Cas' Memories

Sometimes, she still dreams of the lake opening up to swallow him.

It never made much sense. She wasn’t there to see him surface choking up water and ashes, and he never spoke about what exactly happened that day. No one but him saw with their own eyes what lurked in Hope’s depths.

And yet still she kept having that same nightmare.

The night terrors were worst just after he left them. For a few days, she couldn’t even remember clearly what had happened, couldn’t draw a line between dreams and reality. And even now she still can’t entirely recall how she got back home.

When she woke up each night screaming from the warped echo of a memory, an ocean bleeding ashes, engorged with them, her brother exploding into a million stars, she’d told herself that it was all a terrible nightmare. But Cephi never came home.

That reliving eventually twisted itself into a memory that didn’t belong to her. For years after, it haunts her still.

A waterscape shimmering with a glorious gradient of enticing golds, vivid greens, stunning blues, a mix of colours her mortal mind couldn’t comprehend. A painting by the gods within a cage of towering timber, spread before him to the horizon. A call he can’t resist.

In the heat of Acoran summer, the water is a refreshing if unusual chill as he plunges heedlessly into it. But the safe shallows aren’t enough. It whispers, it begs. Below.

He tips his head up to the sky wispy with clouds, patches of cool silver and sweet blue visible through the thick canopy. He sucks in his last breath before he goes under.

Beneath the surface was somehow more beautiful. Sparing rays of muted ivory-gold break through the veil that shimmers above like a portal to another realm. Shadows dance merrily between, sweetly calling him deeper, deeper, deeper still.

And just as he thinks to turn back, he sees something at the bottom. Curiosity burns like the dying air in his lungs, the friendly light has long left him, but he pushes towards the source. He doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know.

Through someone else’s eyes, she watches the darkness yawning open as if the maw of some aberrant creature. A mere instant, a blink, and she loses sight of him forever.

He doesn’t surface again.

This dream, this memory, it belongs to him and yet to no one. Like Varah plucked his star from the sky and held it up just out of reach, and as her claws brush ephemerally over his light, her very being shatters under the weight of this terrible knowledge.

For a little while, she’d stopped having that dream.

And then it all came rushing back up to the surface again. The darkness expels him, and all of her nightmares with him.

The first night after, she dreams of it again. In the terrifying silence after he’s gone, she’s left frozen staring at the water he’ll never breach. Waiting and waiting, unable to move her eyes, to move her body. Until dread permeates the dream so thickly that she knows she must be dead and this is her eternity.

She wakes up gasping for air as if it’s she that’s drowned and not him.

She dreams of it again, and again... Until her nights are spent laying awake as long as she can, hoping the dawn never comes. When she inevitably slips and sees the lake again, when reality sinks its teeth back into her, she awakens praying that he’s still asleep.

Even with the perpetual link throbbing in her brain like a headache she hasn’t yet grown used to, she doesn’t yet know that such endeavours are useless. Her dreams, her feelings, are his, and his were hers.

She gets the sense that he isn’t peering through her mind like a clear crystal, but that the impressions of deep water, something terrible, something gone forever, is what’s keeping him awake. He knows what she’s lost and he can feel it haunting her. But any attempt to reach out, or even to cross the strict five-foot emanation he isn’t allowed in, is rebuked without sympathy.

But she knows his secret. She knows late at night after the inevitable nightmares, when she’s slipped too far between dozing and waking for him to tell the difference, he creeps up to find a warm spot against her turned back or under a wing. And before dawn’s light can draw her from restless slumber, he slinks out again to innocently spend the last few hours a safe distance away.

She knows. She just doesn’t know why she allows it.