I woke to the Dreaming for the first time in a long time.

I was back in the cult-church of my youth. I felt the earth shake with every strike from orbit, heard the fire and damnation from the pulpit, read the news on my phone with shaking, terrified hands; recognizing, somehow, that this truly was the End. There was no final chapter, it was being written around us and the last time I’d Dreamed this had been 2010 in a run-down apartment as I watched the sky torn asunder and the earth split.

The cold weight of the veil hung heavy on my head and across my shoulders as I gripped my phone in hands going white and blue from effort and chill. My brother shook me, tried to snap me out and away to go do something, anything, but sit tamely by. I refused. Not out of piety or false modesty, but because I knew I was not yet ready to believe it.

And so I sat, listening to the drone of people behind me as they stayed or left or ran downstairs in despair for coffee and soda and whatever creature comforts had been brought by the congregation. And I… stayed until it was finished.

The downstairs of the church had a stairway, a singular landing, and another few steps down to the basement floor. Plain white and grey “marble” tile, folding chairs and tables, and old accordion-style “walls” that could be dragged from the edges of the room to create classrooms, or meeting areas closed off from the rest of the area. A few were being used as impromptu praying circles, but for the most part the church had cleared by the time I went below.

It seems in Dreams there’s nothing left for me in this space; which makes sense since the Severing I performed, and the fact that I simply want nothing to do with this place any longer, even if I AM dragged back night after night.

I took nothing from them, this time, save the knowledge of who was present and who was missing, and exited the church from below.

I found myself in the parking lot, my small tabby in my arms as I ran along the lilac bushes for the cars, SCREAMING with everything I had for help. She made no move to bite or claw, knowing as I did that all the youths behind me had been torturing her. The leader kept approaching, hand held out demanding her return. I refused. He looked nearly apologetic as he kept coming, saying “But I have to.” I refused a third time, and the world went sideways.

I was back in the basement, cat nowhere to be found which didn’t feel strange. Jeff, Susan, and a few other shadowy figures stood around me, saying things like this was our final chance to do whatever it was we hadn’t yet.

He referenced the local tattoo shop, and also “Who’s feathers say *static*…?” I knew he was referencing my tattoos even though I don’t currently have any with feathers. I was also granted an image of my next ink, the layout, and the words that will be encircling it.

I woke to the sound of an owl outside somewhere in the neighborhood.

Watch Me Rise indeed.

The dreaming took me and I just woke up.

I only partially recognized the land in which I woke. The world was strange, tilted slightly on its axis. The barn I had stepped into looked like one I knew years ago, but what lay on its shelves and against its walls was nothing like I had known when it was; if not new, younger.

Various jackets marched across long poles between shelves, dishes and candles and books lay in scattered piles covered in dust. And, in one corner where the hardware and boxes of nails lay thrown together, several broken black velvet ring boxes held jewelry that found its way into my pockets.

Several tiny rings, ear pieces, and one tiny bracelet made of moonstone and diamond.

They all disappeared the moment I crossed the barn’s threshold, left standing under a large, spreading, barren tree as the wind whipped by overhead. I heard laughter in it, high and screeching with the howling of the winds. I was carried down in the direction of the house which before my eyes became a large and sprawling stone building. Its halls were complicated and lay in a tangled heap of limbs, as though some stone cephalopod had landed there.

I wandered the halls and in time, forgot how I had come to be there. I found hidden passages and roamed its mostly-empty byways until I came across an artist I recognized. There was rage in my shaking voice as I pointed her out in the sunlight-dappled stone hall. Denied a free-for-all because of the content of some blog or book of mine. Some “moral failing” she decided I’d had instead of anything concrete. As if its existence declared any creation she offered me provided tacit approval, instead of luck-of-the-draw. Annoying, and rage-inducing when I knew her own past was hardly as shiny as she claimed.

She ran, and I pursued.

I saw others hanging her pieces, large canvases covered in tiles to match the patterns of the walls behind. Smudges across the walls that they hid with the monstrosities. As I ran, I followed her through various passages I’d had yet to see. Warm yellow-orange brick, same odd sunlight shafting through the windows, same worn rugs underfoot.

