Chapter 42: Dreamwalker

A vast meadow stretched towards the horizon, no walls to be seen, no collar chafing around her neck. Her paws kneaded the soft dirt, feeling the blades of grass and flower stalks between her digits. A slight breeze caught her wings and rustled through the orange leaves of a maple tree to her side.

The wind sounded wrong. Trees did not rustle in unison. Thousands of leaves made a thousand melodies. A weightlessness took hold of her head and she came to her senses. A dream. No, she realized. The meadow, gentle breeze, they were- she spun around. “Dalian!” He smiled down at her, sitting below the tree. A tree that was not usually here in his Veil.

A warmth, like the spring sun above, coursed through her body. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.” Sylph flapped her sorry wings, dug her claws deeper into the dirt and drew a deep breath.

Dalian cocked his head, and the gentle smile widened even more. “You are pretty hard to find. I reckon you hid on purpose, or perhaps you did not know you were.” His voice was calm and focused, as if this was simply another of his lessons.

“I didn’t do it willingly,” Sylph mumbled into her mouth, “I didn’t even know you could hide from the Veil.” She grabbed a pfodful of dirt and placed it in midair. The clump obeyed her thought and stayed right where she left it. This had to be the Veil, not a dream. The difference was sometimes hard to tell.

Dalian’s gaze flicked up to the tree, and Sylph noticed the small wyvern perched on its twigs. He turned back to face her, wings neatly folded on his back as he paced around her. “Your soul shone extremely bright, like an exploding star in the vast darkness of the true Veil. You tried to reach out.”

“I can do that?” The blades of grass grew fuzzy and started to resemble the strings of the carpet she slept on right now. With the carpet came a cold that seeped upwards. “I suppose I really want to go home and to talk to somebody. You know I am bad at keeping my thoughts focused. Perhaps that helped.”

“Where are you?” A pin pricked her mind as if somebody tried to look directly into her head and she glared sharply at Dalian. How dare he. It happened fast, but he glimpsed at the tree. They were not alone.

Desert sand spread through the meadow from below her legs like a drop of color in a bowl of water. Only the maple tree and its roots remained untouched. Sylph slumped together on the rough sand like a sack of potatoes. “None of you wanted to tell me the truth, about my past, about my mother.” Her gaze narrowed at the tree. “So I did the only logical thing. I found them myself, on my own, well, with Brandon.”

The tree stirred. The bark bulged and stretched and shook as if something inside tried to break free. “That’s enough proof for me. That’s her.” Sylph did not recognize the distorted voice of the tree, but the options were few. Her heart, that had been forgotten by her body so far, pounded with imaginative excitement.

A loud thunk followed. Then curses. “Why did I agree to this? This is nonsense. Let me out!” The tree blew up as if inflated.

“Mum?” Sylph fixated the unshapely bark and a shiver of anticipation had her thump her tail. That amount of cursing and yelling could only be one dragoness. Veria burst forth from the log, showering herself in bark and wood chips. “Why are you a tree?” Sylph broke into a snorting laugh.

Veria nodded upwards with dismissal to the small perched wyvern. “Her idea.” On a second glance, the orange and yellow coloring of the leaves and wyvern were familiar. The small wyvern fixated her with eyes more intelligent than they had any right to be. Arastra’s voice spread out from between the leaves, unable to be pinpointed by Sylph’s ears. “Somebody broadly yelled out: Please, find me. Dalian was sure it was you. I was not. The Veil is a place of lies, deception, and illusion.”

Dalian looked at the tree, more so appeared to look right through it. “The only deceptive one is you. I am sure Sylph sees only the tree, but the Veil does not hide the truth from me.”

A small, crooked leaf broke free from a twig and fell. As it did, it started to grow and squirm like a maggot under skin. Merely looking made Sylph queasy to the bone. The leaf expanded, the plant veins turned flesh and the leaf skeleton split apart to reveal rapidly growing wings. Arastra landed on all fours, shimmering in reds, oranges, and yellows like a localized autumn. Arastra insisted they were her colors in life, but Sylph was not so sure.

“I could’ve sworn you were the wyvern,” Sylph nodded.

“Can’t trust any sense but the one you don’t have,” Arastra answered, settled down in the tree’s shade and turned the uncomfortable sand into long bladed grass. Then she simply observed.

“That is everyone,” Dalian said. All the familiar faces brought a massive smile to Sylph’s own, even if none of this was technically real. Sadly, Oasis was missing. She would probably strangle her in a hug.

