D U N E


- ☾ -


season of change had begun in Dune. He thinks it all started if not the moment he met Sereia, around that period in time. Even in hindsight, it is hard to pinpoint exactly when these things happened.

How many dreamers had there been since her? Dozens? Hundreds? They had all begun to blur together, their faces and names and landscapes coalescing in the sticky, hazy, wonderful-- and sometimes terrifying-- thing he began to call, simply the Dreaming.

From this nebulous, collective landscape unknowingly shared, and contributed to, by every dreamer, a few key individuals touched the boy in particular. Some dreamers had Dune spellbound, and for whatever reason (being dreams, the reasons were rarely reasonable) they latched fiercely to his memories. Be it the warmth of a circlet pressed like a kiss to his forehead, or the clawing claustrophobia of a maze known with too much familiarity… or  the golden eyes of a girl with an unbearable secret hidden behind her lips.

Why was she so sad?

He did not expect to ever see her again. The problem with Dune’s magic is that it is-- at the moment-- almost entirely out of his control. It was possible to end up in the same dream twice, but highly unlikely. On more occasions than he cared to admit, Dune had tried to choose the dream. It was never to any success. So when he first opens his eyes to a world that seems vaguely familiar, he tries his best to ignore the rush of hope that tickles behind the ribcage.

The landscape itself is new to him. He stands on a beach that spans as far as the eye can see. The sun is just barely kissing the edge of the sea, and the sky above it is lit up in shades of gold and orange that fade at their edges to a deep, rich darkness. Against the shore the waves rush in almost eerily quiet. The sand glitters strangely in the waxing daylight-- when he takes a closer look he realizes it is not sand as he knows it but diamonds and pearl ground very finely.

And when he looks up she is there, standing in the waves with her eyes bright and warm as flames. His heart beats a little faster as he says in disbelief- “Sereia?” He takes a step towards her and the ocean at his ankles is warm as blood and beating, beating, beating...

“Do you remember me?” The dreamers often did not, and even if she did, surely there’s something different about him now. Would she notice the confident draw of his head, the assurance behind his voice? Last time, he spent so much time hiding behind a looking glass, showing her the desert on bird’s wings instead of his face, his voice, the strange little nuances of his heart.

It doesn’t matter if she remembers. It didn’t matter if Warset remembered, or Elena, or Orestes, or any of his dreamers-- not that a small, defiant part of him would ever stop hoping. “Wait, I have something for you.” It takes a bit of dream magic that he’s been practicing. He could not yet bend the fabric of the dream to make matter where there was none, but he could change his own form and had learned to use this for a clever (if painful) workaround.

Dune shifts so that his right side is facing away from her, for the feat was quite gruesome, and from the flesh of his shoulder he grows a crystal. It is small, no bigger than a walnut, but the effort draws sweat from his brow. The hardest part is separating it from his skin, which he does in one quick, fluid motion with a soft gasp of pain.

A moment later, in the space between Dune and the dreamer floats a desert rose, named for the bladelike crystals that formed a shape somewhat like a flower. He had found this particular rose one day in the canyons, and had studied it very closely so that he might one day be able to replicate it in the dreaming. It was not a perfect recreation of the one he had found, but he was proud of himself nonetheless. “It, uh, made me think of you.” He feels suddenly bashful as he meets her golden gaze on the other side of the floating crystal, but where the Dune of last time would have looked away this Dune takes another step forward, and he shyly smiles.


☾

And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?

Sereia

 The sand had crunched as she walked. Its fine granules of crushed diamonds and pearls glitter strangely in the light. They sound beneath her feet like crushed bones between her teeth. Then there is the sea she stands in. It is warm like blood and thick like it too. It rolls more silently than it should and the air is filled less with salt than the smell of metal and ichor. Though the waters are blue, the setting sun paints it gold. Which god did she bleed in her dream?


The girl closes her eyes and thinks of the strange Solterran man whose tears were blood. Whose words cut her like a knife. What would her sisters think of her now? The land was making her soft like the petals of a flower but Sereia did not regret it.


The beach is beautiful, strange and bathed in luminous yet ebbing light. The sky is turning to a bruise, as deep as the sores upon Sereia’s heart. Her soul feels the ache of a life spent misshapen, just to fit within the body in which it was so ill-placed. Is there any part of her that feels connected to another?


