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Exploring, Part Four.

It was a very long time before Aquene awoke. She should have felt sore and weary from the sleep on the stones, but they were smooth and very warm. It had been comfortable and nice, and her muscles now tingled lightly from the refreshing nap.

Why was she still in here? Aquene sat bolt upright with some panic at this discovery, she had almost felt like she'd been back in her own bedroom! But she was still here?

The crystals littered across the roof still lit the caravan with a warm glow, and it helped soothe her. She was still sitting in a cavern. There wasn't any monsters or anything.

She stood up to stretch one half of her body as she used the other for balancing, then switched sides, feeling as if most of her body was still trying to sleep. Aquene was dry all over from the damp outside and very comfortable in here, even if she was starting to feel a bit hungry.

Aquene might have been more concerned about being hungry if her mind wasn't starting to swim again with everything she'd seen. It was like a dream... but... but... it was real!

She didn't even understand what it was all supposed to mean. That she had seen someone who was her but was older like Tiegan but still it was her?

It all felt very important to Eeenie. She started to replay it all over and over and over in her head. That way she wouldn't forget it. Neith had taught her that, that if you repeated something in your head, you would remember it later. Eeenie could also remember Neith's phone number and her address!

Right now she had to remember the strange dreams. The toddler started to pace up and down the giant chambers, muttering, unaware that she'd been gone for hours...

____

Meanwhile, a very frantic Neith had called every elf on the property. She and they hadn't much trouble in tracking Aquene, the toddler wasn't exactly hard to find with all of the distruction to the garden she'd left behind, but they'd reached a cliff face. Aquene had vanished there.

The elves, all fifteen of them, and Neith hacked away at the blackberries growing around the cliff. If she had decided to crawl through the forest of thorns, as Neith half expected her to after finding thorns pushed aside back in the garden, they'd break it all down and reach her!

Late at Night



The little girl had been put into a warm soft bed piled with matteruses, cooled in the humid night by a cool breese. Nearby, hanging across the window as a sort of natural curtian, branches of jasmine, lavender and strings of lemongrass woven through had been pegged up along a wire for that very purpose. It was very peaceful in there now, once Neith had been dragged away from her fussing position near Tiegan.

Aquene hadn't been distressed outwardly, and that only worried Neith more. There wasn't any reaction at all, other than hungery, and then Aquene had crawled into her bed.

While Neith sat up and fretted, Aquene lay awake. She was very restless and stared out at the sky, watching what she could see of it. Stars twinkled at her, sometimes a star would fall down, sometimes something flew across the sky. Sometimes Aquene saw moments from earlier, fragments and silly things. After those flashes, Aquene compulsivly got up and would rearrange her dolls and their assesseries on the floor to match it.

It lasted for hours, though Aquene never knew, hours of staring at the stars, flashbacks, dolls being moved into new positions. Her wings had begun to flutter madly, beating three times their usual pace, another thing that Aquene didn't notice.

The moon finally moved so that it illuminated the room with cold silver light. The light on Aquene had an odd effect on her, her skin paled, her hair grew more yellow, her orange eyes sparkled, the falling sparkling dust from her wings seemed to vanish under the brightness. It woke her up further, woke her up for the rest of the night...

Dear diary

I found i could touch dreams. cool huh? it was an accident I made a dream mad by accidently getting it in a pickle jar with vinager. It turned into a nightmare and made me have a bad dream the night after when I let it go. So I chased it and put it back in a jar. (a clean one!)

Then i realized it was a dream. But I wasn't dreaming it. I could only see it because it was covered in the wing-dust. (oh i forgot when i cought it it was under my wings and the jar got dust in it and that's how the dream got covered in dust) and the wing dust on the jar trapped it inside. So i tried to find another dream.
they like my wings. they only come out at night too. the more i looked for them the more i saw them and then i started to see them everywhere even when they were away from my wings. now at night when i look outside i see hundreds of dreams just drifting around. and they have feelings. love. hate. anger. wonder. every emotion. the closer to me the stronger it is. the nightmares have a lot of fear and are angry- they dont like nice feeling dreams near them.

and as i looked at them i would hear voices in my head. but not from dreams. like i was hearing lessons about dreams. it was like someone was teaching me but they werent with me ether. i learnt that nice dreams liked to be reused it made them feel flattered and they live forever so they dont mind if you keep them in containers for long times either. you can find the dream in the dream it made and it likes to be played with like a pet and tickled as you dream with it. the teacher in my head said some people make friends with dreams and never have to trap them. (it looks like it does in the sky- like a firefly in colors.) and that dreams are not animals or humans or anything we understand. dreams are for ever and they mix with each other or they seperate to go on their own and there are never hard feelings or wars or anger at each other. but the angry dreams do get angrier if you treat them bad so I have to be careful.
no one knows you can catch and hold and play with dreams in dreams either. the world is the dream creation but the dream is still there creating it and it likes to be petted as it makes you a dream.
but new dreams are made all the time as the world dreams new things for itself and there are young dreams as well as old dreams so they do have ages but they never die. maybe thats why they like to mix and split and change. teacher thinks so.

but that is all the teacher told me in my head. i wrote it down so i can read it over again. i have not tried any of it yet just put a dream in a jar that i liked. teacher was right- dream liked it. i could feel it feeling content. do gaians know dreams like to be caught? or do they not have wing-dust? you need wing dust in jars or containers or on hands to catch dreams in normal world. but not in the dream world. strange. but i thought i would tell you diary about the dreams and how they are starting to play with me.

eenie.

ps- nightmares are made because of bad dreams in the world about war and evil and that stuff. but teacher says bad and good dreams still mix.

It was two in the morning and all alone amongst the frost and the snow, a girl sat there in her winter clothes, staring fixedly at the sky. To an observer she was staring at nothing- clouds covered the stars. Maybe an observer would be worried that she was seeing things, delusional, or sleep walking.

The observer might be right too- Aquene was seeing things. Hundreds of things. As bright and as beautiful as the stars, but in all the colors of the rainbow, dancing around in the sky, some moving slow and some fast, some high up and some lower down. Some flew in formations, some were alone, there were even 'highways' of these bright things as they mimicked the car lights on the highway below.

Fleeting emotions touched at Aquene's senses as dreams passed by close to her. Sometimes a dream would come right up to her and play with her wings for a moment, or hover close to her nose as if it were inspecting her, sometimes she even felt it push into her sleepy mind to see if it could encourage her to sleep. But she was stubborn. She wanted to watch the dreams and not experience them. So the dreams would move along to find someone else, taking their emotions with them, and leave her there on the roof.

Aquene yawned a huge yawn and curled up closer to the warm stone of the chimney. She wasn't sure what useful stuff she was learning by watching. Some dreams apparently liked to copy lights. Some liked to do what she did- inspect and observe. Some were loners. Sometimes she'd see two dreams dance around each other for a moment and then with a little explosion of light, blend together, becoming one dream with mixed emotion. Aquene even witnessed a complex-feeling dream split into five separate small dreams with the emotions splitting up five ways. It was interesting. She had caught one of the five parts in her little peanut butter jar. It felt kind of good. Not overly good, just good.

So did the warmth of the fire below the chimney, now that she thought about it. It felt very nice in the cold. She felt sleepy and content up here with that to huddle against. And that was where she fell asleep.

Early the next morning Aquene woke up, stiff, frost covered, but still safe and well on the top of the roof. If she'd dreamt she couldn't remember it now. With stiff limbs she unattached herself from the brickwork, floated down to her window, slipped in and slipped into her bed. It was nice out there but it was much softer in her bed. She'd write about her night later.

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