awakening here was a mix of gift and learning. She didn’t understand it the way Jon did; his knowledge surpassed hers like a mountaintop looms high over a riverbed, and though she did not feel completely ignorant she did not mind taking the role of pupil. The attention she gave him was studious; she soaked in his words diligently, even if the mark they left in her mind turned out to be fleeting. Ground yourself. She did not have labels and names and context. In this Spirit World she was utterly adrift, subject to whims far greater than she could really comprehend. But, she was not the unmoored boat rocking unsteady in turbulent tides. She was the river. He misunderstood that part. Understandable, really; she could barely comprehend it herself.

Shudder.

He broke off mid-flow. She did not know which of them caused the vortex, but when the room began to rock she believed in it whole-heartedly, even when it felt as though it might rip her apart. Are you believing me undone? Did he imagine the danger, or did she embrace too readily the depth of her roots here? Because the nothingness didn’t scare her. It was her, in a sense; a shade of her nature, at least. The end of old things, the beginning of new. She was the balm easing the passage of the Wheel, allowing it to press forward without regret. Or something like that; such grandiose thoughts sat awkwardly. Alien, even to her, and they always bled a little stupor into her thoughts, soothed her away from concepts beyond her consciousness.

She really did rock on the edges of forgetting herself; at least enough to calm the dissolution before it killed them both, because whichever of them had initiated it, she now controlled it. It wasn’t his fear that pierced her thoughts and coaxed her to action, nor fright of death, but the sudden if distant echo of… affinity? When he asked her to find something real, she took him quite literally; her hand reached out to wrap around his wrist, and the world about them quietened.

It was natural for her to imagine the studio now in disarray, as if racked by a storm, but solidity returned. Paint splotched her clothes and skin, but the fallen easels and destroyed canvases soon began to ease in and out of sight, ephemeral in the waking world as they were. Her expression now was solemn, though she had been calm throughout the whole ordeal. Whether that was because she had failed to grasp the danger or was simply a facet of her nature was unclear. Given everything, though, she was remarkably undisturbed.

“These others? You speak with them here also?” The question was blurted enthusiastically, despite how close they had just whipped past danger. Of everything, it was the one thing her mind hooked on. He’d been surprised to see her, but perhaps it was simply because she was a stranger. Was it possible to meet someone here? The idea appealed. Company made her feel more real; more tangible. Alone, this world was like a shifting backdrop, and with nothing to focus on and only instinct to guide her, she drifted through it aimlessly.