View source for Compendium:Dream 4

This dream is of a field, vast, golden, sweeping into distance. A woman sits in the grass, weaving strands together into the fabric of the hills, undulating in the wind. She looks up, and mouths words. She looks away, and says nothing. Her hands never stop. The hills never stop, rippling outward, illusions of grasses growing from the fabric and swaying, swaying.

The sun beats down. It is hot, burning, an oven under sky, baking the golden not hills to a glorious brown. Baking, burning. I squirm away, but it doesn't stop, for there are no shadows. 

''There are shadows everywhere. Corner eyes that drift and flicker. Darkness not quite there. See-through world. What's behind?

The respite of shadows is fleeting under this merciless sun, this empty sky. Such a sky should surely crack in this heat, and crack it does, slowly, webbing out, a weave of cracks to mirror the weave of the hills. Bits fall from cracks. Dust and blue dirt. It trickles down and mixes with the hills, sowing splotches of darkness against the gold that smoke and sizzle under the deathly sun.

''Out of the cracks in the sky come vultures.

There are no vultures. Only blue and gold, meeting with a ripple and a clang, spreading from their spiders, sea and sky, desert to desert.

''There are thin spaces in the desert, shimmering air that ripples and distorts, showing images of things not there.

''The thin spaces are shadows where fabric ripples too suddenly.

The vultures dive for the shadows and tear through. Out spills darkness as the grass splinters and unravels, twisting away from itself in its hurry to come apart. The oven heat disperses into nothing as sky and sun shrivel and crinkle into the night.

The other side is cold and empty.