I felt myself slip, and caught only a fleeting backwards glance of the deep pool before falling into it. The mirrored surface of the water slammed into me like a barricade of ice, shatteringly, bitingly cold. I plunged downwards like a stone, throwing out an arm to save myself and feeling repelled by a fiery hex, sending out my thoughts desperately, only to be rebuffed, outmaneuvered, evaded. As I struggled wildly for air, a lucid part of my brain awoke, ingrained teachings bidding me to focus. I began to compose myself, relaxing the tension in my limbs in spite of the danger and stilling my desperately clutching, reaching hands. With effort, I sought to release the frantic primal urges of self-preservation from the dark corners of my heart. I reminded myself that I would not be undone by this trick, though I would have to pay a heavy price for being incautious. The shadowy depths of the pool engulfed me.
One slow heartbeat surged, and then another, faltering in the chilly depths. I shuddered. Confused, disconnected thoughts swam around my oxygen-deprived brain, and my eyes, drawn skyward, began to fade. As the peaceful surface of this strange blue-green sea glimmered above me, I was filled with an unexpected sense of pride. It was, after all, an elegantly enacted coup d'état. I could almost have saved myself. I could have—
I was interrupted by the appearance of a wavering silhouette which loomed over the surface, blotting out the light momentarily. With a splash, it darted swiftly into the deep pool, surging towards me, and I would have reached out to it but my limbs had become leaden and unresponsive. What was this creature? It seemed so familiar yet, as consciousness bled slowly from me, I found myself unable to recall even a name, a memory. The shadow took on a menacing air as it rushed unceasingly towards me, filling my vision with obscuring darkness. I struggled to escape it, but could not.
A glimmer of luminous blue—such deep eyes I had never seen before, or maybe I had, but in a dream somewhere. I found it increasingly hard to focus, and my thoughts had begun to drift about like only so much water, unable to be retained. Wistfully, I wished that I could remember something, anything in this moment.
The form came to a halt near me, close enough for me to feel the aura of warmth emanating from it. Breathless, I gazed, transfixed, into those eyes that gleamed with turbulent emotion. It leaned closer to me, speaking warbling, muted words like music, and I listened in awe as my mind descended further into darkness, dying slowly. Lithe fingers traced sluggish patterns in the deep; it trailed across my temples, and across my heart. Sleep beckoned from the darkness in their wake, unassailable. Utterly vanquished for this one instant, I released the air from my lungs in a plume of twinkling bubbles and breathed in the sharp coldness of the sea, embracing it. Those luminous blue eyes leaned towards me once more. Night swept over my eyes like a serpent.
I awoke within a dream.
Far above me, the sun glimmered, filling the blue-green emptiness with warmth. I sighed a plume of bubbles that twinkled and ascended into the luminous heights. Snatches of thoughts and dreams swirled through the sea around me, agitated by rippling currents. They streamed and twisted through the waters, staining the currents with a billowing dye in evanescent patterns. It was a beautiful sight.
Memories billowed and curled around me…did they belong to me, and I to them? I vaguely recalled something of the sort, and furthermore felt a twinge of anxiety at being unable to remember, yet I banished those unwelcome thoughts. Why worry about such things when I merely wanted to watch the slow ebbing and flowing of dreams in the sunlit currents of this sea? Swarms of bubbles rose up from green depths and into the sky, and I saw faces reflected in them, faces that seemed grotesquely familiar and yet unrecognizable. I averted my gaze, too uneasy to meet them. The ever-calming sea was warm and bright, clear and rippling with rays of sunlight. The sun floated slowly towards the zenith of the sky, and all was silent save for the low rushing sounds of water churning over water, a serenely purifying sound. Dreams swayed in the currents of the sea, faraway thoughts entwining with them and encircling me, leaving a trail of cloudy ink in their wake. As I felt them flow over my hand, I was filled with a curious delight, watching the streams of consciousness undulate and intertwine. Suddenly, a spasm of pain flew over me, and I recoiled. As a cloud of dye enveloped me, I heard a horrific scream of agony that was quickly stifled as the dye diffused. Before I could recover from the shock, a second burst of that painful bile flowed across me, darkening the rays of the sun and suffusing my ears with a cacophony of grieving voices that tore at themselves in anguish. Another merciless surge overwhelmed me, then another, and another until I was driven senseless with grief, and still they flowed over me. The leaden venom burned through my blood, filling me with reddening pain. Drugged by the noxious poisons, I bore witness to thousand crying voices, to people raging, grieving, dying, pummeling the earth and beating themselves in paroxysms of anguish. Tattered memories swarmed around me, sorrowful, joyful, furious, sickening, yet all of them torturous, full of emotions too caustic to be felt, too poignant to be dreamed. I howled in senseless mourning as the voices grew louder and louder and my heart began to bleed with the wretched din. The blazing sun at its lofty height now seemed to abrade me with its fiery heat; the green-blue color of the sea now pained my eyes like acid. It was too much, too much for my vulnerable soul to bear. I pleaded for blindness, for deafness, for escape from the agony.
