Traced Features
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The forest was ancient. Trees that were some ideal platonic average between pines, oaks, and cherries towered up to scrape a sky that was deep indigo marbled with phlox. Their thin leaves rustled and petals from their heartbreak-pink flowers drifted down like colored snow. The ground cover was not grass, but a kind of tentacular, clinging moss, each waving tendril dark as shadow and soft as velvet. A rhythmic thump, like a heartbeat, made the trees shudder every now and then.
Danny was dreaming.
Oh, not because the place was impossible. He'd visited this very forest before, and the Infinite Realms boasted much stranger. But he was dreaming nonetheless.
The moss curled over his shoes and twined around his ankles. More adventurous lengths whispered at the backs of his knees.
He could break away whenever he wanted. It would hardly take any force at all. Still, they kept him in place, feet firmly planted on the ground, winding ticklishly through his toes. He was in his pajamas in the dream, shorts and an old t-shirt.
In front of him stood someone he knew. Or, rather, someone he was supposed to know, but in the manner of dreams he didn't recognize them.
They towered over him, tall and broad enough to challenge buildings, the edges of their all-encompassing cloak fading into the moss below. They had many hands, ranging in size from larger than Danny's whole body to child-sized. With those hands they traced over Danny's skin, lingering especially over the features of his face, each touch gentle, delicate, as if Danny was something precious, something beautiful.
Danny woke slowly. It was the seventh time he'd had a dream like that, although none had been set in the same place, and the figure in front of him had been different each time, the similarities being only the touching and the obscuring cloak. He hadn't thought much of them the first two times, except to savor the feeling of being… cherished, almost.
But having had the dream seven times, he couldn't help but feel there was something else to it. He did, after all, have enemies that could manipulate dreams. On the other hand, he'd mentioned the dreams in passing to Jazz, and she'd wondered if he was touch starved. So maybe not. Maybe he should put some time aside on the weekend to visit the Far Frozen.
He sat up.
There was a box sitting on the end of his bed. It was wrapped in black paper marbled with green, and tied with a silver-white satin bow.
He stared at it. The colors… it couldn't be from his parents. Jazz would have just given it to him. So who…?
The little hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he reached out to it carefully, like one would a bomb, and pulled it back into his lap. He grasped the end of the bow and hesitated.
No one would send him a bomb like this, would they?
He made most of himself intangible, just in case, and pulled at the bow. It unraveled easily, falling away to reveal the seams of the paper wrapping, which Danny pulled apart with just as much caution. Inside was a box made of dark wood, held closed by a brass clasp. He pulled it free.
His breath caught in his throat.
Three porcelain-white masks laid on black silk stared back at Danny with empty eyes. Three masks with his own features, and yet… not.
The mask on the left was him, unmistakably him, but somehow anonymous. Forgettable. Bland and dull. The face of someone unremarkable and uninteresting. A face that wouldn't be questioned, wouldn't be suspected. The face an entirely normal person with no secrets would have. It was, the thought occurred to him, as if pressed into his mind by an outside source, a safe mask.
The mask on the right was also him, but different. Just as surely, that was his face, but it was stronger, braver, better. Like someone who could be relied on. Like someone who was a hero for real, rather than the pretense he put on day after day. A face that could win or lose but could never be defeated. Not really. It was a mask that he tried to put on whenever he was Phantom, but could only rarely pull off in reality.
The third mask…
Oh, it was him, definitely him, exactly him, but each part of it had been shaped with exacting, exquisite, delicate detail. Each rise and curve imbued with a sense of value, of care. This was his face, as sculpted by someone who loved it, loved him.
He picked a mask up out of the box and turned it over. He could see that the inside, like the outside, was perfectly sculpted, perfectly fitted, to a degree that there would be no need for other ties or clasps to keep it on.
This was a trap. With a foreign depth of certainty, he knew that none of these masks would come off as easily as they'd go on.
And yet… and yet…
This was the face he'd always wanted to wear.
The dark hollow inside seemed to call to him. Call for him. He found himself raising the mask, lifting it closer and closer. Not to put it on, but to imagine it, just for a second. To imagine that this was his face, his truth.
And then the shadows in it reached out for him.
Danny blinked himself awake to the sound of his alarm clock going off and fumbled for it. He'd been dreaming… Dreaming about what? He couldn't quite remember. Something about a gift? Or a friend? The Far Frozen? He really needed to visit sometime soon.
Alarm off, he sat up slowly and stretched, then wasted a precious minute staring at the foot of his bed. He really felt like there should be something there.
He was still half asleep, probably. He scrubbed his hands over his face, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Then he paused, letting his fingers trace over his features. His skin felt smooth today.
Maybe he was finally getting over his acne problem.