Andarin: The Mountains: a dream within a dream; --

On the 15th day of what would be known as the Last Month, Wyvern dreamed.

They slept together, a mess of limbs and hair golden and black. They always did, no matter whoever intervened, whatever partner they had at the moment; they slept together from the day they first met, cold and shuddering and pained, and they would to the end of time.

Wyvern never dreamed, not even the disjointed, mad imaginings of an overactive mind stitching random patterns together. Icarus always said it was a sign of his lack of imagination and perhaps he was right: Wyvern was a realist first and foremost. Imagination, he thought, was for others.

It was perhaps why, when he dreamed for the first remembered time in his life that he knew, as impossibly and inherently as oracles did, that what he dreamed was real – not a prophecy, liable to change in the way prophecies did, but as inevitable as if it’d already happened.

Maybe that was what made him burrow closer to Icarus’s side – asleep as only recently he’d found the peace to do so, curled into his body like mating snakes. Icarus’s sleep was never peaceful – he dreamed often and often those were nightmares he could not speak about aloud but that Wyvern knew anyway. Even now Wyvern could see the motion behind his eyelids and the constant nervous twitching of his muscles.

Even now, awake, he could see it. Part of him was fiercely glad for it.

Another…

Wyvern had never wanted to be an oracle. He’d never cared. The world of oracles was dull and joyless, a world laden with angst, pain and other liabilities of more emotional minds. Oracles were wet, too comprehending, too passive, too full of empty philosophies and mysticisms. Wyvern was not a good scholar, let alone an oracle.

But he was one, whether he liked it or not, and he knew better than to ignore the obvious.

He had to think.

“Where y’going?”

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

“Can’t,” he whined. “Not without you.”

“You’re already asleep, love. You can barely stitch two words together…”

“M’not,” and then, of course, he was.

Eleven years of sleeplessness tended to do that.

The lands to the east were silent.

He had seen Solira fall without remorse -- he had not liked those who lived within its ranks, he had not cared for it all. But he’d seen their terror, their pain, their panic -- he had felt it, as real as any reality could be -- and he knew.

Oh, he knew.

“Well then,” he muttered to himself. “We’ll ride this storm, won’t we, Icarus?”

He watched the open road to the west, the one he could sense if not see, lying sinuously like a resting snake amongst the woods and mountains and deserts.

In sunrise, Wyvern sighed, and waited.

wyvern
yea, they shall say, earth's womb has borne in vain
new things, and never this best thing again;