It is a melancholy dream that wraps its sullen arms around her sleep addled mind. It is quiet, but for the birds that drift above like wheeling shadows. Their cries are the wail of children or maybe like sirens calling from the deep. To her kelpie the sound is arousing. It is one of innocence, danger and violence, it years for it, for an easy meal. The dream is beautiful. The dream is a nightmare, her kelpie prowling along its edges, singing in Sereia’s bones.


Her eyelashes flutter shut. They have only just closed when he speaks. Sereia. Startled, the girl looks away from her strange sea and up to where he stands. The beach was empty to start, she knows it was, yet here he is looking as if he has always been here. The boy looks like he belongs here better than she.


Dune.


It is not enough to think his name. It comes tumbling from her lips, first as a tentative question and then more boldly, more filled with delight. “Dune.” Her smile comes bright and more beautiful than the dusted jewels upon the beach. She turns to him in the silent sea, she is moving to him, keen, delighted. Until she remembers how her first dream shattered, how it turned vicious and wicked at her kelpie’s call. He changed, he fled, he saw her soul deep sorrow.


She stops, disgraced, embarrassed. Blood flushes hot in her cheeks. “Of course I remember you.” The swan girl murmurs, her nape arched graceful and fine. How can i not? Sereia wants to say. You were the first person I could be close to and not want to… to kill. “I cannot forget you.”  Her confession falls like the twilight. It tumbles from her aching lungs like a wave spilling up upon the beach. The sound of her breath is louder than the surf at her feet.


Her dream makes him different this time. Bolder, brighter, the distance between them closes as he says he has something for her. She watches the way he moves, shyly, secretively. Her dream bends for him, the air bears a new smell now. It is a scent of bending, twisting, forming magic. It lies sour and sweet across her tongue. She leans in, curious, yearning, wanting.


A desert rose. 


No longer does she know if her dream is at her control, or his. Dune is more present than the first time they met. He is bolder, brighter, more solid, like flesh and blood. If she touched him, would it be like waking? And the flower. Oh this strange rose of mineral, with petals pointed and solid. It is beautiful. She tells him so, with awe dusting her lips and mineral light glimmering in her eyes. “Where did you find it?”


Its edges are rough beneath her touch, but she touches it, letting herself feel every imperfect, perfect petal. It is rough and smooth and so much like a rose and yet nothing like it at all. “Thank you.” She whispers at last, when no piece of it has been spared from her awe-struck gaze. Her smile fades until at last, with effort, she lifts her gaze from the rose. “Will you keep it? So that I might find it again. I do not want it to be lost when I wake up.”


Dune steps closer again, his body warm as the hazy sun kissing the sea. Sunset dances across his skin, capturing its reds, setting him aglow like an ember. Sereia might have noticed if she was not looking at the rose, trying to work out which parts of the rose reminded him of her - the sharp petals, like teeth? Or its rose gold colour? Or the carvings of the earth they saw when he showed her his home, hot and sweltering and so alive. She can nearly feel the dust against her salt-slick skin.


“I am glad you came back.” She says and gazes up at him beneath her lashes. Her smile is rueful and too, too wide. The salt-girl hides it beneath her hair, secreting it away with the fluttering twist of her stomach at the rose he gave her. Her nose tucks into her chest, like fingers curling into a fist, anything, anything to stop her desire to touch him again and remember what it was like to be able to touch and not rip.

@Dune <3


 

She was brave and strong and broken all at once
~Anna Funder

D U N E


- ☾ -


e’s-
He doesn’t--

No one has ever said his name like that. No one has ever smiled at him like that. And she’s glowing with that smile, he’s never understood the expression before (nobody glows in solterra unless painted in glitter or gold) but it all makes sense now, this is what they mean- there’s no light literally being emitted but she’s, there’s no other word for it, glowing. He wants to rub his eyes, screw his head on a little tighter. This feels too much like madness.

She remembers him.

Somewhere, Dune’s body sleeps on real sand, pale silver beneath the light of the stars, and that Dune smiles in his sleep. A small, shy smile, smeared with sleep. A warm, gentle breeze tangles his dark hair.

Meanwhile a warm, gentle ghost-breeze tangles his dark dream-hair. The only difference here is the crushed-diamond sand and the glowing girl. It’s a big difference; one world is infinitely preferable to the other.

She likes his gift, marvels over it with more attention that he had expected. The sight tickles him; he always enjoyed giving gifts. Especially when they didn’t cost anything.

“The canyons,” he says simply. It is said that the skin of Solterra, not the sand but the water-chiseled canyons, was so in love with the moonlight that it soaked up that glow, coalescing it with a rough embrace, and beneath the force of mountains the desert rose was shaped. Many saw the crystal as a testament to a love that could never be, and a symbol of patience and dedication.

