Melantha

wake

Someone is dead,

and even the trees know it.

The trees have a dark and marching confederacy and she stands at the edge of the woods. There is a road, there is always a road, it both rises and falls from where she stands, but what she knows is the wood and the verge and the bracken. Something is falling, thick flakes drifting eccentric in the bright cold air. The sun is rising. She forgets – why does she forget? – what has been done. Opens her mouth to taste the snow –

- but no, no. That is ash on her tongue.

Evergreens, tall and remarkably silent, shoulder together in their strange correspondence. The branches have the lush, sweeping, open-handed look of cedars, though somehow with a straight-spined, soldiering conspiracy, each to each, rather than the shaggy ranginess of so many iterations of trees. The wood hugs close to the verge of the road, bracken breaking into a rutted and weedy track, which is more earth than stone.

The morning - evening? - the light has that golden, nostalgic sweep to it, but the chill in the air seems somehow damp, bedewed - the morning, or evening, is all quick in her throat, and the whole world feels hushed, drawn, dampened, as if after a blanketing of snow. Oh, and there is snow, in melting mounds and strange little hummocks, in sheltered coves beneath the march of the trees. Aside from the lone caw of a single crow, the woods are silent.

Melantha

After talking to Erich about this, finally, and after hearing Tamsin describe her own really weird dreams, Melantha allows herself to slip back into it. She knows it's coming. She doesn't want to go here again, taste ashes again. It takes her time to go back to sleep, even though she took one of the clearwaters that Charlotte has gifted her with and rinsed her hair with it before going to bed. Even though she lit her little pretend-candle in her very-real shrine to let it glimmer throughout the night in her alcove, its little flickering can't keep the dream out.

Her mind forgets, at first, that she is dreaming. She doesn't remember any of this at first, is simply there, and standing, looking up, at snow falling. She opens her mouth the way she always does, aching for the touch of nature on her tongue.

The taste reminds her. And she rejects it, wanting to wake, but does not wake; we don't always get what we want. Melantha reaches up, shoulders hunching, covering her face with her mouth. For the first time in any dream, she starts spitting, all but retching, trying to get rid of the taste. This isn't wildness. This is death, all around her. The trees and the crow and the ash and the snow are all symbols of it, essences of it, and not the rich earthy sort of death that she knows is holy. These things feel like omens of murder.

Melantha looks into the woods. And she knows better than to go alone.

She closes her eyes, though she is afraid to, and starts thinking about Erich. She thinks very hard about Erich. About his hair and his haircut and his face and his arms and she realizes by the time she gets to his elbows this is stupid, dreams aren't so exacting. So she expels those thoughts and thinks instead of the feelings. The weird comfort of all their arguments and the falling-asleep-with and the strength in his arms and how he's nearly always a little too silly and playful for her and the way he lies to himself and represses stuff and then how much she loves him and how much it hurts sometimes to love anything, how raw it leaves her, and how nothing is perfect but everything is real and she knows, better than most, that what is perfect and what is everything you want is never real.

And she says his name over and over and over and over in her mind, trying to call him. She even tells him that she's about to go into some dark woods and there's a dead person somewhere and if he doesn't get here she's just going without him, because if there's any chance she could call him into being in her dreams, there's no way he'd let that one go.

She opens her eyes.

wake

The taste reminds her.

The taste always reminds her. There is the scent of snow in the air but oh that is ash; that is something - that is someone - burning. Here is a truth of the world, there is always someone, somewhere, burning. There is always some funereal pyre.

The taste reminds her and Melantha wakes, wakes within-the-dream she did not want to remember, or live again. She wakes within the dream and recognize the omens of murder: the wood, which is silent as woods were neither meant nor made to be silent. The crow. The hour, the ash. Perhaps even the road. Which is, to her vision, no more than a sinous curve of absence between the trees.

She is going to go into the looks.

She thinks and thinks and thinks to Erich. Oh,

she knows better than to go alone.

--

There is no answer, not in her mind's eye, not in her mind's ear. Not in her mind, the interstitial experience of their presence that always asserts itself when she draws that iron needle through her knuckles; bears, somehow, the bloom of blood from the wound. They are there, somehow, somewhere - her connection to pack and totem is not severed. But oh, it is as if they were sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.

And Melantha wakes.

--

Another night; another dream.

Every piece repeats itself, every piece repeats itself; right down to her experience of recognition, the way she wakes within-the-dream, the calls she extends, searching, searching, the feeling that they are - no, not gone. But instead, sleeping too deeply to be awoken.

Another night; another dream.

She is on the verge at the edge of the road, and the road winds through the dark forest, and the trees cast long, straight-spined shadows across the rutted, weedy track, and sky has the pale blue promise of dawn, or perhaps the last brilliance of evening, she opens her mouth, she always opens her mouth, she always tastes the ash.

There is a road. There is a wood. There is a low, swirling plume of black smoke in the sky.

Melantha

Every time they thread that needle and push it through Melantha's knuckles, she has to fight tears, look away, hide her face in Charlotte or Erich. She gets woozy. She puts her head between her legs. It isn't the pain when they rip it out, it's the blood, it's the openness, the bit of herself spread and raw to the world and it makes her very, very dizzy. Every time. It's worth it, though. You can endure a lot if it's for something you believe in.

Melantha knows that better than most, too.

Erich's not there when she opens her eyes, and neither is Charlotte, though there is an unspoken pact between Erich and Melantha right now to maybe not freak Charlotte out before they absolutely have to, or maybe if this is Something not to expose her mind to it, because her mind is sometimes... fragile. She already walks half in this world and half in worlds neither of them can reach.

Melantha tastes ashes. Melantha feels loneliness. Feels grief.

