When night came, Zalia tried to fall asleep. She had slept just a week and a half ago so getting her body into the space where it would do so again was hard, but Aylie helped. Her control over the dreaming world allowed her to guide Zalia into the dream they had prepared.

She found herself drifting off and allowed sleep to take her. As soon as she did, her eyes opened to see an endless blank mist stretching into the distance. Shapes began to take form amongst the mist, rocks, hills and grass. She walked forward and into a beautiful rolling landscape of green, glittering stars shining brightly above. Turning around, she found Faian standing there, looking confused.

The dreams made by Aylie weren’t like other dreams. Normally, they were foggy and odd, with illogical jumps and events. Aylie’s dreams felt like reality, an experience so vivid you questioned whether you were in a dream at all, or if you had only just woken up.

“Hello Faian.”

Faian’s eyes finally focused on her.

“Zalia? What’s happening?”

“Aylie has brought you into a dream with me so that I may talk to you.”

Faian looked simultaneously confused and annoyed.

“Why, may I ask, have you done that?”

Zalia walked around a bit, always pleasantly surprised by the realisticness of Aylie’s dreams. They hadn’t always been this way, she was just so good at it now.

“Ro has informed me that an Astar exile wants to talk to me and is even interested in working with us against the Astar monarch.”

Faian froze and then immediately began pacing.

“Damn it Zalia, you really know how to throw a twist in a woman’s day… night. What do I even say to that?”

Then she pointed accusingly at Zalia.

“You told me you weren’t going to make any more trouble.”

Folding her arms, Zalia stood her ground.

“I didn’t, Nateysta came to me with this. I can’t exactly tell an Ascendant what to do.”

Faian threw her hands up.

“Alright, I’ll think about it. I’m not so blind I can’t see the possible advantages of an alliance with a rebellious Astar. There’s a lot we could learn from them. Is that all? I’d rather my sleep be restful.”

Zalia tapped a finger against her arm.

“No.”

“Oh for- what now?”

“We have a plan to free Hidey.”

She outlined the plan for Faian, going over everything she and Ember had gone over but in a quicker, more concise way.

Faian listened attentively, despite her annoyed expression. Zalia couldn’t help but wonder if she had interrupted a nice dream.

When she was done, Faian reacted a lot more positively than she expected.

“The plan sounds good. You can contact Indis, I’d rather know where she is and what she’s up to anyway, but don’t do anything more than that until I’ve had a chance to talk to the council about it. Is that all?”

Zalia nodded and Aylie released Faian from the dream. She faded away slowly, melding into the background until it was like she hadn’t been there in the first place.

Zalia had to wait a few minutes as Aylie tried to find Indis, the dream shifting and roiling in a terrible, hallucinatory way. She had to close her eyes to stop the motion sickness, yet could still feel the strange feeling of movement through her other senses.

It eventually stopped, a feeling of intrinsic solidity passing over the dream. She wondered what these feelings were connected to in what was happening within the dream. In reality, was the roiling, shifting feeling the movement of the space through the Astral?

The thought of reality, which meant something so, so different to her now than it did just five or six years ago, being involved in the dreamscape she stood in made her chuckle quietly to herself.

The small smile quickly left her face as the faint outline of a person resolved into Lady Leyra Indis.

She looked around in confusion, opening and closing her hand a few times, twisting it around to inspect it. Then Indis saw Zalia standing there and the confusion in her expression deepened.

“What a weird dream.”

Indis murmured the words, looking away again and walking over to a tree, running her hand down the rough bark.

Zalia waited a moment, wondering what Indis would do.

Indis leaned down and picked a flower, smelling it and frowning again. Zalia had to agree that she found Aylie’s dreams wonderfully realistic.

Indis finally turned to Zalia again.

“Why are you here?”

“Aylie has made this dream and brought us both into it so that I can talk to you.”

Looking closer, Zalia was surprised to find that Indis looked a little… rough. The woman usually held herself to high standards and, even when travelling, barely had a fleck of dirt on her, when it could be avoided. Zalia had almost been convinced that she had developed a passive ability that kept herself clean.

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Now though, that illusion was broken. While Aylie was able to draw people into dreams, she couldn’t control how they appeared there. This meant that the bags under Indis’ eyes and the drawn out look of exhaustion, mixed with ruffled hair and worn clothes were all real. Indis had definitely been through some shit.

Though, Zalia supposed it was to be expected when the people Indis had worked towards helping her entire life rejected her.

A passing look of worry came over Indis’ face at Zalia’s words, though it was quickly masked behind her signature look of superiority, the one Zalia remembered so well from their times together. A little bit of the old Indis was still in there then.

“And why, exactly, do you want to talk to me?”

Zalia searched her expression, trying to see through the mask she’d put up. Why was it that she always did this?

“I know we’ve had our differences, but I need your help to free Hidey.”

Indis waited, looking unimpressed.

With a sigh, Zalia continued.

“We have a plan to free him, but we need someone who can convincingly lie to his face about something. Obviously, I’ll never be able to do that, but I think you of all people could pull it off.”