Somehow as she sapped the color from the room in which I cornered her, some circle alcove set against the back wall, I saw another face. As she melted from view, two others came and stood at my shoulders. A bare-chested boy who looked decidedly attractive, and a girl beside him I didn’t recognize. I made some crack about whether or not they were together as we headed down a spiral staircase to the lower floors. An awkward laugh from him, a dagger-glare from her. Together, then, and not public… I hate those couples. Though my motivation was unknown even to me. (To be honest, looking back, I think I wanted to be him more than I desired anything else. Washboard abs don’t happen by accident, after all. And I prefer to have them than to be with those who do.)

When we reached the outdoors I was alone again, and the witchy artist was nowhere to be seen. I flew on quick feet into the wood, following the trail laid out before me. Off into the wood, lightly across the muddied and wilted-looking trail. My feet made no impressions in the dirt as I followed the glowing flowers that dimmed yet further as I passed. The dirt track unspooled before me, twisting through strange and desiccated trees as I passed.

I came upon a new house on a hill, and saw nothing of good. I was mobbed as I tried to climb the stair to the door, by shuffling, blinded, beings who might have been teachers once. I drew cards for luck and against the rising tide of flesh and bone, and threw them… where they struck, blood did not appear… only more of the growing things that surrounded the house. Vines grew through their bodies, leaves and flowers overtook their melting flesh, and kept them from moving any further. As I jumped from the roof of the house’s porch, i landed much more heavily. It would seem I would no longer pass unnoticed.

I found myself returned to the large, sprawling building made of stone. This time, when I had found my way through the passages and out into the open air, I found myself on the back deck. It matched, precisely, one I had experienced as a child. I found my companion there and my cat, and took up the two broom poles that lay against the enclosure next to the very, very deep and grown-over pool.
“Escape then, and only two to do it on. Time to (static)” took over and the tinny, pitched ring of it still echoes in my ears. I took up the carved poles and jumped the fence to the bank of earth behind the pool. I did what I could to cut down as much of the marshy long grass as possible and bound it to the blunt ended poles as possible, creating a green broom. Quick and quite words were said over these and the carvings glowed for a moment as, blinded, I came to a few moments later flying down the boundary upon which our original witch had flown.

The boundary looked melted. The meadow and tangled wood I had come from looked twisted and as though it would disappear, like a painting under chemicals or chalk in the rain. To the right, lay the open planes and the grass and flowers that bent with a wind I could neither see nor feel. I saw her, far and away, and strangely, also coming from behind, her eyes like fire. I took off across the same path, low to the ground until the long flowering prairie closed overhead and there was nothing to my world but strange tunnels of woven greens and browns and whites and pinks and purples flying past my eyes.

In time, i found myself on the boundary of the creek, now swollen and raging with the autumn rains. It had flooded its banks, the well-known trails I had followed as a child and, where it spilled out across the fields, there formed a new river. It was this I followed, my cat clinging to the broom pole as I sped across the rippling water as closely as possible. The grasses hid me from view from above, and I saw no human shape following behind. No distant shriek of laughter.

No sound at all save for the wind, and the stream below me, and no sight but the great grey clouds and the barest peak of starlight shining down across the water to turn its edges silver and gold in the dark.

I found myself in another den I knew well from childhood. Another tree with deep and tangled roots, and spreading bare branches stripped by wind and autumn’s chilly embrace. There was frost on the ground when I woke, and the cat was nowhere to be seen. The roots embraced me, the fallen leaves in drifts hiding me from view, as the growing vinery traced with ice held it all tightly to itself.

There I huddled, clutching at the ground, shining things scattered through the loose and crumbling black earth, coins and more precious things sunk into the loam and leaf rot mere inches from the water that raced by just a breadth away from my feet.

Despairing, I looked up. I woke.

“I come to bring Freedom, and not Peace.”

The light around Them was blinding, as it usually is. I doubt very much that I have ever seen Omnia face-to-face, save once. The distracting after-image of glazed, blind-violet eyes and salt-white hands conceals Their next words- But they are still lingering like the sound of music when the singer has stopped, my head rings with it.

