biscuits

wake

Here is the dream. It is the dream Erich remembers. It is always the dream: waking in that sunwashed room; the texture and weight of the quilt over his body, the clean scent of linen that has been washed by hand and dried in the sun. The dust in the air and the air in the dust and the boy and MA SAYS GET UP and the feeling of being a lazybones, of lazing in bed when the sun has already broken the horizon, when the world is up and working and you are still, deliciously, warm and asleep.

Still those slipsliding, slipstream names. The room and the frame of it and the windows, which rattle in casements with every shivering passage of wind.

Erich wants clothes wants to know if he can imagine clothes and finds that he cannot imagine clothes and he is not naked; he is wearing old fashioned longjohns, the one-piece sort with a fly and a button-up window in the rear and he can leave those on or take them off and dress in dungarees and a button-up shirt and suspenders that still have the scent of sweat and dust from yesterday and perhaps tomorrow but that is how one lives, here. Sweat and dust and sunlight.

There's a door. There are windows, too. The boy disappearing after Erich reassures him, instructs him to tell Ma I'll be down soon.

Erich

OKAY HE IS NOT GOING TO WEAR LONGJOHNS.

...now that that's clear: yes. He dresses. He dresses with the fluidity of dream-physics, just like how in a dream you can run farther than humanly possible, lift impossible things, fly across the sky if you wanted to.

He starts taking off the longjohns and then next thing he knows he is sliding the suspenders over his shoulders, amused because they feel so weird there, he hasn't worn suspenders since he was about five years old and going to that odd little church in town where all the pictures of Jesus looked unusually ferocious and toothy and all the sermons were unusually fiery and bloody and full of the End Of Days and Last Battles. The few humans living in town thought they were just some minor little presbyterian or methodist or anabaptist or something denomination, but everyone else, the real movers and shakers and owners and workers of the town,

knew that it was all code, really. They weren't talking about god and jesus and holy spirits and marys and josephs; they were talking about gaia and celestines and incarnae and fenris and all his brood.

Anyway.

Point is: he hasn't worn suspenders in so long. Some of the older men in his family still wore them, because they were old-fashioned, see. It makes him feel old-fashioned and Manly, somehow, to slide them over his shoulders. He stops by the mirror to see how he looks, but in dreams we can never really see our own faces, can we? He opens the bedroom door and follows the boy-who-is-but-isn't-his-brother downstairs.

Erich

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

wake

There is a mirror. The mirror is old; is silvered and black. The mirror is framed on the clapboard wall and what it shows him as he is slipping the suspenders over his shoulder is the impression of a -

- is an impression; is an impressionistic reflection of a blond man in sliding suspenders over his shoulders, this liquid movement, and beyond that, beyond that some hint of a sort of disintegrating longing. Some lingering desperation. Some note of despair. Behind the mirror, behind the walls. Beneath the skin of this place. Hard to place now and really no more than a niggling sort of shadow, like the silhouette of a black-winged bird etched out against the disc of a rising - or setting - sun.

- Erich dresses and follows the boy, out of the bedroom door and down the steps. The time it takes to dress, to dream-dress, he can hear the edge of another conversation, all muffled like the voices of the adults in a Peanuts holiday special.

---

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Erich rounds the corner of a hallway and finds himself heading down a simple, simply-planed stairwell.

The walls are plain; they are hand-hewn. They are not decorated, except perhaps with whitewash, which has absorbed though here and there unevenly into the uncured wood.

The foot of the stairs: the front door with its roughly made screen-door mostly closed, the heavier, solidly made door sagging open. The other directly, a long dark hallway that ends in a slow-closing door, the suggestion of a man; and light, and warmth.

Erich

Him and not-him in the mirror. Like-him but not-him. Something in Erich's mind niggles, wiggles, stretches for the truth. Brushes it, like brushing fingers against the underside of lake-ice. He hasn't broken through yet. Not yet. It submerges; he has to go find his brother who is not his brother.

So down the stairs, then. Down the stairs to the plain, rough-hewn, sturdily-built front room. Front door's open, that's weird. He goes over to it first, grabs the handle and pushes it firmly shut. Might be that next time he looks over at it, it will have miraculously come undone again. For now, though, he turns away from it, toward that long dark hallway with its slow-closing door.

"(...)?" He calls the name of the boy, but the word itself is blurred in his ears. He doesn't actually know the name, but in this dream he does. And, calling that not-a-name, he heads down the hall. Doesn't think the boy went that way, but still.

Erich

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

wake

The kitchen is a kitchen is the idea of a kitchen, warm and bright as anything. Light slants brilliant in through framing windows lined with hanging herbs. The deep abiding fragrance of drying herbs fills the air, somehow green and quick and dying and dry all at once. There is such implicit warmth, remembered and golden and delicious and there is the table set for a hearty breakfast, and there is a the woman removing something from potbellied stove and a screen door swinging shut (oh these doors, oh the way they swing) on the opposite side of the room.

Biscuits, the woman is removing biscuits from the stove.

They smell heavenly; entirely of home.

The woman with the biscuits pulls them out and puts down the hot skillet in which they have been baked on the scarred, much-loved table slab in the middle of the kitchen.

She looks: worn out, far away.

The woman pushes back a lank lock of hair and sighs, deeply. Golden seconds tick by and she breathes, more heavily than the task in which she was engaged seems to require.

