See the young child. She loves to dance in the grass as the sun drops, and it spreads its black fingers over her. Like lightning flashes her hair bounces as she jumps.
The sky's warning goes unheeded.
Her father comes to enjoy her motion from the wood porch. He has worked hard during the day. To watch his daughter in the cooling air calms his heart and helps him hold his head high; a scene serene.
The sky speaks once more. The girl stops and asks it what is the matter just at a tilt of her head. No response comes; she continues to run and dislodge the dandelions; they fly. Jumbled messages make the sky a slate and she wonders at her father. He knows. The gravel-stones sound under his feet as he fetches her. Back to the house they go.
"Why?" she asks, keeping her vision up at him, and the sky. "It's like a storm."
"What can I tell you that you will understand?" he asks himself. "Part a story, a dash of legacy. It is myth and monster." The girl shivers, and leans against her father's hip. "A drop of magic in a sour land, a spinning toy on a ball, sand in your shoe." His eye above his beard twinkles. "These and more."
"Tell me," she says. "Tell me."
"You are too young to know such things," he says to her; they walk into the house's light. Mother is there.
"He says the sky is magic, and monster, and myth," the girl says to her. "Is he right?"
Mother kneels and pries off a shoe. "Those and more."
"I want to know."
"How can we tell a thing we are unsure of?" Mother says. "Sleep and grow, and you will know as the birds fly south."
The girl stamped her foot. "Sleep and grow! Time will tell! You are too young! My life I've heard these things; when will they not be true?"
"When you say them, too."
"Look." Father points. "The sky is quiet now. Time for you as well. When it is bright, so will your smile."
Off to bed. She pulls the covers tight up to her chin, so the dark cold stays out. The painted sky from the window near her whispers softly to bring her to sleep, and her eyes close.
A river of red ran across her head; the blue grass around her feet told soft tales. She lifted her head from the water.
Blue grass, red river, pink trees; the colors changed places to show her the untruth of the matter. Orange dirt was in piles. Purple bark looked hard and unfriendly. She turned her eyes up.
Colors turned the sky to rainbow fragments. Few blue showed through. Crimson and teal and amber crescents circled like clock parts, diagonal tracks in midnight blue and eminent purple crossed scratched ebony and a ghostly white. In the center like a rocket's power a cloud of gold and silver swirled to ground, far away as things often were to a child.
The sky's wondrous energy in roving shapes gave way to a din across the plain. Shapes like ants moved; she knew to climb a hill to see them better. It was an army full of humans; the sky's uncounted colors gleamed off of swords and shields, and she found them becoming ranks and rows as if they were toy soldiers in her hands. One at the front sounded the charge, and they moved along with thunderous stomps.
Follow them, she wondered. Witness the battle? This was not her home but she felt in no danger. She felt she could have leaped from a tree and floated to her feet without a scratch. She watched the army move away, lying on her stomach, feeling odd grass between her toes. There was nothing else to see, though the sky and land were wonders of mixed color and sensations she could not imagine being outside a dream, and so she stood and sped down the hill after the army moving away as if one man made of many legs.
Time could have passed but she did not know. She found the army nearer, stopped, waiting. They looked around themselves as if children searching for mother.
One of the many spied her watching, and made to shout. The shout spread on the air and she tried to run across the heathen ground, but was caught. She imagined the fist crashing on her skull, but instead she saw a tent of those in charge.
"She," the soldier announced, tall and straight. "She is here."
"Come inside," a man said, taking her hand. He seemed like her father but seen through a cracked mirror; surely the same and surely not. "Our opponents arrayed across from us, do you see them?" He pointed out the tent. "They would break our bones and grind our flesh down and scatter our ashes! Do you see their thunder? Smell their hate? Do you taste their weapons on the air?" She shivered. "Sound the trumpet, show us the path; lead us away to safety."
