*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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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.
