The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the First Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long passed, a wind rose in the Himalayas. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
She folds delicate paper roses while the world burns.
Once upon a time, it had been a hobby for women of status. Or rather, a hobby for decorative ornaments in a lord’s household. Ornaments with too much time on their hands.
Sophia wonders if she has five years or five days. Maybe she shouldn’t have. She is playing the waiting game regardless of whether her faith in Lan is misplaced or not. She hopes that she made the right call, but there wasn’t a better option. There were worse options, but the Ta’veren deserved better than that.
A light wind carries one of her roses away from her table and into the stream. It fares okay for a while before the water submerges it below. Sophia looks away. This time, she constructs a boat from a sheet of yellow. It was the only new fold that her mother had taught her after her father had left. Everything else, she had learned at the hospital.
She deliberates for a second before taking another pink sheet for her flowers. The boat sits expectantly on her table, waiting.
Post by ZAHIR BRAND on Sept 28, 2015 23:29:11 GMT -5
He hangs in the space between dreams, an endless black ocean dotted with shimmering lights. Some of them roar at him, iron fillings drawn to a magnet. Strong feelings will draw a person's dreams to you; he suspects these two will follow him no matter how hard he runs. It's easier to give in, and easier still to choose Sophia's hatred over Thalia's love.
Zahir sinks.
Presence and awareness come before form. He only has a body when he realize he needs a body. He crouches beside the stream and watches the rose sink and only much later realizes that he can now see a face in the water's reflection. It's a blend of the strange and the familiar, Moridin's memories of his final body and Zahir's own recollection of himself. There are fires dancing in the hollows of his eyes.
He stares blankly into the water until he can smooth his reflection into only Zahir's image, and then stands. He walks to the table and brushes the back of his hand against the yellow boat.
"The rose doesn't have to sink if you don't want it to," he says. "It's a dream. Everything here belongs to you."
It’s the first time that she’s had a lucid dream in years. Even now she's still discovering all of the rules. Lan must have been dreaming in her stead for all this time. That’s just how she lives, isn’t it? Surviving on the suffering of others.
She just wants to take responsibility for something. As if nailing stakes to her hands would make her more human.
Sophia leans out from her seat. “And you? Are you here of your own volition or mine?”
Her expression smooths out again as she leans back into her chair. It doesn’t matter, does it? There were several possibilities.
1. Zahir is real and he will not lie 2. Zahir is real and he will lie 3. Zahir isn’t real and he will not lie 4. Zahir isn’t real and he will lie
She is met with two great uncertainties: Zahir’s desire to see her and her desire to see him. No. One of these things are certain.
“Prove to me that you came from outside of my dream.”
This should be easy for a philosophy student, she thinks.
Post by ZAHIR BRAND on Sept 29, 2015 1:12:21 GMT -5
"Everything here belongs to you," he says again, and picks up the yellow boat. It turns real in his hands, sun-warmed wood, but when he puts it down on the water it only floats for a moment before crumpling into wet paper.
"It's hard to change things in other people's dreams," he remarks. "It's not as mutable as Tel'aran'rhiod here. People, places, things; they all want to be what the dreamer thinks they are, at heart."
He means it as a warning as much as idle musing. He feels solid, right now, as much himself as he ever does, but he doesn't know how long that will last, if it lasts. He wants to pretend he doesn't have to say it but he still wants her to know: i could become the monster you know i am now at any moment. be safe. be safe.
She’s not entirely convinced that his response was a real answer. Sophia is used to it. Their relationship is one of negotiated information and the truths that he wants her to see.
“What if I wanted you to trust me?” Her hands move deftly to unwrap the half-rose that she had just made. She smooths out the paper and folds a small paper bridge, complete with the rails. “Would that happen? Or is that beyond transforming paper into wood?”
She wanted to respect his privacy. There are things that others are not meant to see, but Sophia feels considerably less charitable after being lead on by bread crumbs for all this time. She would rather he didn’t think her a fool.
Post by ZAHIR BRAND on Sept 29, 2015 12:29:57 GMT -5
"For you it would be easy," he says. "Make me part of the dream, instead of a visitor and I'll be bound by your laws, your conceptions, instead of my own."