In her hands a horn, on her feet boots, on her head a helm. A steed grew under her and the tent whisked away. Shouts rose to herald her appointing and the land became a set of two: Two sides of parallel lines ready to collide, two halves of a world ready to rejoin and become one, two impossible realities.
"Do so, miss," the man said by her leg, "and take your place as heroine."
She raised the horn to her lips and blew, squeaking out a shrill cry changing into a boom of shouts from the army flying across the plain becoming a hill, raining force upon those arrayed against her and her kind.
Battle's end came too soon. Blood forced through sleep-closed veins and little eyes cracked to see a mundane moon lowering itself in a bow to the sun. Her little bed, shot with light, seemed all too colorless for a girl fighting the battle of dreamland.
"See now?" Father says when she sat. "Brightness goes to everything."
The girl nods. "A wondrous dream."
"A child's dream?" Mother asks. "Fairies and dragons."
"Battles," the girl whispers. "And colors in the sky like I've never seen."
"Youth sees color in everything."
"She has a gleam."
"Wouldn't you, if your dreams had such a ring?"
"I would," her mother says. "Eat to dream tonight perhaps," she tells the girl. "Eat to work hard today," she tells her father.
"Yes mother," they say, and eat.
What was the sky without its clockwork sigils of strange hues? The girl asks herself this while her father works. What is the ground as this dull gray? The river ran blue. The leaves were green, not pink as her dream had; she saw no tower-cloud dominating in royal metals. Her father's plow brought up the sad earth and painted him brown. The wind had no sounds of men with arm and armor, no enemy to drive back, no promise of greatness. She could not watch for boredom.
"Your gleam is gone," her mother says. "Go, play. Dance as before."
"Dancing is only a joy at night," she replies. "I want to dream."
"And I, but it is for sleep. To pass the time. Now, what else could be done to pass the time?" Mother asks herself. "Good work to break your back makes you tired for your dreams; help your mother."
They dried the sheets and washed the plates, and bathed her father when the fieldwork finished. The sky was dark and she went to dance. Here the colors weren't so dull; she could imagine the power of the sky and world from the land only she saw.
The world above her does not flash like the night before, it is too late for warnings from the stars, no time left to save a little girl from her dreams, only the little girl herself.
She dances under the starry sky and thought perchance to dream, to live a life not hers, and she dances until her legs feel weak and her father takes her inside.
She worried in her bed about falling asleep, until she finally did. She looked from where she lay to find her army and her horse, and horn, but felt the gentle stirring of a new wrongness around her arms as a chill wind.
The sky was cloudy stars in onyx lit with sprays of blue and rose from mountains around her, not grass but stones under. The towering cloud of silver and gold struck up into the void and created a shadow of greatness across the land from a shaded sun she could not see. Rings of red roved in cruel lines to encircle; there were no breaks. She was no army's general, no hero of a battle, but trapped.
She came to see the things around her. Humans, twisted as in dreams, and all staring. They tilted and trembled like trees in the wind, smoky with white eyes like crisp apple meat. The rushing ring kept them there, scraped at the silence as if tines of a fork on her tooth.
She took up the center, the spokes of the wheel sat watching, it revolved.
"Where are we?" she asked the closest.
"In sway," was the whispy reply, "of monsters."
She wandered to the red ring spinning around. "What is touching it like?" There came no answer. "Death? Pain? Stinging?"
"We cannot," they replied together. The chorus made her jump. "Red rings around us, blue rings within, green above and yellow below. To make sense of these things leads to darkness."
She waited for them to speak more. The sky had no green ring she could see; there was no yellow on the ground. "Then why tell me?"
Together: "The colors do not mean anything, nor the shapes. All there is to know is we are trapped inside." The ring's red motion threw hellish shadows across the black ground and pushed her away to the center. No dream she knew, a nightmare instead. Constant motion in a red circle, spinning the darkness around her.
"How do I wake up," she wondered, hands to her ears and eyes shut.
