(18)
Speech pales before this communication they've created. Lines in the sand, not boundaries or barriers but bridges bringing them closer. Hearts' secrets whispered in the set of shell, the glimmer of glass.
An odd anticipation settles in Yami's soul. His dreams become weird, in every sense - myth-like, enchanted. In them, a voice like the music of drowned bells calls to him from the waves, and he wakes to find himself ankle-deep in the lagoon.
Sometimes, he sees a dark, sleek gliding shape in the stillness of the shallows. When he reaches for it, it's gone, swift as a shadow.
"Yugi?"
o0o
Yami's dreams rise like green bubbles, luminous in the darker waters of the night ocean. The candor of dreams should be terrifying: mind touching mind with no barrier but belief. There is comfort in illusion. But spirits dwell in truth, and this is the beauty of an open soul, laid bare of all pretense. Dream-born beauty, Yugi is a kaleidoscope of color - like pieces of twilight glass, violet and night-blue and amythest, lost under dark waters yet somehow glowing with captured sunlight. He is the voice of the waves, the caress of the trade wind, the kiss of the sun.
Arising from his body like a dream, Yami's soul meets its mate, spirits touching with recognition, with joy.
o0o
Night has spread her shadow-wings, like the fins of a great flying fish braving the air. The stars are gems woven into her sea-dark tresses, the moon a silver disk set upon her brow. Harib gazes down upon the sleeping world and sends clever Thenope to answer a merman's prayers, twining him in dreams.
Yugi's dreams dart like little fishes, fleeting and quick before his net. Thenope herds them into a silver bait-ball, a bubble that breaks into a new dream, overweighted with longing. Yugi's heart calls, and finds itself answered in equal measure. Yah-mee's soul is as beautiful as his body; moreso, for his soul shines like a sun, like the petals of a lotus, like joy. And Yugi greets him with joy, with longing fulfilled, with love.
o0o
Their dream is an Impressionist painting merging sea and air: smears of color and light that could be coral or floral, darting glimpses of fish or bird among waving fronds suggesting seaweed or palm. What might be air or water shimmers around them with the soft blue heat of an unseen sun (Sol, whispers one mind; Hetis, the other). In this brief blending, two become one, knowing their depths, lifetimes of memory shared (twenty-one, twenty-one hundred) in the beat of a heart. Each knows the other as himself, knows himself as never before. Doubt has no place here, nor lies; only this oneness, this unity, this love.
o0o
Waking is a necessary separation. Yugi wakes with a smile and goes to chant the morning adorations; he pays special attention this day to Thenope Who Dreams, to Phyros Who Gives Joy, to Nirios Who Speaks and Hears. Interfering with humans is forbidden, but rare exceptions are made. Yugi has followed the constrictions of a courtship with one not of the Sea, remaining hidden so that his Siren's allure would not sway the object of his affections. But he knows, now, that the time to reveal himself has come. The closing move of his greatest game.
o0o
Waking is a necessary separation. Yami awakes with a sense of comfort within his own skin, of contentment such as he has never felt. Lazily, he greets the day, and finds each ordinary thing a contemplation - the sweet taste of coconut meat, the scent of smoke rising like incense into an endless blue sky, the discord of sea-birds, raising their raucous psalmody on the wind. He extinguishes his signal fires, one by one; unspells S-O-S, and stacks the dark stones beside Yugi's cairn. It doesn't feel like giving up. It feels like getting ready to go.