Glimmers of a Dream

[Thalia]

The university. A faint trickle of images contextualised the word, like shining a torch in a pitch black room. Or cupping your hands over a grubby window to squint at the hazy shapes within. Mountains of books, the scent of old parchment and an archaic sense of bottomless fascination. A girl with a furrowed brow, wrestling unsuccessfully with a concentration span beating like birds wings, desperate to be free of the cage. It must be a familiar place for the memories to come so easily; assuming she had actually managed to latch on to the right recollections. No paint, though. No sketchbooks. And that doesn’t make sense. Not that dreams even had to make sense, but the art was important somehow, and she didn’t think it had anything to do with the university. She hadn’t even recognised the art studio she had been in.

“A student, maybe? Past or present, I’m not sure.” She rubbed her face, frowning – not so much from frustration as the effort it took to dredge up even that much. It made her so tired. And it wasn’t even particularly helpful; Jon probably could have worked out as much just from knowing the location in which he’d found her and what she had been doing at the time. “Not of Art, though. I’m not sure why—” For a second she pulled her hands away to stare at the dried flecks of paint caked into the swirls of her fingerprints and under her nails, but the more she looked, the more any sense of meaning slipped from her grasp and other memories trickled in to fill the gaps. The moment of clarity - and she considered it clarity, even if by anyone else’s standards it really wasn’t – muddied and her focus lapsed. Her arms swung down, unaffected by the defeat.

She laughed, eyes crinkled with genuine mirth. “Sure, if you can find me!” He’d mentioned the waking world twice now, but she didn’t connect the dots, not even from his levelling intake of breath. Lacking memories, were they even the same person? Or maybe she would remember all this when she woke; maybe she could find him. She honestly didn’t know. And since there was nothing she could do about it she resolved not to worry; fate was what it was. “I don’t know if I’ll remember… this, when I wake up. But, if I do, then I’ll go to the university?” She shrugged at the sketchy shape of a plan, then offered a grin and her hand to shake on the deal.