Night eventually came and those within the material realm set up camp. She prepared to depart into reality but they already had smoked fish from the previous day. Any hunting when a meal was already prepared would be wasteful, Alvah reasoned.

She tasted the pleasant smoky flavor and relished the delicate texture as he ate. A dark violet rose into the surface of his mind. She felt him involuntarily open his mouth as the sound of his yawn reached her.

This was her favorite time. The storm above began to subside as he laid to rest. His consciousness sank down to her level as things went quiet, however momentarily. The mindscape condensed, the depths met the surface in singularity.

By observing what was beyond oneself, one drew borders. When the mind’s eye turned inward, those walls grew brittle and things from beyond could seep in from outside. Guardians of a fortress were better to watch the gate, not the courtyard. If the guards kept their eyes on the courtyard, by the time they noticed an intruder, the enemy was already within.

Just as the chaos from outside could slip in, discarded ideas or forgotten details leaked out to be added to the great collection beyond. Desdomena swam to the chaos beyond as the mind erected a membrane, the paradox of being both container, contents, and observer distinguished itself from the all.

Before her was a bubble, an encapsulated reality. It appeared transparent from the outside, a masterwork of living glass.

She reached out to it. Maybe it shrank, maybe she grew as she cupped it in her hands. She smiled as the wonders within concealed themselves from her, as if purposefully tempting her.

She hugged it to her chest. She relished the pressure as it slowly pressed against her before sliding inside with a pleasant jolt. The edges where her existence met his tingled. When she finally engulfed him, his warmth spread through her entire being in waves. There was a sense of completeness she only ever knew from this experience.

Her mind blanked for a moment and her body went wild as her consciencness ceased to keep the many impulses that were herself from running rampant. Her connection to him, her only anchor lent her his memories of her form whether he knew it or not. The ends of her hair thrashed and coiled into bleached ivory seven fingered hands and the scar around her eye inflamed as her existence became more exaggerated.

Now he was inside her mind. She tried her best to make him feel welcome but he could forgive her if he experienced a nightmare or two or three perhaps.

Like her form, there was little need for deeper meaning behind her actions. Performing needlessly complicated actions just just to befuddle discerning minds gave her a thrill.

Still, there were exceptions. She found herself taking the features of multiple hands more often than she meant to. The little scare she provided Alvah cemented that guise as a part of her, in his mind. Since she happened to be so often in his mind, her nature obliged.

It was fortunate that that form was tailored to torment him. He was not fully aware of it himself but his fear of Amirit crystallized in a single image. He saw the giantess as a whole as beautiful but he remembered how his mother was crushed in its grasp and the moment the Great One reached to grab him.

She gave that guise of hers seven fingers so the outline of her outstretched hands was distinct. She would not even share his memories with anyone else. If he was to survive, the nightmares she had sown would be of her, not some long gone terror.

Hands had many purposes. They could crush, they could poke and prod, they could carafes. But the purpose he needed to remember was that hands were meant to be held.

The fingers of her new tendrils stretched to branch out into new hands which branched out into more again and again until she was surrounded by a thousand-thousand hands or more. They wound around into a spherical barrier to hide from all the universe.

She wanted to monopolize him. Dominate him. Laugh and cry with him, all those desires merged back into one. All of her wanted to embrace or devour him. In that, her instincts acted in unison.

Pure acceptance meant nothing. Simply accepting a detail was either apathy or or an attempt to remain content. To be accepted in spite of ugliness. That had meaning.

That he saw her this way made her want to express her “darker” side all the more, to let there be no more secrets.

At the opposite end of her sphere, hands converged and spiraled together into a speartip. In the blink of an eye, the spike shot out like an arrow and pieced her chest. They unwrapped their fingers inside and tapped against the bubble.

But this experience could not last forever, not in this era. She could not leave him unguarded in the waking world, not anymore. A fragment of her was already slipping back into reality.

But the span of a dream could be stretched quite far. How many people nodded off for moments and thought they dreamt for hours and vice versa?

Outside her barrier, some of her hands were stretched into depths only to seemingly vanish as she crept into the material. She hid in his shadow. Shadows were real yet not real, a place she felt quite comfortable in.

In that moment, she existed in three places at once, in the material beside him, around him, and as her fingers wormed their way through, soon to be within him once more.

She concentrated her attention on her fingers as they groped for Alvah’s mind. As they came in contact, her fingers flexed into claws and scratched at the delicate surface. She dug her fingertips in, breaking through the bubble but met no retaliation, only the initial boundary.

Greed was just another component of her existence or perhaps nonexistence. Not being limited to flesh allowed her to take it, like all things, to the proper extreme that those with an unimaganitive sense of morality would frown upon.

