Not Straightforward
| Not Straightforward | |
|---|---|
| Date of Scene: | 27 July 2015 |
| Location: | In dreams~ |
| Synopsis: | Seishi Tamashige, the dream-rider, comes upon a prince who knows he's dreaming. Things that begin pleasantly don't always end so. |
| Cast of Characters: | Mamoru Chiba, Seishi Tamashige |
Wherever it was last, right now the dream's decided it's in a field bordered by the forest primeval, just past dusk, and fireflies drift in lazy lines through the summer air. The sky is clear and the stars are bright and impossibly numerous, the constellations strange, unrecognisable. The moon is full and its light is warm, a gentle silver; distant laughter rings through the night, and drums echo from across the hills.
Waiting in the field, there's a dark youth dressed in bright, rich colors, slender and graceful. He's gazing up at the moon, holding a bright golden thing in one hand, occasionally looking down at it. Checking the time. He's alone, but he is most certainly waiting. Though the light is silver, the colors are vibrant and true: a thing possible with dreams, or with magic, or with both.
Layers of details. The closer attention's paid to something, the more real it becomes.
Into the peace of evening comes the rhythmic swish-thud of hoofbeats in the grass: a rider in red, on a dark bay horse.
Seishi honestly hadn't been sure what to expect. O-Yasu's explanations of what she's supposed to be doing and how she's supposed to do it tend to be impatient; he's warned her that dream-riding can be dangerous, that there's a risk of getting lost in the dreams of others. From the strange landscapes she's crossed to get this far, she's begun to get a sense of what he meant. This dream, though... this place seems tranquil, and she's let her horse slow to walk.
A dream as lovely and peaceful as this one can't possibly have been touched by the enemy's corruption. Which means there's no reason for her to be here, but at least it's a chance to pause and get her bearings. As much as that's possible.
So here she is, a slim figure dressed in red samurai garb, long dark hair pulled back from her face in a high ponytail tied with red cord. She reins in the horse (its tack owes more to Tokyo's mounted police than to the era suggested by her clothes) when she sees the young man waiting there and realizes that she's intruding on something. Her mouth opens, then closes again without a sound - should she say something, or would it be best just to leave?
The horse stamps beneath her, reflecting her uncertainty in the way it shifts in place and won't quite stand still.
The youth's bearing is regal, princely; he turns at the sound of the hoofbeats, but it's slow and unworried. His face is beautiful, and on closer look, his garments are indeed those of royalty, faintly middle-eastern, ancient. There's a sword at his side.
His expression is puzzled, but not especially worried. "Are you lost?" he asks, caution coloring his tone. "You don't belong to Elysion."
The ground had been perfectly flat before, but now it's not; it's hilly and complicated, like miniature earthworks. She'll have to dismount if she wants to approach. "You're welcome if you mean no harm."
She does neither - dismount or approach - but she does loosen the reins enough to let the horse stretch its head down and snuffle dubiously at the ground before its hooves.
In the saddle, the rider inclines her head respectfully. "I don't mean any harm, I promise," she says. "I apologize for trespassing like this. I'm not *lost,* exactly, more like..." Her head lifts, and she looks around her at the moonlit field, the bordering forest and distant hills. "...wandering."
Her eyes come back to his, dark in the silver light. "I was looking for something," she explains, feeling that at least she owes him the courtesy of the explanation.
"You may yet find it," says the prince, and his tone is wry but bittersweet. He looks up at the moon again, and then at what is, in fact, a pocketwatch, shaped like a stylized sun. It vanishes somewhere in his long jacket. "She's not coming tonight, and my guard will miss me soon. If you stay here, it won't be pleasant long. A lifetime is so very brief, but dreams come back forever, don't they?"
He starts walking slowly, glancing back; the ground's smoothed out again, easy and flat, the turf spongy and the earth rich. "You may accompany me, if you wish, but there's no telling when it will all fall apart."
Complicated emotions flash across her face, those dark eyes widening momentarily in something like surprise. He knows he's dreaming? She almost asks, but then thinks better of it, and just gathers up the reins and nudges her mount back into an ambling walk that soon pulls her up alongside him. "It's definitely not here," she says. "If it was, I'm sure that things wouldn't be this peaceful, even temporarily."
Once again, she glances around, to one side and the other, contemplating the landscape and the ominous implications of what he's said. "...would she have come if I hadn't interrupted?" she can't help asking. "If so, then I'm doubly sorry."
"She doesn't always. She's always here later, but that's what you won't want to be here for. This part is mine for now, and he might remember where it came from, if he can find her, or if she can find him. He won't remember this," the young prince says, and he's unconcerned, not accusatory, not upset. This is apparently the way of things. Or maybe that's just the way this dream works.
His hands clasp behind his back as he strolls. "You're not from here," he says again, contemplatively. "No one's ever come in from the outside, not this deep. I wonder if the true end is approaching. I've been waiting a very long time."
