For almost two hours, she drifted in and out of true sleep, but never fully woke. She was sweating again, the work of the chill night wind undone. Her dreams were chaotic and nonsensical when she dreamed at all. Jagged, distorted and disconcerting. Fever dreams, to be sure.
A pale, muted dawn was breaking beyond the castle walls when her dreams changed. Two hours had seemed like eternity in her half-conscious, delirious state, and the heat finally drove her out of her own mind as it was meant to drive out the illness. She escaped it, but how or to where she didn't know.
There was the sensation of rising, not just above her own body but above the world itself. Up and up and up, as if her universe had rested on the bottom of an ocean and she was now floating towards the surface.
The Unwaking Waters
She was not looking down at the place where her body still lay, but up. Up at something new and different. Above was something she had never seen, something she could not even put a name to. And yet... and yet, somehow, it was familiar. A distorted reflection of a place she'd been before... or was it a perfected reflection?
She realized belatedly why she could find no words to describe what she was seeing. It was because she was not seeing it in the sense of vision, but feeling. It was the kind of feeling one felt with one's mind and heart, a sixth sense. Instinct, intuition, a gut feeling... a knowing, beyond explanation... which was exactly why she couldn't explain it.
But floating there, just below the surface, she had an absurd vision of Ariel singing about being 'part of that world' and she knew, she knew that she should be there. Something was pulling her. In those hazy waters she couldn't make it out clearly, but it felt like a thread, a yellow thread of silk that was not unbreakable, but nearly so. Yellow... or was it red? Or both, or neither? She couldn't tell. She couldn't see it, only feel...
But there was another thread. This one she knew was purple, because had crafted herself, and it tethered her firmly to her own world, her own reality. She could not leave until her business there was finished, no matter how badly she might want to. Unless he came, and he persuaded her, she would not go until she was ready.
So it was that when her body began to wake again, she sunk slowly back to it, drifting like a feather falling towards the ground.
And when she woke fully, and opened eyes that were dazed but no longer delusional, she did not remember where she had been. All she remembered was a thread.
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timeasmymeasure
not a near-death experience, really. this is something else
Date: 2009-05-25 04:39 am (UTC)A pale, muted dawn was breaking beyond the castle walls when her dreams changed. Two hours had seemed like eternity in her half-conscious, delirious state, and the heat finally drove her out of her own mind as it was meant to drive out the illness. She escaped it, but how or to where she didn't know.
There was the sensation of rising, not just above her own body but above the world itself.
Up and up and up, as if her universe had rested on the bottom of an ocean and she was now floating towards the surface.
The Unwaking Waters
She was not looking down at the place where her body still lay, but up. Up at something new and different. Above was something she had never seen, something she could not even put a name to. And yet... and yet, somehow, it was familiar. A distorted reflection of a place she'd been before... or was it a perfected reflection?
She realized belatedly why she could find no words to describe what she was seeing. It was because she was not seeing it in the sense of vision, but feeling. It was the kind of feeling one felt with one's mind and heart, a sixth sense. Instinct, intuition, a gut feeling... a knowing, beyond explanation... which was exactly why she couldn't explain it.
But floating there, just below the surface, she had an absurd vision of Ariel singing about being 'part of that world' and she knew, she knew that she should be there. Something was pulling her. In those hazy waters she couldn't make it out clearly, but it felt like a thread, a yellow thread of silk that was not unbreakable, but nearly so. Yellow... or was it red? Or both, or neither? She couldn't tell. She couldn't see it, only feel...
But there was another thread. This one she knew was purple, because had crafted herself, and it tethered her firmly to her own world, her own reality. She could not leave until her business there was finished, no matter how badly she might want to. Unless he came, and he persuaded her, she would not go until she was ready.
So it was that when her body began to wake again, she sunk slowly back to it, drifting like a feather falling towards the ground.
And when she woke fully, and opened eyes that were dazed but no longer delusional, she did not remember where she had been. All she remembered was a thread.
A thread and the taste of paopu fruit.