Author's Note: Sorry for taking so long. I was lazy. Exposition I guess is really not my thing, either…
The dream wasn't a random generation of her mind. Of that, DG was becoming more and more certain. Not only did the same eerie sequence of events pervade her nights, they became more persistent in number and desperate in tone. But no matter how hard she tried to decipher their meaning, she simply could not comprehend it.
And what was worse, she felt too ridiculous to tell anyone, even Cain, to whom she had developed a habit of sharing practically every little thought in her head on their weekly trail rides. He was such a quiet, internally-focused man that she felt extremely, absurdly verbose and vapid for all her prattling. On one occasion, she had told him so. And she'll never forget his response, not ever.
Bringing his horse to a halt, he had shifted in his saddle slightly, and pinned her with that damn perceptive gaze of his.
"Well, DG," he had stated matter-of-factly. "I've known a lot who've had far worse ways of easing their minds. So talk all you want, if it's what keeps you sane."
She hadn't realized up until that point that her friendship with the tin man was practically the only thing keeping her sane, a state that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as the confounding dreams continued.
...
"OZMA!" DG cried out as she started awake. Her cheeks immediately reddened when she was able to resurface from her dream and recognized her surroundings. She was sitting in a comfy chair in the corner of the vast library where Ambrose delivered his lectures on the history of the OZ to the princess.
Currently he was staring at her in a shocked manner, a bit of the old Glitch showing through as his thought processes were struggling to analyze her outburst. Perhaps, he had not even realized she had fallen asleep. He did tend to get carried away with his own loquacious narratives.
She gave him an apologetic smile as he began to understand what had happened. Surreptitiously, she used the sleeve of her emerald green (for once a color she was partial to) spencer to wipe at the small wet stain on the open pages of the book that had served as a pillow.
It occurred to her that there was a new epiphany within the dream, that she had finally teased some key bit of information from it. But what was it...the jarring arousal from her REM state had driven all memory of the dream from her mind.
"Ambrose?" she interrupted his resumed narrative of the history of agricultural systems, how her great great-grandmother had instituted the something-or-other proclamation requiring that... try as might, DG could never pay attention.
"Yes, princess?" he asked, pausing in the middle of his umpteenth turn about the space to turn to face his pupil. DG missed her old friend. Certainly, he was just as decent and kind a man as he was when she met him. But gone was that particular innocence he retained as Glitch.
"Did I happen to say anything when I-um-dozed off?" she probed, hoping that he could provide her with the information her own brain failed to divulge. Maybe the barely restful, disturbed state of sleep she suffered had affected her mental capacity...
Despite feeling slightly pensive, she smiled upon witnessing the familiar sight of Glitch glitching, even though Ambrose had fully regained his grey matter and thought processes. Apparently, his memory was primarily consumed with matters other than short term memory.
"AWs-something," he said slowly, furrowing his brow. "Aws-ah?"
DG began mouthing the sounds, trying to jar her own memory. Why was it so difficult to recover dreams once they were forgotten, or never remembered as it were?
"Aws-ah... Awz-ah... Oz-ah..."
"Oh! OZMA!" DG shouted, and then shrunk back into the chair as she heard her voice echo through the great library.
"What does 'OZMA' mean?" she whispered, overcompensating for her outburst.
"Outer Zone M-something A-uh-Association?" she hazarded.
"I've never heard of it," Ambrose responded, still obviously deep in thought. "It's something you dreamt about?"
"Uh, yeah," DG conceded. "But I think it's important, Gl-Ambrose. Are you sure you've never heard it before?" He shrugged in an apologetic manner and shook his head. "...ever?"
"OZMA..." he pondered again. Normally he would assert he wad right, and move on, but for DG... And she had obviously been bothered by something recently. "It sounds archaic. We could try the ancient archives index."
"Could we?" she asked, feeling like she was being a bother. Ambrose was responsible for an awful lot of the infrastructure of the OZ, and his time probably could've been better spent than educating her, let alone following crazy clues from crazy dreams of hers.
"For you, princess, definitely," he said cheerfully, his eyes lighting up with the prospect of research.
"You are a dork, you know that?" she commented.
"What's a dork?" Ambrose asked as they walked towards the reference section.
"It's, well, never mind," DG asserted, not wanting to insult her friend, even though she had meant it in all kindness.
The library's reference system was remarkably like a computer. Well, a computer circa 1970 that took up an entire room, but only if the 70s had employed intricate clockwork and magic instead of computer chips. It was rather steampunk, actually. DG felt like she should adorn a bustle and some goggles just to watch it in operation.
Ambrose expertly inputted the search parameters, the metal keys clanking so rapidly that the sound was reminiscent of angry squirrels. After a few moments of silence, except for the buzz of the inner workings of the machine winding away, something not unlike tickertape was spat out of the great computing device.
"Looks like there's a few fragments in some of the remaining pre-Dorothian records," Ambrose announced, looking over the small type printed on the length of paper. "And one in a collected work of Gilikin mythology."
"Gilikin?" DG questioned, unfamiliar with the term.
"Very, very old land, dating back to when the OZ was divided into four kingdoms," Ambrose recounted. "Not much is known about the period, except for in mythos. The end of it was marked by the arrival of your ancestor, the great Queen Dorothy."
"Let's try the Gilikin mythology first," Ambrose suggested. "The archaic languages can take a little deciphering..."
...
"Ozma, ancient Queen of all the land of Oz..." Ambrose read from the unfurled scroll with DG looking over his shoulder. She watched as characters glowed and danced about the-well, it looked more like cellophane than any other comparison she could conjure.
"What is that?" she asked. The language most everyone spoke and every written thing she had encountered was what she recognized as basically modern American English, but these characters were odd.
"Hmm?" Ambrose surfaced from the text.
"I don't understand those...letters?" she explained.
"Oh, I didn't realize," he remarked. "I apologize, princess. It's written in the Giliken dialect, basically a dead language, used in this work primarily for esoteric appeal, I imagine."
"And it says that 'Ozma' is the name of an ancient queen of Oz?" DG asked, trying to concentrate on the information but still finding herself mesmerized by the elegant characters flitting over the page like fireflies at dusk.
"Yes," Ambrose confirmed and then continued to read, "She was also fabled to be of fairy origin, possessing significant magical abilities."
"Like my family's?" DG asked.
"Perhaps," Ambrose replied. "Her line may have merged with yours over time, if she was even a real person."
"What else does it say?" DG questioned, curious how such an obscure reference had appeared in her subconscious, one that she had never even heard in passing before.
"That's all it says about this 'Ozma'," the former 'head case' announced with an apologetic smile. "I doubt the ancient archives have any more significant information, but I can have any references pulled and translated, if you'd like, princess."
"I'd like that," DG said distractedly. Why would the name of an ancient, probably mythical queen pop up in her dreams? She just couldn't figure it out. Despite how strange or relevant her dreams had been in the past, they had always had root in something real, substantial.
She couldn't help but wonder if this Ozma was literally haunting the empty halls of her nightmares?
"Are you feeling all right, DG?" he asked, very much her old friend seeing something about her that concerned him.
"I've been a little tired lately," she confessed, knowing she could escape with an omission but probably not an outright lie. "But I'll be fine." She gave him a reassuring smile. "Thanks for entertaining my whim."
"Anytime," he said with a genial smile that was belied by the concern still in his eyes.
A/N: The next chapter should be more interesting than this one…I hope… (and posted sooner?)