she's still out there and the chasm grows; any

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

The dreams have left her raw, left her shaking, because there is a leaden familiarity to them. She remembers that imprisonment (that’s the word she uses, now, as she is older and wiser and realized her childhood had been usurped by a mother on the razor’s edge of madness) all too well. She remembers the weighty, particular quality of the dreams, because for so long they had been her reality.
She dreams of castles, and rivers, and birds large enough to ride on.
This sounds idyllic, except these are not her dreams.
She sleeps and she wakes in the mystical world and she is alone there, which is strange, there is no gray woman with tired eyes and a loving smile. The world continues on, but she can never find its puppeteer.

It is a long time before she realizes she is the puppeteer – staring at the castle, hating it, she thinks I wish you were gone, and poof, it is, blinked out of existence, and the world is stranger for it.
The next night the castle is back, restored, and again she thinks it gone, and again, it obeys.
She does not push her seeming ownership of the place far, because the wrongness of it is a heavy thing to bear.
She changes her own shape, in the dream. She makes herself look like her mother, for a moment, but that makes her uneasy, brings too many thoughts to the forefront.
(If this is my world now, what’s happened to her?)
She makes herself into a monster, a snapping snarling thing, which is entirely satisfying. She makes herself impossibly beautiful, pushes the limits in front of a skewed reflection in the glass of the castle, until she surpasses beauty, circles back around to something hideous. There is satisfaction in this, she finds. Making and unmaking.

She is tired, for a dreamer, because the times there are not restful. She does not yet know how to escape – she wakes into Beqanna, but it is of her circadian rhythm’s accord, not her own whims. The tiredness has settled into her bones, it makes it walk slowly, as if she has aged beyond her years. Her lids are heavy, but she fears sleep, trying to prolong the moments to which she is made to haunt a dream that is not her own, so she keeps walking, one foot in front of the other, a plodding pace, but enough to keep her awake.
She does not expect to see him. She had forced him from her thoughts when her thoughts turned too often to him, until he was almost a thing buried.
(Fortunate, or she might have tried to make him, in the dream.)
Her tired eyes nearly do not recognize him, the world is heavy around her, blurring. Bur the redness of his skin sharpens, those twisting wings, and she remembers, quite suddenly, how they had felt against hers.
“Brigade?” she asks, though she doesn’t need the confirmation – she’s awake, now, and she knows it’s him.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm

@[brigade] sorry i couldn't resist