It would need his...willingness in order to work, but resisting the temptation of someone else's dream is harder when they feel strongly about you. Letting go of your own awareness is just laying down arms, not taking action.
It shouldn't be so easy, he thinks. If it were the right thing to do, it wouldn't be easy. But he tells her anyway, because he knows he owes her at least that much.
There’s nothing that she likes about what he just said. They make enough of those mistakes in the waking world, don’t they?
"I don’t need to use you to appease my ego.” She feels rather disgusted, and it probably showed on her face. Sophia wishes that he didn’t think so little of her, but it's not as if she hasn't earned his scorn. Facing Zahir is indefinitely easier than facing Thalia. At the very least, she can say that she has earned his time. “Did you want to trust me? Or did you just need to project your insecurities onto someone else?”
Men are all like this, she thinks. They only love a woman until she won't shut up.
Post by ZAHIR BRAND on Sept 30, 2015 0:52:03 GMT -5
Zahir is silent for a moment, and then decides for maybe the first time in his life to actually try and explain something to someone.
"Did I want to trust you? I don't know what you mean by that, or where I'd start. I don't even know what trust is," he says. "It's like trying to explain snow to a man who lived his whole life in a desert. I can hear about it, I can see what it does to other people, but it's not real, not for me. You want me to do something for you that I can't even conceptualize."
Whatever it was that Sophia expected, that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she should have, but no one wants to believe that the person that they love has only ever known impairment.
She’s silent for several minutes. She goes through several possible responses. Sophia eventually settles on honesty.
“I’m sorry.” She rises from her chair so that the both of them are standing up. The furniture collapse into dust and the winds collect their due. The stream overfloods and collects the paper that remains. “I’ve been unkind.”
In her experience, the cynical people are usually those who have been betrayed once too many times. From the sound of it, Zahir may not even know the bitterness of disappointment - an emotion that has guided the entirety of her life.
He won’t understand, she realizes. He won’t emphasize, but he has to know. Her hand moves to her collar buttons. Only a few millimeters of cloth hid an ugly festering wound. Not of teeth and claw, but of angry thorns and bruised petals. Sophia hesitates. What difference does it make now?
(The difference is, she won’t be alone with her bitterness.)
Her own dream betrays her insecurities. A spot of black appears on Sophia’s white dress. The blot grows larger and larger until the entire dress is dyed black. Her collar recedes until she is wearing a strapless gown. Her heart is the de facto centerpiece. Only the thorns seem to be holding it in her chest cavity. The roses have long since died, their brown husks hanging limply off their stems.
This is why she hates dreaming, she thinks. Lies don’t survive as long as they do in the waking world.
“This is what snow looks like.” She decides to correct herself before he corrected her logical proofs. “Or an absence of it. Remember it well.” He would have to hurt someone else to see it again.
Post by ZAHIR BRAND on Sept 30, 2015 2:50:17 GMT -5
He shrugs. The world is unkind. His fate is unkind. Unkindness in itself is not, to Zahir, a sin, but merely a fact of life. It does not surprise him that the woman he loves might occasionally be unkind. Its absence would be more shocking. It bothers him that Sophia sees the need to apologize to him, but that's all.
Zahir...doesn't understand, but the image is still striking. "I won't forget," he says dryly, because it isn't like the sight of his (ex?) girlfriend's rib cage blooming with withered roses comes along very often. And then, because it seems like the appropriate moment: "I'm sorry as well. For Portland. And for afterwards. I thought I understood what I was, what I had to be in order to do what has to be done. I didn't. I don't. It was wrong to take it out on you."
One of the roses start to regain some color and texture. It’s the most honesty that Sophia has displayed in a long time, but the thorns cut deep. His apology hasn’t undone the damage, but she can feel better about having a fresher rose in her ribs.
“I...have also been unfair. I should have given your fears more weight.” She sighs and approaches him slowly. Sophia places a hand on his hair again, just like back in the waking world. “It’s not my place to forgive you for what happened to Portland. I’m not sure that any one person can.” Portland is a measure of Zahir’s humanity and Sophia’s strength, or the lack of both. The city only took on meaning after it was already gone.
Her hand slides to his cheek. “I won’t let you hurt like that again.”