They are a creature of the Grey, even more than I am. The in-between, the always-were and never-was. Humanity, in all its thousands of permutations, its never-ending change averaged into this face, this form, shifting forever beneath that ice-blue robe. White tinged blue like morning snow, dazzling forever when the light hits, with afterimages and impressions that are no more a lie than the Entity they conceal and reveal at once.

If Somnium is my Patron, They are my Parent. A concert-harmony of Light and Dark, compulsion and free will, the rise and fall of the tides led by the ever-present moon and witnessed by the sun. Attended by as many stars and planets as the sky can hold, in all its glory.

Their presence is a firestorm, super novas and rebirth shattering the veil around Their feet and I, when did I fall to my knees? When did Omnia turn “She” and “Mother” in my mind…? That neutrality traded in one moment for the understanding that this, this is as it should be. Freedom, not Peace. Love, in intricacy and not complacency made more so by indolent, insolent demand for sameness.

Omnia is all things. The Divine Parent. Loving Acceptance. Arms open wide to the universe, beckoning.

And here I am, at the feet, bathed in the glow of that acceptance, wrestling with my thoughts and the ride and fall of words that I cannot comprehend. The grey of the hearth is sharp beneath my knees, soapstone and silver falling from my hands. Distantly, I can hear the singing on the River’s edge and the many calling back and forth in song and dancing-

The dreams of the night turning brilliant and blinding if only for a few moments. And it is the mundane that cling now more than anything, now that I am awake. The taste of chocolate in my mouth and the spark of heated metal against my skin… shaking them off and picking up the thread of the Dreaming is harder than ever.

“Freedom, and not Peace. Autonomy, sovereignty, crowns on crowns, unbound and loosed, the world shaken to its foundations and rebuilt. Peace is not freedom, and it comes at the cost of will.”

Dreaming 8/27/18

I woke in a clearing that may or may not have been The Clearing.

Every tree was choked in vines and I could hear the shrieking of what might have been only monkeys but might have been something Else entirely. The whole of my vision made it look as though the entire world only existed in shades of brown, green, and grey. I could not see the sky, no matter how I tried to look upwards through the branches, or out to the edges of the jungle. There was nothing but the trees, long and tangled undergrowth and everywhere the same vines choking the life out of it all.

I had left an earlier Dream of the Estate to get here. A pleasant atmosphere and better company for the most part. I had not left of my own volition, I had been compelled. The three men I left behind, and the pews full of people would just have to understand. I certainly felt no shame in their company, nor had I when the pews began to fill as we took our sweet time before or on the altar. Blasphemy is its own sweetness, and I take mine where I can find it some days.

It felt oddly familiar, in the same way that most Dreaming feels familiar. Like I should know where I am, or that it will come to me if I just wait for long enough. I was climbing through trees that were tangled and covered in the vines. Every so often, I found a desiccated animal corpse in the trees, wrapped and choked in vines as if they’d been used as a water source. I’m amazed now, looking back on it in the Waking, that I did not react with more disgust or recoil in horror.

People were talking around me in a language I did not understand but understood all the same. They wanted me to go to the Top; the Tree? the Mountain? I don’t remember or perhaps I never really knew; and talk to Mother.

I did not want to go. I knew even then what people would say of me if I followed where they led. If I did as I knew I was going to be forced to. If I met who I would be forced to meet. I wanted to leave. I found I could not. No method open to me worked despite my struggle.

These people, in skins and leather and weaving, their bodies covered in mud and paint, their hair knotted and plaited ornately and ALSO coated in the same mud or paint were the very opposite of me. No matter what Aspect I wear, or what Witness I am called upon to wrap around me like a cloak, but that is not what made me recoil. It was the known response I would receive should I speak of what happened. I am still being compelled to write about it. To share. I want to leave, but I am Awake now and I cannot.

The next thing I knew, I was halfway up the Tree. Following these People higher and higher; scrambling over root and rock alike. Trying to ignore what is held in branch and vine.