Dune, crow-like, just saw a pretty thing he wanted to keep. He thinks she might like the story behind it, but he doesn’t feel like sharing it. Perhaps he’s afraid of sentimentality or skewed meanings. He does not want the gift, the gesture, to seem grander than it is. And when she asks him to keep it for next time, his expression is torn between delight and despair. One emotion for the thought of another night together, another dream, and the other for the acute realization of how rare a second dream is- how slim must be the chances of a third!

But despair, in the dreaming, can turn things sour fast, and the last thing he wants is to grapple with a nightmare. He nods and takes back the rose. There are already enough sharp edges to this place, carefully concealed with veils of silk and velvet. There is, he understands, something decidedly monstrous about the girl. But he only has eyes for her light and her softness, her long smooth angles, and he is content to turn a blind eye to the shadows.

“This is how death arrives,” he supposes. “Wearing a pretty face.”

A moment later she says “I’m glad you came back.” And if in that moment he had to choose between a dull life or beautiful death, it’s not clear which he would prefer.

He wants to say too many things: I would have come sooner if I could, or I’ve tried so hard to get here again, or something, anything, but the sight of her is like a hammer to the chest and all the words he grasps at collapse into, simply: “Me too.” He takes another step closer, the shimmering sand crunching like teeth underfoot. She’s curled up like a flower, hidden behind a wild curtain of hair. But he can’t unsee her. He wouldn’t, even if it were possible, even if she asked him to.

The thing about Dune is that necessity has made him greedy. And Dreaming has made him bold. He gently brushes the hair from her face, tucks it behind her ear. He meets her eye for a long moment that stretches thin as glass. The instant it's about to shatter he turns abruptly and trots down the beach, calling behind him “How far does it go?” When she begins to follow he shifts into a gentle lope, and diamonds splay behind them like sea foam in the moonlight.


☾

And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?

Sereia


As Dune smiles in his sleep, a twin smile also passes across Sereia’s lips as she sleeps suspended in the sea. 


As the wind stirs Dune’s hair, so the sea gently tugs Sereia’s with the drifting of the tide. 


There is no outward sign that Sereia is dreaming, but for the smile upon her mouth and the way her lips twitch with dream words. But within her, the girl’s heart flutters against her breastbone. 


Dune tells her of the Canyons, where he found a rose and from it fashioned hers. She remembers her earlier dream, how he flew her through the desert, the canyons, the busy, dusty streets of Solterra. When she woke after that first dream she wondered if they truly looked like he showed her in her dream. She vowed to herself to go one day and see what the streets really looked like. 


Still, you see, she does not think this boy real. Sereia has never even heard of anyone who could dreamwalk, though she has heard fairytales like it. But that was just it, they are merely fairytales. 


Dune deprives her of the story that rises to his lips, hoping to be told. If he had, she would have tumbled into it and fallen in love with the moon and the Solterran canyons. There is no fear of miscommunication here, not when she thinks he is only a figment of her dream. Though he feels something like salvation when he is here. Dune gives her hope, hope that she might one day be able to be close to another, be loved by another and not want to kill them. 


He looks at her and does not see the vicious, dangerous smile, nor the way she moves, feline, predatory. Sereia has spent a lifetime trying to be different, something other than what she was born as - a kelpie. He does not see it, he does not ask her if she eats gods as well as men. Her heart still twinges with Raziel’s question. She still flounders, stumbling over his words again and again in her nightmares. But this is no horror of a dream. She is determined not to let it succumb to horror as her last one did. She wants to keep Dune as long as she can.


Me too, he says and all she can think is if he will come again. The question is there it is upon her lips it begs to be asked. But the boy, her dream boy, steals her words away as he sweeps her forelock back behind her ear. Ah, she cannot remember how to breathe. The air tangles in her throat. The butterflies in her stomach turn themselves over and over and over. Does he see her? That kelpie part of her that makes her monstrous. Does he?


Does he?


Dune holds her in that look. Long enough that she sees verdant greens and sunset oranges flecked across his irises. Long enough that she wonders where she has seen such colours before in the sun as it kisses the sea in slumber. there in the momentary flash when the sun disappears fully below the sea and nighttime blooms. She will always look for him there, now, she thinks. There in the moment just before sleep. It might become and even hope, that should dream of him that night.