The laughter in the distance, the drums, the sounds of nighttime celebration in a land of eternal summer, they've all fallen silent. Still, fireflies float in the air, lazily marking out different constellations, an old, old world, forgotten by everyone.
The scenery's different without having changed; they're walking through a rose garden in full bloom, the air headily sweet, a beautiful palace garlanded with ivy and tipped by pennants bright in the nighttime; the very ground hums with magic; the prince breathes it. This world holds its breath.
"At least you know how to find what you're looking for. Maybe in your waking life, you can teach him," he says wryly, glancing up at the rider with the slightest of smirks.
The horse turns his head to whuffle at the roses; he probably wasn't going to try eating them, but she checks him with a gentle tug at the reins anyway. "I'm not sure I do know," she admits, answering his wry smirk with a lopsided and rueful smile. "Or what I'm supposed to do when I find it. But I have to look. Otherwise I wouldn't go trampling across people's dreams like this."
It feels suspiciously apropos to say it, here in the midst of the rose garden. This isn't a place to be riding, but Seishi's not at all sure what might happen if she dismounts. Better not to risk it. She reins her mount in a little instead, falling behind the prince rather than crowd into the space between the rose bushes.
"...If I meet him," she ventures after a moment of hesitation, "I could try to tell him something. I don't know if I'd recognize him, though. Or if he'd believe me."
The prince stops and turns to regard Seishi, up on her horse. His eyes are the color of Earth's oceans, ancient and renewing, blue and depthless, bright in the dusk of his impossibly beautiful face. His expression is solemn. "Don't tell him about this. But tell him about dreams. He'll believe you. This isn't his yet, and he needs her to help him find it."
One long-fingered hand, slender but callused from swordplay, reaches into the hedge next to him and carefully pulls free a rose as red as blood. There are no marks, no scratches on his hand when he withdraws it. He steps closer to Seishi, free hand coming up to let the horse snuffle at it, then carefully stroking its forehead, its long face; his other hand offers her the rose. "And you'll recognise him."
The horse's breath feathers warmly against the skin as it smells the hand it's been offered to smell, and then it stands politely still and allows the touch to its face, no longer at all uneasy. Shifting the reins to one hand, Seishi leans forward a little in the saddle and reaches to close her fingers carefully on the stem of the offered rose. "Okay," she says - just that, for a little while.
She looks down at the rose as she lifts it closer to her, silent for a long few moments as she studies the elegant curl of its petals, breathes in its fragrance like it's a sign she needs to engrave into her memory. "I don't get it," she says at last, with another lopsided little smile, "but maybe I will when that time comes. I'll try, at least."
"You will," the boy-- really, he's not so much older than Seishi, is he? But he's not real, but he is. Who knows how old he really is? But in this moment, he's very much a boy, because there's a teasing lightness to his voice, full of mischief. "Always do your best! And even if your best still isn't enough and you lose everything, even if you die, the time will always come around to try again. Never lose hope."
The rose is thornless and perfect, strangely real, a solid connection to something alive and whole and unchanging at its core.
The scenery's changed without calling attention to itself; gradually Seishi will become aware of noise in the distance again, but it's no longer laughter and music and the drums of celebration: the voices are screams and shouts, the percussion is war drums and the clang of steel against steel and stranger metals not of Earth, and the roses all around her are white, the greenery turned silver. The bright moon above isn't the moon, it's enormous and blue and white, and the stars are cold and shining steadily. The palace isn't the ivy-wreathed multicolored celebration of life; it's a different palace, one of luminous white stone, lit orange and red from fire raging within.
The young prince isn't in the brightly colored garments anymore, but navy blue and silver armor, and he's at the top of a set of stairs she can see from there, sword in hand and jumping in front of a girl made of white and silver light, a girl who's silent with fear and desperation. Her hair is so very long, made of molten moonlight, and her diaphanous dress is smudged with ash and torn and muddied at the hem.
The woman they're facing down must be eight, nine feet tall, riotous flow of red hair spilling down her back and magic clearly twisting the air around her to darkness. Her sword is already on the downward plunge, committed to killing the girl, and instead it plunges through the heart of the young prince--
--the dream rejects Seishi violently.
Seishi's reaction as the dream changes around her is nothing reasoned or considered. If she took even a moment to think, she'd understand that *this* is exactly what O-Yasu meant when he warned her about getting too caught up in other people's dreams, but even though the prince himself told her, she can't see this violence play out in front of her and not do *something.* It's reflex, the way she leans forward and digs her heels into her mount's sides to urge him forward.
The horse fights the command, crow-hopping and tossing its head, and in that moment she understands two things clearly: she will not make it up those stairs in time to do any good, and even if she *could,* her tessen is tucked uselessly in her belt and she does not have a hand free to draw it, not without casting away the rose he gave her, something she knows instinctively she *must not* do.
She watches helplessly, crying out as the sword comes down. "No--!"
With an equine scream, the wild-eyed horse rears and then bolts.
At home in her bed, Seishi Tamashige wakes up with a jolt, clutching a perfect red rose in her hand.
