Perchance to Dream
Part Two
Tamsin perched on a tree branch, an unmeasurable distance above the forest floor. The branch shivered slightly under her weight, but she felt no fear, not even the little prickle at the back of her neck her mother had taught her meant excitement. She knew better now.
She edged towards the end of the branch, feeling it dip, all but daring it to break. But it held firm, and her balance held, even as she peered down into an endless chasm of green. Her lack of unease was her first proof that she was dreaming.
Danger is what gives life its sharp taste, Dewshine always said. But Tamsin had discovered something better: a life that could be sharp without cutting, sensations more vivid than any she could feel inside her imperfect skin. Now she could stare down the fall to earth without as much as a flutter of dread in her belly. Even her father would confess to disquiet when the thermals evaporated and he was forced to beat his wings to fight off the remorseless worldpull.
She leapt off the branch, less a jump than a forceful step, and she floated effortlessly across the break in the canopy to the next tree. She began to run, springing from branch to branch as she might in waking life. Only now she did not feel the burn in her muscles or the fire in her lungs. Now when she bounded between trees she did not need the extra reach of her brightmetal climbing hooks. When she reached a gap only birds could cross she simply kept running, and her feet found purchase on the air itself, propelling her onward.
Pain can be sweet when it reminds us we’re alive, the Wolfriders believed. But Tamsin knew better now. Pain was just another word for limitation. Now she had discovered a world without limits. Now she could truly fly.
When she grew bored of running – for she could never grow tired, not here – she dropped down on another tree branch. It was a strange wood she had never seen in the waking world: black and knotted like it had been charred, yet growing strong all the same. The leaves that grew from its stems were huge, triangular sails of a beautiful shade of blue-green, that made her think of the clear waters around Eastward Isle, where an elf named Spine had once taught her to surf the rolling waves. Small white flowers grew all over the sail-leaves, but when Tamsin alighted on the branch, the flowers became six-winged butterflies, and they swarmed about her, their fluttering wings tickling her face.
Tamsin heard a sound on the wind, a long buzz that became a hum that became a wolf’s howl. She turned, grinning. Her friend had returned.
The swarm of butterflies came together over her head, their many flitting shapes combining to make the outline of a four-legged beast. With a bright flash, the butterflies became a glowing mist, which took on the form of a great white wolf.
But it was no earthly wolf, no Russet to live and die when his body betrayed him. Not even a Starjumper, trapped forever in one single form. Her new wolf-friend was a creature of air and light, freed from the bonds of the cruel earth. As he sat down obediently on the branch, he was tall enough to set his chin on Tamsin’s shoulder. As he rubbed his furry cheek against Tamsin’s – just as Russet used to do – she felt a faint tingling racing across her dream-skin. And when he lifted his head to regard her, he stared through enormous, teardrop shaped eyes that sparkled like gemstones. They reminded her of the butterflies he had once been.
She hailed him by name: “Sylas.”
And he answered: **V’Nan.**
“Shall we hunt?”
His answer was a play bow, dipping his shoulders and raising his misty tail, fluffy as a fox’s, seeming at times to divide into three or four separate wisps of white smoke, before becoming one again.
Tamsin turned and began to run through the trees. The wolf followed eagerly. They raced each other through the alien canopy, kicking up bizarre birds and flushing out shrieking treewees. When wolf or elf came within reach of a prey, the hapless creature shattered into a cloud of sparkling shards – like crystal leaves, and Tamsin and Sylas fell to catching as many of the slivers of light as possible. They always dissolved upon touch, rewarding their hunter with the briefest memory of another life, another experience. Tamsin gathered up the shards greedily. One moment she was soaring through the air, a majestic bird of prey; the next she was a hairless infant in a dark den, screaming for mother’s milk. She witnesses a half-dozen different moments from a dozen different lives. She drowned in sensations. And when she was too overwhelmed to continue, she simply let herself fall gently through the understory until she came to rest in a thick bed of ferns on the forest floor.
Sylas floated down behind her, and collapsed at her feet. For uncountable time, they lay in a sated dazed, happier and prouder than any mortal hunters could even be.
At least Tamsin lifted her head and yawned. “What a feast,” she murmured.
**Shall I show you more?** the wolf asked. **We could explore the Multitude.**
“No… not this time. Come here.” She patted the ferns beside her. Obediently the wolf moved to her side, flopping down on his side so that Tamsin could stroke the thick, warm fur at his throat. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, and she saw her own face reflected and distorted in the many facets of its depths.
“Don’t you ever blink?” she asked at length.
The wolf’s muzzle wrinkled in thought. **No,** he sent at length. **Why would I need to?**
“No... I suppose you don’t.”
**You do not, either. Not here.**
“Maybe one day. Right now my eyelids feel heavy as boulders.” She blinked sleepily. “Hmm… you won’t disappear if I close my eyes, will you?”
He licked her chin. **You know I won’t. I’m a part of you, V’Nan. **
His sending – which was meant to comfort her – only made her sad. “You mean you’re not real.”
**I’m as real as you need me to be.**
Still she was reluctant to leave him, to end the dream and plunge into the deeper, colder sleep of restoration. Her last memory of Russet had been of sharing the hollow between tree roots, gently stroking her old friend’s fur as he tried once again to work her little moccasin off her foot.
