Dreaming Damnations -Chapter Eighteen, Part Two

    Surprisingly, she managed to find sleep after retiring to her blanket and pillow on the floor. Even with the paw of a large Cat draped over her in a feline hug as her warm breath tickled the back of her neck and the Black Knight’s dark hair brushing her face as he slept with Jedda in the ‘girls’ room. Komako used the Unicorn as a pillow as she slept horizontally two feet below their feet. She couldn’t recall at what point the sound of the room’s occupants’ breathing –light snoring in the Black Knight’s case –transformed into the ticking of unseen clocks in the obstreperous, surrealistic dream world, but she could hardly have wished for better timing.

   Every hidden thing she almost seemed to sense in the dense mist evaded her path without truly moving. Any detail she actually managed to decipher amidst the brume soon eased out her memory. She coasted along throughout this realm paying no heed to the ticking however close the sound drew to her, following her intuition with blind faith in a determined sort of trance. Yet she felt more awake than ever in this phantasmagoric world. Her own face stared back at her now and then from mirrors resurfacing from beyond this world’s mysterious veil, but they never collided with her. Narcissa felt the world’s constant shift as she glided in her search. She surmised no reality bothered to place rules and restrictions on this realm. Nothing existed to hold it together like framework. Rather than a constructed building with set dimensions, this place was more like a silk cloth billowing in the wind. It had no set shape, no set time, no set reality. It was as good as the purest essence of a dream.

    At last, as if waiting for her, those emerald eyes emerged from the mist. They were a child’s dreamy eyes, and yet they still managed to reveal the ancient age of the soul they echoed with stunning vividness. It was as if her eyes themselves were her soul. Narcissa sensed the girl’s hidden lips smile –or perhaps the eyes spoke clear enough on their own to indicate her facial expressions –and then her hypnotic emerald gaze evanesced.

    “You’re back,” her disembodied voice spoke, sounding as if coming from another world entirely even as it sounded close enough to be right in her ear. “And more here than usual.”

    “I know who you are,” Narcissa spoke into the mist. Her heart raced with excitement as her mildly blurry thoughts threatened to break down from the rising din of questions she wanted to blurt out all at once. “At least I’m very sure of who you are.”

    “Do you?” the girl asked curiously. “The heart is as unfathomable as the sea. Even if you connect to it, you can never see all there is to see.”

    “I don’t know about connecting to the heart, but I think I know your identity at least. You’re the first Purgatory Wonderland winner, aren’t you? You’re the White Rabbit’s Alyss! You’re the person I’ve been wanting to speak with all this time, aren’t you? Fioralba Ambroise!”

    “I believe so, yes,” the disembodied voice confirmed, making Narcissa’s heart want to burst and put itself out of its misery from its own rhapsody. “How strange you say that you’ve been wanting to speak to me when that’s precisely what you’ve been doing.” When she spoke next after a short giggle that said ‘Oh, silly you!’, her voice came from somewhere nearer. “To think you have an interest in me! Is that why you’ve made a connection here?”

    “I made no connection. I’m still convinced I’m being pulled here. Cut the riddles and the games and give me straight answers. Please! Tell me what you know about Amaranth and what she’s –”

    Narcissa’s own voice became blurred to her own ears, prompting her to drift off at a point she wasn’t even sure about. She couldn’t remember what she said after her voice blurred.

    “I’ve shown you what I know,” Fioralba said, her voice blurring as well. “The logic you find in the depths of a dream cannot be grasped by the waking mind’s rationality. It has to be the heart’s. Because that’s where the dream comes from. This world is what it is and is what it isn’t. Must I repeat that? Amaranth is a complex being and a complex concept. The truth is tangled and armed with thorns.”

    “You have free speech, don’t you?” Narcissa asked exasperatingly, her muddled mind only half-able to grasp what she was saying.

    “Free speech, yes,” a new voice said, startling her. “If dreams are anything, they’re free-flowing. But their flow doesn’t follow waking logic, does it?”

    This new voice, though fuzzy, was much closer than Fiorabla’s. It was as if the reality surrounding the speaker was much stronger. He had come from the outside just as she had.

    “My Alyss is not in the same state as you. You could say she’s just partially enough of a concept herself after the millenniums spent here to communicate in dream logic.”

    “White Rabbit?” Narcissa asked unbelievingly.

    The red-eyed lagomorph popped out of the world’s misty veil so fast she feared she’d be startled awake. The loop from his pocket watch’s golden chain rattled as he approached her as one would a stray dog caught digging in the trash.

    “You aren’t supposed to be here. No one is, especially not an Alyss!”

    “But –”

    “Send her out, Fiorabla!” he cried. “Out, out, out! Be your way, Alyss, before it’s too late! Best not test Amaranth’s leniency, girl. Out with you! Out!”

    As he spoke, his voice becoming more distant by the second, he make shooing gestures with his paws until he was near enough to shove her.

    “Now’s the worse time to stir up Amaranth! She needs no more stirring than she’s already getting. Now be on your way! You’ll speed things up should you rouse –”

    Narcissa’s fading mind fought to cling to the untouchable world when it started disappearing. Blackness seized hold of her vision with a heavy pull, creating a nauseating sensation as it competed against the light-weighted feel of the surrealistic realm. Her thoughts soon got vacuumed into the darkness as well, dragging her into lethean depths.