She looks startled; she is looking right at a stranger whom Erich instinctively knows as his middle brother [word-slew], but there is something strange about the moment, as if it has been excised from one particular place and inserted here, where its meaning is wholly different.

What Erich hears of their conversation is - "... see you there."

It is clear that she does not know his brother's name.

Or why she is here.

Or when.

Or how to get anywhere close to home.

--

wake

Per + Alertness roll: is that other dude... Thomas Delacroix?

Erich

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Erich

!!!

That is what is in Erich's mind at the moment. No words, no coherent thoughts even, just raw surprise and excitement and sudden-breakthrough and many many many many exclamations.

!!!!!!!!!

Like a gear clicking into place his memory clicks into place. He is not some longjohns-wearing, biscuit-eating farmer waking up in the idyllic ideal of a farmhouse. He does not have a little brother or a middle brother or any brothers at all. He is him, an Erich, an Erich very very far from home in this dreamscape, but astounding, bewilderingly, ever-so-excitingly,

he is not actually alone here. Is that Thomas Delacroix? He knows for a FACT he would not dream of Thomas Delacroix left to himself; I mean really. So: that must mean that IS Thomas. Right? And that is really Thomas. Which means maybe that woman is somebody too, and that little boy was somebody, and who really cares because that means somewhere in this dreamscape is Melantha and their dreams are actually interconnected.

He is a horrible person and a horrible Ahroun and really he should say something but: he grabs one of the biscuits still hot from the skillet (because of course he's gonna eat those biscuits in a dream where he won't get the runs if he eats biscuits) and yells something,

HEY THOMAS WAKE UP THIS IS A DREAM

and then he turns and runs for the front door. Runs for the outside. Looks for a forest, a trail of smoke, ashes in the air, something.

Thomas

[Perception+Alertness for Thomas is like the saddest panda of all the pandas.....]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

wake

Thomas' brother comes in the door behind him. His brother his dream-brother the lazybones upstairs. Thomas is up before him and will get to eat all the biscuits if he hurries and there is a woman at the stove, a tired woman, a startled woman, a woman who looks at Thomas for a brief and startling moment, this narrowing and nearly electric connection, and whom he knows - as instinctively as he knows anything else - does not belong there -

And then his brother muscle through and picking up a biscuit and shoving it in his mouth and oh my god Erich that is the most meltingly delicious biscuit you have consumed in god knows how long, rich, flaky flayers of fat delicately suspended between the dough my god, my god, what you are missing out on and throwing another one at Thomas and yelling

HEY THOMAS THIS IS A DREAM.

And Thomas knows it is a dream.

And Thomas knows that that is Erich Reinhardt.

And Erich Reinhardt is running out of the back door and finds himself in a dry-dust farmyard in the shadow of a listing building and moving at a thundering run past a red-painted clapboard barn and out into a deserted ... street, of sorts, that is really no more than a rutted road lined with these half-memories of wooden buildings, the odd storefront without anything close to ordinary written words, the street and its houses deserted though here and there - a glimpse through the window, a drifting curtain, a stranger's face seen suddenly through a half-forgotten crowd before it disappears into the scrawl of ordinary life.

It is morning. It is morning, oh the ache of that slanting golden light. The certainty of it.

The street is a town is a memory of a town; the wooden sidewalks framing a rutted road, which disappears on both ends into a primordial, misty forest.

Black bunting is wrapped around the railings and support posts framing the simple porches.

And oh, oh, oh. Is that smoke in the sky?

Erich

Okay so we lied. He grabs a biscuit, throws another at Thomas, sinks his teeth into his biscuit and oh my god so he grabs another one, and another, and just one more and now he's cramming three biscuits into his pockets as he's running out the door, a fourth biscuit jammed in his mouth.

Outside. The threadbare impression of a street. One of those coal towns maybe, dying now that no one uses coal anymore. One of those grain towns, now that all the farms are bigass conglomerates. One of those dying towns, regardless, and the fading whitewash on the fading buildings, and the smoke in the sky. Strange that the morning should seem so golden-nostalgic, or maybe --

maybe that's just Erich's read on it. His own, unique impression of the world he inhabits.

Never mind. Hardly important right now. He sees it, the dense wood. The primordial forest threaded in mist. The smoke. Someone died, it's a funeral pyre, he knows this because it is all exactly as Melantha told it to him. And he's so excited now, his big pure good-hearted heart all but thumping out of his chest with it. He runs, following the smoke, whether or not Thomas is alert now, whether or not Thomas is following him: feet fleet on the sidewalk, arms swinging, mouth

still chewing that biscuit. It's so good.

Thomas

Thomas bats at the flying biscuits, because Thomas is in this dream again and he is not interested in eating dream food. For all he knows it is like fairy food or pomegranate seeds. But he does still smile faintly at the sight of Erich cramming biscuits into his mouth before he runs out the door.

He looks at the startled woman. The quiet of the kitchen in Erich's wake. And he will follow, but first...first one thing. Because each of these dreams seems to give him just one more thing.

"Hey," he says gently. "What's your name? Where are we?"

wake

The woman in the kitchen gives Thomas a brief, confused glance. She's starting after Erich and somehow it is only the startlement of his passage that allows her to access her memories.

"Amanda - A-amanda Jeffords."

And then: Erich and Thomas wake.