“Rest now,” Tamsin had told him. “I’ll be here.”
She’d known the end was coming. She’d wanted to stay with him, to hold him and comfort him, to ease his passage out of his skin. She hadn’t wanted him to die alone.
Slowly, surely, his body began to shut down. His breaths grew shallower, his heart slower. But he lingered on, unwilling to admit defeat.
Tamsin had given up before him, surrendering to the pull of sleep, after too many sleepless nights listening to Russet struggling for breath. She had dreamed of the two of them running through the forest together as they always had – only this time Russet could run with her high up in the understory. And when she’d opened her eyes, Russet’s soul had left his exhausted body.
Her mother told her not to blame herself. The important part was that she’d been there. Skywise told her that the dream itself was a sight of Russet’s passing, the wolf’s final farewell before his flickering spirit became lost in the great anonymous spirit pool. Sunstream told her her self-loathing was a natural reaction: if she could blame someone, she could avoid the far grimmer reality of life’s inherent unfairness.
It didn’t matter what they said. She doubted she’d ever forgive herself for seeking pleasure in dreams while her wolf-friend sought oblivion in death.
For over a month, she’d clung to the conviction that if only she could find Russet’s spirit, she could somehow make amends. If Skywise was right and their souls had brushed together at the moment of Russet’s death, then surely she could find him again. Sunstream said beasts’ souls burned too faintly to retain identity after death; but Russet was no mere beast. He was quarter-elf, a grandson of a High One. Surely he could retain something of himself in death.
She’d gone into the Palace, she’d fasted and dreamed as she had during all her many abortive spirit-quests, before she’d finally heard a name that sounded like the low hum of a bee. And when she accomplished nothing but weight loss, she’d asked Skywise to teach her dreamwalking, so that she could control the visions of sleep.
“The first thing you need is a dream-guide,” Skywise had told her. “Something you can learn to recognize, some sign that tells you without a doubt you aren’t in the waking world.”
“Wouldn’t the things I see be proof enough?” Tamsin had asked. “In my dreams I’m always flying… or walking through trees… or doing other things that can’t be possible.”
“But they seem possible in the dream, don’t they? No, if you try to trust in that, you’ll never learn to dreamwalk in a straight line. You need something else. An animal, an object, a sound, a word…”
“What do you use?” she’d asked.
Skywise’s cheeks had gone a vivid scarlet. “My… my soulname. It’s… it’s a little silly, but for a long time I trained myself to think of the last elf in the world I would want to hear saying my soulname. And if he appeared in my dream and said it – and my skin didn’t crawl! – I’d know I was dreaming.”
“Who?” Tamsin asked.
“Never mind. It’s an old trick I haven’t needed to use in years. You might want to think of something with your soulname too. It’s the key to a lot more than just Recognition,” he’d added when she’d frowned. “It’s the key to who you are.”
She’d had her doubts, considering she had never truly heard it properly… or if she had, it was the most uninspiring experience of her life. Vvvvvvvnnnnnnn, an angry insect’s buzz. What sort of soulname was that? Still she did her best to think of it, every time she found herself in strange circumstances. And as the days turned to months and she sank deeper and deeper into dreams, she began to hear it deep in her bones, the little voice that had taken the place of fear.
Vnnnn, it purred whenever her stomach should have clenched in terror. You’re safe here.
She knew the waking world could never be safe. Death and danger lurked around every corner. She’d done her part to make it so, hunting the creatures of the understory with her bow and hooks. Danger fed a Wolfrider’s soul, Dewshine liked to say, but Tamsin’s soul was making another choice.
Still she never found Russet. She’d howl for him every time she realized where she was. Her anguished cries brought other wolves – spirits of long-dead Wolfriders who flitted near her for mere moments before abandoning her to her grief. They didn’t know her. Nor did they care to. Perhaps they knew she had abandoned the Way in her sorrow.
Then one dreamwalk, another wolf had answered her howl: one made of light and mist, one who addressed her by her true name, and who taught her just how powerful it could sound when heard clearly.
**V’Nan,** he’d sent, and she’d felt such an overwhelming sense of peace, as if she had only just now truly completed her spirit-quest.
“Who are you?” she’d asked, but the wolf had simply shrugged his shoulders.
**A friend. A guide. If you are seeking one.**
Dazed, she’d held out her hand, and he trotted over to rub his muzzle against it. He smelled faintly of Russet. His ethereal fur glowed like the walls of the Palace. His too-large eyes were like knapped blackstone.
“Do you have a name?” she’d asked.
**You haven’t give me one.**
The sound had slipped from her lips before she quite knew what she would say.
“Sylas…”
The name conjured images of Blue Mountain That Was, of a world where elves had once lived without fear or limitation… until they’d built shackles for themselves.
Sylas would be her guide back into that state of being. She had known it then, and in each encounter the dream wolf had proved her right. In the timeless world of dreams, they had already spent an eternity together. A wolf of air, he was a mirror for her own soul, Wolfrider and Glider imperfectly melded together. And unlike Russet, he could never leave her, never take a path she could not follow. How could he, when he was her own creation?
Still, she felt a moment’s irrational fear, as she contemplated their brief parting. Clearly, she had a long way to go before she could know true peace.