A new voice intruded. Not made of loathing breaths like the others; this one pulsed beyond her vision in the self-made darkness and the quiet inside. This was not a dream-figure's voice of calm and quiet and attention freezing her: "You have to realize."
"What?" she asked the silent land. "Realize what?"
"Turn and see heaven come to you," was the reply from nowhere. She looked.
The motionless, metal, distant pillar still had its unknown shine. "That is what you think to reach," the voice simply said, "and feel its cool touch...to know."
The voice faded, turning into a whistle from the mountains; she marveled at the look of the heavy cloud made of gold and silver. "What is it?" she asked the smoky men. They all found each other's eyes.
"It," they repeated, until it crashed from all around her. "We do not see it. We do not know it. We do not want it do not need it do not hear it."
One spoke alone. "It is what we are."
"Please," she asked. "What are you."
"We are dreams."
The words went to each next of them until they all had said it. "I know, I know I dream. I want to wake up now."
The closest of the smoke creatures turned its hazy head at the ring of red. "We can not wake," it said. "But you are a girl in her bed with father and mother near, and you need to wake up."
They were gone; perhaps never there. The ring cycled, drawing on her eyes. She came closer, almost wishing for heat, but there were only cool dream lights.
"If I touch this," she wondered, "will I die?" The voice from the dream did not speak. "Will I wake, or sleep forever? Become as one of them, to stay here until my body fades to swirling blackness?" Over the mountains the cloud was motionless in defiance of the light surrounding her.
"No advance can be made standing still," were the words seeming to come from her mouth, and in she plunged.
"She!" hailed the bodies around her. "The lady of broken rings!" they cried together, suddenly surrounding her. "Sund'ring bonds that keep us away, building up rings that lift us high! Turning monsters that keep us sway, triumphant queen to rule the sky!"
The dark and blasted land was gone, replaced in a blink with a bright parade; on shoulders she rode. The cloud bobbed in her vision as she was carried away; the new sunlight transforming it to stationary fireworks of colors no man understood.
The ticking clock tells them the time; she should have been awake.
"The day passes," says mother.
"Let a girl sleep," says father. He shakes the dust from his paper. "The dreams have her."
"I was scared when they had me." She turns to him. "And you?"
"As scared as we all. No mother to lean on; father did not know."
"We know."
Father nods. "The sky's fire is not a lesson unlearned. It stays and stays." He sees the sun shining. "It is light enough."
Mother stands and goes to the girl's bed. "Wake child. Wake before the day is done," she whispers.
Her eyes open. "A terrible night."
"It is the way," mother says. She sits and the bed creaks. "The first is joy and color, sweet songs of life. The second mingling with fire."
"And the third?"
Here mother pauses. What to tell a child who knows little of life, and all the paths it can take? When she asks of the future, and you know, do you say?
"The third is darkness," mother finally says. "But at the end, light."
"The cloud."
"The goals are different." Mother remembers. "In mine a ray of green sunshine, like shooting up from the water. Father's, a great city that hummed with noise and excitement."
"You? Father too?"
"Yes child, same as you. We saw the sky afire at night, we heard sleep call louder than before. But we must not sleep long. The real world is better, you see." Mother lays her hand on her head. "To know dreams: a blessing. But to wake...greater still. What would a nightmare be without waking?"
She imagined the dream in the circle of red with no parade, no blitzing light, no exit from the prison. "Terror."
"So the world saves us from ourselves." Mother stands and exits. Father enters, smiles, sits.
"No tears, little one," he says, and hugs the girl close. "Here the dreams cannot get you. Until tonight you are safe."
"But I must sleep again."
"As we all. Mother tells you the truth; the third night teaches you. It teaches me still."
"What does it teach?"
"If I say, you cannot learn. Tonight you will know, and tomorrow, instead of a girl, a woman." There is silence. "Come, mother has your meal. You can help me in the field today, and dance tonight, and sleep and wake, and begin your life."
The sun scuttles over her head; instead of long shadows heralding beauty behind closed eyes she sees the blossoming blackness and feels a chill.