Veria approached her, wings outstretched. “You terrified us. Coming all the way to the desert. Are you in Gideza?” She playfully flicked her bladed tail forward. “I should be mad, but-” She puffed up with every other word. “I am proud that you followed what you thought was right.”

“You should not encourage that behavior,” Arastra said from afar.

A single tear shot into Sylph’s eye, and she took a step back. “Really? You are proud?” Joy and pain mixed in her mind and the hallway back home in Carthia materialized around them. Exactly as she remembered it when she overheard their lies. “How are you proud?” Sylph stammered through the words. “All I wanted was the truth. Who my parents were. Why they left me all alone? And why things happened that way? You knew, and you lied to me. And now you tell me you are proud that I left because I was fed up with what you said?”

The wind quieted down as if intimidated by Sylph’s outburst. Dalian joined Arastra and sat down beneath the tree. Veria continued to advance, albeit her wings fell down to her back. “I had time to think. Hiding the truth from you was not our best idea.” She lowered her head until her forehead almost touched Sylph’s. “I never wanted it to end like this. So I am glad that you were stubborn and brave enough to show me that. I am sorry.”

Veria apologized. And yet, Sylph felt wronged. All the images and memories in her head threatened to pour forth and pounded her mental barrier to the Veil. Tears formed in her eyes as she tried to hold them back, but they coalesced around her in throbs and sobs of her past. Veria could not undo them with a simple sorry.

“Sylph,” Veria said, and it had to be the softest word she had ever spoken. It trickled through her ears like a feather and straight into her head. Sylph knew she meant what she said. She did not know why or how, but she knew Veria told the truth. And yet they found themselves face to face with a sky-high stone wall right beside them. In front of that wall stood a young Sylph. Her ears were two sizes too large for her head and she pressed them against the stone with some effort as the top kept flipping.

The wall gave way to a pitch black abyss. The distorted mental images of Veria and Dalian paced around like roiling fog, stiff bodies and yet moving. Memory Veria raised her voice. “I don’t want to be stuck with a hatchling. Why would I do that? Do I look old enough to want one?” Sylph knew exactly the words that followed.

“I don’t want Sylph.”

The little Sylph burst into tears and ran into nothingness outside of the scene, vanishing into a thin mist. She could still feel the sinking cold in her chest every time she recalled the scene. That memory had never faded. It stuck to the back of her head like an old scar. She raised her head to face her mother.

Veria stood still, tail limply lying behind her, and her wings had dropped as far down as they would go. She continued to stare at the exaggerated misty version of herself. “I did not know you heard that.”

“I hear a lot of things, even back then.” She reminded them quite often, but only now did Veria seem convinced that she actually did.

“You know that isn’t true, right? What I said?” The words fell out of Veria’s mouth with barely any movement. The spikes behind her head rustled as they raised.

“You sounded very convinced.”

“Wait.” Arastra joined the conversation, still sat below the tree, but her voice sounded closer. “I will not defend your mother. She said it. But, consider her situation for but a moment. The entire city was in chaos and she suddenly had a daughter from one second to the other.” A new image of Veria entered the scene. That Veria looked barely larger than Sylph, with less pronounced spikes but no less muscle. “She was not much older than you are now.”

Veria’s age was not something Sylph considered. She was very young to have a daughter. “I wouldn’t want to. But, you remember what I experienced before. I liked Void, but he also did ruler things all day. He had little time for me.” Sylph forced back more tears as she fixated Veria and Arastra. “I spent most of my short life there with you two. Well, Veria in body, and both in mind. My life was-” she heaved a sob, “My life was suddenly so much better. I finally had somebody that took care of me, talked to me and put up with me. Before you, it was all pain and degradation. I had never had fun before Void’s castle. I did not even know what it meant. And then, when we first arrived in Carthia, I hear the one person who finally took me in say that she does not want me.” Veria seemed to shrink under her words, as if suddenly loaded with a heavy weight. There was no holding back her tears anymore. “Do you know how that feels? To think that your entire new life will be taken away once more?”

Veria barely found the words to say. “Sylph, I did not want you to hear what I said back then. If I only knew, I would have cleared it up sooner.” Fuzzy images spread out from her as she tried to show some memory, but it did not take hold.

“Let me show her,” Dalian said, and let his memory wash away the last straggling tears of Veria and Sylph. Washed out wooden planks lined the floor and a crude stone wall rose all around them. Sylph recognized the room. It was one of the common rooms in the barracks near Carthia’s training field.

