355. About power, 6

(Rose)

We're going a little faster than before, as Bleue noticed something unusual glowing in the distance.

I didn't see anything.

It's an artefact.

Another.

It seems Bleue found the fossilised heart of a dead daiûa, again.

We're going across some woods. A park probably, as the city reappears in full just afterward.

We enter streets turned into chasms. Night is already falling. Bleue walks ahead, faster. I follow her with a torchlight and a careful ear. It seems we're really alone.

We enter the storage room of a library through a collapsed wall. In the basement we climb down. Unless the street level has risen over time. That could also be.

There's earth all around the walls, and what were once windows. The city is one or two stories below the level of dry mud on this side. The streets were flat and clean, but were the surface of an old flood that dried.

Between, the shades and mould of this place, we have shelves of books turned into flour. Books by hundreds. It's been so long since I last had such a sight.

That may be the one thing we miss from the old world the most, reading.

Letting her fingers softly brush the damaged covers, Bleue walks along one of these alleys were decay has settled. The rows of books are barely standing still.

She's feeling nostalgic. I am as well, a lot.

Once upon a time, it was two children... Or four actually, with their parents in another town, and later on at home...

Everything was clean and polished at the time. There was light in the rooms and the smell of dry paper aging along the furniture waxes. People reading quietly around us. We were reading together as children back then...

Now, I look at a woman with dark wings covering her back from head to toes, in a damp and dirty abandoned basement of a kind. It smells like mould and dirt, and everything around is old or in decay.

There, we feel the strong contrast that time and chaos brought to us.

Bleue grabs the cover of a book and pulls it to her. A mush collapses on the floor at her feet instead of pages. She looks at it, a little conflicted and sad, as I am too.

We discussed the loss of culture recently. It's another picture of it we now face.

B - It's a little sad.

R - I feel that way too.

We move on to the chambers deeper within the building. It's an electrical room. It was.

There's just a row of locked cupboards with switches and round but flat bulbs.

There, on a chair, lies the ashes of something that existed on both sides of reality for a while. We can't say what it was anymore. There's a kind of copper ring there, that twists its shape over itself. It's still a ring, but that twists over itself as you follow it, like when you wear a belt and tie it showing the wrong side on one end.

Bleue touches it and the floating ashes that remained collapse silently. The abstract shape we didn't really notice disappears entirely in dust. She wraps the prise in cloth and we leave this tomb.

We will again face the issue of what to do with it. Maybe we'll just burry it.

~

We're resting around a fire. The treasure lies a little further, under our bags. She can still see its glow. It irradiates directly through everything as if no walls existed.

It seems stronger than the leftovers of the other wish stones we still carry along.

B - Whoever or whatever it was, something in its... smell, lets me think it cared about the books here.

I don't comment that idea. It sounds unlikely but reassuring.

B - Most people... Might not bear living in this world. If you've grown in civilised times.

R - I was terrified in the first days... The first days were hell, just hell.

B - What I mean is... People, most people, I would expect to cling to the past. But not you.

I glance at her. I don't comment how wrong she is.

R - Hard to say... There are too few survivors to ask. What's really on your mind?

B - Do you think... You love this world despite its desolation, because it is more free, or because it's a little like the fairy tales dad used to read to us?

Good question.

R - I don't think any of his tales really helped me to get ready for it. But they grew my taste for the strange discoveries, the whimsical and the surreal. I think that taste grown within me found new nutrients in the present time indeed. It's not quite the world I would have dreamt of, but it is a world out of my wildest dreams and nightmares.

B - I can see how you turned out to be in good matching for this world. Likely even more than within our old one.

R - Maybe. Hard to say... The original Rose, she looked happy on the pictures I saw.

B - And Blue was along with her.

R - Like you are with me.

B - It's strange to hear about past lives. I've been built with some memories of the real Blue, but very few. So sometimes, I just have a picture or a voice, a piece of memory coming to mind, and I'm not sure where and when it was. It's like some illogical memories and I'm not entirely sure if they're from a dream, or a long lost reality.

R - What are they for instance?

B - You, walking down a street filled with people and warm lights. It might have been the very city we've made our home as well... It felt familiar.

I wonder if we're repeating a part of that past story. Hard to say from where we are...

~

B - Do you often think about dad?

R - A lot. Thinking he would have been delighted to hear about a tenth of what the world now offers. He... probably would have been thrilled to witness it.

B - I don't really remember him. But I share this nostalgia.

R - I really liked him. He was really gentle father. He truly raised us, all of us, with care. Seeing him die was awful.

B - I really don't recall much... I'm sad and sorry.

R - It's alright. It's an old wound. It just makes me a little blue to remember him.

I think this world was made for him.

As a child, I saw a father whom was talented at reading bed time stories and writing them. A dad.

Now, I realise he was a man, a human. Not just this fantastic figure of a dad I recall and made of him.

Exactly like me, who is not solely the figure of a kind woman I try to keep as an ideal. And now that I try to think what my father's real thought might have been...

I think he might have been a little sad as well in his world and time...

Stuck around his home with a family and a poor job. The shop didn't sell much of his books. We were living on mother's inheritance. It was more than we needed, but still.

Father was surely happy with us, his daughters and his wife.

But I can now glimpse that his true unspoken dream, was to travel again...

To explore the world, and discover unexpected things...

I can glimpse clues of that will, that became a buried dream.

R - Father... Probably gave up his dream, for us. I think he gave it all to make us happy to live in our old world. The best way he could envision. By raising us to be dreamers... Against all odds, it did give me some of the strength to live. I survived because I...

B - I understand.

I'm sobbing a little. I can love this world, because a part of you were by my side all the time...

I'm grateful, dad...

~