“I wish you could be with me when I wake up,” she confessed.
The wolf parted his lips in a tooth grin. **But I am always with you, V’Nan. You just need to learn to see.**
He licked her cheek fondly, as she felt the dream beginning to fray. Reluctantly, she closed her eyes and let herself sink into the darkness. When she crawled back out of oblivion, she was back in her bed inside the Palace, and everything seemed a little dimmer, a little less substantial.
* * *
Tyldak came to visit her at sundown, bringing her news of the hunt. “The riders flushed a pair of deer into the long grass,” he said as they strode through the halls together. “The buck got away, but we brought down the female. We’re having a feast tonight if you’d like to join us–”
Tamsin shook her head. “And feel Mother judging me with her eyes? I think I’ll stay here. Here no one shames you for not catching your own supper.”
“Your mother means well,” Tyldak offered awkwardly. “But she’ll never stop thinking like a wolf. At any rate, it’s not only the hunters tonight. A few River Folk families are coming too. Bringing… fish and river clams and the like to share. You could bring some tales; I’m sure you have collected enough in the months here.”
“Oh, Father, you have no idea! Did you know I’ve been to the Gliders’ Blue Mountain?”
His eyes widened in interest. “Sunstream showed you in the Scroll?”
“Oh, so much. And not only Blue Mountain That Was, but Blue Mountain That-Might-Have-Been. I’m already starting to see the time-threads of a different tapestry – the different paths the past could have taken.”
“Really? I thought it took ages of study before one could start to read the Multitude within the Scroll. And you’ve barely been at it for a season.”
“Oh, I don’t see it in the Scroll. Not exactly. It’s… it’s a new trick Sy– Skywise taught me,” she amended quickly. “Or… or at least he started to teach me, and then I took over from there. I spend my waking hours drinking in the Scroll, you see. Like locksending, just… soaking up all the memories like a sea sponge. And then when I sleep – well, Pike always said dreams are a way for the mind to make sense of the waking world, doesn’t he? And when I sleep I squeeze all the memories out of that sponge, and I can see things I never saw when I was awake.”
“What a clever girl I have,” Tyldak beamed. “What sort of things?”
“I… I searched the memories of you and Mother. Your Recognition and what came after. And I saw all the different ways it could have happened. You left Blue Mountain for her – but in another time-thread, she chose to give up the Wolfriders for you. And there was no flight to the Palace for you – no war with the trolls. Windkin was born at Blue Mountain. And in some worlds, Winnowill made her Great Egg, and you all went to the stars, dreaming forever as she’d planned. And in others, the Wolfriders still came and brought the mountain done. And… in others…” she scowled and looked away.
“Yes?”
“It’s nothing. I don’t want to bother you.”
Tyldak gestured for them to sit. “Tell me.”
“It’s only… I saw a world where she left you, and went back to her Wolfrider lovemate.”
“Such had been our plan,” Tyldak admitted ruefully. “We underestimated Recognition’s pull on us both. Or perhaps it was already the beginning of love.”
“But there was no pull in this world. She left you and Windkin was raised by another elf. And I… I must never have been born in that world. Or… or perhaps I was born to someone else… just you or just Mother… either way I wouldn’t be me!”
“Your mother and I would not be the same elves either, surely, if we did not love each other.”
Tamsin let out a humorless laugh. “You know, in some worlds I saw, you didn’t have your wings?”
“Winnowill never made them for me?”
“Or you never asked for them. And in others… she made your wings but she made them off your arms, not your shoulder-blades!”
“Like Bonebat?” Tyldak sounded amused by the idea.
“Worse! You had no hands at all.”
“Pft. That was a nightmare,” he dismissed.
“But these worlds exist! Sy – Sunstream says that all that can be real is real, somewhere. Every choice we make… every path not taken… somewhere else – somewhen else – that choice was made, and it spawned another reality. And some grow and thrive like our own. And others just… pop! – like bubbles in sea foam. Broken threads on the loom of the Multitude. It’s terrifying to think about it!”
“I think this is why so few elves have made the Multitude their realm of study,” he said gently. “And if it is giving you bad dreams, then I’d advise you to take a rest from the Scroll.”
“But Father, I want to understand!”
“We all do.”
“Not all of us,” Tamsin muttered under her breath.
**Your mother?** he guessed.
“Not just her. Minnow used to come by to visit… so did Eelgrass and Brookfall. But Eelgrass won’t answer my sendings now… and Min – well, we fought the last time she was here.”
“I think she will be there at the feast tonight.”
“I don’t want to see her. She said such cruel things to me, Father! I was telling her about all the spirits I’ve met, and she said I was neglecting my flesh-and-blood friends!”
Tyldak smiled sadly. “When was the last time you went down to the river to see them?”
“Why should I be the one to see them? I’m not a near-wolf to come at a human’s whistle! And what would I do down there? Fish and swim and drink and join – nothing I haven’t done before. They all say I’m just wandering around doing nothing – but they’re the ones who just dance the same steps over and over. At least I’m learning!”
“You are. And your zeal would have made Lord Voll proud,” Tyldak said. “Certainly it makes me proud.”
Tamsin grinned.