She could not devour a soul. It was like trying to eat a stone. But as long as she had both his body and mind, his soul complimented her collection.

She only needed one person to exist. As long as one human survived, the delusion that was her would continue. She would not let her prey go even if the world ended. The contradiction of something unreal as herself could possess a creature of reality so completely was intoxicatingly audacious.

Her senses leaked into his dream as she became all within. She merged with it so there was no difference between her and all he encountered.

Was there a difference between a god and dreamer? If one had the power to make anything true, what value was there in reality but one's fancy? She stood at the line of dreamer and dream, one that made all things real for a night.

After a day of adventure, Alvah returned to the garden in his mind, a home he never had and would never reach. He was on his knees, cutting the grass with a sickle. He grabbed the tips of the blades of each patch and shortened them handful by handful. It was a dreadfully slow and meticulous process.

In the distance loomed a cedar forest and nearby wound a river. The rest was an endless field of green unbroken by any mountains or cities.

He wore plain and dirtied clothes. One did not work with soil and keep one’s hands clean. Even his face had a smudge from when he wiped the sweat from his brow. A little secret he never told anyone was that one of the reasons he refused to keep a beard was to avoid having to clean it after such a day or worry about it tangling in brush.

Was it strange for a prince to love gardening? She used the correct word, “love”. This was something he did even when reduced to a heartless shell. To be a ruler with subjects he could nurture and enjoy watching come to fruition.

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He gathered some water from the river in a bucket and gave each plant its appropriate share, making many journeys back and forth. Desdomena sped the passage of the sun and let several days pass until he finally saw fit to add a new addition to his garden. There were no potted plants for him to relocate, he predated the idea and planned his arrangements long in advance as he let certain ones fill in the soil and pruned those that starved the others of sunlight.

His plow was shaped like a thick but short scythe as he plunged into the earth to prepare a new place. As he tilled, he happened upon a skeletal hand, her hand.

He got on his knees and dug frantically with his bare hands, unearthing a skull with mottled red hair and a crack running vertically along her left eye socket. She was a corpse, food for his plants.

That was something she envied of the material. Even if it was buried, ground up, or devoured they left behind something.

He froze as the shock led to time itself slowing. That moment seemed to drag on forever yet his heartbeat kept going so hard that it hurt his chest. His rational mind finally caught up and he breathed heavily a few times before he gritted his teeth in a tense smile.

“Good evening, Desdomena,” he greeted her as he relaxed. He knew if he found anything of her, she was still alive.

Blood welled from her injured socket and trickled down her exposed cheekbone like a gentle stream of crimson tears. The liquid glided over her teeth and rather than drip from her chin, journeyed to the back of her neck where it flowed into her hair. Her hair slowly revitalized and lengthened.

A speck of the ichor contained in the socket dried to form a pupil. The red tears ceased to flow as the remaining blood solidified, the outer ring losing its color to form the whites of her eye. The rest of her body followed after, flesh covering her false bones as if her skin was a liquid poured into a glass.

“Good evening, Alvah,” she replied as she pulled herself out of the ground. The lingering dirt simply fell off of her.

Perhaps she needed to relent for a while. He was growing accustomed to her surprises. But one of the nice aspects of dreams was that each time could feel akin to a new experience. A familiar nightmare could happen every night and each night send the dreamer screaming.

“I thought I would help you with your garden,” she added sardonically. “Provide some additional nutrition.”

“I prefer your company here than in the ground,” Alvah replied tiredly as he put away his tools and brushed himself off. He glanced at the sky. Now that she was manifested, she no longer needed to hide the surprise. Everything remained essentially the same but also everything was subtly moving, crawling like the scenery had been painted onto an army of living ants.

“Why a corpse?” he asked as he sat and invited her to join him.

This was not the first time they had a conversation like this. He did not fully remember every conversation they had even if he was a lucid dreamer. She remained silent this time as she joined him. In previous discussions she might tell him how she wondered for a if there was any kinship between those that no longer were and she that never was.

“There were rituals for summoning the dead through mirrors or dolls,” he informed her without being told anything. “There is a relationship between the departed and the not quite real.”

Here, he had access to her thoughts the way she had access to his. However, he was not as adept in the matter as she was and if his mind was like a text, hers was a collection of rampant scribbles. He could also be remembering pieces of previous conversations.

“Have I already said as much?” he inquired as he crept his hand over to hers.

Desdemona slid her hand to his and they entwined their fingers together. She felt a sensation of a pulse run through her body. In his fantasies, she had a heartbeat.

“You have. Then you will speak of symbolism. Sometimes if you are being particularly nice, you will say those ideas-“ she trailed off mid sentence.

“What would I say?”

She smiled and brought a finger to her lips. “My secret.”

