Episode 84: In A Dream (Aadya)

Little feet pounded everywhere, a hurricane of sounds and colors swirling through the air. She tried to reach out and grasp one of the wisps but it slipped through her fingers. Again and again, she floated in the center of the room, her hand failed to meet anything, the sounds wouldn’t stop.

Then she sitting on a log.

Before her there was a lake. She knew this lake.

It was in the Upper Dell, owned by Indigo’s family. The water was shimmering a perfect reflection of a clear night sky, trees framed the twinkling stars and moon reflected on the black silken pool.

She looked around, for the rock she had taken Drey to on one of their lasts nights before heading out to battle.

He was there, just as she remembered him, except his body was more relaxed than she had ever seen it before. His hair was more chaos than she remembered it. His face a bit thinner, his chin a bit sharper, his milky skin a bit softer in the glow of the moonlight.

She had had many dreams of him over the years, less as time passed, but this one made her ache in longing for him.

This was a dream, she reminded herself, though her instinct felt unsettled. It was more than a dream, but he wasn’t home.

That thought triggered another; perhaps his death was less permanent than she had thought.

Drey walked over, his steps light but deliberate.

“I hoped my lady would enjoy a talk,” Drey asked, the nook of his arm stretched toward her.

Aadya stood and wrapped her hand through his, her fingers resting on his warm inner arm.

Her body heated to match his, and then a little more, in longing and desire. It seemed as though her desire to be the one to die earlier – instead of Nell – had brought him to her for the night.

She didn’t care that it made no sense, because in her heart she knew that she would always dream of him if she allowed him to entrance her mind.

She envied Nell.

They began to walk, toward the lake and then around the shoreline. His body was pressed lightly against hers, “Nell says you divorced?”

The last place she wanted to sort her divorce was a dream.

It was also the place where she needed to sort it, so she could move forward with her own life.

“Yes. Twice, sort of,” she stated.

Drey stopped walking, his pale blue eyes taking her own aquamarine ones in, then he wrapped his arms around her. He pulled her close against him, so every cell felt fused together.

“How are you?” he asked, his hands still cupping her back, holding her to him.

She tried to look him in the eyes, to be strong, but he had been such a place of weakness. They had shared in each other’s weaknesses and given each other strength for the war, for the time before the war….

She buried her head against his chest, and let her body navigate the desire to cry in his arms and to stand strong.

She had, ultimately, pushed Meldrick to this. She knew it was better.

“I miss you,” was all she could say. She did, she missed him deeply and dearly and wanted nothing more but to have him home, in her arms. She wanted more than a dream, and everything in her screamed that it was possible – that it was soon.

It was a unique level of torture, one that she knew she would endure a thousand times over if just for a few moments with him.

“I’ll stay as long as I can,” he promised.

He stepped away from her, and picked up a particularly flat, smooth, and shiny rock from the water’s edge.

She grinned, through the emotions, knowing he had fabricated it just for this moment.

She watched his wrist as it flicked the stone across the water, and she watched him as counted each time it bounced off of the surface. Six skips, in total, and he turned back toward her.

“How are you otherwise? If you had one thing you wish you could say to anyone, what is it?”

If he was real, he would have used the same line on her. It felt like home to be near him again; of course she would tell him anything. Her mind knew her well.

She went over to the water’s edge and found a similar rock to his. She tossed it across the water and counted the skips – one after another into the eternity of her imagination.

The moment mimicking his own activity gave her time to formulate her thoughts, to find out what she was most dying to say and hiding.

“I’m afraid,” she stated. “That everyone I love is going to be lost in whatever we’re about to face. I’m afraid we’re not strong enough; that physical strength is meaningless in this war.”

The Dragons were strong, long-living, healing… but the magic they had been facing twisted their hubris against them.

Drey’s brow furrowed.

“What is it? Who are you up against?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

She wished dream her knew more, had some subconscious inkling toward what was at play. Konrad was useless, disinterested in things that mattered most.

Konrad had been influenced by magic. She had too, and she didn’t doubt that her interests in hunting and adopting children from other realms were entirely her own desires.

She began listing the pieces, “Ionia, my son Tarragon, wiccans, an unknown enemy… there are too many coincidences.”

Her brow furrowed too, and he wiggled his eyebrows to tease her before pulling her against his chest.

She breathed in his scent: chocolate, coffee, oak, and the fruity wafts of a spring.

He pushed her away again.

Dream Drey was eager to make progress. From the lull of her waking life, it felt more energized than she was accustomed to.

It made Aadya wonder how the spell’s termination would impact everything; how waking up would feel when it wasn’t just her mind, but every layer of her being, restored.

Zero had informed them it could take a few days, up to a week, to feel normal again.

She had been so submerged, blinded by the submersion, that she wasn’t sure what normal felt like or meant, but she trusted him.

“Did you know Zero’s youngest brother visited today?” Drey asked.

