Perchance to Dream
Part Three
The blows came hard and fast against her shoulder blades: one branch, then another, and another – snapping under the impact, stealing her breath, stabbing her back with splinters. She sucked in a desperate mouthful of air between each strike. Skyfire seemed to flash behind her eyes as her head snapped back and forth against her limp neck.
At last, her fall slowed to something less than terminal velocity, Tamsin crashed into the underbrush, and after the last stab of agony, she felt herself go still.
She tasted blood on her lips. Her breath was a wet, rasping wheeze.
**Help me…** she sent weakly, trying to focus through the pain.
She struggled to open her eyes. Even the smallest movement seemed to tear her apart. Something was badly broken, deep inside her. Something was cutting her with every failing breath. The shaft of light falling through the broken canopy blinded her. Spots danced in her vision.
**Sunstream…** she tried again. She could barely organize her thoughts.
The worst of pain began to recede. She felt herself drifting, slipping away from sensations.
**Sylas,** she begged. **Sylas, help me, please.**
His voice echoed in her mind, gentle and comforting.
**Sleep, V’Nan. Let yourself rise above the pain.**
With another crackling sound, like the splintering of the branch that had betrayed her, she felt her mooring give way. She was shedding the weight of her shell, rising like warm air. She looked down and saw her own body, broken and bloodied on a bed of greenery.
**Sleep,** Sylas urged again. **It’s better this way.**
What was he saying? She couldn’t think clearly. In place of the pain, a heavy torpor was now robbing her on conscious thought.
She swore she could feel the soft caress of a hand on her cheek.
**We can be together now,** Sylas promised.
**You… you’re a spirit, aren’t you? You were never my dream at all.**
**I wanted to be. I wanted to forget the truth.**
**Why?**
He did not answer her, but she felt his sadness, like a cold mist enfolding her, and she understood.
**You were a Firstcomer, weren’t you? You died in the crash.**
**First… yes. The first… and the final victim of Timmain’s folly… trapped in a causal cycle, cast adrift in time, apart from Multitude. Forever screaming in a call that will never go answered… wrapped in an instant of... exquisite pain… until I heard your cry. Your soul called to mine, and woke me from my nightmare,** he continued in a rush. **You gave me a new purpose. You gave me freedom!**
**You lied to me,** Tamsin accused.
**I… mislead you,** he admitted. **I only wished you to spare you more pain.**
**But I hurt now!**
**Only because you cling to your pain. It drags your spirit down. Let it go. It’s so much gentler here.**
Sudden panic thrust Tamsin’s soul back into her body. She gasped, and coughed out a mouthful of blood. Renewed agony assaulted her nerves. She felt Sylas’s confusion, his anguish. Or was it her own?
**Why do you resist?**
**I don’t want to die.**
**But we can be together, as you wished. Join me in the spirit realm,** he urged. **We can make our own world, our moment of perfect joy. Why… why do you fight for life? What has life given you, but hardness and sorrow?**
The profound weariness drew at her, as undeniable as the worldpull. She struggled to form thoughts. She conjured the images of her parents, her friends, her tribesmates and her chief – so many faces she had taken for granted, never imagining she might never look upon them again.
**My family… my friends… my Holt… I… I’m not ready to lose them**
**But, you will not. Nothing is ever lost, not truly. Please, V’Nan. Stop fighting. Sleep. I promise you, there’ll be no more pain. You won’t even notice when you slip out of your shell.**
**You don’t understand. Maybe you can’t… but… this shell… this life… I’m sorry, Sylas, but I’m not ready to let it go. Maybe there’s no difference to you… spirit or living elf. But… there is to me. And I want to live!**
**I… as you wish…** Sylas replied sadly.
She felt his presence withdraw. The sudden absence was a further blow of pain, but she used it to drive away the darkness clawing at her. Trying to stay inside her shell was like trying to don a coat filled with daggers. But she burrowed deeper inside her screaming nerves, seizing at any sensation, no matter how agonizing, if it would keep her soul rooted to her broken body.
She couldn’t find any handholds. She kept falling upwards.
She heard Sylas’s voice again, urging her, only not towards death this time.
**Hold fast, V’Nan. You can endure this!**
I can’t… Tamsin thought weakly.
**You can! You are stronger than you know. Stronger than I was.**
She thought she heard another sending, as distant as the babble of the river.