The sea around me lapped softly, reassuringly.
Gentle soothing waters caressed my trembling form, easing away the burning sores from my skin and the pain from within my heart. For a long time, the currents flowed around me and diluted the dreams of those strange other worlds that bled and hurt. A drifting peace filled me in their wake, a clear tranquility that swept me up and held me suspended beneath the waves. The sea was calm and bright, rippling softly on its pellucid surface as bubbles streamed through it and lances of hot sunlight glinted through the waves. As I lay basking in the dappled light of the ocean and the low sounds of rippling waves flooded my mind, I heard a song of unearthly beauty, a lyrical baritone; the sea was saturated with it and it filled me up with warmth. My heart was lifted, my back arched involuntarily as I released the shuddering tension that plagued me. Enveloped with this song, this beautiful graceful dream, I was at peace. The churning of the sea began to slow and it seemed like the whole world was spiraling to a standstill, that the sun was ceasing its chaotic flight across the heavens, around the star-strewn galaxy. What could this be but a pleasant night, a heavenly black night with no moon nor stars nor fire, with no crumbling earth to mar the swollen maternal seas of the world, with no breath of life or rippling gale to distress the pure clarity and stillness of the night?
Though the strange sensations still swam around me in wide arcs, their painful dyes had been diluted and dispersed by the sea and song. The sun had been likewise defeated, and it fell heavily beyond the seas into nothing and was gone. Eternity was nigh, present in the resounding cadences and the airy coldness of the infinitely opaque heavens. Time held no meaning anymore. In the resulting darkness, I felt calm and closed my eyes. Listening to the rushing sounds, I became the sea of darkness, the lapping of the waves and the blessed emptiness of the deeps. I was myself no longer.
This was a watery twilight that rippled and swam with diffuse light, shadowy and moist. This was an endless, endless cool sea above, drifting in myriad eddies and surges. This was a hauntingly beautiful intonation, deep voices that swam through the sea and bewitched time to a sluggish grey crawl.
The seconds dripped downwards, merging into surface of the sea like little warm raindrops in the dark, spreading faintly curving ripples far above before dissipating into the endless heights. Swollen glistening bubbles heaved themselves from the low murky depths and floated, shivering, towards the fluid firmament; in the twilight of the ocean, there was nothing but sleep, endless sleep.
The surface of the gentle sea wavered. Muted shadows shifted and flowed across the waves as rushing water flooded the mind with its liquid murmurs. Scattered dreams and emotions flitted through these dilute meditations like tattered veils, elusive and strange. All sense of identity diffused slowly into the never-ending sameness of the ceaselessly churning waves.
After an eternity of emptiness, there occurred at last a jarring sensation of wavering uncertainty which fractured the senseless lethargic homogeneity of the sea, a feeling like a spider's web carefully and slowly and inexorably being pulled apart. At once, there was a rush of dry air being released and a sharp intake of breath as a rattling breeze swept through the stagnant corridors of my lungs. The darkness of cold eternity melted and dissipated in the warmth of the wind. My eyes fluttered open and, for a moment, the lustrous infinity of the sea was too dazzling to behold. I awoke.
Air. A single thought spun through my dazed and vacant mind and sought something to connect to. The water's surface glimmered. I breathed a second time, a raw and halting exhalation that burned through the bridge of my nose and stung in my throat and mouth with its unfamiliarity.
Air—that was Fai. Oh, sweet Fai, capricious as the Air! Sanguine and inventive and subtle Fai…I breathed deeply, feeling that warm presence in the vibrant scented air around me. Warm blood began to spread through the stilled core of my chest and within my aching heart which beat, and beat again. Awakening further, I discovered myself to be submerged in a rounded basin of sun-fired brick in curving descent away from the remote stars; far above, the circular opening glimmered luminously, sending shafts of moonlight into the dusky depths. In the rippling image of that faraway blue aperture, I was seized by a painfully sweet memory of twin azure eyes that twinkled with bright intensity and love. My heartbeat grew more vigorous as I stirred, filling the echoing chamber of the basin and my temples with gushing palpitations.