The sky stays a silent dark as she again pulls the covers over her and wonders how the stars will be this night.
With sharp pulls of light and downing drops of darkness she found herself in the center of a burst in all directions, stone bridges over a sea fanning away like a wagon wheel. Behind her, black nothing, to all sides, shoots of colors as her mother might have dreamed, and in front, the cloud's glimmering beauty. The path she faced led her there.
She took it, and her legs struck out again and again, the cloud bobbing in her vision. She was supposed to learn; she wondered what the lesson would be.
Dream's time wrapped around her, and she felt hours had passed. She came up to a crossroads like she had left, with paths splitting off in every direction. The cloud seemed no closer, and she continued.
The fifth time she came to the separation of paths she knew she hadn't gotten any closer. It had been a day of walking with no rest, though she didn't think she needed it. No sun had risen. No pains of hunger or thirst scratched her.
Despite these things, she felt a closing presence darting from one side to the other, weakening her. Unlike the red ring from the dream before she could not escape; it moved with her, always keeping her in the center, as if the shadows grew to devour her.
She ran, pushing herself to the great and plodding speed one finds while asleep. The unseen horizon whipped behind her, and the cloud did not grow. It hovered away, never changing, but the darkness shrank. Once it seemed to reach out and stroke her arm with a long, hairy finger, sending a frozen sensation down to her hand.
She stopped at a crossroads with the darkness tight like a hoop. Going to the cloud had been repeated over and over; she wondered if another way was right. The beams of colors, rainbows grazing the dark sky, beckoned. She went toward a watery green beam like her mother did. When next she came to the branching paths, the darkness had inched tighter. It was all the same. She choose a different color, dark blue speckled with gold.
No matter what color she chose it was the same result. The darkness wrapped furred arms around her, squeezing, until she could hardly breathe for touching its chill.
The next crossroads she came to she sat, knees to her chest, trying not to touch the darkness. The sight of the glimmering cloud stretched to earth, hazy through the dark strands, sent her world reeling. The darkness reached a tendril and wiped a tear from her cheek, she brushed it away.
"The cloud cannot be reached," she said to herself. "The colors the same. Where do I go?"
"You have to realize," came a voice from the darkness. "Chasing it leaves you trapped. It is heaven come to earth."
"So why is it so far?" the girl asked. "I never get closer."
"Because you are not on earth, are you?"
The tangible darkness faded. She was left with all her choices: the cloud in front, the colors around her, and darkness behind her.
"There was a girl with a choice to make," the voice said, a mere stirring in her mind. "She could run after her dream with all the power and energy her young body could muster, but she could not catch it; you can never catch dreams. She could turn and walk toward the pillars of light around her, but what is light? A way to see. One choice remains."
The girl turned around, seeing the path behind her. It led to a blank, dark sky devoid of stars. "Sometimes dreams lead you to wonderful places," the voice said. Like a projection she saw herself leading an army. "It may take you to dangers and terrors." She saw herself in the red ring's prison, pushing out, fearful of what would happen if she could not leave. "But the only safe exit is to understand dreams are only foolish stories told by our dear hearts, sometimes to cherish, sometimes to crumple and throw away.
"For what is life without dreams? Sad, sorry. The painters do not paint, the speakers do not speak, the dancers do not dance." She turned, bidden by a strong and rising wind, and saw the cloud behind her dissipate. "Visit dreams each night but live in the world of truth. These mean nothing." She turned back to the dark path and found the lights around her growing dimmer. "If a dream sticks on you, take it with you into the world, and give it life so others can feel your emotions. Leaving it here renders it dead."
The darkness grew over her head, cutting off all light. "And nothing is sadder than dead dreams."
Father sits waiting for his daughter to wake. She seems pale and concerned in her sleep. After a time, her eyes open. They find him.
"What have you learned?" he asks.
"Dreams can be many things," she says, sitting up in bed. "But they cannot be real life."