A simple lightglobe above illuminated a group of dragons and humans sitting around a low table. Several bowls and cups lined the edges, while metal playing cards filled the middle. The stench of a long night of drinking permeated the air.

Void’s gigantic, ghostly, black Sol head rested on the floor behind Veria. His skull alone nearly dwarfed the entire group and yet nobody but Dalian even knew he was there. Sylph wondered how it must feel to have people walk through you as your entire body lingered somewhere in the building. Then again, the dead rarely felt a lot. Even Arastra, with her far more corporeal form, thought of physical objects as nuisances blocking her sight.

“My wing color is wrong,” Arastra scrutinized Dalian’s memory of her lingering in the corner, bearing simple ocher scales.

“It’s just a memory. We weren’t exactly on good terms back then.” Dalian shook his head.

“Shush,” Veria grumbled.

Sylph ignored their bickering and tried to remember if she was there. Dalian must have chosen this because it applied to what she said. Her gaze passed Dalian, Ronnie, another human whose name she forgot and finally looked at Veria. Sylph’s young self lay cuddled up against Veria’s side and looked soundly asleep.

The memory started to move. Dalian placed down a card. “There is a lot of chaos in the town, Sylph could—”

“No.” Veria draped her wing around the small Sylph. “I’ve thought about it. We are the only ones that know what happened. Others would treat her like an orphan of the war, and I can’t risk that. I don’t want to risk that. You can’t take her away from me.” Veria pushed Sylph closer to her with her tail without waking her.

“Didn’t she bite you for stopping her from overeating yesterday?” Dalian asked, and the group laughed.

“She is pretty fierce, and terrible with food. Sylph is a fighter, I can feel it.” Veria bent down and gently tapped her tiny claws with her own. “It’s basically like having a student for life, isn’t it? I will teach her how to stand up to anything and anyone who would seek to harm her.”

“A student?” Arastra shook her head. “Having a hatchling is not like having a student. You’d wish it was. Take it from a mother of four. But I’d be willing to lend you a pfod, not that I have much of a choice, just so you don’t screw her up.”

“I’m not gonna take hatchling raising advice from a dead queen with a fascination for overgrown mind assaulting lizards.”

“If you were even remotely interested in dragons, you would’ve been infatuated by Void too.” Arastra’s tail flicked aimlessly, unaware that Void was technically in the room. “Think about it, his firm muscles pinning you to the floor and massive-” “Stop that, this is not about me. Keep my musings out of this. Focus, Dalian.” Real-but-not-less-dead-Arastra intervened. Her image stopped, grew fuzzy as they fought for control. The memory skipped forward.

“Should I be fine with this?” Void rumbled, his deep voice only audible to Dalian. “Veria does not exactly strike me as a family person. Or like somebody that knows how to raise a whelp.”

Dalian did not turn around. His voice was a strange echo as he talked through the Veil. “Trust me, if Veria sets her mind on something, she will do everything to reach that goal. Even if it’s raising a hatchling. And we are all here to stop her if it goes wrong. I know perfectly well that she can be a bit too ambitious.”

Sylph wiped away a salty streak running down her face. Why had they never told her about this? This memory would have been so much better to have.

“Actually,” Memory-Veria continued, “what do we do if she does not turn out to be a dragoness after all? What if Sylph doesn’t fit as a name?”

Void answered, but Dalian translate for the living. “Seeing how she grew up, she’ll most likely be a dragoness. Let her worry about her name. It is not uncommon for Aer to change their name if they really want to.”

“Can’t you just, you know, look?” A human with lavish hair glanced up from his cards.

“If only it was that easy. Aer are confusing.” The memory started to fade and Sylph snorted a single ha. Her name was their worry. Now it had been hers. In her opinion, it would have fit if she had been a dragon, wouldn’t be too much of a difference after all.

It felt nice. Especially to hear Veria say that nobody could take Sylph from her. That was all she had wanted. Perhaps she should have realized it at some point that it was her life and that it would not be taken away. Instead, she fought her very self, correcting all the storytellers, only to arrive back at the very start and the same question about who she was and where she belonged.

Veria’s wing closed halfway around her and yet there was no warmth. Instead, an icy dread still lingered in her chest. Sylph turned her head to face Veria once more. “Why did I have to go all this way to find the answers I wanted? Why not just tell me the truth? Were you worried that my mother would take me away?”

The ground beneath her paws grew cold and snow spiraled outward. Since they were all coming clean right now, she would show them what their lies did.