Just when she can bear the way he stares at her no more, he steps back. Suddenly she breathes out that tangled breath he snagged within her throat. He turns, trotting dark and sleek up the beach. She does not think, even for a moment, before following him. Running after him, her gilt and blue tail catching in the strange wind. Dune asks how far it goes and she has no idea. She throws her chin up and laughs and does not feel the familiar need to hunt him, stalk him, feast upon him. No, she laughs and feels the sting of spraying diamonds as she flees up the beach after him. Reaching him, boldly, bravely, she reaches in, nudges his shoulder with her muzzle and marvels at how he smells of sand and earth and cold, winter nights. 


“I don’t know, but I race you to the end of this dream.” And she runs, pushing her legs as fast as they might go, until it is nothing at all like running, but flying. 


At the end of the dream is a lighthouse that turns its light slowly, slowly through the fading twilight, casting shadows that fly like monsters, dance like elves and drift like moons. Beware, beware, beware it silently warns with its every rotation. Beware the girl, beware the boy, beware the strange dreams that are nothing like reality.


@Dune <3


 

She was brave and strong and broken all at once
~Anna Funder

D U N E


- ☾ -


er laughter floats past bright as a cloud wrung of all its rain. Like there was nothing else in the world- no sorrow, no worry, not even memory. Just being, light and merry and here. With Dune. And her touch, warm and friendly, as though they were just children… well her touch he chooses to not think about. Some things were better enjoyed in the moment, not clung to.

His ears perk as she proposes a race. He snorts. Dune was never one to turn down a challenge or a dare-- or a race. She didn’t stand a chance, and he was not nearly enough of a gentleman to let her win. “Keep up, little fish.”

Little fish? He’s off before he can ponder the origins of that, too busy winning the race; in fact so intent on victory that he forgets this is a dream. He forgets they could be running a long time. They could be running forever, or at least it would feel like forever when they first wake from the reverie. They could spend a lifetime running without needing to rest... without needing to eat or sleep or even breathe if they don’t wish to..

They also aren’t bound to any physical rules here. Dune runs faster and faster just as easily as standing still, breathless only from the exhilaration of the dream and the warm tickle of Sereia’s breath on his shoulder. Her gleeful presence spurns him on. Truth be told it distracts him, too, but only in the loveliest way.

The sea to their left is but a blue blur now. The fine diamonds beneath their hooves upturn and shatter beneath their force and speed, remaining suspended opalescent and shimmering in the air behind them. Like a fairy path, something from the fables. But Dune is not looking back- he’s charging forward, ever toward the end of the dream.

They run so fast they are no longer touching the ground. It’s subtle at first, hard to notice. You spend your entire life rooted to the ground (well, at least one of them did) you expect it to always be there. Meanwhile the diamonds are still shattering to fine dust that billows like smoke below the dreamers, a shimmering dream road that rises to meet their hooves. It’s not until the smallest incline of his head, as he reaches for Sereia’s gaze, that Dune realizes they’re above the earth. They’re flying.

The sound of his laughter reaches daringly for the sun.

As they draw close to the lighthouse it paints them in alternating stripes of brightness and shadow, something about it like the spinning of a roulette wheel, or the prophetic plucking of leaves from a flower: Loves me- Loves me not- Loves me- There is a heaviness to the come and go of the light, and Dune’s laughter fades. Struck by a fierce desire for the race to not be over, Dune slows- or perhaps he just wants, for the first time, to give the victory to another.

☾

And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?

Sereia



As she runs in the dream and laughs, Sereia does not wonder if her real body twitches or laughs where it hangs, suspended in the deep blue of the ocean. She does not think of what normal living is like. For Sereia, in this moment, this dream is her reality. There is nothing more than this. She is so asleep, so given over to and committed to this dream that she tumbles into it. It is a rabbit hole that pulls her deeper, deeper down. She sinks, with a smile upon her real body and laughter that peels from her sleeping lips and rises in silent bubbles to pop upon the sea’s surface. 


Dune is ahead of her. It is so easy to chase him, the huntress part of her thrives upon the chase. Though she feels the drive, she does not fear it, not in this place where Dune is the only boy she has never wanted to eat. She pursues him, fast, fast, faster than her kelpie self could go and yet he is faster. Always he edges away, always he is out of her grasp. Maybe it was a sign she should have heeded, for are dreams not full of them sometimes? The boy is out of her grasp, he is not for her to catch.