“But you must not push yourself too far, too fast,” Tyldak insisted. “You look… wearied. It might do your soul some good to spend some time outside the Palace. It needn’t be the feast,” he added when she opened her mouth to protest. “We could go scouting together, just the two of us. I’m aching to stretch my wings properly after all those rains. And I’d love to hear more of your dreams.”
Tamsin tried to imagine it – leaping from tree to tree as Tyldak flew just about the canopy. They used to hunt and scout together all the time. But after so many dreams of sailing through the trees without fear of falling, the notion of struggling against the worldpull did not appeal to her.
Tyldak was strong enough to carry them both. But she hadn’t been carried by her father since she’d been a cub. And she couldn’t ask for a ride without admitting her new fears. Then even Tyldak might accuse her of growing too soft in the Palace.
“Maybe something besides scouting?” Tamsin offered. “What about my old nest? The one by the river. Is it still there after the rains? We could… fix it up… if you wanted to.”
Tyldak smiled. Even as a child growing up without a forest around her, Tamsin had preferred to mimic birds instead of wolves. Tyldak had helped her build many giant birds’ nests, first on rocky ground, then atop stands of delicate saplings, and finally up in the canopy of the regrown rainforest. “Like the old days?” he asked.
Tamsin smiled and nodded. “I mean… I don’t mean I’m coming back to den there – please don’t let Mother think that! But….”
“You need a retreat from your studies,” Tyldak agreed. “Even Sunstream and Skywise leave the Palace when their heads are too full. Shall we go hunt for the nest tomorrow?”
“I’d like that,” Tamsin said.
* * *
They worked together for two days, rebuilding the nest, while Tamsin told Tyldak of her many dreamwalks. She did not mention her wolf-guide, though she did ask if Tyldak remembered any elf in Blue Mountain named Sylas.
“Sylas? No… I don’t think so. I knew of a Syrath once… a distant cousin of my mother’s, I think. Of course, after all this time, I could be forgetting someone. Why?”
“The name came to me in a dream,” was all Tamsin would say.
Tamsin slept in the nest from time to time, if only to prove to her tribemates – or was it herself – that she had not completely abandoned the world outside the Palace. The advent of the dry meant the skies were cloudless most days. She preferred the cool of the Palace for daysleep, but late at night she fell asleep under a blanket of stars. It didn’t matter where she slept; her wolf-friend would find her.
One thing nagged at her: while listening to another tale of the Multitude, Tyldak had asked her if she had glimpsed Russet’s different life-paths. She hadn’t; in truth, she had never seen him in her dreams, despite reviewing memories of their time together in the Scroll of Colors. In fact, she seemed incapable of conjuring him in her sleep at all.
She asked Sylas about it, one dream. They sat together inside her nest, looking out over the forest canopy, and Tamsin could easily believe this was the waking world – were it not for the tendrils of white smoke that rose from Sylas’s fur, and the wolf’s butterfly eyes.
**Perhaps part of you does not want to call him back,** Sylas offered. **Perhaps that part of you knows it would only cause you grief.**
“Are you that part of me?” Tamsin asked. “Are you trying to take his place?”
**I know I could never do that. But I wish to see you happy.**
She had been stroking his spirit-fur, watching the stray wisps of glowing mist come away on her fingers, like shed hair. Now she withdrew her hand. Perhaps they were right – Venka, her mother, Minnow and her friends from the river. Perhaps she was just hiding from pain. If so, pain had caught up with her all the same.
“I don’t think you should be my wolf anymore,” she said sadly.
She’d hoped he would argue with her, but instead he sent, **I understand.**
She felt the weight on the nest shift as Sylas got to his four feet. She looked down at her hands in her lap, unable to watch him disperse into the misty butterflies.
“Is this better?” he asked, his voice no longer echoing in her mind, but floating on the wind.
Tamsin turned and stared. And stared.
Standing just behind her was the handsomest elf she had ever seen.
She stumbled to her feet, slowly taking him in. He stood taller than her father, and he wore the somber garments of Blue Mountain That Was. His long sleeves and feathered capelet made her think of the Scroll’s memories of Lord Voll. But Lord Voll had always seemed so frail, his face lined with worry and age. And there was no frailty in this face: only the ageless beauty of strong-bond features and skin that made her think of the finest, polished white stone. He had her father’s strong chin, Aurek’s hooded eyes, Door’s proud cheekbones, and his high-domed skull was completely devoid of hair, like Ekuar’s. He was like every fantasy of a Glider lord come to life. She had to check the impulse to reach up and stroke a perfectly curved and pointed ear.
His perfect brow furrowed slightly as the silence stretched out between them. “Tamsin? If this form does not please you, I can–”
“No! No, this… this pleases me,” she stammered out. Now she could not resist the urge to touch him. She raised her hand and ran her fingertips down the line of his jaw. She felt the same tingling warmth, where her skin touched his. Wisps of mist curled about her fingers.
“You’re perfect…” she whispered.
Sylas’s pale lips curved in the slightest smile. “Good. Now, where shall we go today?”
Still giddy as a child, Tamsin could only only shake her head. “Oh, I don’t care. You pick.”
He folded her hand within his own. She had always thought herself a tall elf, yet she felt tiny compared to him.
“Only because I know your heart,” Sylas said.
