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Thebabywaslaughingagain.
Whatever I was, whatever this place was, it was paradise, and I didn’t want to leave. Sometimes there was silence, in a sort of floaty, tranquil way and that was nice. Other times, I’d hear a baby—mostly happy, sometimes shrieking—or birds singing and insects chirping. The air always smelled of flowers and the ocean, and it was always warm.
I knew what these things were and I knew that they were good and peaceful, but I didn’t knowhow. How did I know that?
Had I existed once? Laughed like that child laughed?
Was I dead? Or was I yet to be born?
No, that didn’t seem right. How would Iknowthings if I hadn’t been born?
Maybe this was the entirety of my existence. Maybe I justwas. Whatever I was.
Light flickered just beyond me, blistering heat giving way to a more temperate warmth and a refreshing breeze. The world was nothing and everything all at once, and I existed.
I just existed.
Occasionally, I tried to move, to feel, to see if I had some kind of physical form. Not because I wanted to leave the paradise place, but there was a niggling sense of unfulfillment at the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite shake. That while I was happy and comfortable here, I wasn’t being very productive. That I wasmeantto be doing something else.
“Of course you are meant to be doing something else. You are the Spirit of Dreams,”a soft voice whispered, feminine and gentle. Comforting and sweet.
Huh. I knew that I was partially connected to some kind of other world—the laughing baby didn’t exist in this black void where I was—but I’d thought I was alone here.
“Who are you? What is the Spirit of Dreams?” I thought, with no mouth to ask.
“The Spirit of Dreams,”the voice began, ignoring my first question.“Carries dreams of prophecy and malevolence on their wings through the dreamscape. You see what you’re shown, deliver what you choose to deliver. Your mind was once a vast repository of the presents and futures of everyone you’d ever met. Too vast. Too much for any mortal mind to bear.”
Wow. That sounded important, like I’d been someone who mattered once. It was sad too, though. Wasn’t it? I’d once had a mind full of knowledge, and now I had none. Or rather I had some abstract understanding of how things worked, but I couldn’t remember people. Other beings.
Was that my baby laughing? It had never occurred to me before, but now I was horrified that perhaps that wasmychild and I’d forgotten them.
“The child is not of your blood,” the voice said gently.“Unusually, you have an infant as one of yourphylakes.Your guardians. The child and her mother are caring for your physical body while your soul resides here.”
Oh. Well, that was nice of them. “Do I still have wings?”
There was a long pause before a tinkle of delicate laughter.“The wings are metaphorical, Spirit of Dreams.”
Hm, no flying out here—wherever here was—then. There was a strange feeling suddenly weighing on me that I hadn’t experienced since I’d realized I was in paradise. Disappointment? Yes, that word felt right. I didn’t know how or why, though.
“Am I alive?”
“You exist between the world of the living—the upperworld—and the world of the dead—the underworld—with one foot in either. Which way you go is dependent on you.”
I wanted to be alive, didn’t I? That seemed like a logical thing to want. And I had to thank the kind people who were caring for me. Myphylakes. It would be rude of me to go ahead and die while they’d been going through all that effort of looking after me.
Then again, there was a sadness that accompanied that thought too. No—an apprehensiveness. I couldn’trememberthem. Had I once known all about their presents and futures too? And now I knew nothing, not even their names?
Would that makethemfeel sad?
“For what you are, you are unusually compassionate. Then again, your thread of fate wouldn’t have wound the way it had if you weren’t. You were very loved, you know. And you loved fiercely in return.”
Wow. Whatever this emotion was, I didn’t like it. Despair, perhaps? It was an acute kind of agony, crushing and overwhelming, too big to escape from. I was going to drown in this terrible feeling. There was no way out.
“Come to the underworld with me, Spirit of Dreams.”
“And die? What about the people I loved? Are they in the underworld?”
“Not yet. One of them might be, soon. You could stop it. You are between worlds, you can do what no one else can.”