**Tamsin, where are you? We are coming for you!**
**…Father?**
**Courage, child. We’re almost there.**
“Sylas…” her bloodied lips formed his name. But no answer came. A shadow fell over her closed eyelids, and she imagined it was the final darkness of death swallowing her up.
A gust of air slapped her face, and she thought she heard the beat of wings. Then she knew nothing more, until she awoke in her bed in the Palace.
* * *
She couldn’t be dreaming. She hurt too much. The searing pain had dulled to a numb ache, but she could still taste copper at the back of her mouth. A soft cloth dabbed away the last of the blood from her lips, and she grimaced at the sensation. Her entire face felt as swollen as a melon. Each time she opened her eyes, the brightness made her close them. But she managed to make out, through rapid blinks, the faces of her parents and the healer crowding around her.
“Tamsin? Can you hear us?” Dewshine pleaded.
Tamsin tried to speak, but all that came from her mouth was a garbled string of sounds.
“I’d say that’s a ‘yes,’” Rain said brightly. “I hope you’re proud of yourself, cub. I haven’t had a challenge that like since the last time Skot danced with a flock of stalking birds.”
“Check her eyes again, healer,” Tyldak said sternly. “There must be something wrong with them, for her to try to make a jump like that!”
“Just a little out of practice, like the rest of her,” Rain assured him.
“What were you doing so far from the Holt?” Dewshine demanded. “Climbing in your gown, without your climbing hooks? And without telling anyone! That’s not like you.”
“Wanted… clear m’head,” Tamsin slurred.
“Thank the High Ones Sunstream heard your sending!”
“I didn’t, actually,” Sunstream spoke from somewhere beyond Tamsin’s blurry field of vision. “Not at first. It was another voice – one I’ve never heard before. It told me ‘Tamsin needs help.’ And its echo led me back to you.”
“Sylas…” Tamsin whispered, overcome with warring emotions. She remembered now, how he had deceived her, how he had tried to lure her into death. But in the end he had saved her. Thank the High Ones, indeed.
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard that name,” Tyldak said.
“Who?” Dewshine asked.
“Spirit…” Tamsin murmured. “Met him… in a dream… not ’mportant.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sunstream said. “It’s a rare spirit that takes an interest in the living. Even our beloved dead… they come to us on their terms, and they seldom understand ours. Dart and Kimo have certainly never called to me for aid, though their close kin have needed it more than once over the years. For a spirit with no ties to our tribe to intervene… it’s almost unheard of.”
“You must tell us everything,” Dewshine insisted. “And Sunstream, you must try to find him for me. I must thank him.”
“Time enough for that later,” Rain ruled. “Tamsin needs to rest now.”
“No dreams…” Tamsin protested.
Rain laid hands on her again, and she drifted off into oblivion. When she awoke again, a full day had passed, and the ache in her bones was nothing compared to the hunger in her belly.
Her parents had remained at her bedside – even Dewshine, despite her constant unease within the Palace walls. She fed Tamsin a bowl of root pudding, until the beast in her belly was appeased. And she listened patiently as Dewshine told her about Sylas – the parts she dared to say aloud, at least. The hunts in the Multitude; the way he had seemed nothing more than a dream, and the little clues that had finally revealed his true origins. But she said nothing about her soulname, nor Sylas’s pleas for her to join him in death.
When Dewshine and Tyldak retired to their den for the daysleep, Tamsin found she had little desire for her own bed. She stayed awake well into the night, then when exhaustion threatened to undo her, she drained a cup of a thick bitter tea, hoping for a sleep without dreams.
Still she tossed and turned most of the night, panic jolting her awake before she could sink into deep sleep. Though she couldn’t recall any dreams, by morning she was so tired she swore she had spent the night running from shadows. And sure enough, come the afternoon daysleep, she went without the tea, and found herself once again in the dark forest, chased by a strange wolf.
* * *
An eight-of-days passed before she found the courage to confront Sylas.
She chose a forest glade at dusk for their meeting. Bright moons lit up the glade, and fireflies in every color danced overhead. She did not have to wait long for him to answer her summons. He must have been waiting for her.
He approached her with a cautiousness she had never seen in him before: a prey animal uncertainly sharing a waterhole with a hunter.
“I feared you might never call me again,” he finally said.
