Fractals and Dreams

There was a somewhat of an experience whenever she settled in someone to talk to them – she couldn’t call it a feeling, because that would imply she knew what anything felt like – but there was something she could barely put words to that was unique to those she haunted. Haunting Isolde, the girl she’d made her home, was as close to the idea of what she imagined a blanket must feel like, from the look of calm relief that usually accompanied pulling it around one’s shoulders, to the way Ilmora’s sisters used to rub their cheeks against her mother’s embroidered quilts in such a satisfying way.

Haunting the outcast was closer to the sound of howling wind, Ilmora felt. Empty and yearning for more than closed doors. Or maybe he was more like wilted vines, starving for something, curling and crackling under abysmal heat quietly enough that only someone with their ear to the trellis could hear them dying. Or maybe he was something else entirely – Ilmora was terrible at describing things.

She supposed the wind metaphor made more sense for him, as far as themes went. She watched, amused, as he jumped at her question, and she could hear his heartbeat in his own ears, swallowed down like a bitter pill. Languidly she shifted in his mind, and as she rolled around, her voice shifted to one of his ears to the other: Ah, so it’s a potion you’re making then. That makes much more sense. I wouldn’t have taken you for a witch, but I suppose magic takes all kinds.

She curled up comfortably, and she liked to imagine that if she had limbs, she’d rest her chin on her knuckles, like she saw the men at the taverns do sometimes. What do you want to forget so badly? Might as well tell, since you wouldn’t remember this conversation either way. Oh – and do tell me out loud, otherwise I can’t hear you.

An amused sigh, and then: And, before you ask the ever-tedious question, you’re not losing your mind. Just haunted for the night. No need to fret.