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 Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2011 2:22 pm
 Since's Cue's "visitation", Aislin has been having the strangest dreams.
Considering her lifelong habits, that was saying something.
All her life, she'd had particularly vivid dreams, often recurring visits to a world that existed only in her mind. It had always been pleasant there. She had never had a nightmare in her life.
Until now.
Two things were unique about these dreams. The first was that she knew she was dreaming. There was a unique feeling of detachment that accompanied the dreams, the feeling of watching from a distance as things happened, the understanding that none of it was real and yet it was inescapable. The second unique thing was the content of the dreams themselves. Now when she closed her eyes, she found herself immersed in horrors that she could not have possibly witnessed.
There had been a war in Agua Azul, and Aislin had been peripherally aware of it...but it was nothing like this. She glided over views of heartache and battle, famine, misery, blood pooling around the bodies of wolves without faces. The sky was a hazy orange color, and the earth was barren and pitted with smoldering ruins. It looked, in short, like the end of the world.
And yet, there was something else there. A presence. Aislin felt it the way you feel someone walk into a room even if they make no sound -- the undeniable existence of another soul crowding into a space. Someone...no, something was sharing Aislin's dream-space with her.
It took days for her to figure out what it was. Eventually, when she revisited the world of devastation...the light would come. The brilliant dazzling starlight that she had first imagined when Cue had spoken of his vision...it fell down through the sky in a graceful arc and loomed over the ruined earth, dancing and shimmering and calling out for her to follow.
So Aislin followed.
And that was the strangest, most infuriating thing of all. Aislin would follow, but never get far enough to see where the light was truly heading...and then she would awaken, confused and disoriented, somewhere other than where she had fallen asleep. She was accustomed enough to sleep-walking, but it had never been this bad before, and she was beginning to grow a little concerned that one day she might actually stumble off of a cliff or walk into the sea, and what good would the light do her then?
Just now she was wandering -- much as she had been that day when Cue had first met her -- with a hazed look in her eyes and her features slack and sleepy. In her mind she was following the beautiful glow of light...but in reality, she was walking stiff-leggedly into an open patch of meadow.
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Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2011 4:49 pm
 Cumulonimbus was wandering, too, although without the benefit of guiding dreams. He had not seen his dear new friend in a good several days; close and important as they might be to each other, they still had precious little familiarity between them, and he would be hard-pressed to guess where she might be from day to day. And in her absence, he had brooded intensely, for a while. Then followed a day and a conversation that brought upon him an almost mystical lightening of his inner burden, and he was eager to find his friend and talk about it before the shroud descended upon him again - he could feel it hanging, sometimes, felt the tasseled edges tickle at the back of his neck.
So, he wandered about, combing the terrain for a patch of butter yellow, of pale sky blue. And when he finally saw it, he felt his heart leap, and then tremble as he realized she was sleepwalking again. He sat and wondered at her progress.
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Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2011 4:58 pm
Aislin's ears slipped back, her misty eyes drifting haplessly over the terrain, and a low whine caught in her throat. She was caught in a strange place, a deep rift that had opened between dreams and wakefulness, and she struggled to choose one or the other. She was aware of another presence, of eyes upon her, and part of her wanted to run to him....but she was still aware of the brilliant light that hovered just out of reach, and she wanted to run to it, too.
Soon enough, choice was removed from her.
"...Nimbus?" She said, tentatively. It felt like she was whispering across a huge expanse. The dream dissolved around her, the destroyed landscape slowly fading into the normal, boring lands of Agua Azul. For just a brief moment, a ghost of a dream clung to the shadows, and she could swear she saw the writhing faceless corpse of one of the dream-wolves, but then it was gone. She shivered a little.
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:09 am
Right off the bat, he knew that something was different here. His senses were as finely tuned to catastrophe as a deer's or rabbit's, and he could nearly taste in the air a fear, a pall, fuming out from Aislin. Without thinking, he rushed to her, head down, his face bright and pensive. "Aislin!" He sniffed at her heels, her shoulder. "What happened?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:26 am
She collapsed against him, small and vulnerable -- childlike. She buried her maw in the fur of his shoulder and trembled, slightly. "I've had the most awful dream," she said, thickly. "Awful...but wonderful, too. It's...I can't even describe..."
She sniffed and pulled back, flopping to her haunches. She looked at him sorrowfully. "Have you seen it, since...that time?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:44 am
Wired as he was, he had to strain not to react to the sudden flush of wolf across his body with a violent start - Cue had not been cuddled an awful lot as a puppy. Her words bundled him past this neurosis, though. He matched her sorrow with a look of grave sobriety, which darkened at her question. Darkened and gleamed, because he had recently begun to nurture a certain...anticipation about the whole scenario. "Nothing," he said carefully, "barely a twinge." He stared at her for a long moment, with the thoughtful concern of one measuring out a problem. "It doesn't feel gone, though. It feels...expectant."
