There is a turtle, floating into the untold darkness, slowly rolling as the streams of time are parted by her legs.
She has a dream, and she dreams of a world, an imperfect sphere of green and blue; a marble filled with thoughts, hurling through the void, dancing with her sisters around a yellow sun.
On that marble there are minds, one is twisted in a knot.
On that marble there are minds, one is mending shards of self.
On that marble there are MINDS, IDEAS, CREATION. A spiral of infinite possibilities unfurling through their own space-time. Some are joyous. Some are screaming.
In a wooden hut at the edge of the village, they are sharing their vulnerable selves in the oldest dance known to their people.
In a white, cold room they are celebrating the success of a modern ritual, they mimed the mask of a Mad God as they prepare to kill it.
In a room as white, but not as cold fingers are weaving a story, for humans to read.
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Sarah is not sure what to do with her life. A degree in law sounded good on paper, but that's all she's getting right now, papers. Papers telling her that "at the moment" and reassuring that "we will let you know", to circuitously tell her she is not wanted, not needed, not useful. She is not allowed to become a cog in the everlasting machine that churns people's lives and spits shreds of time to be enjoyed with the remains of a salary paid by people with days equally busy.
The kettle is on the fire, the whistle and the tea brings comfort and coziness, memories of home and belonging. Bittersweet moments of family, while she remembers her nest, but can't help remembering the thorns too. There is a reason she decided to fly away, and she's happy about it, if she could just stop feeling so _damn_ lonely all the time.
Oh, there's plenty of ways to fill that void for a brief moment, sometimes for more, but they all feel hollow in the end, never really answering the question but just distracting her from it. She thinks back to her years in college, all the parties, all the boys and girls she tried to explore, only to find herself unable to really open up, to build something more than brief shared stories.
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Realizing she's now holding a cup of cold tea, she just gives up on it, not even bothering to clean the mug. She can do it tomorrow anyway. Yeah, tomorrow she'll definitely clean all the piled up dishes on her table. The raindrops hitting her bedroom window are soothing and it's a good feeling, being all wrapped up in blankets and warm as the outside world is screaming its fury. The raindrops are echoed by her tears, as she feels the black hole in her chest expand to fill her completely, before sleep finally comes to stop the pain.
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Lorovia is walking under a canopy of green, finally free to have a moment for himself to think and wonder. He hears the chants of the other boys as they prepare for their Trial, their mad run through the woods as they hide from the hunters sent out to reap them. He won't be joining them this year. Or next year. Or the one after that.
Mafaan, the two-faced god, must have been drunk the night when Lorovia was born. If he looks into a pond, or a quiet river, the reflection shows the wrong face, it shows a girl with shapely curves instead of reflecting his own figure.
He's particularly unhappy today, and his feet bring him further away from the village, further into the forest where everything old lives, where his ancestors are sleeping under the roots during the day, and dancing to the moonlight during the night. He stumbles, and as he rolls through the underbrush the thorns attack his arms and legs, before he's finally able to stop by grabbing onto a peculiar rock that catches his eye. It's... weird! The color is wrong, and the shape is... not very rocky? It has a beautiful pattern, a symmetry that is not a butterfly, but a flower. He starts to dig around it, eager to unearth this weird find to show it to the other boys, when he suddenly realizes that it's quite useless to rush, as they're not going to come home until the moon is full again, and even then... not all of them will. He begins to cry in anger, why, Why, WHY!
As the first tear hits the rock it blackens as if burnt by a fire. But Lorovia is too angry to notice it. As the second tear hits the rock, it becomes blue as the deepest ocean. As the third tear drops it crumbles into ash, while a whirlwind embraces his body, and he plunges into a soul-dream, as the druids in his mother's stories did in the time of myth.
"You. Have. A. Dream." says the sound of the dream, garbled, as if coming through the rain. Lorovia is unsure what to do, where he is, what is happening exactly.
"You. Are. Not. Who. You. Are" - what does that mean, exactly? Of course he is who he is, the voice is not making any sense at all!
"Become." - he starts to drown, tries to reach the surface, but there is no light, there is no surface, just the pressing embrace of deep blue water.