The changes are sudden and they rattle within the void of her ribcage; in the spaces between the scars of her ribs.
It is deafening. He remains upright, unmoving in the way that her toes dig into the ashes as they turn into gold. The reflection of them against her skin would have, once in the past, made her feel like she was shinning herself. Shinning eternally. Yet as the gold spread and the roaring of the waves came, beneath her feet there are still ashes. Her skin remains as dull as before; as everything around her is taken from her she refuses to change with it. Short nails dig into soft and frail flesh of her palms. Another bare faced elf, coming as if knowing they know best. In their youth and vanity and their vision that only reaches until the light of their eyes can see.
You will meet me, but not yet. Her frown deepens as she feels the weight of his stare on her. The lively colours around them screaming as the clouds shift and move away. There is no clear source in the sky, no Sun that lights over above them all. But it is not necessary.
The sea kisses the scarred sole of her feet and they feel like bites.
“A shaper of dreams.” she corrects; her eyes now seeking this Child’s. There is something familiar about them, something that is right at the tip of her tongue; dancing above it but refusing to allow her to swallow its meaning. It is unsettling, in a way that she felt that she should not be holding the stare. The priestess does not do so, black eyes narrowing as she releases the pressure against the palm of her hands when she feels that they would give in “There were many like you once.”
Hers is a soul in revolt. He feels the outline of her, inverse space; void where woman should be. He traces the shape, knicked on the edges. She is not worn down by time, tossed and polished as a riparian pebble, buffeted by the will of the stream wider than she. She is the river rock, jagged and too-slick, cutting the flow. She stands against the unstoppable tide, unstilled by time. Fail to course-correct, to steer from her ancient inevitability, and be sliced upon her. Be seared by charcoal eyes, hot as embers. She is the monster at the end of the world.
She has seen it many times over.
“There are none like me.” He says, laughingly, and the world swells as though in greeting, remembering the touch of one who might still its waters with a thought, and as one who brought them back. His hair is dark, dark, some indefinite color between the shades, implacable, but curling, yes, and wild. It is lifted up behind him, messy through its binding, thick enough to be weighted in the hand. Pretty and soft and shiny under this sunless sky. Something rebellious and gentle about it, so loose and unsecured in its long dark tail. Something about the windless breeze that had not been before. So casual the arrogance, spoken more as a thing of fact, some secret he knows but will not share, waiting for the long unfurling of time’s ribbon. All things revealed, all that will be, will be.
“They are not gone,” he says, lifting his head as though to catch the breeze. As though he had not made it. “Only changed from what was. You remember them like they were, and struggle to see them as they are. In the memory of places. Like this. Like others. What you would have them be cannot be. They are something else.”
His eyes slide to her, honey amber resin, something tempered and molten over a flame.
She burns, she seethes, she stokes his glow.
But he looks at her, sees her, feels the unrepentant tug of her unyielding will. Feels the grey ash on her tongue, the battles carrying their weight on her body. The toll of faith in a mad creature that once called itself a thing divine. She is sodden, a sponge too full of other people. She is leaden.
And she looses none of what she carries.
He pities her, and the crash of the waves hushes, baited, waiting with him. The sea softens to a distant, rolling murmur. Above, the cry of wheeling gulls; nowhere in sight.
He hears her chastisement, correction parsed in the sharp angles of her words. He does not unravel - he gives her a thread to pluck, to remake, to weave her own.
“A shaper.” He agrees, because he does not need to make right a thing which is not more or less truer than another. In any given dream, is he not the dreamer? And of the Dreaming beyond, the invisible web of all sleeping higher beings, this space that is and is-not - is the dreamer but one more among the others? Each the dreamer, each the dreamt-of.
“All things yield to time.” And the rest, unspoken, a thought carried in the susurrations of the shore: Why not you?
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