‘It’s too late’ the elf whispered
through the opaque container, and somehow now Celia was able to hear her,
‘Ith’s gone...’
Fear and confusion
were building up in Celia’s chest. All that was left now was the box and the
blue-green rot. The only thing that she could think to do was try to save the
elf, whoever she was.
‘Hollta’
she moaned and the box broke in half. The elf staggered out of the broken
shell and on to the choppy sea. They seemed to be walking on the water now and
the squid-like creature that had held up the box had disappeared. Maybe it
hadn’t been water – perhaps it had been ice, or a marble floor. Now, there was a geometric mosaic on the floor.
In the middle of it was a hole; a wound in the earth that she could scarcely
bear to look at.
She looked down at
her feet. There were no mosaics there, just the unbelievably buoyant water. She
was still bobbing in her dream sea. It now felt like she was looking through a
dirty pane at some distant event. The elf and she were in two different
places. She guessed now what was
happening, she was looking from the dream into reality.
The elf had new
clothes; where there had been green vines there was now a Visneorian officer’s
uniform of some kind, or at least the jacket. Celia looked up to where the elf
was stumbling forward. There was an all too familiar woman standing there.
Bea! But, how? Even in the
dream Celia tensed to attack. Then she looked back at the elf. She seemed to have no way to tackle the
witch. Celia remembered the green vines that had been wrapped around her body –
they looked so much like snakes.
‘Neidr!’ she shouted as loudly as she
could, willing the spell to work through the dream barrier. The green vines
reappeared instantaneously, but this time they were snakes – nine snakes
wrapped around the elf’s olive-brown body. That wasn’t how the spell normally
worked at all.
Celia could no longer
hear what was being said beyond the dream membrane. But she could see the fear
in Bea’s face and the word that her lips formed.
‘Nharo’
The spell would
surely kill the elf; it would flatten her like a swatted fly. What could she
do? The images had begun to slow down and to fade. She clenched her fists in
despair, but then felt something strange in arms and looked down.
Somehow Boo was there.
She sniffed the air expectantly and tried to squirm out of the witch’s grasp.
Celia cried out as Boo’s claws dug into her. She let go for just a moment and
the tree shrew wriggled free and up, jumping through the dream wall into the
marbled room.
She struggled to see what happened next but
now everything was just a blurry mess, the figures behind the barriers nothing
more than streaks and shadows. She felt tears welling up in her eyes – whoever
that elf had been she was undoubtedly both an ally, and assuredly now dead. And
Boo had gone as well, also probably to certain death. At that point she let the
darkness of non-dreaming sleep overcome her, hoping that she would forget what
had happened; hoping that she would forget her failure to save them both.
She woke – finally – with a start. There
was a pressure in her bladder but none on her stomach. She didn’t register what
this meant at first. She looked around. She was in a dark tunnel, on some sort
of stretcher or bier, and all she could see in front and behind were the bright
glow of torches. From where she was lying she could see nothing much of the thin
shapes carrying her even if she screwed up her eyes. They certainly didn’t look
humanoid; but that didn’t necessarily make them enemies. She was travelling
surprisingly fast and didn’t think that trying to get off seemed sensible.
Crying out also seemed like a risky plan; she had no idea if she were a
passenger, a patient or a prisoner. She frowned to herself in the darkness. Her
guts tightened with apprehension – did Owen think that she was dead? The
thought churned up her stomach. She tried to think about something else.
She remembered that
there had been a dream. She tried to hold on to the escaping tail of it; it was
a strange dream about an elf, but it was slinking away. She concentrated on it with all her might.
There had been an elf
in a box on a tumultuous sea, and she had asked for help. What was it that she
had said? That she should help her save someone? And there had been someone
else there, someone terrible? Someone from the well of her deepest fears, she
thought, but she could not quite work out who. And, maybe, there had been
spells... Celia shook her head; it was so hard to remember, and it was just a
dream after all. Why then did it seem so important? She sighed – she’d had more
than enough of dreams.
She lay half-awake in the clammy darkness. Her
enemy’s half remembered face flashed at her from the dream fragments. Something
evil had been near but she could not see clearly what it was. She fought
against the return of sleep, fearing the new dreams that might come.
She felt a pain in
her hand. She reached out to feel the source of it with her index finger – there
was a tiny scratch where Boo had escaped from her arms. It was then that she
realised that Boo had gone and that she would be very hungry again by now. She
only wished that she could remember where she’d gone. It was almost as if she
had jumped into her dreams.
She allowed sleep to
overwhelm her again – she was still so very tired. This time though there was
nothing to dream of for a long while.
No comments:
Post a Comment