Nightmares Reimagined

[Thalia]

The boy talked about things she did not understand, of death and hunting and tyrants. Meanwhile the Watcher himself spoke with booming decree, like he did not even hear the accusations. The do nots spurred a virulent memory from old depths; nothing specific, but it felt as if it was a litany of control she had heard many times before. But where once she might have known and trusted this soul, now he was a resonance that spun on the axis of many different Ages, and it all blurred to her with a sting of surprising rejection. Those red eyes narrowed distant disapproval, and even his other face only found her tolerably vexatious while she was of use to him. Yet crowned with paler wings Nimeda had seen that other face beckon a woman from the cradle of rest and bring an axe to her head. A dreamer who had done nothing but quietly dream.

For the Watcher was not the only one who knew how to observe in this world undetected.

The deference she was prepared to give because it cost her nothing slipped a little through her fingers. Nimeda did not turn her face away from death, nor did she judge its act, and truthfully few questions had bubbled from that witness until now. She smiled a little at the boy by her side as he interjected into the confusion of her thoughts, but it was sad at the edges. "Oh always," she agreed lightly. As he turned himself away she stubbornly paused for him first, a hand on his shoulder, to see if he wished to leave. Not everyone understood how, and he had found himself here by no natural means. The self-declared Sandman did not hold him but neither did he make any attempt to help ease the passage back to true sleep. When the offer was declined she only nodded, ruffling a damp hand distractedly over his head. “I like your head,” she said affectionately in response. 

Nimeda still was turning the word tyrant over in her mind like a new possession when she turned back. The frown that tugged her expression was more melancholic than accusatory as she searched that large black form for something she recognised. The Watcher had hurt no one here, but neither did she like the cage of his will or the way he used it. Then there was the common thread to his commands, and she was uncertain if that was intended or coincidental. But it was true all the same. “It does not need to be stable,” she told him. No power bolstered her voice. She would not fight for attention he gifted so sparsely, though she recognised now that his neglect had left an injury in her – to have felt absence replaced with disdain. To feel unsure what she had done to deserve it.

“The dream is chaos, wild and restless and free, the place where all possibility meets. It needs no control, only tending. You asked me for truth, before. And it is this. I recognise no king.”