That earned a sullen frown from him. People were not the selves they were when they were awake when they dreamed. Parts of themselves that they kept hidden melded with their conscientiousness. But what he sometimes said was “Those ideas did not apply to you because you are real to me.”

They needed a change of scenery. The plants turned to dust around them. In the matter of moments she brought on centuries of decay and ruin.

“Speaking of the not quite real and the dead,” he began, not even blinking as the world became something closer to the reality they knew. “I must admit I was jealous of the pure gods when this began. As I watched everything crumble, I resented the idea that I had a soul. They vanished but it would not be over for me when I died.”

“I am aware,” she soothed.

But it was nice to have him say it as he often did. That he envied the soulless existence that he used to attribute to her.

Yet he feared death at the time. Not because he feared a conclusion but because he did not want to journey into an unknown continuation. If the world could speak through these tribulations, it likely would whisper the next chapter was a grim one.

This was a common game they played. She let him reimagine the dust around them as grains of sand and the world opened to the blues of a vast sky above and endless ocean below. They stood at a beach at the world’s end.

It felt strange how honest she could be with him. She lied very frequently back in better days. Lied enough that she forgot what it was that she said that was true or false. She lacked an origin, she was a creature without lineage or history. She simply existed and some of what she remembered of herself might have been tales she told or might have transpired in reality.

What was most difficult to remember or even imagine was her time before she gained self awareness. When her entire life was just a long running narrative of motiveless actions, just impulse.

Between the unpolished truth and a beautifully elaborate lie, she would pick whichever carried the deepest sting. In a world where the gods are dead, the truth often hurt quite nicely. Still, if she only told the truth that would require no effort on her part and prove remarkably boring yet if she only ever lied, her words would hold no weight.

No one should want the truth to prevail. The truth was ugly but ugliness apparently won the day. If beauty was to be tolerated then lies needed to survive.

“Alvah,” she began. She gave a pause for him to give her his full attention. He looked her in the eyes as if searching fir the question before she could ever voice it. “If I told you the sky was yellow, what would you say?”

“I would look to the sky to be certain,” he stated clearly before softening his tone. “Then tell you you are toying with me.” He smiled.

Her smile widened in turn. People grew accustomed to endless abuse. A kind word, a considerate gesture made such trials all the more cruel. She sensed him exert his will. She allowed it and watched as the sky changed colors.

“But then together, we would just make the sky yellow,” he postulated. “Would we not?”

The unnatural skyline glinted on the sand. Desdomena introduced other colors as the sand turned transparent and transformed into rainbow quartz. The crystals tore through Alvah’s sandals and bit into his feet like shattered glass.

He winced as his feet bled. He gritted his teeth so his smile would not falter. His resistance to the phantom pain satisfied the monstrous existence that was herself.

She needed to get at least one more reaction from him as her awareness shifted to the material realm. The her within began to fade.

But Alvah had more to offer. “You are already leaving?” he asked sadly but still smiling. The water rose and surged around them so it swallowed the land behind them. They were now on an island.

“I had to wait a little while for you to finish cutting the grass,” she replied as her vision shifted for a moment to the material as she told their traveling companions to sleep. She wanted to keep him distracted a little bit more, she gave herself enough focus to remain cohesive.

There were no good or bad people. That was not how the world should be sorted. Not by good or evil but those that found joy in the world and those that did not. There were those that discovered their pleasure in the screams of others or in their own suffering.

By his mental decree, eight tidal waves rose. They closed around the two until the waves joined together and flattened into colossal mirrors. The light sparkling off the quartz leapt from mirror to mirror until all was engulfed in an array of every possible color.

The sight overlapped with her outside self looking at him sleeping. For a moment, she thought he was upside down but he was laying down while she was looking down on him. Her other self placed her hands over his ears.

But she owed him her attention here. She concentrated attention as he clapped his hands. “I will see you when I wake,” he promised.

“You will,” she reaffirmed.

With his clap, the mirrors around them shattered. The countless fragments caught the sun and the yellow sky so it appeared they were surrounded by countless golden snowflakes.

“Goodnight,” the her in reality finished.

Parting with words was wrong. Words let one hide the unpleasant details and phrase matters as one needed to. A disaster could be transformed into a victory or a celebration could be remembered as foolishness.

She would never tell him how she truly felt, not with words. Words only took one further away from the root. What good would it be to translate those sentiments into words especially when their minds were already interconnected. They both knew.

And he should never tell her, not fully. She was fine with that. There was a word they should never use to refer to each other.

What value was the faith of one that abandoned his own family? That quality was priceless. He left his family and lost his friends, he had nothing left but her. She trusted him more than she would any saint.

She kissed his brow.