The scene shifted. Suddenly the nest was not anchored to the treetops, but floating free in a great sea of air. Tamsin looked around in all directions. Other rafts of vegetation bobbed on air currents, above and below them. When she looked over the edge of the nest, she could not see the ground, only a vast sky-blue infinity dotted with floating islands.
“I’ve never seen this in the Scroll,” she breathed. “This can’t be real.”
“Have I not told you? There is not that can be envisioned that does not exist...”
“…Somewhere,” Tamsin finished. “In time or space. So where are we?”
“Does it matter?”
She looked back at him. Their hands were still clasped tightly, and the long fingers wrapped around herself felt far too real and warm to be a mere fantasy.
“No,” Tamsin admitted.
“Shall we go hunt?”
“How?” Tamsin looked back at the vast distances between green islands. Aerial roots trailed below the largest ones, making her think of banyans stranded leagues above ground. “Do we jump?”
“I had considering something more… dignified.”
A shadow fell over them. Tamsin let out a gasp that soon became a squeal of delight, as the nest suddenly tripled in size to allow the giant hawk to land beside them.
Sylas helped up onto the back of the animal’s neck, just in front of the wings. Then he climbed up in front of her, and Tamsin yelped and held his waist tight as he urged the bird to spread its wings and spring forward. They fell, the wind buffeting them, until the hawk angled its wings and caught an updraft. Then they soared ever higher into the sky, until the nest was just a distant point of green, lost against the blue.
* * *
When Dewshine came at last to visit her daughter, she took one look at Tamsin’s transformed palace room, and let out a moan of anguish.
“Oh cubling! What have you done?”
Tamsin looked up at the walls proudly. What had once been smooth crystal lines was now molded into the fluid, organic shapes of the ancient Gliders’ rockshapings. The once-glowing walls had gone dark as black pearl, and instead the room was lit by glowing balls, held fast in the talons of starstone hawks. Tamsin’s simple bed had become a great stone bowl, set with fractal patterns. Even the water jug and other simple tools sitting on the side table had been glazed with Glider motifs.
“Mother, you came!” Tamsin exclaimed. “And at the perfect moment. I just finished. Isn’t it amazing? shaped it all with my own hands and thoughts – like I was sculpting clay! It’s so simple once you learn how – really, it’s no harder than commanding the starstone’s light to rise and fall.”
“But… why, child? Why this?”
“It’s… Blue Mountain,” she said, confused by Dewshine’s question. “Or it’s supposed to be. Did I make it right? I had only the Scroll to guide me.”
Dewshine looked at her with fresh eyes, noted the changes she had made to her little moth-fabric gown: the longer train, the cascade of feathers at her hips. “All the things you could make with the power of the Palace behind you…” Dewshine lamented. “And you build a cage.”
Tamsin made a face. “Well, I like it, and I wager Father will too,” she added with a touch of spite.
“No doubt he will. He has always been skilled at only keeping the good memories.”
“And you only keep the bad ones,” Tamsin shot back. “No. That’s not right. You always act like there was something awful about the Gliders, but you never remember the sorrows of being a Wolfrider. You act like the Way is so perfect! But it’s not. It’s cruel and it’s hard and there’s nothing wrong with wanting the world to be soft and gentle!”
Dewshine recoiled from her daughter’s sudden anger. “And you think you’d find gentleness inside Blue Mountain? A world of caged birds fed by their captors – scratching pretty lines in stone to keep them from pulling out their own feathers? Oh, child, you have no idea what it was like inside that prison!”
Tamsin softened slightly. “I know you suffered there, Mother.”
“You have no idea.”
“No, I suppose I don’t. You never shared it with me. Not really.”
“And I never will. No one should know that feeling. She held my soulname, Tamsin! In life she tormented me – three long years of terror, knowing she could use it to find me, to control me.”
“That’s ancient history, Mother. She’s been dead for ten thousand years!”
“Has death stopped her? All it did was tie her to the Palace… a stone’s throw from the Holt. From me and mine.”
“It cleansed her.”
“So they say. It earned her forgiveness, certainly. Even by those whose lives she destroyed. Even though she proved time and again that she hadn’t changed. Did you hear what happened during the Reappearance? When she stole Weatherbird’s body? Skywise laughs about it now like it was nothing but a childish jest. Sometimes I have dreams… that her spirit finds its way into my body… that I wake up, as surely as Weatherbird must have – alone and untethered, a helpless prisoner in my own skin.”
Tamsin shrugged. “But Winnowill isn’t a spirit anymore. She has a new body now. She’s a world away on Homestead with Haken’s Ark – the living mountain she’d hoped to make of Blue Mountain. She has everything she ever wanted now. Why would she ever bother you?”
Dewshine winced at the subtle inflection in her daughter’s voice. “Yes. I am quite insignificant to her. It’s what has kept me safe all these years, I am certain. But I never thought I’d hear my own child dismiss me as she once did – as something less than an insect.”
Tamsin huffed. “I only meant, you have nothing she wants.”
“And nothing you want, either? You who once longed more than anything to be chief huntress?”
“You’re remembering it wrong. What I wanted more than anything was to fly.”
“I am going to lose you,” Dewshine said bleakly. “For the first time, I truly believe it.”
