313. After a bad dream, 9

(Rose)

I did my best to forget about that encounter like I would a bad trauma.

It broke too much of the reality I like and know. Too much of my beliefs. I always want to meet daiûas, but the Daiûa from the dark ages herself is a step too far toward insanity for me.

I'm glad she's gone. This fear of death now calms down.

B - Meeting a daiûa is always a surprise. It's alright, it's over now. That one is gone. And look, the road ahead is clear now.

The monster Daiûa is gone. I'm breathing again. Bleue helps me stand up and walk the first steps.

I feel like I'm waking up from a very exhausting bad dream.

Whatever the future may hold... We'll...

Ah well. Let us just go and forget this.

So we're resuming our journey to Constantinople.

~

To me, the world changed abruptly about eight years ago.

Before that, it was the normal world of humans. After that, it became the world of beings-like-her.

An abrupt fall from drought, to flood and oceans. No middle ground.

No magic in my oldest time.

But perhaps... What if?

Cursed words, what if...

I prefer what happened next, knowing what happened prior. Not doubts. Not regrets. Not guilt...

But maybe this invisible water, whatever you want to name it, already existed, even if only in small quantities.

Blume already existed somewhat in 1925. She was already like a seed in the ground, waiting.

Maybe some of their seeds were already there, long before I would like to guess. Maybe their water already existed on Earth, even if there was mostly a stable drought during the modern times.

What if it had been different in the distant past?

What if their invisible water had actually filled up dam lakes somewhere in the sky?

What if there actually had been rivers of it on Earth, that no one ever found?

Ley lines...

The seeds of Blume and the others, they've been among us for centuries before their power began to affect reality.

For how long? Since when? From where?

What I saw as the solid and clean frontier when times have changed, from old to new world, has fallen like a broken illusion.

Most of the old world's reality still stretches and work in our times. But now I hear that some vanguard of the new world stretched its presence far into the past.

Maybe the world never really fell as much as it completed a transformation...

All of the daiûas. And probably other legends as well, from time to time lost in the flow of stories and history. Needles, potential needles, in a haystack.

This reality may have overlapped with the old one for much longer than I wish was possible.

Mostly violent interaction. But still...

Unnoticed from history and the empires, they might have walked among us for a very long time...

It's hard to swallow for me. Despite the earnest wishes of my youth.

I like the threads of chaos, now that I can name them.

And we all dreamt of meeting a daiûa. But it's the dreamt itself that we liked, far more than the prospect and consequences of actually meeting one for real.

I'm a hypocrite, but that's a little how I feel about her now, now that I've met the one my family got that name from.

What she is is too much for me to swallow right now. A reality that began to break before even my time, no...

I'm glad she left without asking for more. I was badly uneasy.

Still, the tales loving child I once was can't help but wonder, where will she go? How did she meet us? What happens next?

No. For her, it should rather be, what happened before? Where did she go for the last thousand years or so?

I want to know, but I don't want to know!

She makes my past a joke, history a joke, everything...

For Bleue and I now, for us is the usual wonder.

Not for this ghost that pretends to have transcended time beyond reason.

I close my eyes, wishing for her to leave my memory.

The nightmarish truth about history she carries will slowly, very slowly be absorbed. The being she is can vanish with the leftovers of human history.

She will.

~

I wake up with tears along my eyes again, in a gasp of anguish.

Bleue who sat close by turned her smiling face toward me.

B - Rise and shine my Rose. Still having bad dreams?

R - Yes...

She kindly smiles. She gleams. She fills half of the landscape I can see as she gets closer. She holds me.

A quiet minute passes as she just does nothing but holding me close.

I'm comforted... She, you're with me.

You're with me in this world.

I gradually ease up. I relax. I sigh.

The shape of the pain from that goddess of decay slowly vanishes from my mind.

Decay... The unpleasant side of chaos.

I sigh again, expelling some shadows of this painful memory.

I look at the present again.

Bleue.

I manage to rise again. Let's move on, shall we?

~

In a way, I have met my god.

And I didn't like it.

It grinned, and left.

My beliefs have been shaken, though it's hard for me to say why or how.

But I will survive. And roses will thrive.

While this god too will remain in the forgotten shades of history.

~

We walk around the cursed city with Bleue and Ana.

We'll reach the sea again, and then follow the coasts, old and new, until we reach the old Byzantium.

I'm curious at what is left.

One day along the road, Bleue asked me again. How long are we going to travel through the world? How long do I want to?

What do I want to happen next, for us... From now on and forever.

We will grow old, is the first thing I can think of.

As I can already tell I'm not twenty anymore, not that I was really stronger back then. On the contrary I'm much stronger and healthier now.

But it still is a rough life, and we certainly won't live on like that to reach our eighties.

I guess... The wisest choice would be to find a home before we get old.

Build a farm. Live in an easier manner.

Maybe with our friends back in England.

To document what we saw and experienced maybe.

Or to keep travelling, looking for other survivors? Or other daiûas?

Or even try to find and learn what happened in the past to change the world?

Or... Trying to become... No.

I don't know...

I can't choose yet.

~