When we reached the top, there was a small knot of people who had made it. Others we’d lost or left behind or they’d given up. Maybe it was the difficulty of the climb, maybe it was the horror of seeing something drained of life before your eyes. I don’t and probably never will know for sure.

We came to a ledge, wrapped in roots, branches covered in lichen and dripping moss like grey-green curtains. We found a pool, set in the face of the green-grey cliff face. The rim came just above my navel and the inside was coated in what looked like yellow ochre. A seeping, poisonous, sulfuric yellow.

In it, a wizened old woman sat, crouched, like a frog. Her wrinkled skin was as brown as the earth beneath my feet, her hair was tangled with more of the vines and leaves, thin and grey and matted down her back and shoulders. When she lifted her head, I could see the vines growing beneath her skin.

In spite of how clear the water was; crystalline and cold; I couldn’t see the bottom. I don’t know whether it was algae, silt, leaves or some other reason; but I could not see the Woman below the shoulders. She looked as though she were absorbing the water, and being absorbed at the same time. Taking from and giving to the Tree and the vines that strangled and grasped at it.

Immediately upon taking this in I was uncomfortable and on edge. I knew what would be required of me without being told, and I had half a mind to refuse. To back away and hurl myself into the void beyond the trees and the cliff face. To find some Beyond to entrust my long fall and eventual death. I knew it would be useless. The trees would never end, and the cliff face was a lie or a supposition- I had not seen the sky since the Dream began.

Instead, the same compulsion began anew and I was driven forward, and the People surrounding me drew back.

When She spoke it was as rough as bark and as thunderous as the mountain’s tectonic energy that had given it birth. As silent and imperious as a deep forest pool. Inexorable. Commanding.

There was no way for me to resist as my arms were, untouched, plunged into the water to the elbows. I wanted to scream. There was only silence.

Immediately there was a pulling sensation, as though blood was being drawn from my veins. The water and the Woman remained the same, no light no red no new change in feeling or expression. I wanted to fight, to pull away, but I couldn’t move! The draw was stronger than iron chains and bound me fast. I could do nothing but struggle mentally and try again and again to scream.

When she released me, I could breathe again. I hadn’t realized I had stopped. She poured more water over my hands, and I saw that hers had the same vines and leaves growing beneath the skin. Her nails were black, and the water was numbingly cold.

She spoke or I heard or I was made to understand that now I was in the water and the water was in me. Chosen, and no way back. Caught, like a rat in a trap no matter what I thought or felt or wanted for myself. Helpless, and both terrified and enraged by it.

Someone younger and narrower of body than I was brought forth. Struggling, water was poured over their hands as well. I neither heard nor understood what was said, if anything. I wonder now, in the Waking, whether the water pulling out and rushing in was to make me acceptable, or wash something else away so I could receive the same, dubious, blessing.

I wonder if that was why I was made to go first.

I have the impression fires and darkness, keeping the prowling things at bay. I know She will eventually be consumed, though she is Older than Old. I don’t want to know. I want to leave. I cannot. I don’t.

I wake to the Dreaming again at the base of the mountain-tree. My hands do not work, and I am uncomfortable beyond measure. It burns in my veins and I want to rip the skin from my hands. It will not leave me, and I cannot leave it. I want more than anything to leave the Dream. I cannot. I don’t.

The earth felt like it was vibrating beneath me, and I couldn’t see; like I was no longer wearing my glasses. I felt crazed. Like I was searching for something. Supposed to do something. Seek something out before it was too late. Something required that I’d forgotten.

I woke from the Dreaming uncomfortable, disoriented, nauseous, and knowing i don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to deal with whatever aftermath it drags in its wake. I still feel compelled to write out the details and to post it.

I hope this is enough.

I Dreamed last night and I was spooked enough that I didn’t want to be home all day.

So I rode through the heat to the local coffee after hitting the gym, and I wrote it all out, and I am still spooked. I am also feeling very compelled to write about it.

So…. consider this your forewarning of a Dream post incoming. You will not receive another.

Return To Whiskey Downs

The Downs have changed a lot over the past few decades. It was one of the first things I noticed when I looked at the old gardens.

