Chapter 2
Stumbling I arose, and sought the tree for comfort, but in my sleep I’d been transported to a different sort of place, a mirage of where I had been.
Now I was on a tiny island of moss covered rock, amidst a vast glassy sea, where I could see forever down, down to the deepest depths. My lonely shore had but little circumference, enough to stand and walk around on, but to run would be futile.
I realized my waking had taken me not back to the forest, but rather to a place in between my dreams. Strangest of all, there was no sun, nor any marker of the passing time. I saw sparkling schools of tropical fishes, yellow and green, vermilion, pink. flying through the shimmering air of the Ocean’s deep.
My former judgement faded, and I risked to see the reflection of my own familiar face. Staring down to the crystal clear surf, so still as water never is on a terrestrial shore, I saw my form indeed, but no reflection was it. Merely a shadow covered the water below my gaze. It seemed the water had not learned to reflect, and indeed, the empty hue showed no tinge of color from the baby blue sky.
I reached for the water then, hopeful for a drought or refreshment, to see if it be salt or fresh. But my hand merely stretched the surface like the membrane of a vast insect wing, for closer to the truth that image was. It dipped down, and as it did, color returned, iridescent, opal. For I had awoken in this world between worlds, in the sphere of a bubble affixed to the wing of that tiny maiden. A forgotten cosmos from my former utterance.
I heard her giggle, tremendous, vast. But as she did so I saw then I was growing, or that wing shrinking. Though just before a mere mote of dust had I been, I sat now on her wing as an ant might, and then a beetle. The fish I had seen were no fish at all, but the many colors of a flowered headband that graced her nearly glowing golden hair, sparkling into my bubbled world like a million newborn stars.
And as I grew that world inverted, or so it must have, for no longer was I but a tiny inhabitant on the expanse of her wing, but in my world was she, and the living surface beneath me became once again moss, and smooth lifeless rock. Her form was not that of a half human insect, winged like a dragonfly, full clothed in green folds. But fair and tender, with a perfect silk garment, white as the sun, and yellow too. Her face seemed half cross, but her arms held me. I lay on her breast, and my eyes search for hers above.
For in the forest I lay, at the foot of the tree, as the spell of that place lost it’s hold on me.
“Foolish that was” her voice came now, motherly, but young.
“Why does this tree cry” I though to say, wishing I knew how to make words in this place. But she heard me as the tree had before.
“The first tree this is, not created but still living. A memory it has, of the former world, an illicit dream of a time forbidden, it shared with you, now you may never go back.”
I gasped, sitting up now, and turned away. Enchanted I’d been, the melody returned.
And I awoke, and behold, It was a dream.
I stumbled from my haze, nearly falling on my own bedroom floor. How I’d returned here from the path, and the Arbor, I knew not. In a trance perhaps, or the whole thing had been a dream from the first. But Oh, so real was it, how precious every second, how perfect every vision, and that melody… I had to hear it again.
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