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:52 am
She nodded, somewhat emphatically. "It is, I think," and then it tumbled out of her like a rush of floodwater before she could stop to think about or filter her words. If anyone would understand and accept what she was experiencing as fact, Cue would -- certainly her family wouldn't. But they didn't have this same powerful shared experience to draw from.
"I keep having the same dream. In it, everything is terrible. There are dead wolves...everywhere. It's like the worst war imaginable, but it's worse than that. Like the whole world has been torn apart. But there's....there's this light," and here she met his eyes, and the earnestness in her own was hard to miss -- some dreams she knew to be folly, but this one was the most real thing she had ever experienced. "And it doesn't exactly talk to me...but it tells me, somehow, that everything will be okay. That it will show me the way out, to somewhere....safe."
She shivered, because she could still vividly remember the blood-stained mud, the craterous earth, the howls of suffering. "And when I wake up, I'm not where I fell asleep. I think it's...trying to tell me we have to leave."
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 12:39 pm
As Cue listened, the grave look on his face darkened; what could this be if not a portent? What doom was coming down upon them? These thoughts were so troubling that he barely had time to think on the strange chance that allowed it would be them who received these messages. "I...is that what it was trying to tell me?" A pang of insecurity bit into him. "But you're right, Ais, I mean, you must be." His worried eyes peered into hers. "We have to go. Soon. As soon as we can."
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 12:44 pm
And that was it? It was that simple? No argument, no 'you're being a silly girl', no 'you know it was just a dream'...just simple, unabashed acceptance. She had the overwhelming desire to rush forward and kiss him all over in gratitude, but she didn't. She was troubled, also.
Somewhere, in the back of her brain, something nagged at her. "Not...not just yet," she said. "We have to be careful. And...we can't just go by ourselves."
Ah, there it was. This was the important bit. "If something bad is going to happen, we have to warn people. We have to get them to come with us."
She thought of her family, of the few other friends she had made growing up here, and an uncomfortable knot rolled up in her stomach. Talking about taking action on a dream was one thing, but actually doing it was too exciting for words. It was baffling and amazing that Cue -- who had always been so nervous -- would be so firm and confident now. She'd never really seen that side of him. She liked it rather a lot.
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 12:59 pm
For a moment, he caught a glow in her eyes that made his heart skitter, and it left him unprepared for the turn in conversation. Running away with Ais would be easy, the easiest thing he'd ever done, but...telling the pack what they'd seen? Trying to convince them to leave? His ears twisted up like dead leaves. "Aislin..." He stared at his feet. "No one will believe us."
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 1:02 pm
"They would!" She insisted, although she knew they probably wouldn't. Who ever would believe either of them about anything, much less this? Certainly not her father or sister. Oh, no! What if they got hurt?
An awful twisting feeling took over her gut. It was so strange to be the one worrying, about anything but especially about something this big.
"...They'll believe you," she said, then, and her whole face lit up with a sort of radiant, inspired joy. "They'll have to! You're always so serious, anything YOU say they'll have to know is real."
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 1:11 pm
Oh, he knew it was bullshit, but how could you not react to that much confidence in you? Nimbus swallowed, faltering in front of her. "That's not going to matter," he cautioned, his gut beginning to twist into a similar formation. "How can we make them believe in a dream?"
And then he remembered Skald.
"Unless...you could convince them you're a Seer, Ais." His voice hitched with nervous optimism. "Or you could find another reason for them to leave. Are they happy here?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 1:17 pm
Convince them....as in, lie? That made her very uncomfortable. Then again, maybe she was a seer. Maybe all of her dreams really were real. Wouldn't that be ironic. She knew this wasn't the case, of course...but sometimes maybe lying was okay, if you did it for the right reasons.
"I...well, I don't know if my friends are. You need to meet them, anyway." She was about to say 'you'd like them' but she wasn't honestly sure that he would. "But...my dad, and my sister...we can't just leave without talking to them and at least trying..."
And then, in another floodgate outburst, "But besides, it's NOT just a dream. You know it's not because you've seen the light too! It's REAL. That's what we have to show them...it's real, and we've both seen it."
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 2:17 pm
He scowled. "But how are we going to do that? They're not...I mean, what do we have to show?" He fought the urge to stand up and pace about, like a caged animal. "You can't make people believe something just because you believe it." He landed a rather hard look on Aislin. "So, what can we tell them that will make them coe with us?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 2:25 pm
She gave him a crestfallen, 'what do you mean you can't make people believe' look. Clearly that was exactly what she had hoped they would do. "Well, then....we convince them that things are bad. Or they will be bad. And that they will be better, somewhere else."
Her brow furrowed. Was this such a stretch, really? Wasn't that basically what had joined them as friends to begin with -- a feeling of not belonging, of there needing to be something more in the world? And if something more really did exist, wouldn't everyone want to find that? "...I mean...even if something terrible doesn't happen, it could still be so much better than what we all have."
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