Gone were the ornamentally created front lawns with their hedges and potted flowers in large, decorative basins. Gone were the flowering trees and willows, gone were the streams and the fountains and the sound of chimes in the wind like crystal and bell. The air was dead of all things but the sighing trees and even that seemed more memory than present whisper.

The creatures that still lived in the high-walled kitchen gardens were not much better off. Even if those in the Great House had moved on, or disappeared, or passed, they still lived among the holes in the hedgerows, or stole the dusty, questionable hospitality of the gardener’s quarters.

I found myself rearranging the bricks beneath the dirt. Exposing the worn-down stones to the air after gods only knows how long beneath the earth; scraping back the loam and rotting leaves and the good black thickness beneath my digging, searching fingers that, in a moment’s glance, looked more molelike than human.

When the dirt and debris had been cleared away; all by hand, for all the tools’ handles seemed rotted and splintered in the sun; I fell to re-arranging the bricks. They were supposed to form raised beds, once upon a time. Silver-grey and red sandstone in the most beautiful patterns. All I found were the grey and blackened, as if fire had come or the long years spent apart had desecrated all my childhood heart held sacred.

Hours in the dappled shade and silent, twisting breeze exposed the foundations. The patterns I had laid in laughter and a summer’s joy. Before the heat had settled in my bones and made every move a misery when the index climbed too high. Back when the sun’s caress left freckles only in its wake and dancing-bright eyes; not reddened skin and desperate, drained exhaustion.

When I was finished, the bed was raised again, and the path between it and the gardener’s cottage had been squared and straightened again as well. It was a little frightening, really, how the mounded black earth looked more a grave than garden, but there was nothing left in my shoulders but ache and I had not the tools to enact further change.
The vines that climbed the cottage walls concerned, for the way they insinuated themselves between the bricks and seemed to cover more than a third of the roof. They, too, would have to be removed; and yet… and yet I did not reach for them, wary as I was that they might now indeed be holding the building together even as they ripped it apart.

The glass windows in their casements were still perfect and uncracked. The little diamond panes bright, if dusty, where they stood reflecting the sun. I knew the drapes inside would crumble if I touched them, the sink was full of half-done dishes and a thick layer of dust. Spiders spun webs in the corners and the furniture… taken from the Great House on the abbey grounds, when the new things had been acquired in some long-ago year, looked as though perhaps, with a new upholstered cushion and perhaps, perhaps, some polish….

But I did not throw open the door. Did not shove my shoulder to it and command it yield to me. Did not even reach for the knob to check that it were locked… I was, yet again, on the outside. Couldn’t even remember finding the door in the bank beneath the tree roots… didn’t remember the dry streambed and the sunny, dappled shade that shifted in every rustling breeze and the call of distant hawks-

But I had put one small corner of the garden to rights, and in time perhaps the denizens of the hedge and heathrows would repopulate it. I sank back down on my knees and brushed the path clear of dirt and leaves, plucked the grass from the verge and discarded it beneath some hedge or other. The birds might use it, perhaps, if it struck their fancy.

When I rose there was black dirt clinging to my hands, a testament to its time gone fallow with nothing but the changing seasons dropping leaves to turn to mulch and only the rummaging about of the wind to till it. It should not be so ill-used, the grounds I had loved so much, ran wild on, should not be so silent.

No sheep bells calling across the moor. No distant barking of the hunting hounds. No choirs in the abbey, no whistling in the fields. No laughter from the club at the end of the lane, no sighing, crying notes from Fox’s violin or Badger’s low baritone-bass. No high clear ringing from Mouse’s pipes-

And so the dreaming fell to pieces much as the first in a decade had, with potential peeking from under leaves and behind the sturdy trunks of ancient oak and apple trees. When I looked over my shoulder, shadows were moving and there was a smile on my face. Perhaps not so dead and forgotten as all that…

Perhaps I could still go home, after all.

The Deep Dark

I could hear them down the hall… playing video games, talking to the dog? the cats? I don’t know. I was content enough to stand at the butcher block counters and cook instead. All my utensils and needs lined up in a very neat row against the colored tile backsplash, laid against beautiful sage-green walls. Calming. Carefree.

