"Omne vivum e vivo."
—
The wind blows anew—a wind once familiar and irrepressible of memories it conjures to him, now is strange and alien, though he should not find it so…like petals found from a flower that was of its fullest bloom yesterday, he finds it unsettling to learn of in their state at the droop of the stem and naked pistil.
He could see all were being woken around him, as if a new sun were drawing their eyes open.
He was alone, however…he could sense the world waking though he himself could have been stranded on an island in this new oasis.
Cassius looked heavenwards with new eyes.
Instead of the blue and red skies he was accustomed to, his view of the heavens was now green as jade and malachite meshed together.
It…was moving…as though an ocean had flipped itself and had dyed its currents to become visible—truly apparent to follow as far as the course would let.
His eyes read the magnetic topographical elements of that jade and malachite sky…the variations of hills, gulleys, winding rivers of energy, true to feel as well as see.
He utters no more than a surprised sound from his new throat and sees the air about him move crazily with the vibration his utterance emits.
Instantly he knows where he is…Rakhana.
Simultaneously, he understands he is also on Earth…her homeworld.
His only noise tells him where everyone is…where everything is…where he is.
Voices like thoughts like ripples like words…one and all can hear and understand without error.
And she…She is sleeping…he can feel her sleeping as though she were dreaming—not beside him, but everywhere, all around, even inside him and everything not him.
"Isole…ISOLE!"
He is unanswered, but for echos of his own grief reaching out to others who express varying degrees of sympathy at his emotion…grief, too, has a color, and a different shape of current, as sometimes clouds do in the sky.
Willing himself to stand on his new legs and to move his new body, achingly, in search of her, he wanders listlessly, trying to sort out the echos, the vibrations, the fibrillations of that magnetic landscape forming and created by her own dream, unbeknownst to him…He searches, and others tell him her body is not there.
"Isole…come to me!" he screams.
The dreamer dreams, and the world is reborn.