fifteen
Mira lay down for a nap upon returning to Gardiah Estate later that afternoon. Between the heavy lunch and the excitement of seeing Uncle Ramaron for the first time in months, she was utterly knackered. And when her mother told her to go ahead while she worked on something else? Fantastic.
She was out the moment her head touched the pillow.
And she was in somewhere else as soon as her inner mind’s eye opened.
Mira wasn’t disturbed by the epicurean darkness around her.
She had been here before, hundreds of times.
It’s like going home after a long time away.
She felt it when she was let out of prison and back in Lerenan Estate.
She sensed it every time she returned to any room of hers after a tough year at the Academy.
And she embraced it now, a world where she walked among the stars and tasted the honey of the unknown on her tongue.
It was always so decadently sensual. If she closed her eyes, she heard a song in the distance. If she reached out her hand, she touched the breeze of life. And if she deeply inhaled, she smelled the sweat of the first to be born.
She didn’t mind staying here. Not in her sleep.
Yet something stirred in the darkness before her.
“Ma?”
A hand reached from the Void’s deepest embrace. Mira thought it was her mother’s, but why would Joiya be here? And why would she assume it was her mother in her dreams?
The hand flailed. Before it was lost to the nothingness of the universe, Mira reached out, expecting her hand to pass through the other.
Instead, they touched. She clasped the fingers about to turn into stardust and pulled.
She was soon face-to-face with a woman who hovered before her, bedecked in a dress of gossamer blue that contrasted brightly with the darkness around them. Even the woman’s long, black hair was bright and vibrant when compared to the universe itself.
Yet her face was imperceptible. She had no mouth. A tiny button nose. Where there should have been eyes, two bright blue beads were peering straight into Mira’s soul.
“It’s you,” came a whisper. “The aura I have been looking for. Her daughter.”
“Whose daughter? You can see auras? By the way, I’m dreaming. This isn’t real.”
“I have searched for countless nights. Traversing the dreams of girls who have lived over millions of years. Today. Tomorrow. Yesterday.”
Mira opened her mouth, unlike the woman before her.
“I am a Dreamwalker. Perhaps you do not know my kind any longer.”
The term did not ring a bell. There were so many roles lost to the passage of Epochs.
“I am a priestess. I am a prophetess. I am a soul-seer. Yes, I see your aura.”
“What do you want with me? Who are you?” Mira took a step back, absorbing the nature of her favorite haunt. Is this even real? It felt real. She knew she was dreaming, but…
“You are…” The sound echoing from the woman’s invisible mouth to Mira’s mind was incomprehensible.
The dulcet notes tinkling in her ears, however, were unmistakable.
Could it be the Harmony? The language of the First Epoch?
The first language of the julah? Its words, its syntax, and its very beat lost to time like the concept of a Dreamwalker?
“I don’t understand.”
“I come to you from another time. Perhaps another universe. But you are Her daughter. That is all that matters.”
“Whose daughter?”
One of those hands reached out to gently touch the tip of Mira’s jaw. Cold, incurable dread spread through her, chattering her teeth and tempering the butterflies in her stomach.
“Hers.”
The face flashing before hers was intimately familiar.
Ma. Yet it wasn’t the Joiya that Mira had known all her life.
Instead of the sweet, elegant woman who had raised Mira, kissed her, held her, and brushed away her tears at the end of another long heartbreak, it was an entity that looked like Joiya but carried with her the ferocity of a woman who would carve a warpath for the very things she loved.
Fire. Blood. The eye.
When the woman in her mind closed her eyes, a third opened in their place.
The Dreamwalker’s hand pulled away again.
“Your aura is effervescent. Like your father’s.” The Dreamwalker’s voluminous black hair obscured her face and the blue beads within. “Like mine. A phoenix of rebirth. The snake of life. You are your parents’ child. You are the creature that should have never been born.”
“I don’t…”
“Your mortal mother knows. I’ve been sent to tell you this, for all of this was foretold by me, by Her. Her rebirth would remake the universe. But it has not. She destroyed the call.”
“The call to what?”
“Ascension.”
“This is insane… the Ascension…”
“A beautiful aura with a mote of impurity. A glitch in your very system. The tiniest tear in the fabric of the universe.”
“The Ascension, though…” It was a fable. A prophecy.
“Tell her…” Here it came. The strange sensation of being ripped away from the dream. A part of Mira was awakening back into her mortal world, where time was a fixed point and the Harmony long extinct. “Rahara knows. She speaks through you, for the Lady has shut us out.”
“Who? Who are you? Who is the Lady, and who is she shutting out?”
The Dreamwalker dissipated into a fine, blue mist—as she became one with the Void, a snake coiled around what was left of her throat.
Mira knew who she was. It was on the tip of her tongue until someone shook her awake.
“Darling.” Joiya stood above her daughter, a hand on her shoulder as one gently shook awake the other. “Wake up, my heart. You’re having a nightmare.”
Mira shot up, twilight shaking the windows and her mother’s blurry face focusing before her. Yet in its calming presence were the remnants of another.
Three eyes. Blood red. Creation. The Red Line.
The Line that flowed through her own blood.
“Ma, I…” Mira’s voice almost betrayed her. Had she been sleeping with her mouth open? “I had a dream. I was in that space. You know the one.”
Joiya sat on the edge of the bed. “Yes? Your precious dark place.”
Ah, sure. Mira used to talk to her mother about her dreams in that place. The conversations had dwindled over the centuries as Mira matured and claimed her own secrets.
“Something happened. Do you know what a Dreamwalker is?”
A fallen smile. A pale cheek. An empty eye.
Except this wasn’t a figment of a dreamworld. This was the woman sitting before Mira. The one pulling her own soul away from the room.