Waves beat against the cliffs outside and I knew without doubt what was waiting down the shore. I didn’t pay attention. Instead I directed my mind towards making better meringue in a small white stand mixer with a steel bowl, and getting sourdough and ciabatta toast ready. Light fluffy eggs, parbroiled in a brand new stainless steel oven and toast browned in the simple white toaster, before being set in a skillet with browning butter.

Down the coast, they combed the beaches and the caves. Crawled over the rocks like black insects flashing oilslick colors in the light. Everything they searched for was already lying safe with me… and I was Busy.

Their technology had given them the blueprints of every room hewed into the rock of the cliffs. The sea stacks towered over the water, their insides riddled with maze like catacombs and hiding places for the People. I knew their places, intimately. Had watched over them in silence, I could not tell how long. Witness, called up from the blackness of my own Deep Dark.

The black gravel slid like sand under my feet, leaving its mark in swirling smoke stains along my calves. I felt no burning. The cave walls were sharp and slick, no blood flowed from any touch of mine. Other voices howled in the dark, my own did not join them. Closer than their next breath, farther than they could ever hope to reach.

The yolks joined the fluffy white nest beneath the broiler, and the toast, now closer to french than plain browned bread, was slid onto plates round and white as the moon. Music came from somewhere, and its echo matched my heartbeat as I moved from the island to the counter and back again, smooth as a dancer. I could see past the pillars into the living room if I cared to… I did not. No need. I knew where they were; the second half of my soul and my god; without needing to reassure myself with my dreaming eyes.

I knew the three that led just as intimately as the new technology had betrayed their secrets to the outside world. I did nothing. The red plants that grew like spider’s legs outside the entrance to their dwellings tore at clothing and shredded skin… I knew too well the numbing effect its thorns could have. I said nothing. The earth swallowed them whole.

Things in the deepest reaches stirred. Not ours, not ours, not our People. And the figure on the beach merely whispered to the ice-salt wind “no.”

The earth moved.

I looked into the distant sea, leaned against the sun-warmed glass of the door, pulled aside the curtains. Just our cliffs, the edge of the bluffs, sloping down and away into the raging spring seas below. Just green, and yellow, and the deep grey and dirty whites of any northern coastline… I remembered the blacks and the reds. I remembered soaring on aching wings down the riverlands, over downed trees and under ever-growing canopies. Saw mouths yawning wide to catch the unwary, black and brown fur and slick shining scales alike.

I heard the thunder as yet one more world slid into the unforgiving salt deep… its children resigned to their fates or accepting of this turning of the Wheel. But the timers were going off, and there were things to be cleaned in a stainless steel sink, food to plate, and lovers to call to the table.

I paused at the shelf above the oven, a spidery plant in black, grainy soil. It nearly seemed to smile back at me as smoky stains ran along an outstretched finger.

I think we understand each other.

I was back on deck. Sting of salt spray, burn of salt air in the lungs, frigid cold of the north seeping into my bones.

The deck rolled with the waves and above my head the neverending storm was still raging. The rain came down in thick sheets that iced the rigging and slicked the deck with a sheen of thick, green, glass. We’d prepared for this. Had known about it, expected it. In this part of the Sea, the eye never sleeps and the waters never still. The Maelstorm, the Vortex, the howling wind and neverending toss of a restless, never silent ocean… this was expected.

The fleet rapidly approaching was not.

The dangers unlooked for aren’t always the hardest to overcome. The wreckage that piled around us and the sea stacks scarred in the battle were proof positive of that little truism. I had watched the truly massive flagship bear down on us, ten decks, under full sail, her prow a spear through the blinding rain and quick, brilliant strobe of lighting strikes. Like a spider, with the lower three decks manned by thick, long oars that propelled her even faster through the water towards us.

Our forward vessel stood no chance against her. The screams of her crew through the wind, the wrenching, shrieking, gutted sound of her timber torn apart, that will haunt me.

