The Dreamer

"What would you dream of, if you could dream?"

It doesn't sound right coming from his mouth. Too airy, too haunting, too light. Elika frowns, and wraps her arms around her knees. They've foregone a fire tonight, it's too risky. The desert wind feels almost colder than death. When she speaks, the words come out like the crunch of snow. "I am not doing this with you."

It's dark, with no moon, and no stars. The shadows of Ahriman hang suspended over the sky. Even though she can't see, she knows to her irritation that his blue eyes are calmly fixed on her.

"Come on, Princess," he says lazily. He's coiled up on the sand like a big cat, or maybe a snake. How he stays warm in that tattered, ripped excuse for a shirt, she has no idea. "It's a simple question." His voice slips back into an almost crooning caress, one that has too much sibilance and too much night. "What would you dream of, if you could dream?"

Elika breathes deeply. She counts to ten, in the ancient, sacred language of the Ahura. Sometimes, she's afraid she's the only mortal left in the world who understands it. After she's done, she still wants to clench her fists and maybe throw one into his face. She's sure he's smirking. She's sure.

She restrains herself with an effort. "No," she says, and this time ice gilds her voice. She stands. She is willing to damn him and perhaps her too if it will get them some peace tonight. They have a long day tomorrow. "I am not doing this now. I told you."

He stops. The sand rustles beneath them, mindlessly sifting with the wind and playing over their shoes. She stays caught between the urge to cross over to the next dune and lie down alone and collapsing bonelessly where she is. There are many things that Elika does not know, amongst them the final way to end Ahriman, but one thing she does know is that until she does she will always be tired.

She wishes she could see his face. So that she can read him, of course, and know what he's planning before he opens his mouth.

"Come on, Princess," he says again, and this time it's with his normal voice. The hardened one. The one where she can taste the warmth underneath the weariness, if she cares to pay attention to it. "Better to be prepared now than floundering tomorrow. Like last time."

Elika jerks. She hadn't thought he was going to bring it up. Hadn't thought he would dare, after what had happened...

"I'm leaving," she says emotionlessly. "Now."

She turns to go, and then his voice stops her.

"Princess..."

So simple. The still yearning in his voice, the suppressed longing. Enough to call to an echo of her heart and hold her spellbound for a brief moment.

It's only brief though, and she's ready to keep walking when of course, he keeps speaking.

"If I could dream," he says quietly, and now he no longer sounds like he's looking at her. He sounds like he's looking far away, maybe inside the desolate landscapes of his self. "If I could dream, I would dream of life." Something of a smirk slips into his voice then. She wonders if he can ever keep it out. "I'd dream of a donkey, and riding into the sun. Of sand and flowers. Of the fresh smell of the sea, and horizons never-ending."

Perhaps it is because he is no longer talking to her. Or at least doesn't sound like it. But Elika sways for a moment, caught between one dune and the next.

She steps back, and sits down, and is silent for the rest of the night.

"What could you dream of, if you could dream?"

The dawn is a cold gray, and she knows how it feels as she swings around and hisses into his face. She can see him now. It's a relief, to be able to pin him with the full force of her glare. It's a damn annoyance when he just lets it slide down his cheek, like water. He grins at her, switches back to his normal voice. "Well?"

She growls under her breath, swings around, and keeps walking. There is a scar that beckons them across the horizon, a familiar gouge in the earth that she finds it hard to look at. She feels her stomach clench and twist. "Try this again, and I'm leaving you behind."

She hears his footsteps stop, startled, a break in their dance. And then they resume again, sauntering. "No you wouldn't, Princess," he disagrees pleasantly, idly kicking at a stone in his way. "You need me."

But he doesn't repeat the question.

"Elika."

She almost slips. For a moment, she feels the sharp, juddering hit of fear she felt when she fell the first time, so many months ago, Then her magic bursts out from underneath her and swings her back to the ledge, and she clings to it like it's something living, a sign from Ormazd.

"Elika!" his voice is alarmed this time, and he skids down and grabs her, sending a shower of sparks cascading after him. She shudders as her arms slide around his neck and he starts the descent down again for both of them. A few seconds later, when the adrenaline dies away, she realises that she's shuddering in anger.

"What were you doing?" he demands in a whisper. He is shivering too, she wonders if they are both vibrating with the same rage. "You're losing your head."

She almost loses her breath at the sheer audacity. "I'm losing my head?" she half-snarls back. "Who was the one who started this in the first place, might I ask? Who was the one who tried to bargain with the God of Lies? Not me."

He stops, and she can't see his face because he's facing the stone, but her cheek is pressed against his scarves and she can smell the sweat and exhaustion and cold determination in them. Part of her thrums in remembrance of her realisation, not that long ago, and she brutally quashes it.

When he speaks, his voice is cool and even.

"You're losing your head," he say quietly. "You almost died the last time we came down here. And since then, you've been slipping and snapping and you won't tell me..."