“Puckernuts! Were you this insufferable when Windkin left home?” Tamsin narrowed her eyes. “You were, weren’t you? You make it sound like you’ve always been so proud of him, but he chose the Gliders over the Wolfriders, and you’ve never forgiven him. That’s why you’ve always wanted to keep me so close – why you’ve always wanted to keep me a cub!”
Dewshine shook her head. “He was always a wanderer. Wolfrider, Sun Folk, Glider… he’s taken his turn in each tribe, yet he’s never truly belonged to any. Not even now… though his lifemate rules in Oasis, his soul remains rootless. But you… you grew up with the forest. You were rooted firmly in the ground. I thought you’d always run with the pack.”
Tamsin shrugged. “I thought Russet would never die. We were both wrong.”
“Yes,” Dewshine agreed. “What’s lost is lost. What dies, dies. It is the Way.”
She looked at Tamsin as if she longed for her to contradict her. But Tamsin merely turned her head and contemplated her lavish bed. “I’m tired,” she murmured, her voice already leagues away.
“I’ll leave you to rest, then.”
Dewshine lingered at the doorway, but Tamsin did not call her back.
* * *
“Tamsin, come help me work these burrs out of Moledigger’s coat.”
Tamsin watched as her younger self reluctantly climbed down from the sapling she was trying to scale. The elf-child joined her mother beside the auburn-maned wolf and began to pluck out burrs. Dream-Dewshine and dream-Tamsin worked together in quiet companionship.
“Why are you showing me this?” Tamsin asked Sylas.
“You brought us here, not I,” the guide insisted.
“When can we go back to Oasis?” the dream-Tamsin suddenly asked. Dream-Dewshine’s fingers froze over a section of knotted hair.
“Do you like Oasis so much? We were only there last flood.”
“Carrun’s so much fun,” the cub said. “Is she really my great-niece? I don’t see how she can be, when she’s my elder!”
“Only by a few years.”
“Anyway, I need to tell her everything that’s happened. About the pigs and the work on the Holt, and… and don’t you want to see Windkin again?”
The dream began to disperse, the vision of mother and daughter and wolf evaporating like morning mist. Tamsin looked at Sylas for guidance. “Was that a memory?” she asked.
Sylas nodded. The dream reassembled itself, and now Tamsin watched as her child-self scampered off with an equally young Carrun, while Dewshine hung back beside Tyldak. All around them rose the red rock cliff sides of Oasis.
“The walls are higher than I remember,” Dewshine whispered to Tyldak.
Tamsin walked up to her mother and father. She tried to touch Tyldak’s wing, but her hand passed through it like through mist.
“You cannot touch a memory,” Sylas explained. “You can only witness it.”
“I’d forgotten…” Tamsin murmured, “…just how much Mother hated visiting Oasis. I can’t even remember when she stopped coming with us.”
The vision shifted again. Now the dream-Tamsin was older, an adolescent standing alongside her father, waving enthusiastically as Carrun came towards them.
“Your mother is wrong,” Sylas said. “Nothing is ever lost. Not truly. Some things simply require a little work to find.”
“I never really wondered what she thought about Windkin following Winnowill’s own father,” Tamsin admitted. “She... never really healed from what Winnowill did to her, did she?”
Sylas shrugged. “Many believe complete healing to be unattainable. When the damage is done… it can be repaired, but never reversed. At least, not without causing greater damage.”
“You mean manipulating the Multitude? Reversing the flow of time?”
The barest hint of a smile crossed his full lips, but it was enough to make her heart swell with joy. “Very insightful. Yes, our kind have learned how to move across the great tapestry of time and space. But our attempts to re-weave it have always failed. Spectacularly.”
“Like the Reappearance? Kavhi and the Palacestone?”
A dark shadow fell over his face. “A trifling incident… to hear some tell it.”
“Sunstream says he thinks it created a… what did he call it? A cause…”
“Causal cycle,” Sylas said flatly.
Tamsin nodded eagerly. “That by inciting the Djunsmen to attack, Kahvi caused the Palace crash in the first place. And that by fighting the Djunsmen, but failing to stop them completely, the Palacemasters actually helped preserve the time-thread. That without Kahvi and the Djun and everything, the Palace wouldn’t have crashed, and we all wouldn’t have existed.”
“That is one interpretation. Certainly one the Palacemasters would prefer.”
“Sylas? Is something wrong?” Only moments ago, he had seemed so proud of her cleverness, yet now he was so distant. Tamsin drew nearer to him, hoping sheer proximity would lift his mood.
“Nothing, V’Nan. Merely… an unpleasant memory.”
Her brow knit. “Can dreams have memories?”
The gentle smile returned. “There are dreams within dreams. Shall I tell you what I dream, while you are out in the waking world?”
She nodded. Somehow – she wasn’t sure who had moved first – her hand found its way within his.
“I chase the same dream as your mother. To inhabit a moment so perfectly, it can last forever. To find a Now which need never become a Then. The oblivion of time itself, around an instant of perfect clarity.”
“Clarity…” Tamsin mused as she gazed deep in his eyes. Strange, how their color could change so drastically depending on the mood. She’d seen them stormy gray while they rode a giant hawk, mossy turquoise while they walked across the surface of alien worlds, or black as obsidian when they explored the shadows of the Multitude. Now they were a pale blue, like the ocean shallows.
