This is not her dream.

It's snippets at first: flashes of color and sound and smell, like the moving world glimpsed through a sliver in a dark caravan, abstract and unknowable.

Then she is there.

The first thing she registers is the roar; a whirl of sound that rears itself again and again into a crash and then smoothes out just as it turns again.

Then there is touch. Something wet and granular clings to her feet, sloshing between her bare toes, and as the roar crashes and flattens she feels the cool slide of water rushing up around her ankles.

The sun is warm on her face.

She opens her eyes.

This is not her memory.

Isati has never seen the ocean. She's seen the icy tundra up north, the landlines of icebergs and fractured ice set amongst choppy, dark waters, but she's never seen the tide, never seen the sea uninhibited.

She stretches; or rather, the one whose memory this is stretches, dark hair tumbling around copper shoulders, and words are mumbled to a dark-eyed man with long, stringy black hair, but this conversation does not concern Isati. The languid stretch of stomach muscles does, the warmth of the beating sun, the great swallowing expanse of the thing stretched out in front of her.

It is infinite, overwhelming, and Isati feels the Paragon's awe like a second skin, the wonder and the wistfulness.

It's been so long since she's felt anything like this.

There's something underneath it though, something not part of the memory: fear of the cold water, the infinite deep, and the things that swim silently in the deep, in the dark.

Isati understands fear. It is an ever-present tutor, an exacting lesson.

But even as it tries to make itself known here the sun still shines; the waves crash and drown out its silence and the murky muck of sand clings, solid and rooting this body, fixing it on land. Here, in this sunshine, in this glow, there are no dark things, there is only this infinite possibility.

What is it like to have so many choices? Isati wonders, or maybe the woman in the memory wonders. It's all mixed up now, but Isati doesn't care, can't care, because here, in the light, in the water, in roar of waves crashing around her, she feels it, all of it.

Water tracks down the creases of the corners of her eye when she wakes up in the dim, dark room, as if the sea has followed her out into the real world. She's lying on her back in the barren, cold loneliness, but she can still feel the sun on her shoulders, her face, a warm kiss of something she had forgotten. It arrests her, holding her in place for a long moment before she rises.

This, this song, this melody, this murmur of bloodstream and bones is different than that of fight and nerve.

It has been so long since she's felt anything else.

What else is there? she allows herself to think for a moment, in the dead of night, when even Mother is abed somewhere, drowsing, or slumbering in some manner. Not watching. Not seeing. What else is out there?

She is; this Isati knows, and as she grasps to that unseen tether, the tenuous line that had been dead for weeks and weeks now, she feels the phantom touch of something cold on her fingers, an echo of an old friend.

One rises now, out of the gloom, awoken by her stirrings and its mask hangs in the blackness like a hollow sign, a false hello.

It moves in tandem with her, settling the dark robe on her pale shoulders, following a step behind as she moves out of the room.

The stars are small, cold dots in the atmosphere, stretched out across the infinite darkness, the impenetrable shadowy blue. The night holds a bone-marrow chill out here, on the terrace of the Throne Room, and Isati plucks at that tether once more.

When she turns her head it's not to the vast stretch of pale mountainside, the long curve of Phoenix's Bend; it's into the Unspace.

The Paragon she finds there does not bask in the warmth of noon sunlight; nor hunch protectively, shielding her throat and other, soft areas. She stares, unrelenting, at the monster staring back at her.

"I wondered when you would turn up," Isati says again, because hasn't she said this before, a different time, through a different body, amidst the flash of lightning and clash of swords?

"How am I here?" the Paragon demands.

This incites a smile on Isati's face.

"Rifle through your thoughts," she suggests. "You already know."

She sees it happen: that spark of understanding, that moment of connection, and she feels it too, for a second: the touch of a different hand on the tether.

"You should be more careful with your sleeping arrangements," Isati says into the silence. "And perhaps get more sleep."

The Paragon's dark eyes are narrowed, slivers that seem to be trying to spy a hole, a tell at what Isati might have possibly seen, how she could have known about this mistake before she did.

"Nothing," Isati says to the unsaid query. "Only a dream."

Just the impossible, infinite sunlight, sea, just a revelation beyond thoughts and worlds, held only in feeling, instinct, knowing...

"Still training?" she adds, watching the way the shadows settle around the Paragon's eyes, feeling a phantom heaviness made of sleep, exhaustion, settling on the bridge her shoulders. "Don't tire yourself out before you even get here."

There's something curious in the Paragon's face; something searching, a probing less suspicious, less guarded than the one before. She's silently asking what Mother would ask, what Mother would demand in a tone chillier and darker than the night, sharper than a blade, if her exacting eye could fall on this, could pierce the veil and see what her daughter has done. 

Or rather, hasn't.

Extortion, torture, manipulation, false-memory implants. Easy trails, dark trails, low, romantic things that are weaved and crafted effortlessly in metal hands, in the beating beep of those metallic seekers, sitting patiently in a cabinet, waiting to be put to use. These are the songs Isati knows well, the beats Mother has taught her well.

But she does not play them.

"Why haven't you told the Imperator?" the Paragon asks, all directness, forgoing her own tools, her unseen hands.

Because, Isati thinks, her mind flitting again to the cabinet, you wouldn't be yourself by the time you got here.

Because Mother could never understand the desire not to control.

"It's no fun when she plays," she says instead, but she thinks that perhaps for the first time now the curling smile is not convincing, that the hard words might contain a crack.

Because there's something knowing in the Paragon's eyes, something that echoes old thoughts shared between them.

It's just a game you have to learn to play.

There's no way out.

I can't let them control me.

"Get here safely," Isati says into the nothingness. "We can't have you losing before we've even begun."

A/N: Guys, I'm on a movie roll this week and I just watched The Thing and its so good. Terrifying, I'm never trusting another human being again, but oh my god, my mind is blown. I can't believe they made it in 1982.

Chapter notes: Isati first tells Allayria she wondered when she would arrive in Prodigal's "What We Dream in Electric Sleep," and the thoughts shared between them come from "Lightning Bones," and "Beacon, Here I Am." The dream scene is from Paragon's "Thalassa City, Part 2." The Spirit seekers first show up in Paragon's "Disguises" and are named in Partisan's "Sisterly Love."

Next week is another familiar face! Handsomer though, if he does say so himself 😉