She wants to say a lot of things. She wants to maybe even cry. But instead she says, in a voice scraped raw of feeling, "Don't."

He hangs for a moment on the cracked and deadened vines. She clings on tightly to him, as if she wants to squeeze his breath out. No. Don't. Never.

"Fine," he says. "I won't. But something is bothering you, Princess, and if letting it out will save both our skins, I suggest you reconsider."

His patience with her has worn thin. She can tell it in the harshness of his voice. She uses it to spur her denial, riding it hard and blindly away from the shadow of the truth stalking her steps.

In her silence, he slowly starts to climb again. It's tiresome, slow work. She watches the stone pass them unseeing, her mind fixed on what awaits them below. The words echo between them, and into the stillness of the gorge.

What would you dream of, if you could dream?

They keep climbing, and when they reach the bottom, before she can swing off his shoulders, before they can react, it happens.

The Dreamer is not like the other Corrupted. He still looks mostly human, for one. She can see skin, and clothes, and even most of a face. It's his eyes that mark him out. They are pure Corruption - no pupil, no iris, no eyeball. Just a black pool of stench and despair.

He looms out of the darkness, out of nowhere. And suddenly his voice is all around her, gentle and wistful, hollow and compelling, misty and seductive.

"What would you dream of, if you could dream?"

Elika opens her mouth to scream, in fear or in a battle-cry, she's not quite sure, and then she is suddenly no longer there.

The gorge vanishes. The low, brackish river of Corruption at its bottom is gone. Elika hangs suspended over an endless abyss, and her fear of falling, normally muted underneath the surety of her faith in Ormazd and her knowledge of her magic, heaves and cries under her skin. Two images dance at the edges of her vision, and if she concentrates, dimly, she can feel the Corruption worming into her mind. But the images are more compelling. One, on her left, the dark and silence of her death and the sure knowledge that Ahriman is still imprisoned and the sun shines clear. And on her right, a damaged world, a hardened world, but one lit by a different sun that shows their triumph. Theirs. Because she is with him.

Elika wants to curl up and vomit, because she knows what those images mean.

Her denial, though, runs deeper and blacker than the abyss. The picture on her left begins to grow stronger, fuelled by her desperate conviction. Her eyes screw shut. That is what she should want. She knows that. That is what needs to happen.

That is the moment she feels herself begin to give into the dream.

And then someone behind her says, his voice soft and reverent with surprise, "Elika?"

She jerks in surprise. Her concentration scatters. The image on her left falls back with something like a howl, and then the image on the right rushes her and the Prince both with such savage ferocity that they are swallowed up before they can blink.

She wakes to swearing.

She is lying on warm grass. She rolls over and blinks at it. The soil underneath still looks grey and unhealthy, but the shoots push out of it, determined to grow, and the sun is shining above them.

And he is swearing, and kicking at clods, and generally acting bewildered.

That doesn't seem right...

A frown twists her face as she stares down at the dirt. This wasn't what had happened last time. Unless...

The realisation hits her like a camel. Elika almost laughs, and then she smothers it. She rises instead and arches her eyebrow at him. It feels good to do so, a little warm aspect of the dream that tries to creep into her mind and get a foothold.

He swings around as if he can feel her gaze, and then the words burst from his lips as if he can't control them any more. "I don't get it!" he says, half-cry, half-shout. "The last time you came out of this you acted like some part of you had died." He kicks again at the dirt, and then curses liberally as he hits a rock. "Ow!"

She wants to smile at him. Wants to explain. She can feel the tendrils of the dream eagerly surging forth at the awakening of those desires, trying to take her and twist her to the Dreamer's control. But it's different this time. Now she is no longer struggling against both him and herself. Now it's just him, because she has the Prince, the real Prince with her. And even though that means he can't rescue her from the outside like he did last time, it gives her an odd sense of hope. They have done the impossible together before, she knows that. She'll even grudgingly admit it if pushed. Having him with her...

Makes them strong.

"I don't know how you came in here," she says brusquely. "Perhaps it's because we were still touching this time when he got us. But maybe we can find a way out together before..."

The memory flashes at her, and then is subdued by the Dreamer's hand. Still, that moment is enough. Elika remembers the moment of complete silence, complete desolation, complete emptiness when faced with a copy of the Prince, a construct of her mind, herself all alone in her denial and being held still with her mind violated by the Dreamer. She swallows. At least there is no copy this time. Perhaps that will turn the balance. She swallows again, and hopes. "Before something bad happens."

He shakes his head again, but realisation has caught up with him and he remembers. "Last time I got you out by getting a knife in the bastard's gut," he says. He starts to shift from foot to foot now, restless. "How are we meant to do this from the inside?"

She freezes. She thought he would know, somehow. "I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't..." he cuts himself off abruptly, and turns away. She realises she is seeing him at his unfettered best. Annoyance and irritation and quickness all. He's been holding back around her since the last time, she knows. As if she was something that might break. She winces. Perhaps it was the way she had acted, as if she'd been made of ice splinters.