For a moment, she wondered if her mind was trying to tell her that Xander was to blame for the potions used against them, or to credit for the breaking the spell.

“No,” she replied. “He’s the president… our son’s fiance is running for governor there.”

She tried to work it out – who Xander might really be. Maybe waking up meant seeing Xander and who he truly was.

No, she could feel it in her gut – Xander was not an enemy.

If not an enemy….

Drey was haunting her.

Good haunting.

He wasn’t just Nellie’s white angel anymore.

“Do you know how he got there?” Aadya asked, energy filling her as she realized this wasn’t time to bounce ideas off of Drey, it was time to be with him.

“The Caelum assaulted him when he arrived,” Drey added.

Aadya took it in, and took him in. He was there, somehow, for a moment.

He watched her, their eyes locked, hers full of tears.

She ached for him.

Sixteen years had done nothing compared to being near him, in some way, again.

He hugged her again, enveloping her in himself.

“Whatever happens, death isn’t the end. If you lose people, they’re not gone,” Drey assured her, his hands running through her hair and down her back.

It wasn’t just a dream. She knew that now. She knew because he was different, he wasn’t the same person she had parted with years ago. He was more.

“Thank you for watching Nellie,” she said. Nellie was, in some strange way, their daughter. Just theirs.

“I’m carrying Nell’s twins,” Aadya told him. She wanted him to know – that after all their time together, knowing he had loved Nell and a large part of him wanted to die over being bound by elixir to her, knowing that he had been stripped of his wings by his mother…

He looked down at her belly, his hand drifting casually across it and resting on the center, “And you loved them enough to bring them with you into a dream. Do you know what you’ll name them? The more names we have the easier. Nell gave me a few dozen today, but not these.”

“Not yet,” Aadya replied. “Nell’s been leaving suggestions in random places. I like Palila. He spells it wrong.”

He had informed her, casually in the hall, that Palila was pronounced like pie-aye-uh. It should have been spelled Paella.

Drey laughed, and kissed her head, and her temple, her lips, her cheek, her lips.

He lingered on her lips, and breathed words, “Be distracted, Aadya. You’re doing a beautiful job with an impossible task.”

“I’m lost,” she admitted.

He stretched his arm outward, then drew it up between them. In his hand, a soft pink dahlia. Forever his.

“Don’t forget who loves you,” he reminded her.

She moved closer, closing any remaining gap between them, and slid her hands under his shirt so she could pull him even closer to her. He tucked the dahlia into her hair and lifted her. Her legs wrapped around his waist.

In a moment, they were falling back onto a fluffy bed covered in white. The blanket puffed around them as they fell into its depths.

She imagined showing him the palace – the dream he had and how she had done everything she could to make it a reality.

It was monstrous – a square mile of dam that used water for energy and housed over a thousand people and easily a thousand guests, along with the military.

He pulled her shirt off, then let his thumb trace her jawline.

“How did you achieve it?” he asked.

“The dwarves. Is it anything close to what you imagined?”

She unlaced his pants and removed each article of clothing.

She had never seen him with wings before, but he had them now – flickering with ember. He was himself, in her arms.

She let her fingers trace the edges of the wings, up above his head and back down to his spine, just above his hips.

“It is,” he said. He pulled at her lip and kissed from her neck down to her collarbone and across her chest.

“However,” he said, surfacing, “that was a fantasy. I never expected you to follow through on it.”

Aadya laughed, and he moved against her as her body shook in humor.

That was a fantasy.

Her lips met his again.

“I had to try,” she said.

She let her hands run through his soft white hair, still standing on end like every moment she had known him. She trailed her fingers around his head, down his chest, and even lower.

“It’s perfect,” he whispered in her ear.

She moved with him, and he moved with her.

Then he relaxed back, his head pressed into a pillow and his eyes locked on the glass ceiling of her bedroom.

“You’ll find someone new and amazing,” he said.

“You’re coming home soon, you know,” she told him.

She felt it, the luck magic enticing the solution out of her, but she still didn’t believe it.

In a dream, she could believe it.

“What?” Drey asked, propped on his arm and facing her.

“It’s a feeling,” she said, and she kissed him again, pushing him toward his back. She looked into his eyes, capturing every weave of color.

“I’ll wait for you,” she promised.

“Do you know, I made sure that star was visible from my house too?” he said, his eyes gazing upon the glass panes that separated them from the stars. from his pair of stars that orbited each other and blended to appear as one.

She laughed again. “I bet yours doesn’t leave for part of the year.”

Every time the planet rotated the star out of view, she felt cold and lonely until it returned again. It was a beacon of herself. Her drive to be everything she aspired to.

“Never,” he replied, as his image began to fade from her dream.

“I love you,” he said, in the last moments she could see him.

“I love you, maorekel.”

“Maorekel.”

She rested her head back, the stars swirling in the night above her, until darkness enveloped her, and she was once again home – alive – awake.

Alone.

“I’ll wait for you,” she whispered into the empty night air.

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