“Can you blame me?”
“I never meant to hurt you, V’Nan.”
Hearing him speak her soulname did not cause the pain she had feared. But neither did it inspire the feeling of comfort and safety it once had.
“I know you didn’t. But… it hurt all the same.”
“I… I was selfish,” Sylas admitted. “I wanted you all to myself.”
“And I wanted to escape everything that wasn’t gentle and pleasing. I thought I could live on dreams. But I can’t. And I want to live, Sylas. I know that now. I don’t just want to see the world, I want to touch it. One day, I want to bring new life into it.”
He looked aghast. “Into pain? Into constant danger, constant unrest?”
“It’s not all pain and harshness. And when it is… it makes us appreciate the joy all the more. I want everything this shell can give me. The good and the bad.”
He shook his head. “I cannot understand.”
“I know. And I cannot understand the spirit realm. Not really. You’ve done so much to show me. But I know it’s only one thread in… in a tapestry I can’t begin to understand. Like a fish can’t understand air. Like a wolf can’t understand flight. And I know I will… when it’s my time. But it’s not my time yet.” She swallowed. “And… I can’t stay here.”
Terror flashed in his eyes. He began to reach for her, but she instinctively drew back. At his look of heartbreak, she almost felt her resolve break. Miserably, she raised her hands to hold him at bay.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“You are leaving me?”
“I don’t want to. Believe me.”
“Yet you are! Why? Why can we not meet here as we used to?”
She struggled to remember all her reasoned arguments. “Because… because I am not strong enough to walk between worlds. Not now. Because I’ll lose my way again and I won’t be able to find my way back to my life. I’m sorry, Sylas. I wish I was different – I wish I could share myself between shell and spirit as easily as Sunstream or Weatherbird. I wish I were the mate you deserve.”
“You are!” Sylas insisted. “You alone called me out of my prison.”
“And you’re free now,” she protested weakly. “You can find others – all the High Ones –”
“None like you.” Again he reached for her and this time she could not bear to repulse him. He took her elbow, gently drawing her against him, until her palms braced on his chest.
“In all the worlds I have visited, in all the realities I have explored, you are unique,” he vowed. “I have never known another like you. Please, do not leave me. We can find a way together – there is always another path, another choice. I will do whatever I must–”
“I can’t ask that of you–”
“Whatever I must!” he replied fiercely. “Only tell me how I can stay with you!”
She smiled sadly. “Can you be alive again?”
His eyes widened. The emotion seemed to drain from face his face, leaving only an impassive mask. His gaze slowly turned inward, and his brow began to furrow slightly.
“I’m sorry,” Tamsin rushed to say. “That wasn’t fair. I’ve no more right to ask that than you…” she trailed off helplessly.
“Have to ask you to die,” he finished.
“There are so many worlds in the Multitude. Maybe in one of them… we found a way to be together.”
“Why not this one?”
She couldn’t let him go like this, she realized. As much as she had sworn to make a clean break, she found she could not resist his pleading gaze. “Will you wait for me?” she asked. “Until the day when I’ve sung all the howls meant for my world? Until I am ready to let go of my shell?”
Sylas nodded wordlessly. She thought she saw a flicker of hope in his eyes. But perhaps it was only the light of the moons reflected in his gaze.
“I’d like to visit you again,” Tamsin said. “When I’m stronger. But… I’d understand if it would hurt too much–”
“Always, V’Nan,” he vowed. “I’ll wait as long as I must.”
She longed to kiss him one last time. But she knew if she did, she would only be tempted to delay, a moment at a time, until she found herself locked in the dream forever. So she only whispered, “I love you.”
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she was awake.
She left the Palace and followed a game trail outside the Holt’s boundaries. When she was sure she was out of earshot, she gave way to her grief and howled long into the night.
* * *
It hadn’t been true love, she told herself each day, as she struggled to rebuild her life. It had been an illusion, nothing more. She kept repeating the words until she almost believed them. When she felt herself weaken, she would remember how Sylas had deceived her, how he had shaped her dreams like a master crafter, how he had used his knowledge of her soulname to create a beautiful prison. It had all been in service of enslaving her. Perhaps he did love her, but how could she ever love him?
But she did. Or she had. She knew it would only take the gentlest nudge – a word, a sight, a touch – to drive her back to him.