"Yet?"
"We should always try."
Her father smiles. "So we should."
The sky's warning goes unheeded.
Her father comes to enjoy her motion from the wood porch. He has worked hard during the day. To watch his daughter in the cooling air calms his heart and helps him hold his head high; a scene serene.
The sky speaks once more. The girl stops and asks it what is the matter just at a tilt of her head. No response comes; she continues to run and dislodge the dandelions; they fly. Jumbled messages make the sky a slate and she wonders at her father. He knows. The gravel-stones sound under his feet as he fetches her. Back to the house they go.
"Why?" she asks, keeping her vision up at him, and the sky. "It's like a storm."
"What can I tell you that you will understand?" he asks himself. "Part a story, a dash of legacy. It is myth and monster." The girl shivers, and leans against her father's hip. "A drop of magic in a sour land, a spinning toy on a ball, sand in your shoe." His eye above his beard twinkles. "These and more."
"Tell me," she says. "Tell me."
"You are too young to know such things," he says to her; they walk into the house's light. Mother is there.
"He says the sky is magic, and monster, and myth," the girl says to her. "Is he right?"
Mother kneels and pries off a shoe. "Those and more."
"I want to know."
"How can we tell a thing we are unsure of?" Mother says. "Sleep and grow, and you will know as the birds fly south."
The girl stamped her foot. "Sleep and grow! Time will tell! You are too young! My life I've heard these things; when will they not be true?"
"When you say them, too."
"Look." Father points. "The sky is quiet now. Time for you as well. When it is bright, so will your smile."
Off to bed. She pulls the covers tight up to her chin, so the dark cold stays out. The painted sky from the window near her whispers softly to bring her to sleep, and her eyes close.
A river of red ran across her head; the blue grass around her feet told soft tales. She lifted her head from the water.
Blue grass, red river, pink trees; the colors changed places to show her the untruth of the matter. Orange dirt was in piles. Purple bark looked hard and unfriendly. She turned her eyes up.
Colors turned the sky to rainbow fragments. Few blue showed through. Crimson and teal and amber crescents circled like clock parts, diagonal tracks in midnight blue and eminent purple crossed scratched ebony and a ghostly white. In the center like a rocket's power a cloud of gold and silver swirled to ground, far away as things often were to a child.
The sky's wondrous energy in roving shapes gave way to a din across the plain. Shapes like ants moved; she knew to climb a hill to see them better. It was an army full of humans; the sky's uncounted colors gleamed off of swords and shields, and she found them becoming ranks and rows as if they were toy soldiers in her hands. One at the front sounded the charge, and they moved along with thunderous stomps.
Follow them, she wondered. Witness the battle? This was not her home but she felt in no danger. She felt she could have leaped from a tree and floated to her feet without a scratch. She watched the army move away, lying on her stomach, feeling odd grass between her toes. There was nothing else to see, though the sky and land were wonders of mixed color and sensations she could not imagine being outside a dream, and so she stood and sped down the hill after the army moving away as if one man made of many legs.
Time could have passed but she did not know. She found the army nearer, stopped, waiting. They looked around themselves as if children searching for mother.
One of the many spied her watching, and made to shout. The shout spread on the air and she tried to run across the heathen ground, but was caught. She imagined the fist crashing on her skull, but instead she saw a tent of those in charge.
"She," the soldier announced, tall and straight. "She is here."
"Come inside," a man said, taking her hand. He seemed like her father but seen through a cracked mirror; surely the same and surely not. "Our opponents arrayed across from us, do you see them?" He pointed out the tent. "They would break our bones and grind our flesh down and scatter our ashes! Do you see their thunder? Smell their hate? Do you taste their weapons on the air?" She shivered. "Sound the trumpet, show us the path; lead us away to safety."
In her hands a horn, on her feet boots, on her head a helm. A steed grew under her and the tent whisked away. Shouts rose to herald her appointing and the land became a set of two: Two sides of parallel lines ready to collide, two halves of a world ready to rejoin and become one, two impossible realities.