I saw him through the spray and rain, towering, in oiled leather coat and hat, shirt open nearly to the waist, wrapped in a ruined silk waistcoat, with soaked skin. Guns were all but useless in the storm, but swords still held their purpose. And his, wrapped in twisted wire, was easier to grip than many; and the blood on his hands bespoke his rabid desire to hurt, even if he was hurt in the process by the barbs that pricked his palms.

I did not see the spar that knocked me overboard, only felt the heave of the deck and the rapidly approaching rail that knocked the breath from me before I went over the side. The water stung a hundred cuts or more, and burned in my lungs.

I sank.

The lights that flashed above me illumined the battle still running, two fleets in combat with each other and the elements. Shapes moved in the dark, drawn, inexorably, towards the surface. The slid by me in the blackness, bodies as slippery as oil and twice as repulsive. I floated there, suspended, until my air ran out.

Awake was nearly as bad as not, aware worse. Trapped in the swirling eddies that surrounded the wreckage like water in a bathtub drain swirling around a toddler’s abandoned toys. Even the massive trireme, with her extra decks stacked above the three of oars…. lay tilted on her side, listing. The sea was stained red, and in the distance the storm was still raging.

I dragged myself up the rocky, broken shoreline where wreckage lay piled, saw the multitude of streams that fed across the beachhead and into the ocean… watched fresh water become salt, and mix with the blood of a hundred thousand men or more-

Fainting, overcome, exhausted, I fell against one of the sea stacks, eyes burning and unable to see far beyond the first ship that lay, spine broken, in the shallows. It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem possible.

I have stood on the deck of that giant ship, and taken her wheel in hand. I have sailed these narrow seas and the Vortex for what feels like centuries. But the ark is not mine now, and her decks are not under my command. And though I know her mazelike interiors like the back of my hand, her labyrinthine secrets…. I wonder that I should have had to face her like this, in such desperation.

What creature propelled her through the water? What twist of the Wheel has pitted me against her crew….? Was is the last storm? Was it the last time I stood on those salt-scoured boards and looked out into the darkness? What had they said to me, the crew, the officers…? What words passed between us in the lamplight before the mast?

I cannot remember now, and every memory slips through my fingers like sand. It doesn’t matter now. Whatever is chasing me is chasing after me still, whatever lurks in the darkness below is still there beneath the surface. It feeds on the bones of dead men, and circles the wreckage for more.

Whatever this island is, I am trapped here, until or unless there are survivors… or I can craft a vessel from the hundred drifting in the tide.

Alone.

thebibliosphere:

I took my meds too close to bedtime again and I need you all to know the dream I had last night involved Robin Williams becoming the new Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. Not, a character portrayed by Robin Williams, just Robin Williams as himself running around Hogwarts doing wandless magic and being as loud and big as possible because and I quote before I forget:

“Listen, children, I’m not saying all this bad shit that is happening isn’t scary and you shouldn’t be concerned–because you should!–but I’m telling you this now for free. Life is a boggart, it’s the biggest boggart of them all. You never know what it’s going to look like one moment to the next. And sometimes you just gotta laugh. It’s okay to laugh. It’s part of the grieving process. You need to grieve before you can heal. But it’s okay to laugh while you’re doing it.”

I didn’t wake up right after that, some more stuff happened in a hazy sort of way as the dream began to dissolve into conciousness, but I remember him yelling Expecto Patronum as he punched a Death Eater in the face. Because sometimes, evidently, you have to make your own happy memories.

Because sometimes, evidently, you have to make your own happy memories.

I got a really, really up close and personal look at the Book. Saw the cover with my own two eyes, watched the title take shape, and Witnessed its creation.

I held the boy in my arms and heard the song with my heart and my own two ears, listened to the tonal roar become the rise and fall.

I saw what it did. Saw the revival of what was dead and the recreation of everything lost in a space perverted and disused for its original purpose…

I saw the omens I was meant to see, felt them in my little robin-heart, hidden and sheltered at once in spaces overgrown and recognizable as what they are/were.

I saw the cords being forged of wire and metal and fire and pressure- the hiss and steam of the work being done.

I felt the rise and fall, in blood and bone and deeper things.

My answer is No.