Now, he's just being him. And that brings her hope from some strange place she doesn't want to think about.

He turns back just as the warmth from the hope makes itself known to her, and the Dreamer tries to dig in again. His eyes are sharp. "Maybe we can get out of here if we can figure out more about how this works." He gestures at the air vaguely. "What was that blackness before? What is this dream?"

Her stomach abruptly drops out of the bottom of her belly. "I don't think that will work," she says quickly. She folds her arms around her, for warmth. "I think we..."

She peters off, because she doesn't really know. Part of her closes her eyes in disgust. He was right. She is slipping.

And then she almost does it for real, because suddenly he is almost on top of her, eyes inches away, nostrils flaring.

"Elika," he says flatly. "Our bodies might be dying out there. Whatever you've been trying to hide from me, now is a really bad time to keep doing it."

Elika halts.

The world seems to spin past as he waits for her. She doesn't pay it any attention. She knows it. It is a world that has gone through much pain and sorrow and hardship, and seen far more than its share of war and death, and yet that is what she has chosen, and it still horrifies her in ways she doesn't want to confront.

But it seems he does. "Princess..."

The sound snaps a memory in her again. One that the Dreamer tries to control, but can't understand, and so has to let through his fingers. "If I could dream," he says quietly, and now he no longer sounds like he's looking at her. He sounds like he's looking far away, maybe inside the desolate landscapes of his self. "If I could dream, I would dream of life."

The words unlock something in her. She thinks that if she woke up now, she could weep. She looks quickly to the side of him; it's somehow easier if she's looking at his scarves, and not at his face.

"Okay," she says softly. "Okay."

He stops.

In the stillness, she keeps speaking to his scarves. They wave in the sunlight and wind, their faded colours still bright against the sky. She wishes she could see them like that in the real world. She dreams she will one day again.

She dreams.

"The last time I was here," she says, and her voice is softer still because it feels like the Dreamer is now seizing her head and crushing it. She stifles the gasps from the pain. "I thought I would dream of death. Of what should have happened."

She doesn't need to explain. She sees the horror and sick memory on his face, and she is grateful for a moment that denial has no sway here, or at least not much of one. "But instead I found myself here, and then I realised that meant..."

The words are still hard to say. Harder than she imagined. But she manages.

"Then I realised that meant that... even at the deepest core of me... I don't want to be dead anymore." And that I want to be with you, and so many other things.

She wonders how much of that he will understand. She feels like she can't say more, like her pride and shame are stopping up her tongue just as effectively as the Dreamer ripping apart her mind. But she manages to fix on his face and she knows the moment he understands, in a way he wouldn't have those months ago on that day in her city.

"You little idiot," he breathes.

The words should hurt, but nothing hurts more than the Dreamer right now, his fingers digging into her skull. She gasps and sinks to one knee, and then he is there, his grip firm on her shoulder and his words hissed hard into her ear, as if he's no longer afraid she will break under him.

She is glad.

"This last week you've been drowning yourself in shame." The whisper is hard, like a slingshot. "But what you don't get is that you haven't chosen to sacrifice people just so that you can stay alive. You've chosen to live, and knowing you, to defeat Ahriman forever."

He pauses, for significance. A part of her is distantly amused. He always did have the flair for the dramatic.

"For once, for yourself and not your people, you've chosen to dream."

Elika doesn't quite hear the words until the impact hits her, slaps her across the face. She hadn't thought of it like that. She hadn't. She had only felt the complete shock of having her beliefs about herself, her world, and her loyalty ripped away from her. She was the last Princess of the Ahura. Her death had caused this mess. Surely she should want to dream she had stayed dead. Surely she was being disloyal if she didn't. Surely that meant she was no longer the right person to do this, no longer the Warrior of light.

But perhaps he is right, and if that is the case...

The pain lifts. Dimly, distantly, Elika thinks she can hear the Dreamer screaming as the shards of the dream are reflected back at him, coiling in on themselves to sting the hand of the master who once wielded them. And then comes an explosion of sunrise behind her eyes - the light and the hope she had buried underneath her denial, fierce enough to burn and strong enough to smoulder, even through Ahriman's night.

For the first time since her first death, Elika feels truly alive.

And in the moments before the grass and the sun and the sky shatter, she manages to lift her head and turn to face him. He looks like he always has; windblown and handsome, strong and snide. But this time she focuses on eyes; fierce, wild, and full of the love she can admit to herself exists.

Here in the dreamworld, at least.

And then they leap forwards, into the future, into the darkness, and into eventual light.

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A/N - I haven't written for a long time, I know. Part of this is because I'm currently travelling in Europe, and part of this is because I think I'm scared of writing again. But tonight I met up with PauseTheTragicEnding, and I was inspired once more. So thank you to PauseTheTragicEnding for your unfailing support and enthusiasm, and thank you to everyone who is still reading this, and given me their support and encouragement. I can't tell you all how much I appreciate it.

Take care, for now.

Shadowhawke.