"Do so, miss," the man said by her leg, "and take your place as heroine."
She raised the horn to her lips and blew, squeaking out a shrill cry changing into a boom of shouts from the army flying across the plain becoming a hill, raining force upon those arrayed against her and her kind.
Battle's end came too soon. Blood forced through sleep-closed veins and little eyes cracked to see a mundane moon lowering itself in a bow to the sun. Her little bed, shot with light, seemed all too colorless for a girl fighting the battle of dreamland.
"See now?" Father says when she sat. "Brightness goes to everything."
The girl nods. "A wondrous dream."
"A child's dream?" Mother asks. "Fairies and dragons."
"Battles," the girl whispers. "And colors in the sky like I've never seen."
"Youth sees color in everything."
"She has a gleam."
"Wouldn't you, if your dreams had such a ring?"
"I would," her mother says. "Eat to dream tonight perhaps," she tells the girl. "Eat to work hard today," she tells her father.
"Yes mother," they say, and eat.
What was the sky without its clockwork sigils of strange hues? The girl asks herself this while her father works. What is the ground as this dull gray? The river ran blue. The leaves were green, not pink as her dream had; she saw no tower-cloud dominating in royal metals. Her father's plow brought up the sad earth and painted him brown. The wind had no sounds of men with arm and armor, no enemy to drive back, no promise of greatness. She could not watch for boredom.
"Your gleam is gone," her mother says. "Go, play. Dance as before."
"Dancing is only a joy at night," she replies. "I want to dream."
"And I, but it is for sleep. To pass the time. Now, what else could be done to pass the time?" Mother asks herself. "Good work to break your back makes you tired for your dreams; help your mother."
They dried the sheets and washed the plates, and bathed her father when the fieldwork finished. The sky was dark and she went to dance. Here the colors weren't so dull; she could imagine the power of the sky and world from the land only she saw.
The world above her does not flash like the night before, it is too late for warnings from the stars, no time left to save a little girl from her dreams, only the little girl herself.
She dances under the starry sky and thought perchance to dream, to live a life not hers, and she dances until her legs feel weak and her father takes her inside.
She worried in her bed about falling asleep, until she finally did. She looked from where she lay to find her army and her horse, and horn, but felt the gentle stirring of a new wrongness around her arms as a chill wind.
The sky was cloudy stars in onyx lit with sprays of blue and rose from mountains around her, not grass but stones under. The towering cloud of silver and gold struck up into the void and created a shadow of greatness across the land from a shaded sun she could not see. Rings of red roved in cruel lines to encircle; there were no breaks. She was no army's general, no hero of a battle, but trapped.
She came to see the things around her. Humans, twisted as in dreams, and all staring. They tilted and trembled like trees in the wind, smoky with white eyes like crisp apple meat. The rushing ring kept them there, scraped at the silence as if tines of a fork on her tooth.
She took up the center, the spokes of the wheel sat watching, it revolved.
"Where are we?" she asked the closest.
"In sway," was the whispy reply, "of monsters."
She wandered to the red ring spinning around. "What is touching it like?" There came no answer. "Death? Pain? Stinging?"
"We cannot," they replied together. The chorus made her jump. "Red rings around us, blue rings within, green above and yellow below. To make sense of these things leads to darkness."
She waited for them to speak more. The sky had no green ring she could see; there was no yellow on the ground. "Then why tell me?"
Together: "The colors do not mean anything, nor the shapes. All there is to know is we are trapped inside." The ring's red motion threw hellish shadows across the black ground and pushed her away to the center. No dream she knew, a nightmare instead. Constant motion in a red circle, spinning the darkness around her.
"How do I wake up," she wondered, hands to her ears and eyes shut.
A new voice intruded. Not made of loathing breaths like the others; this one pulsed beyond her vision in the self-made darkness and the quiet inside. This was not a dream-figure's voice of calm and quiet and attention freezing her: "You have to realize."