As she walked down to the huts along the river, she told herself that would learn to live without him. It wasn’t the first heartbreak she had endured – though it was by far the worst. But she would endure. She would recover. She would find love in the waking world, even if it was only a poor consolation at first. Or Recognition might strike her like skyfire, and she would forget all about the power of Sylas’s voice. She would find someone who could be her lifemate in every sense. Or if not, at least she would have a child to whom she could devote herself, a fresh root tying her to her body.
The greatest lesson of pain was its impermanence, surely. The aches of her body had long healed. The aches of her soul were beginning to ease as well. She could bear to think of Russet without a fresh stab of grief. The same would happen with Sylas in time.
In time… but Sylas lived apart from time. Did that make his own pain easier or harder to bear?
Whenever she thought of him alone on the astral plane, she felt herself weaken. But he would learn to grow past his pain too. Now that she had set him free from wandering in darkness, his spirit would meet others, and he would rediscover all the other comrades from his time. Sunstream said most spirits preferred to live on a level of thought well beyond all living elves. Sylas would surely find comfort there. And perhaps love. Perhaps by the time Tamsin joined him in the spirit realm, he would not even recognize her soulname.
That thought was the most painful of all. Yet she forced herself to repeat it, until it began to lose its sting.
She went in search of her old friend Minnow, to make amends for her neglect. But when Minnow saw her coming, the river elf smirked and remarked: “So! Ready to stop mucking about in the Palace and rejoin the real world, are we?”
Tamsin turned away without a word and walked back the way she came, even as Minnow called half-hearted apologies.
Without her dreams to occupy her time, she didn’t quite know what to do. She joined Eelgrass and Brookfall on their fishing trips, but she could not bear to drive the killing spear home herself. She sat with Newstar and watched her weave cloth. But she couldn’t imagine herself taking up the loom either. She climbed no higher than the upper platforms of the Grandfather Tree, and practiced her jumps over the safety the bathing pools. She practiced fletching arrows, and found herself comparing the alignment of feathers to the branching fractals of the Multitude. She helped her mother prepare kills, and wondered what secrets she could learn, if only she could read the scripts written in the blood on her hands.
Sleep with the dream-blocking tea was all too brief and unfulfilling. But without the tea, she found she had lost all ability to control her dreams. And again and again, she found herself running through that same forest, a wolf snapping at her heels.
“It’s understandable,” Skywise told her. “You came close to death. Your spirit gets that close to breaking out of your body… it will take it a while to settle down. Drukk, the first time I got husk-shock, it was the better part of a year before I could sleep peacefully.”
It was more than that. She couldn’t trust her dreams anymore. She couldn’t trust anything now. It seemed there was nothing in the entire Multitude that was truly safe and comforting.
“We must make our own safety,” Sunstream told her, when she confessed her fears. “In this world and all worlds. Just as we must make our own peace.”
“I… I just want to stop being afraid,” Tamsin murmured. “I want to stop… fighting.”
“Life is a fight,” Sunstream reminded her. “It’s the nature of our world – of every world I’ve yet glimpsed. The Way, the creeds of the College… all of Haken’s crowd-stirring boasts… they’re all the same song. The only constant in life is its waning – and the fight against it.”
“I used to think at least spirits had peace. Then I met Sylas.”
“From what you’ve said, he has yet to truly accept his state.” Sunstream gave a slight shrug. “But acceptance has its own price. I’ve lived long enough to watch dear friends drift away from themselves in death. Their spirits merge, disperse… transfigure in something different… something beyond our comprehension.”
The thought that she might lose Sylas to the great anonymity of the spirit pool was a claw of grief in her belly. “Not all spirits,” Tamsin said insistently. “Chani… and Winnowill… the Waykeeper…”
“They have chosen to fight in death as in life. But it is by far the harder path.”
Hardness... so there was no escaping it, in life or death.
“Will you be moving back home?” Dewshine blurted out one night at supper, having clearly held her tongue as long as she could.
“The Palace is my home,” Tamsin insisted.
“But… you’ve giving up dreamwalking, Skywise tells me. You haven’t been studying the Scroll. And you’ve been spending so much time out in the world again… I thought–”
“Don’t push her,” Tyldak muttered under his breath.
“I don’t want to give up my studies,” Tamsin said. “I want to understand – now more than ever!”