Now, as my blood filled with bittersweet reminiscence and that purpose I had only just remembered, I bent my will towards the last strands of the enchantment which sang now faintly through the waves, brushing against me and coaxing me to return to the eternal dream-state from which I had just emerged. The bright loci of the spell shone in my mind as I maneuvered them into long flowing strands, weaving the tattered ends of the incantation into a knot, the binding theirah. The song swelled into a crescendo of sorrowful remembrance before abating. At once, the arcane prison came undone, and a rush of a billion tiny escaping bubbles fluttered desperately towards the luminous heights in a twinkling swarm. Glassy shards sank towards the bottom of the pool. Struck by unexpected weariness, I drifted upwards through the steadily lightening blue-green pool of swaying dappled patterns. Time seemed to stand still as I drifted, half-lucid, amongst motionless suspended dust twinkling in the waves. In my sluggish ascent, my mind bent inexorably like a compass needle towards the past.
Memories swam around me like the very sea, intoxicating. I remembered that hollow and frail form, lifeless grey eyes that pierced my heart with innocent loneliness. I saw Fai's exuberance in creating Chi, his face bursting into a gleaming smile. Sweetly and bitterly, I remembered his sadness and gloomy isolation, his uncontrollable raging and the long hours of solace at his bedside that followed. I recalled the peace of the early mornings, watching him breathe softly and deeply in the shade of his room, wondering what he was dreaming about as the rosy dawn spread over the glistening snow.
In a rush, the past swept me away. I saw the dream begin on that lonely and grimy world with an unscrupulous meeting in secret. I saw that ultimate deceptive sleep overtake me, that resounding instant of grim and proud surprise as he uttered those brave words "At least…you'll have a good dream", that moment when the last of my senses were absorbed into the sea of nothing. My mind churned, awash in a flood of sighing beautiful memories.
A good dream…
I jolted, suddenly very much aware of the subtle cadence that had reawakened in whispers all around me. Once again, the sea's song had beguiled me with the past. Fear gripped me as I realized how close I had been to falling back into the nothingness of sleep. My aspirations had nearly evaded me again—alas, those memories were too fresh, too dear to my heart for me to have had any sort of defense against them. I concentrated on remaining lucid, on retaining those sensations of which I had so long been deprived. I reluctantly let Fai withdraw to the back of my memory, if only temporarily. Now was not the time for idle reminiscence. I held fast to the reeling world.
The water was barren and cold, I now felt, a jagged clenching cold that clawed with dull iron wherever its heartless hands could reach. I winced slightly, intensifying my focus in an attempt to blot out the pain. As the surface loomed ever wider, I noticed a pearlescent sheen twisting on its surface—Chi, and the second half of his spell, one which I would not undo. My garments billowed and furled in the frigid waters as I continued my lengthy ascent.
At long last, I burst through the surface of the pool and into the chilly air, soaked thoroughly. The pearlescent sheen vanished from my sight as it threaded and laced its winding way invisibly through the dimensions. It was going to find Fai, to tell him I had at last prevailed over his latest brilliant—desperate—ruse.
I heaved myself from the pool and shuddered at the chill as my sopping robes dripped puddles and rivulets across the tiled floor. A humorless laugh escaped my frigid trembling lips as I thought of his desperate flight and the panic which must even now be gnawing at his heart. Doubt hung heavy on my heart as always: I alone had imagined this path, I had sown this black flower into Fai, rooting it deeply in his tangled sorrows so that those sorrows might end. Such risk, such anguish—oh, if I were wrong! Anxiety rose in my throat until it choked me and I felt a raw burning like acid. With effort, I quelled these superfluous emotions.
The fiery agitation soon left me, leaving in its wake a somber clarity. Sighing a cloud of icy vapor, I reminded myself of that steadfast ideal, that by these actions, the burdens of his curse would all be eased from Fai's patiently straining soul.
Longingly, I thought of that moment when peace would grace his countenance. My eyes fluttered shut as joy welled up in my heart and I relished such a precious, precious idea. I savored that sensation fully, rolling it around my consciousness and absorbing every nuance of the feeling. Resolve etched itself into my being; I would succeed. If Fai could lead a mended life, I would surely attempt anything for him. I would enclose all of his burdens within myself and, having done so, they would be expiated and dissolved. For that moment, for that sweet potential of salvation, for Fai…for him alone I now lived and breathed in that chilly air.