****
The Captain that guarded the door didn’t follow him in, and Quartz didn’t ask them to. He wasn’t here to interrogate anyone, just to bring water. Just to keep captives hydrated so they didn’t die in an untimely way and inconvenience everyone in the Negaverse.
Hvergelmir of the Cosmos was the knight in this room. He felt an unpleasant tightening in his gut about this visit, one he recognized as the ever-familiar shadow of fear. He had been a member of that knightly order, once — before he’d ever known there was an order to have a membership in. Before he’d known there was anyone else, fighting monsters. He’d worn a white uniform. He wondered how hers would look. The same as his, gold bandolier sash over a white bodysuit, silk trailing from cuffs? Or would it be different, some variation on the theme?
The room he entered was dark.
There were creepy puppets hanging from the ceiling all around — and at the center of it, the young woman in question, shackled wrists and ankles to a chair. There was blood marring the ground under her chair and to one side, and down that arm from an injured hand. Quartz tapped on an LED touch lamp attached to the wall inside the doorway and shut the door.
She squinted at him and it was terrifying.
Her brow furrowed like she was looking at something that didn’t compute.
I know you, he thought. I don’t know anyone, and I still know you. Why do I know your face?
“Dionysia?” she said in the middle of the silence. He took a frightened step back.
When he didn’t answer, she waited a little longer, then asked, “Do you remember who I am?”
“Who are you?” he answered, haunted, like she was Jacob Marley’s ghost.
“Hvergelmir Knight of the Cosmos,” she gave back, uncertain but still evidently hopeful.
“How do I know you?”
“Dreams,” she suggested. “Dreams of the future, five years from now. We’re Cosmos knights. We’re friends.”
No. That’s not how I know you.
He stared longer. Wondered. Studied her for some sign. She seemed concerned.
The edge of the temple platform ran with crenelated stone. It offered a mesmerizing view into space, and Dionysia went to the edge to look out.
That was when he saw her, standing there. The young girl.
It wasn’t his imagination this time. She had shimmering, frost-pale hair in a thick braid down her back, quiet golden eyes, and an ill-fitting robe of many colors over top of a grubby brown shirt and pants. Her feet were bare. She was looking out over the crenelated parapet, and this time when Dionysia peered out, he could just see the faint image of a planet that almost seemed to be below them.
In the vision at his Wonder — he would swear it was this woman. But that vision hadn’t been of something in the future; the little girl he’d seen was no more than ten years old, at best.
“No,” he said in a far away voice, “You stowed away on my island. You were a child.”
She looked unnerved by his staring — unnerved and profoundly confused. He came forward, intent on giving her water. He could puzzle this over later —
“I stowed away? You’re remembering me from another life?”
He didn’t know. How was he supposed to know? With so few memories, and no context for them, how did Quartz know where the vision he’d had in space had come from, or what it was, or how?
“I’m remembering you,” he said vaguely. “That alone’s an occasion.”