Suddenly they were standing in the ocean, ankle-deep in a vastness that stretched to the horizon all directions. Tamsin broke from Sylas’s gaze only long enough to take in their new surroundings, before she found her eyes drawn back to his.
“I’d rather an instant of perfect joy,” she murmured.
“Can we not have both?” he asked, in a tone that almost sounded teasing.
“We?” She pressed her free hand to the feather trim on his collar. She felt his fingers at her waist, lightly skimming down to rest against her hip. His gaze shifted; he stared at her lips.
Still he wouldn’t make the final move. It fell to her to go up on her toes and pressed her mouth to his.
She felt him start in surprise, instinctively pulling back even as his lips parted under hers. She stepped back with a vaguely apologetic smile. She chided herself gently: trying to seduce one’s own dream had to be a new standard in vanity.
He continued watch her, with an almost studious air. She started to turn away.
He checked her with a flash of a smile and quick shake of the head. Still holding her hand, he drew her back against him, his mouth crushing against hers without reserve; his arms wrapped around her, holding her as if he never meant to let her go.
Of course he knew exactly what she liked.
* * *
Tamsin spent less and less time in the waking world. She cancelled sessions of Scroll study with Sunstream. She declined offers to practice starstone-shaping with Skywise. She skipped meals and kept to her room when she heard too many people about. Venka came and repeated her concerns, and even Sunstream began to grow wary. But Tamsin’s answer was always the same. “I’m learning so much.”
She was. The pace Sylas kept up was arduous. Each dream promised ever deeper discoveries, offering still deeper questions. More often than not, she’d wake feeling exhausted. And the more she slept, the harder it became to stay awake.
It was only understandable that she began to rebel, and shun new horizons in favor of idle dreams inside a recreated Blue Mountain. There they could play at being Glider lords, touring their domain or riding their giant hawk, or simply lying in bed and spending what seemed like days trading lazy kisses.
She could tell Sylas found her sloth mildly annoying, but he could hardly deny her. He was her creation after all.
Her fantasy, and nothing more…
She tried not to dwell on the implications of it. Whenever she did, she was struck with a crushing sorrow, as if a trollhammer had shattered her breastbone. As if she was facing Russet’s loss all over again.
“I’m as real as you need me to be,” he had said. But he couldn’t be. Because more and more, she needed his presence like she needed air. He’d become a dreamberry thirst, unslakeable until she was back in a dream and in his arms. She’d listen for his voice in her waking life, and jump at every sound. Something – anything – would suddenly remind her of their adventures together, and her heart would thunder like skyfire. Sunstream could be sitting in front of her, sternly warning her that she was pushed herself too hard, and she would find herself imagining how much sweeter his words would sound on Sylas’s lips.
In those rare moments the fog lifted, she realized she’d become no better than a drunkard. But she couldn’t bring herself to stop. Those rare dreams when Sylas did not appear for her were miserable enough.
In those dreams, she wandered in a dark wood, where the trees grew densely packed and without low-hanging branches. She could not scale their slippery trunks, and she was condemned to wander the forest floor for what seemed like forever. Then wolves would howl, and instead of feeling kinship, she felt only terror, and she would run for her life as a dark shadow snapped at her heels.
“Where were you?” she would demand, the next time she saw him. “Why didn’t you help me? I needed you!”
And he would just look away, his gaze mournful. “You ran where I could not follow,” was all he would ever say.
She began to sleepwalk. Once Skywise found her wandering the halls near the Palace kitchen. “Guess your heart knows what’s what, even if your head doesn’t,” he’d laughed as he steered her to a table and forced her to eat a hearty meal of grilled toadstools and nuts.
Another time she awoke all alone inside the cocoon chamber, where the wrapstuffed elves – the broken Navigator and the victims the Siege at Howling Rock – lay on starstone beds. She wondered if her sleeping mind was trying to tell her something.
“Do you dream in wrapstuff?” she asked Sunstream.
But he only gave her a stern look, looking very much like his father. “You’re not ready for that.”
She bridled at his dismissal. “Why? Because you say so?”
“Yes.”
When she turned away with a huff of anger, he added, more gently: “Because I can see where you want to go. And I won’t let you leave this world by finger-spans. Not when so many howls within you have yet to be sung.”
“Maybe my howls aren’t meant for this world!” she snapped.
But Sunstream wouldn’t give her the fight she wanted. “When your howl is done, you’ll know.”
“He’s wise for one so young,” Sylas remarked, when Tamsin told him of their exchange. They lay idly in the bed at Blue Mountain, his head in her lap as her fingertips drew patterns across his bare head.
Tamsin snorted and jigged her knee under his head. “Young? He’s half as old as our time on this world.”
“Ah, your world is young,” Sylas dismissed. “A hot-blooded stripling. Quite intoxicating in its youth. That must be what drew us here.”
“It’s my world, is it? Not yours?”
“My world is here,” he replied drowsily. His eyes slid closed as she traced the shell of his ear. “In the safety of the astral plane. Others explore. I only guide. I’ve never had to make my own way…”
She heard a wistful note in his voice. “It’s hard,” she admitted. “Making your own way. Cutting your own path. Much easier to stay with the pack.”