"What?" she asked the silent land. "Realize what?"
"Turn and see heaven come to you," was the reply from nowhere. She looked.
The motionless, metal, distant pillar still had its unknown shine. "That is what you think to reach," the voice simply said, "and feel its cool touch...to know."
The voice faded, turning into a whistle from the mountains; she marveled at the look of the heavy cloud made of gold and silver. "What is it?" she asked the smoky men. They all found each other's eyes.
"It," they repeated, until it crashed from all around her. "We do not see it. We do not know it. We do not want it do not need it do not hear it."
One spoke alone. "It is what we are."
"Please," she asked. "What are you."
"We are dreams."
The words went to each next of them until they all had said it. "I know, I know I dream. I want to wake up now."
The closest of the smoke creatures turned its hazy head at the ring of red. "We can not wake," it said. "But you are a girl in her bed with father and mother near, and you need to wake up."
They were gone; perhaps never there. The ring cycled, drawing on her eyes. She came closer, almost wishing for heat, but there were only cool dream lights.
"If I touch this," she wondered, "will I die?" The voice from the dream did not speak. "Will I wake, or sleep forever? Become as one of them, to stay here until my body fades to swirling blackness?" Over the mountains the cloud was motionless in defiance of the light surrounding her.
"No advance can be made standing still," were the words seeming to come from her mouth, and in she plunged.
"She!" hailed the bodies around her. "The lady of broken rings!" they cried together, suddenly surrounding her. "Sund'ring bonds that keep us away, building up rings that lift us high! Turning monsters that keep us sway, triumphant queen to rule the sky!"
The dark and blasted land was gone, replaced in a blink with a bright parade; on shoulders she rode. The cloud bobbed in her vision as she was carried away; the new sunlight transforming it to stationary fireworks of colors no man understood.
The ticking clock tells them the time; she should have been awake.
"The day passes," says mother.
"Let a girl sleep," says father. He shakes the dust from his paper. "The dreams have her."
"I was scared when they had me." She turns to him. "And you?"
"As scared as we all. No mother to lean on; father did not know."
"We know."
Father nods. "The sky's fire is not a lesson unlearned. It stays and stays." He sees the sun shining. "It is light enough."
Mother stands and goes to the girl's bed. "Wake child. Wake before the day is done," she whispers.
Her eyes open. "A terrible night."
"It is the way," mother says. She sits and the bed creaks. "The first is joy and color, sweet songs of life. The second mingling with fire."
"And the third?"
Here mother pauses. What to tell a child who knows little of life, and all the paths it can take? When she asks of the future, and you know, do you say?
"The third is darkness," mother finally says. "But at the end, light."
"The cloud."
"The goals are different." Mother remembers. "In mine a ray of green sunshine, like shooting up from the water. Father's, a great city that hummed with noise and excitement."
"You? Father too?"
"Yes child, same as you. We saw the sky afire at night, we heard sleep call louder than before. But we must not sleep long. The real world is better, you see." Mother lays her hand on her head. "To know dreams: a blessing. But to wake...greater still. What would a nightmare be without waking?"
She imagined the dream in the circle of red with no parade, no blitzing light, no exit from the prison. "Terror."
"So the world saves us from ourselves." Mother stands and exits. Father enters, smiles, sits.
"No tears, little one," he says, and hugs the girl close. "Here the dreams cannot get you. Until tonight you are safe."
"But I must sleep again."
"As we all. Mother tells you the truth; the third night teaches you. It teaches me still."
"What does it teach?"
"If I say, you cannot learn. Tonight you will know, and tomorrow, instead of a girl, a woman." There is silence. "Come, mother has your meal. You can help me in the field today, and dance tonight, and sleep and wake, and begin your life."
The sun scuttles over her head; instead of long shadows heralding beauty behind closed eyes she sees the blossoming blackness and feels a chill.