And wakes.

--

The morning after they all agree to try and adjust their dreams, Melantha makes sure Erich knows, and if he knows how to get a hold of Tamsin they have to let her know, too: she couldn't get Erich into her dream. So that sucks. She says again she'll try to do something different, she'll try, because the reality is:

this is going to drive her insane if it goes on long enough. She knew a woman, when she was younger, who went mad from nightmares, from not sleeping. The woman killed herself. Melantha doesn't say any of that. She just says she'll keep trying.

--

And this time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich.

And the next time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich and until after she's started walking into the wood.

And the next time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich and until after she's started walking into the wood and until after she's reached out and put her hand on one of the trees.

wake

The wood is lovely and dark and deep and she knows the words, everyone knows the words, knows the way they paint the world and the wood is lovely and dark and deep and silent. The cedars are so damnably silent in the snow and also; so rich, even in the midst of winter, those lush, low-sweeping branches that fringe the wood's edge are different here, dead needles underfoot, the hush of the wind swaying the treetops.

The wood feels warm; comfortingly warm beneath hands and her feet are near-silent and the hush that she is aware of only deepens as she hikes through those straight-marching trunks.

The sky is gone and most of the light; the shadows too. She loses track of the smoke in the sky, but points herself toward it or perhaps, perhaps she simply intends to go there, and so she does.

Maybe it is the scent, the acrid flare of it against her soft palette that she follows.

Or perhaps she has walked this path before; too many times before, the wend and the warp of it beneath the silent trees.

--

Soon, or perhaps not soon but some time later the smoke thickens. Billows through the air like drifts of morning mist, ghostlike between the branches. There is a clearing and she sees the clearing and in the clearing the pyre is smoldering, sputtering through the shrouded body-of-a-man wrapped in a winding cloth. Two figures at the edge of the clearing shade their eyes against stinging smoke, sort through the hewn wood and found-branches for something dry, and aged, and ready to catch light: a stoop-shouldered, humpbacked old woman,

and a boy, of eight or nine years.

Melantha

She's been dreaming for too many nights now to think of things like poetry. At least: when she's asleep. She keeps drawing what could be an anthology illustration for Robert Frost in her waking hours, sketching. The dream is depressing, is depressive, and she feels sapped by it even though nothing is happening to her. She still sleeps. She just feels flattened out, feels greyed out.

Feels like she's been walking forever when she finds them, and she is unsure of how many nights it has been now, wonders now how many times she has gotten this far, how many times she has choked on smoke, coughed it out, pulled her sleeve over her nose and mouth to try and filter out something that isn't real at all.

Her eyes sting and water. And then she just starts crying, because of the fire, and because of the man wrapped upon it, and the little boy, and the things she has lost. At least the tears moisten her eyes. She doesn't think the emotions come from the dream; they come from her, because she remembers sometimes, and it kills her. Erich was cast out, but... at least his family is still alive. And it's such a self-pitying thought she never voices it, never really even allows herself to think it, but

it's true, isn't it?

Melantha wants to talk to them, but now doesn't seem like the right time. It's a funeral. She wipes her eyes and walks over, slowly,

starts searching through the wood with them for more to put on the pyre.

wake

Their eyes are dry; the old woman and the boy. She is here because she was made to be here because she was meant to be here because she is always here. See her hands; the splinters beneath her nails. See the steady strangeness in the way she lifts her head and swings her eyes to watch Melantha as she arrives; as she finds wood. As she adds it to the pyre.

The boy, blonde haired and blue-eyed, also turns to watch Melantha as she enters the clearing and he is not steady but - something else. Stretched and withheld perhaps, tense as he watches her bend over and select the most seasoned bit of deadfall to toss onto the pyre.

Something about that motion brings the boy to life. The dull thud of the wood against the lifeless body, the hollowness within: whatever it is, he is in immediate motion, lurching out of the grasp of the old woman's gnarled hands, launching himself toward the body on the pyre, tearing at the shroud.

I hate you. That to the old woman as he evades her grasp. I hate you all. I hate him. I hate you. I hate you," that is to Melantha: direct, wild, furious but somehow without venom or rancor, oh no: Melantha recognizes all to well the impetuous, enduring grief of a child. "Everyone keeps leaving. I just want you all to stay. I hate you. I hate you."

The boy is all motion; he attacks the shrouded body then throws himself into the wood and oh the woods absorb him, as if he were one of their own. A few, brief seconds of thrashing echoes through the underbrush, see, and then nothing, nothing.

That silence again. The silhouette of a single crow flushed dark against the sky.

The crackle of the flames.

The shroud has slipped down from the body's face. An ordinary man, not remarkable anyway.

He appears to be sleeping.

The old woman is lurching toward her, three-legged - no, that is a walking stick.

--

And Melantha, wakes.

Melantha

[ONOZ]

Melantha

Blonde hair, blue eyes. Could be Erich's brother, thinks he's Erich's brother. The brother Erich doesn't have, the brother Erich insists is real, real, real though. She moves, he moves, and he throws wood, running at the pyre.

Melantha yells at him to stop, don't do that, no --!

He hates so much. And he hates her but she doesn't feel hate. She hurts with him, hates with him, yes: she understands. Everyone keeps leaving and Melantha is weeping again, openly. The boy runs. He runs into the wood and the woman is coming toward her and Melantha hates her, too, hates her because she remembers someone else, not so old, coming when her mother died, raising her, taking her away when her father died and her brothers died and her other brothers ran away.

"No!" she snaps at the woman. "I don't want you!"

And runs into the woods after the boy, runs into the dark with him, after him, for him, is him,

but wakes. There are tears on her face again.