But she runs after him anyway and laughs until her lungs burst and the diamond dust he kicks up clings to her sea-salt skin. She glitters like a cave wall dusted in precious stones. It takes her less time to see that they are flying. Her eyes close as she rises, her breaths snag in her lungs. She can breathe in any way she chooses, but this, oh this astounds her. There is no water to cradle her, nothing that holds her. She flies effortless and the air feels like nothing at all. 


Dune is slowing, and she approaches faster, faster as he grows slower, slower. The lighthouse blinks at the pair as it turns. It bathes them in warm light. Beneath its glow she slows to a stop and taps the roof of the lighthouse with a toe. It chimes like a bell, telling of her victory. She listens to the strange noise and tips her head back as she floats, relishing her victory. Her gaze tips to his as the light sweeps round, it bathes him in gold where he floats. A flash, like lightning, illuminating him starkly, fiercely. Leto’s eyes grow serious as she holds him in the warmth of her wide, wide eyes. “You look like a god like that,” Sereia breathes. “I thought you were a figment of my dream but what if you are something more.” A moment more she gazes at him before she then looks away. It is too much like tearing her gaze away. It takes too much effort. “I have never had dreams like this.” her voice drops to a shy whisper. “Thank you, whatever you might be.”


Little fish. His words creep back and they steal the smile from her lips. She looks out over the sea and obediently it turns to grass, to a wild meadow devoid of fish or kelpies like her. Still the diamond dust of their beach run hangs in the air, now it is like a fine, dawn mist over the open meadow. Slowly Sereia looks back to him, with lovely eyes but a figure too slim. “Why did you call me little fish?” She asks, her voice small and sad. “Are you mocking me?” Now her voice drops to a whisper and she hopes that he is not. But if he is a god or her conscious, his reasons could be anything at all. The light flashes across his body, again and again. It beats like a heart that grows faster, faster. She then realises it is her own, how it races, how she feels it more than she should. She is nervous, even here. She aches beneath the name he called her. Oh, she thinks, is this where it becomes a nightmare again?

@Dune <3


 

She was brave and strong and broken all at once
~Anna Funder

D U N E


- ☾ -


t was not often like this for Dune. This complete and total abandonment of reality. This forgetting, even for a moment, that it is a dream. That he is an intruder, a hitchhiker, a ghost. Always he can follow the thread back to his real body, which shifts in its sleep and inhales the scents of home-- wet ash from the fireplace, the thin straw of his bed, and, from outside the window, sage and sand. But sometimes he gets so caught up in the magic he forgets himself.

And so if he looks like a god it does not entirely surprise him, for in moments like these he feels like a god. He is orphan-turned-beggar-turned-jack of all trades and master of dreams. Why not take another step up, claim himself a god? Here, beyond the realm of contestation; Here, where there are no rules at all, and no one to challenge him.

It’s the sound of her victory that stirs him from the reverie. The warm chime spreads from the lighthouse and hangs as no sound does in reality. Like the sky, it tricks the senses into thinking it is within reach; Dune almost reaches out his nose, convinced for a moment that he can touch this sound, speak to it.

It is a dream, it is all a dream.

The light fans out behind him, casting a halo in his unwieldy mane that billows in the seaward breeze. “There’s always something more to everyone.” Like whatever insidious thing she hides from him, swept behind the curtain of her long mane and revealed only in the briefest of glimpses. There is a reason, there must be a reason, why her dreams always feel something like a battlefield. Perhaps this is why he is reluctant to show her the truth of things, that he is not of this dream but flesh, stirring far away in his simple bed. Knowledge is the only currency that holds weight in dreams, and once given it can never be taken back.

Sereia thanks him, and while courtesy demands he say “you’re welcome,” the words don’t come. Dune is not here to be benevolent. His reasons are entirely selfish- she fascinates him, and in dreams he always sought that which intrigued him most. “Of course,” he says, letting her thanks slide off and away.

And then his mistake comes back to bite him, hard, in places uncouth. “Why did you call me little fish?” He blinks dumbly. “Are you mocking me?”

“I don’t know,” he says quickly, “no, of course not! It didn’t mean anything,” his voice is gently pleading, and without thinking too much about it he reaches out and tugs gently at her mane as his mind grasps for some reason that might satisfy her. “You’re by the sea,” he remarks finally. It is something he had not realized as true until it was said out loud. But as he listens carefully now he can hear her sea outside the edge of this dream. The constant movement, the crush and roll, echoes in the consistency of light here-- look close enough and see it flickers gentle and rhythmic as the pulse of the ocean.