“Nor should you,” Tyldak said firmly. “But you’ve been badly shaken. And you wouldn’t have been trying to clear your head in the trees if some part of you didn’t long for some fresh air and open skies.”
“Maybe. Maybe Sunstream is right. I should go to the College. There’s much I could learn from Aurek and Weatherbird.”
“But you would not go forever…” Dewshine fretted.
“Of course not. You’re right. I’m not Windkin. My soul is firmly anchored here.”
To her own mild surprise, she found she meant it. After overwhelming her senses with the variety of Sylas’s dreamwalks, she found a great comfort in the familiar sights, sounds and smell of the Holt. Every flower’s scent, every bird’s cry, every beam of sunlight falling through the canopy reminded her of the simpler days of her youth, when she had been content with each day as it came.
Perhaps in time she would recover that serenity. Nothing was truly lost, after all.
When the night came, she retired to her Palace den. And once again she found herself in the dark forest, running through the trees, the snarls of a wolf echoing in her ears. Only this time she could sense something had changed. In place of terror, she felt a burning sense of purpose. The wolf no longer chased her heels, but fled from her, a smoky shadow darting between the needle-thin tree trunks.
She didn’t catch him that night. Nor the next. But she awoke feeling rested, uplifted. After her morning meal, she felt a strong desire to go climbing. Dressed in sensible leathers this time, and armed with her climbing hooks, she slowly worked her way up through the understory, until at last she broke through to clear skies.
* * *
The next time she found herself in the dark wood, she was ready. When she caught sight of the wolf, she ran as she never had before. She pushed herself until she felt the fire burning in her muscles, until her breath came in ragged gasps, until her poor shell ached so much she truly believed she had run back in the waking world.
She could never outrun the wolf before, but she had never had the proper motivation. Before she had been driven by panic and instinct, the unthinking needs of the soul. But what drove her now was a grim determination. She would end this cycle of hunter and hunted. She would kill her fears once and for all.
Suddenly she had run the wolf down. Cornered against a stand of trees, it crouched low, baring teeth of starstone shards, its black fur standing up on its back, shedding tendrils of smoke. Still Tamsin felt no fear as she reached for the dagger at her hip.
She watched as the brilliance of the starstone grew, eclipsing the wolf, turning it a glowing white. She recognized the multi-faceted eyes staring up at her, unblinking.
**You know what you must do,** Sylas told her.
She drew the dagger and held it up. Compared to the wolf’s misty brightness, the blade was black as obsidian.
Something seemed to buzz in her ear. The ground shivered under her feet, and the entire dream seemed to pulse like a living thing.
The dream-wolf snarled, as Sylas’s voice turned harsh in her mind.
**You must!**
Tamsin’s arm began to draw back of its own accord, but she checked herself. The buzzing grew louder in her ear. She felt a prickling urgency at the back of her neck.
The wolf saw her hesitation and snapped its jaws at her. **Do it! Set us both free!**
“Forgive me…” Tamsin whispered.
** V’Nan!**
His use of her soulname compelled her. Her arm came down, and the dagger plunged into mist, over and over, until the wolf broke apart under her blows.
A sharp pain at the nape of her neck snapped her from her dream. The angry buzzing became the enraged shrieks of a Preserver. Its claws were snarled in her hair as it tried vainly to pull her away from the shredded wrapstuff cocoon.
“Bad highthing! Don’t cut wrapstuff!”
She blinked repeatedly, half-expecting this reality to collapse like the previous one. How had she come to be in the cocoon chamber? Had she been sleepwalking again? She looked down at her bared dagger, now sticky with slashed Preserver webbing, then at the cocoon beneath her. The outer layers were in tatters, and her last cut had pierced the innermost veil of wrapstuff. It fluttered away as the sleeping elf stirred.
For a moment only, Tamsin thought she glimpsed the outline of a truly alien creature, with an elongated cranium, and flat face, and eyes like a butterfly. But then she blinked again, and as the last shred of wrapstuff came loose, it revealed a face she never thought to see outside dreams.
No… it can’t be…
Sylas slowly opened his eyes, pupils rapidly shrinking to revealing violet-gray irises. He struggled to focus on her face. At length a ghost of a smile graced his lips.
**Forgive me, V’Nan. I could not wait after all.**
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.