“I know. There is strength in unity… a choir of voices. And there is comfort in an absence of choice. Until the pack deserts you.” His brow furrowed. “Until you’re truly alone… lost in a dark place, beset by terrors… and unable to flee.”
Tamsin felt her throat tighten. “Yes…”
He opened his eyes, saw her anguish. He hastened to sit up and take her hand. “I heard your cry, V’Nan. Your pain. Your need. That’s why I came. I understand what it means to be utterly lost. My purpose is to guide, to help, to break the trail others have set me upon. But I was purposeless. Cast adrift among uncaring souls. Unheeded, unneeded. And then I found you. You wanted purpose, but you lacked direction. I gave you guidance, and you gave me a purpose again.”
“Again…?” Tamsin smiled even as her brow knit in confusion. “ I… I don’t understand. Where were you before I dreamed you up?”
“There are dreams within dreams,” he reminded her. “And at their heart, a nightmare that never ends. A moment suspended in eternity, a scream that never dies…”
She scrambled to her knees, suddenly frightened of the haunted look in his eyes. “Sylas? I – I don’t like this. I don’t want this.”
“Causal cycle,” Sylas breathed, his gaze turning inward. “‘Everything comes full circle,’ she said, but did she mean this? Or is it just a pleasant lie, told to absolve herself? To absolve us all. My kindred… what happened to you all? What tore you beyond my reach?” He looked at Tamsin forlornly. “Like you I screamed! But they didn’t hear me. They didn’t come.”
“I don’t want this!” Tamsin repeated stubbornly, wresting her hand from his. “I want to wake up.” She blinked her eyes rapidly; she pinched the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger; she bit the inside of her lip. She whispered her soulname to herself under her breath. “V’Nan, V’Nan, wake up!”
“V’Nan,” Sylas cried. “Don’t leave me!”
She was struck with the same rush of awareness she’d felt the first time she’d heard him speak it. Only this time, instead of a sense of peace and completeness, she felt only an all-encompassing sense of otherness.
Other…
She awoke in a cold sweat, shivering in the darkness.
He wasn’t a part of her. He wasn’t just a fantasy. He was… something else.
And he held her soulname.
* * *
She fled from the Palace. She had to get away from her room, her bed, the dream and the memory of her soulname on his lips.
The trees seemed to press around her. She felt like the caged bird Dewshine had railed against. She had to break free.
She ran to the first tall tree she could find, and began to climb.
She was out of shape after a season in the Palace. Her calf muscles ached and the tendons in her arms burned with each scramble upward. The train of her gown snagged against twigs and creepers. But she pushed on, breathing hard, not pausing for breath until she broke through the canopy and into the bright daylight. The rainforest extended in all directions, a nearly unbroken blanket of green.
She fought to control her racing heartbeat. When she looked down the way she’d come, her head spun from the altitude. She felt aware of the worldpull as never before. She withdrew even further into the crown of the tree, until it began to bow under her weight.
She clambered down to a thicker branch, and began to run along it. When she reached the end of one branch, another was well within reach. Here the crowns of the trees were all but intertwined, and when she came to a break in the canopy, she had only to spring forward and let her muscle memory carry her safely to the next tree. With her gaze straight ahead, she could only see the blue sky and the green foliage. The leaves slapped against her face and the stinging bite was a welcome distraction from the pain in her heart. The thrill of danger at each jump took her mind off the terror of her dreams. If she could only she could keep running, she could outpace the memory of Sylas calling her soulname.
This must be what Mother felt, she thought. The clenching hands around her heart, the sensation of spiders crawling inside her skull.
Who was he? Who had invaded her mind? Some long-dead spirit, bored of eternity and looking for diversion? A malicious dreamwalker from the College or Homestead? She couldn’t believe a word he had said, after all. She couldn’t even be certain he was a he.
The thought that it was Winnowill herself almost made her stumble. She recovered, and ran on. She wasn’t Dewshine. And Winnowill was a changed soul. Everyone said so. Everyone said they had nothing to fear.
Fear… loss… danger… her dreams had been a refuge from all that. But if even the astral plane wasn’t safe, where could she go? Where could she find peace? Was there nowhere pure and gentle? Was there no shelter that didn’t become a cage?
The canopy opened up in front of her, but she could see a safe branch reaching out across the clearing. To her sun-dazzled eyes it was tantalizingly close. She had made such jumps many times in the past. She pumped her arms and took the branch at a full sprint. When the bough began to bend under her feet, she launched herself forward, arms and legs pinwheeling.
She felt herself fall short of her target. She reached out and snatched the tip of the branch with both hands. She felt herself drop as the branch bowed, deeper and deeper. She tried to swing her legs up, to curl them around the branch.
She heard the wood crack, then splinter, just above her hands. She clawed at the air, trying to grab onto a better handhold. But the branch was already snapping back, and she was falling away, spun head-down by her own momentum, caught by the wordpull.
She fell. And fell.
Elfquest copyright 2016 Warp Graphics, Inc. Elfquest, its logos, characters, situations, all related indicia, and their distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Some dialogue taken from Elfquest comics. All such dialogue copyright 2016 Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Alternaverse characters and insanity copyright 2016 Jane Senese and Erin Roberts.