“A Dreamwalker, darling?” Joiya chuckled, and there it was again: the warm cheeks, the bright eyes of life, and the effervescent smile. “They faded from our world millions of years ago. For you to meet a Dreamwalker, they would have had to be—”
“She said she came from a different time. She wanted me to know about a ‘mote’ in my aura.” Mira rubbed her eyes before the details faded from memory. “What was she talking a—”
When she looked up again, her mother was gone. Instead of being by her side, Joiya stood in front of the window, gazing into the maw of creation represented by the setting sun reflecting off a pane of glass.
Her chest heaved up and down with such anxiety that Mira worried that her mother was about to collapse. But before she could check on her, Joiya turned, forcing a smile.
“Don’t pay any mind to silly dreams, my heart. You had a nightmare. That’s all.”
“You never told me I had a phoenix in my aura.”
The smile twitched on one side before sparking into a full-blown grin.
“Oh, haven’t I? I must have, many years ago. Or maybe you recently read about it in one of those articles about those seers who went blind. Very overblown, my heart. It’s a risk we soul-seers take, peering at one another with our inner eyes.”
Inner eye… Was that the third eye Mira saw consuming her mother’s face?
“She said she was a priestess.” What else had that mysterious blue woman said? “And a soul-seer. A Dreamwalker.” Mira got up from the bed before her mother could flippantly walk out of the room. “A prophetess.”
That got Joiya’s attention again. “I’m sorry? A prophetess?”
“She said to tell you…”
“…Me?...”
“That Rahara knows.”
Although a tattoo suppressed Joiya’s sorcery, she was suddenly at her daughter’s side, that terrible gravitas pushing Mira back onto the bed without a single finger touching skin.
“Rahara.”
Her mother’s voice was faraway, yet right here, spilling smoke into Mira’s ear.
“Yeah. Who is that?”
“Rahara…” Tiny steps took Joiya farther away, as if she suddenly realized she needed to give her daughter some breathing room. What is happening here? “Rahara.”
“Do you know who that is?”
Mira did not revel in sounding like a helpless child who needed her mother’s guiding hand to reach shore after a tumult in the waves.
Something must have happened. Why else would Joiya take this so seriously?
Were Dreamwalkers real? Could they really cross thousands, millions of years from the past?
Rahara… It was such a simple name for something so old.
The very few names to survive from true antiquity were mouthfuls like Tera’akala bah Erransol.
Times so old that the Houses had yet to be founded, and people were just called by one name.
Or their mother’s name, if there was more than one of the same name.
There were no Raharas from what Mira recalled. Then again, there were no surviving documents from the First Epoch. Except for the prophecies, that…
“Rahara was a Founder of the First Sixteen,” Joiya said, sitting in an armchair by a tea table.
Finally, she was the effortlessly feminine woman whom Mira knew best.
She almost looked cozy enough to kneel beside and beseech a scratch on the head.
Like a pet… but I can’t help myself… It had been one of child-Mira’s favorite things to do.
“She was a powerful sorceress during her day. One of the foremost priestesses of the time, which was why she became a Founder. Her followers went with her to establish her House… using a name she divined…”
“The First Sixteen?” That was what stuck out to Mira the most.
“No way. Nobody knows who the Founders were. It’s not in any of the surviving records.”
In House Lerenan, the oldest known progenitor was a man named Pliam bah Lerenan, from before the bah and sah and such were dropped from naming conventions.
And in House Dunsman, it goes back even farther.
But not to the Founder. Hell, most other Houses could say what other House their Founder came from, if it was that recent, but…
“Yes, my heart. I know who the First Sixteen were.”
“No way.” Mira dropped to her knees by the window. The sun had finally set well enough behind the trees that she was not blinded. “That’s not possible. You’re smart, but not that smart.” She snorted. “I bet Dad has no idea, and he has access to the same restricted texts that you do.”
“I know who they are.” Joiya instantly pursed her lips. “Who they were, I mean.”
“How?”
Joiya leaned her elbow against the armchair, her feet drawn up beneath her, and her face showing her age.
While she wasn’t old enough to show many lines in her skin or gray in her hair, she wasn’t Mira’s age anymore.
Five hundred years since she had me. That must have done something to a woman.
Let alone the stress of being the High Priest’s wife…
“You will not find their names in any surviving records, no. It was what they wanted. I only know because… well, suppose you could say I’ve had some dreams myself in my life.”
That was the biggest non-answer her mother had ever given her, and Mira was losing it.
“She said something about the Ascension.”
Joiya stopped breathing. She covered her mouth with her hand as if to prove a point.
“Does it have to do with the Prophecy of the High Priestess?”
Joiya closed her eyes.
“Ma!”
When they opened again, Mira was at the mercy of gravity as it pulled her down toward the carpet in a desperate act of self-preservation.
What is happening? She couldn’t breathe.
Her lungs crashed against her ribcage, as if desperate to free themselves from her body, to access the air all around her. What the hell!
“A mote in your aura…” Just like that, the planet released poor Mira, who gasped to hear her mother’s voice. “So, it’s come to pass. It’s here.”
“What has?” Still short of breath, Mira gazed up at her mother, who didn’t look any different from before. Only now her eyes were open, and she peered out the window with her fingers perched against her chin. “What the hell is going on, Ma!”
Joiya chuckled. She was not in the room with her daughter anymore, despite her body still sitting there. She was lost in her own head. She perhaps saw infinity spread before her.
“I bet it happened when we first touched down here. This whole house is a testament to my greatest sin. Ah, well…” She glanced at Mira with that doting, motherly expression that held not a shred of sincerity. It was as if Mira no longer knew her own mother.
No. She’s been overwritten. By something else.
“At least I got to be your mother.”
Mira had no idea what to say to that. She had long given up understanding a thing since arriving on Arrah.