The sky stays a silent dark as she again pulls the covers over her and wonders how the stars will be this night.
With sharp pulls of light and downing drops of darkness she found herself in the center of a burst in all directions, stone bridges over a sea fanning away like a wagon wheel. Behind her, black nothing, to all sides, shoots of colors as her mother might have dreamed, and in front, the cloud's glimmering beauty. The path she faced led her there.
She took it, and her legs struck out again and again, the cloud bobbing in her vision. She was supposed to learn; she wondered what the lesson would be.
Dream's time wrapped around her, and she felt hours had passed. She came up to a crossroads like she had left, with paths splitting off in every direction. The cloud seemed no closer, and she continued.
The fifth time she came to the separation of paths she knew she hadn't gotten any closer. It had been a day of walking with no rest, though she didn't think she needed it. No sun had risen. No pains of hunger or thirst scratched her.
Despite these things, she felt a closing presence darting from one side to the other, weakening her. Unlike the red ring from the dream before she could not escape; it moved with her, always keeping her in the center, as if the shadows grew to devour her.
She ran, pushing herself to the great and plodding speed one finds while asleep. The unseen horizon whipped behind her, and the cloud did not grow. It hovered away, never changing, but the darkness shrank. Once it seemed to reach out and stroke her arm with a long, hairy finger, sending a frozen sensation down to her hand.
She stopped at a crossroads with the darkness tight like a hoop. Going to the cloud had been repeated over and over; she wondered if another way was right. The beams of colors, rainbows grazing the dark sky, beckoned. She went toward a watery green beam like her mother did. When next she came to the branching paths, the darkness had inched tighter. It was all the same. She choose a different color, dark blue speckled with gold.
No matter what color she chose it was the same result. The darkness wrapped furred arms around her, squeezing, until she could hardly breathe for touching its chill.
The next crossroads she came to she sat, knees to her chest, trying not to touch the darkness. The sight of the glimmering cloud stretched to earth, hazy through the dark strands, sent her world reeling. The darkness reached a tendril and wiped a tear from her cheek, she brushed it away.
"The cloud cannot be reached," she said to herself. "The colors the same. Where do I go?"
"You have to realize," came a voice from the darkness. "Chasing it leaves you trapped. It is heaven come to earth."
"So why is it so far?" the girl asked. "I never get closer."
"Because you are not on earth, are you?"
The tangible darkness faded. She was left with all her choices: the cloud in front, the colors around her, and darkness behind her.
"There was a girl with a choice to make," the voice said, a mere stirring in her mind. "She could run after her dream with all the power and energy her young body could muster, but she could not catch it; you can never catch dreams. She could turn and walk toward the pillars of light around her, but what is light? A way to see. One choice remains."
The girl turned around, seeing the path behind her. It led to a blank, dark sky devoid of stars. "Sometimes dreams lead you to wonderful places," the voice said. Like a projection she saw herself leading an army. "It may take you to dangers and terrors." She saw herself in the red ring's prison, pushing out, fearful of what would happen if she could not leave. "But the only safe exit is to understand dreams are only foolish stories told by our dear hearts, sometimes to cherish, sometimes to crumple and throw away.
"For what is life without dreams? Sad, sorry. The painters do not paint, the speakers do not speak, the dancers do not dance." She turned, bidden by a strong and rising wind, and saw the cloud behind her dissipate. "Visit dreams each night but live in the world of truth. These mean nothing." She turned back to the dark path and found the lights around her growing dimmer. "If a dream sticks on you, take it with you into the world, and give it life so others can feel your emotions. Leaving it here renders it dead."
The darkness grew over her head, cutting off all light. "And nothing is sadder than dead dreams."
Father sits waiting for his daughter to wake. She seems pale and concerned in her sleep. After a time, her eyes open. They find him.
"What have you learned?" he asks.
"Dreams can be many things," she says, sitting up in bed. "But they cannot be real life."
"Yet?"
"We should always try."
Her father smiles. "So we should."