And like the ocean as the storm draws in, the light grows frenetic, the shadows feverish. The pulse beats faster, urgent, and Dune has a sinking feeling. The lighthouse begins to crumble, bricks falling from the facade one after the other. “It didn’t mean anything,” he says again, this time annoyance edging into his voice-- annoyance with himself, for ever using that stupid, stupid name.


☾

And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?

Sereia


There’s always something more to everyone.


Dune says it sagely and in that moment she hates his wisdom and the truth he speaks. She cannot deny how right he is. It is a truth about her and it stings, needling her deep in the places she is most vulnerable. He uncovers her with such a comment. It feels too close to exposing her, as if he lifts her forelock from her face to see her kelpie mouth beneath. 


Sereia snaps back, as if he has reached out to touch her and move her hair from her cheek. But he is still stood too far back. Instantly she is ashamed and wishes only for things to return to how they were a moment before. Before he called her a fish, before he spoke such wounding truths into the beautiful places of her dream.


Sereia is looking to her feet, no longer the beauty of the dream enchants her. No longer can she bear to look at him when he suggests she might be something more. Isn’t it strange, she thinks, that she should fear him when all he is is a part of her mind, a guide navigating her way through her thoughts. Even guides take you to painful places you do not wish to go. 


And that is it. When she looks to her feet, away from him, embracing his truth, thinking herself a fish is when her dream begins to crumble. The rotating light of the lighthouse, beating like her pulsing heart, crumbles, heartbroken into the ether of her dreamscape. 


He says the name means nothing, but Sereia does not believe him. Not when he has said there is always something more to everyone . He knows. Of course he does. Why did she let herself think he did not? She likes him because beside him he forgets what she is, but Dune has always known. So why does she hurt now? It hurts because the name feels like a mockery. He denies that too and as she slowly lifts her face to look to him, she is not sure whether she believes him. Not when her dream turns into a nightmare around them - for that is what nightmares do, isn’t it? They play back your greatest fears, they mock you, kill you, hurt you, terrify you. 


Then, annoyed with her, he tells her the name means nothing. She knows she should accept what she is, that she should not let such things hurt her. But from him it is a deep, deep wound. He cuts her to the quick and makes her a fool.


Sereia steps back, away from him, away from his annoyance, the name little fish. She wishes she could like it, she wishes she could smile with him, feel sweet and special. But no, it only hurts her and makes him angry. She takes another step back as her dream continues to crumble and change and grow dark and frantic. The sea falls away, it drags the beach with it, fast, fast, fast. It happens as she takes her other step away from him and suddenly she is falling over the edge of the cliff the beach has made. She is tumbling down, down, down, falling out of her dream. She startles awake as her stomach drops and then catches. 


Sereia looks around. Deep beneath the ocean, in her place of sleep and rest, there is no pulsing lighthouse, there is no boy who calls her little fish. Her stomach twists with the memory and she swims away, up towards the surface, trying to shed her dream, her sadness, the deep aching loss. She liked Dune, but like all things in her mind, he reminded her of the one thing she wishes she wasn’t.

Above all, she laments that she does not have the gift he gave her. She longs for it to be real, to feel its sharp edges, its intricate layers of rock petals. As always, Sereia wants what she cannot have. 


@Dune


 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana

D U N E


- ☾ -


he snaps, primitive, then collapses in on herself like a dying star. She wilts in the span of seconds. Spring to summer to autumn to winter-

to winter-

to winter.

He hates the way the childlike joy leaves her eyes as she looks down, and the way the dream shifts and darkens to meet her mood. He hates the way she takes a step away from him. “What’s wrong with you, I--” Another step and away she goes, a white star tumbling down into the darkness.

-

Dune wakes with a start and a snarl. “Damnit.” Pure impulse, no thought; he picks up a red ceramic bowl and throws it into the wall. It shatters, spooking the stray cats that had been dozing in his cluttered, dingy, hovel of a home. The very first light of day streams in through the massive hole in the roof, illuminating the dust drifting down from the ceiling, unsettled and apathetic.

“You idiot,” he fumes as he opens the door and steps out into the sleepy predawn morning. “She’d rather step off a cliff than be with you a single second more.” He shakes his head and eases into a trot; the soft sound of his hooves in the sand replaces the scathing self commentary.

Nothing to do now but get to work, and throw himself into it so thoroughly he would have no time to think of pretty dreams and pretty girls and all the other things he’d never have.

Still, even knowing this, he can’t unclench his teeth.


☾

And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?