Lemosyne

[Thalia]

Sometimes she arose in the void, a half-place, unknowing and afraid.

Or maybe it had always been this way, and now she only remembered it more often.

“Jon?” She twisted to the call of old ghosts, seeking a foothold on where she was. On who she was. Around her the world swirled all its colours together like a cruel trick, and he was known for them (once?). Her surroundings dizzied her, a nauseous storm, leaching into a darkness that cloyed until it swept like a hand across her shoulder, turning her about. Presence lingered in her peripheral, unseen. A whispered voice, acid sharp, a puncture to the heart: “It was easy,” it said; smooth, feminine, and beautifully cruel. “To leave you.”

She did not listen. Refused to.

Her hand clenched a fist, then pressed tight to her chest; a lid, a lock, a plea. Eyes closed, afraid afraid afraid of that pulling feeling, like life and soul were naught but a tightly coiled thread, and one violent yank was all it might take to become nothing. Dream, memory, less than.

Gone.

She reached out wild and desperate, soul tossed about like a storm-wrecked ship seeking safe harbour, until when she next swiped tears from her cheeks the world had finally stilled. She blinked, no longer seeing an empty ‘scape of nothing, but the heavy shadows of deep underground. Her skin was cold beneath her pale garments, and colder where her palms patted the cool metal beneath her. She rested within a giant iron fetter, so large it curved around her body like a babe’s cradle. It should have been a nightmare. But she was not sure even Mara’s pets ever came here.

Her breathing stilled, but not her sense of disquiet. This was wrong, and she could not place the tip of her finger as to why, but it permeated until she trembled.

Beside her something moved, alive; something slow, and unfathomably large. More than one. Soft clinks stuttered in the silence, and her perch swung lazily in the air. A fetid lizard stink filled her nose and mouth as coiling bodies moved and shifted amidst their chains. Then, the scorched carrion-heat of a soft sighing breath, and a return to peace; the creatures were unperturbed by her intrusion, because they were used to it. Her fingers found the edges of a scale in the dark. Comfort and mystery.

“Do you dream?” she whispered.

If they did, perhaps it was somewhere else their souls fled. A constellation of worlds might lie behind those stone eyelids, for all she knew. They did not speak of it.

Her eyes closed, too. Content.

She visited because no one else ever did. If her grandmother ever troubled herself with dreams, it was not to look upon that which she presided over in the waking world. No one else would even dare, except perhaps Him, and never for this reason.

The thought suddenly left her mouth dry, and she wasn’t sure why. Her hands rose to press against the contours of her own face, panic beginning to beat again, but it was just a face. Seeking calm, she waded memory for her name. A touchstone. An anchor. But the one that came felt jagged on her tongue. Startled, her eyes flared wide.

The world lurched again, and settled again, and she curled into herself, barely daring to look.

Had it been a memory, or a dream? She did not know. It lingered like a taste of the Tiber waters that Noctua had decried. Not because it had felt bad, but because the peace found had not been a memory of hers. Old things surfaced from time to time; things she knew that she shouldn’t know; an awareness of others that transcended flesh and blood shells and recognised something older. But such things drifted away just as quickly. They never consumed like that, as fresh of feeling as if they had happened yesterday.

“My name is Nimeda.” She spoke the name into her knees, body curled tight. And prayed that it was true.