Dreaming Of A Place

It’s a village where silence speaks its name, day in and day out. It’s a place where the old go to die and the flowers bloom from their corpses. It’s a cottage on a hill by a forest, surrounded by fields on all sides, where a not-quite-deity makes her home.

She’s too tall, in the way that she has to duck through doorways, and too strong, in the way that she can snap cutlery clean in half if she’s not paying attention. Too kind, in the way that she’ll take in any nameless stranger, and too forgiving, in the way that she’ll let them rob her blind without even a protest. Things can be replaced, she says, but people cannot.

It’s springtime, a time of birth and renewal and new beginnings, but the old echo of a goddess longs for one thing only. Not the future, and not a new life. Not a family — she has her little brother already — and not a hearth to sit by, though it warmed her through the cold and blistering winter.

She sits by the window, mug of wildflower tea in hand, and she wishes for dreams.

Once, many years ago, she dreamt of a place. No, not a place, a Place. Somewhere beyond the realms of her little village with its little villagers, living by some unwritten calendar of the seasons. Somewhere beyond even the furthest reaches of the astral oceans, where the stars shimmer at the limits of reality. Somewhere that, she knows, she can chase every night when she closes her eyes, and still wake up wanting more.

She’s never made it back there. Not once. She’s dreamt of shifting deserts pouring into azure oases; mountains of emeralds dripping into oceans of opals; and shadowed forests opening up into verdant glades. She’s never dreamt of the Place, though, and it’s something that haunts the corners of her hollow mind with a vengeance.

Sometimes, on the days when she’s alone, not sought out by anyone except for her own thoughts, she thinks she can hear it. It’s not a particular sound — rather, it’s the absence of it, a staticky low hum that makes her blood rush through her ears. Heartbeat, one, two. Her memories of the Place are few and far between, mostly because everything blended together when she was there. Seconds into years, colours into grey. It was simple, liminal. Held together by cardboard and daydreams.

She falls into these memories. Repeating corridors, one after the other. Wallpaper that peels at the edges in exactly the same way each time. Flickering lights, just repetitive enough for the ghost of a pattern to emerge, but not enough for her to understand.

She’ll never understand.

“Hestia!”

It’s her brother, waving from beyond the window. Her mug of tea is still hot in her hands — not much time has passed, or perhaps her fire magic bled out through her palms whilst her mind was away, drifting through the layers of reality.

There’s a lot to think about.

“I’ll be there in a moment.”

There’s a lot that goes unsaid.