Anger broke Indis’ mask.

“Right, so you’ve brought me here just to insult me. Real grown up of you, Zalia.”

Zalia frowned.

“What? No. We need-”

“I heard you the first time. Why should I help Hidey?”

This wasn’t going how Zalia had expected at all.

“Because he can and will help the people of Endaria, surely that’s something you can appreciate?”

Indis scoffed.

“The people. The damned people of Endaria. They can go to Cormaine for all I care.”

Zalia almost recoiled at the venom in her words.

“You don’t mean that, I know you don’t. Look, I understand that you’re hurt about not being voted in Indis, but-”

“Do you!? Do you really!?” Indis yelled, continuing quietly, “Do you know what it’s like to be rejected by your own people, the ones you’ve laboured and destroyed yourself for? Do you really understand that, Zalia?”

Zalia was silent, speechless at the tears rolling down Indis’ cheeks.

“No, I didn’t think so.”

In that moment, Zalia realised that Indis knew that she’d been doing things that were… wrong, in the name of her people. She’d known and done them anyway, through some twisted sense of morality that the result of her actions warranted them in the first place.

Zalia knew what her childhood and early life had been like and thought that, perhaps, Indis just didn’t know how to do things any other way.

“So will you not help? War has been called against the Astar for their actions and we need every bit of power we can get. Hidey would be invaluable to us right now and while I could find someone else to do this, I would much prefer someone I know would succeed.”

Indis basically snarled at her.

“I will not help you. The people of Endaria decided that they would be better off without me, so be it.”

At that, the dream began fading. Zalia met Indis’ eyes and held them, searching deep within and finding a terrible loneliness there. As Zalia’s eyes opened to the real world, she didn’t feel anger or disappointment, instead finding herself sad. It was an emotion she was surprised to feel about Indis, yet it was the right one. There was no way to describe Indis’ life up to this point other than tragic.

Zalia sighed as she got up, stretching to relieve the tension in her muscles. They were step one into their plan and things had already gone very wrong. Without Indis they would have to find someone else to lie to Hidey. Or, perhaps, lying to him wasn’t necessary. Could she find a way to draw out the Astar without tricking them?

Ro had called them egotistical and had stated that their cold and calculating manner was not natural, but society driven. That meant that those emotions were bottled up and put away. What if… what if she could taunt them into a fight?

She would have to wait for Faian’s go ahead but it might be possible.

It would be many hours until the others woke up so Zalia went to Aylie, who would still be awake. She hadn’t yet developed the ability to use her dream powers on others when she was asleep herself, if that was even possible.

She found Aylie sitting casually, one knee up to her chest, on one of the large trunks that wrapped around their house from the Ancient of Life that grew above.

“Hey,” Zalia called up.

Aylie looked down and gave a wave.

Zalia climbed up with ease, her powerful body able to lift weights far greater than her own.

“I assume you heard everything?”

Aylie nodded.

“Puts a bit of a hitch in my plan.”

Aylie nodded again.

“Are you alright?”

Aylie shrugged.

Zalia brought her into a gentle hug, not saying another word. Sometimes it was better to get someone talking. Other times, though, it was best to let them find their words on their own. Zalia felt this was one of those times.

They sat there under the stars, wind pulling at their clothes and hair as the heat from the day dissipated into the night.

More than a few times, Aylie opened her mouth as if to say something, then stopped. Still, Zalia waited. She stared at the sky, drawing lines between stars to create constellations of her own. The sky here held different stars to the ones from her own world and as such the constellations she was used to weren’t here. That saddened her a bit, sometimes. Her world might have been terrible in many ways, yet the stars had always been the same, without care for the small happenings on a planet far away. They had reminded her that while it might seem that the world was ending sometimes, it didn’t really mean anything to the universe as a whole. To some, that was a horrifying thought. To Zalia, it was comforting.

“I did something that I think might be bad, back with the Astar.”

Zalia snapped out of her reverie, pulling away just enough to look at Aylie.

“What do you mean?”

“When I was out of my body, part of the mist, I was trying to talk to you for so long. Everything felt… fuzzy and thinking was hard. I pushed and pushed and a message appeared saying that I had broken the protective barrier between my body and soul. I could talk to you after that.”

Zalia frowned. This is what she had been hiding? It explained why the dream she had crafted had felt so much more solid.

“That is strange, for sure, but I don’t think it’s something bad. Why do you feel that it is?”

“I- I don’t know. I’ve just felt different since it happened. I’m scared.”

Zalia pulled her in close again as Aylie’s voice cracked, hugging her tight and giving her a kiss on the head.

“We’ll figure it out together, alright? You don’t need to be scared.”

Aylie started to cry. She had grown so tall and so strong that Zalia sometimes forgot that Aylie was still young, a teenager. It was a hard time in life, even without magic.

“Oh darling, it’ll be alright. We’ll figure it out.”

She held Aylie as the night passed by, each hint of Aylie’s pain and fear breaking her heart. How she wished she could just take that all away.