And then she woke in my body.
By the power held within my name, and my title, she will be blessed with Fractured Beginnings.
—Dream Journal (Prophetic), 30.
✦
Aspen shot up from bed, then her lungs exploded.
Her hands worked faster than her thoughts. They seized her stomach. Then her chest. Her throat. She hacked as if she was rasping on sand instead of air.
Get it out. GET THE HEAT OUT!
Her legs thrashed despite her and tangled with sheets that were softer than she remembered. She lurched sideways—not so much falling as being dragged down by her own vertigo.
Her skull bounced against the wood floor. "Tssssst!" She nearly cried as she grinded the heel of her hand into her temple. The air was hot and it smelled of burnt sugar. Did Jamie mess with the thermostat? And make... a pancake? No, when was he ever able to cook? Then the heat subsided and her eyes widened.
There were a pair of pale feet in front of her.
And there was a glowing blue mushroom on the floor. And the floor consisted of gray wood that swirled in seamless, fluid knots. It looked less like timber and more like the calcified muscle of a giant beast.
Aspen's breath caught in her throat. She didn't scramble back. She didn't scream. She went statue-still, her body rigid against the whirling contours of the floor.
W-Where are my posters? And my phone? I'm hallucinating, I have to be. Great. Perfect timing. Or maybe this is VR? Those pale feet began to walk—no, run toward her! Fuck fuck—her head tilted back in jagged increments, straining to find the summit of the figure looming over her.
But the summit came crashing down. The figure dropped to its knees, thrusting a face into focus.
A girl?
Not a predator, but a young woman with a curtain of hair that spilled over her shoulders. Her hair was a torrent of—Aspen blinked hard.
Then she blinked again.
Her hair was a torrent of seafoam. Seafoam green. Blue and aqua. I-It's nearly glowing! It seemed to refract light rather than reflect it.
Her hands shot to Aspen's face, cupping her cheeks too hard. There was something in her palms that Aspen couldn't make out. Aspen pulled back, a full-body spasm that sent her scrambling backward on her elbows.
Her spine collided with what she assumed was the bed frame. Why did she grab my cheeks?!She raised a knee to the woman, primed for any sudden movements.
"Back," she wheezed. "Get back. Why are you touching me?"
The woman froze mid-reach, her strange hands hovering in the air like rejected gifts. "What? Lyra, it's me." Her brows lowered in increments. She looked right into Aspen's terrified eyes, searching for something.
Why is she just staring? The fuck is going on?
"Lyra?" the woman whispered, her voice cracking in the middle. She let her trembling hands taper to the side. "We just—we spent all yesterday together. You painted my wings." Her breath hastened. Voice rising. "You know me. What are you doing?"
Who is Lyra supposed to be? Maybe this really is VR?
Wait no, what am I thinking? This is a dream, I'm so dumb.
But why would she think I'm someone else in a dream? And what does she mean by I painted her wings? Aspen frowned, inching back.
Trace back your steps. Saturday night. Licked a fork. Beat Jamie up. Licked a spoon. Whacked off. Went to bed.
Okay then this must just be a weird dream. Find your bearings. Aspen tried to shift her weight, but her limbs were heavy. Like dead weights attached to her torso, responding a split-second too slow to her commands. "W-Who are you?"
The woman's face crumpled like she'd been stabbed. Her mouth worked. Nothing came out. "Don't," she said, voice tight. "Don't play games. I swear to the spirits, if you don't stop this right now..." Her jaw trembled as she stared into Aspen's soul. Her breath hitched. "Why would you lie to me? What is this? Was everything just...?" She bit down on whatever she was going to say next.
Aspen couldn't find an expression to fit her face to. "W-What're you even talking about? I know I'm dreaming but come on. I don't know who Lyra is."
The woman's face flickered—confusion, then forced certainty. "You're still dreaming, that's it, "she said, more to herself than to Aspen. "Lyra said she wouldn't leave. Even if she was going to kill herself, she wouldn't leave me through this. She wouldn't let me see it. This—this is a nightmare. Of course I'm having one because of how scared I was." But her eyes were scanning Aspen's face, looking for something that wasn't there.
Kill herself? Nightmare? This... doesn't feel like a dream. Aspen brought her hands up to cover her face.
Or what should have been her hands.
Her hands—her hands, the ones that could shuffle cards without looking, the ones that knew exactly how hard to press a pencil. The ones with chipped nail polish and pen smudges.
Instead, brown, green, and blue pigments swirled within her palms. They pulsed to a rhythm beneath the skin. Deep aqua bloomed at the site of every pulse. It was the same aqua of the glowing mushroom. The same aqua the woman's hair seemed inspired by. These hands didn't know her, but they knew the enemy.
"No—no no no, what is this? What happened to my hands?!"
She didn't wait for an answer. She drove the fingernails of one hand into the back of the other. She clawed at the swirling pigments as if they were mud she could scrape away.
But she noticed that her fingernails also pulsed with aqua veins beneath the keratin.
"G-Get it off," she gagged, scrubbing faster until she broke the skin. "Get it off!"
"Lyra, stop!" The woman lunged at Aspen's wrists, pinning them to the floor. The grip was too tight. Like when her mom used to grab her after she'd run into the street as a kid—that same desperation, that same you could have died intensity. But her mom's hands were warm. These were cold.
The contact shot electricity through Aspen's arms. The woman's skin was rough. Clammy. Wrong.
"Let go!" Aspen kicked out with legs like bags of wet sand. "Don't touch me!"
The woman's grip tightened, face pale. Two moth-like wings shot out from behind her—green membrane crossed with gray ash spirals and circles. "Lyra, please, you're hurt. Look at the ash on you. Look at all this. Look at everything! Why are you doing this to me?!"
Huh? I'm hurt? And a-are those wings?
Wings...?
Lightning shot through Aspen's spine, her limbs lagged. The heat returned to her throat—not a wildfire this time, but something slower. It ate at the last of the oxygen in her lungs. She stared at the woman's back, where wings shot out. Then her head dropped to her chest.
There was something there. Dark. Wet.
She touched it. Her fingers came black.
She froze. She looked up at the woman, and then down at her sternum again.
Not blood. Worse. Thick, grainy, like wet charcoal mixed with oils. Like she'd been packed with wet ash. That ash spilled out to the fabric of her tiger pajamas—no, she wasn't wearing any pajamas anymore.
She was wearing a white silk dress. Pale as a corpse.
"H-Heh. I'm so fu—"
Her eyes rolled back.
✦
For a few moments—minutes? hours?—all Aspen saw was blue. A very faint blue. Her chest was warm and a peony scent tickled her nose. Am I waking up now…? God, I need to tell Jamie about this dream. His stupid face would be so cute.
She opened her eyes to a different face.
It was another woman, with hazel hair and dusty green eyes. Unblinking. Tracing her slightest movement with the focus of a wolf, and pressing into her chest with her hand. "So… you've woken wrong, Hermit."
Aspen's neurons fired. The command was simple: Bite. Thrash. Escape. But it dissolved before it could reach her limbs.
There was something about that woman's hand on her chest. She exuded a peony scent that poured into Aspen's lungs. It smothered the scream in her throat until what emerged was nothing more than a wet exhale. No—can't—Mom, Jamie, where—the warmth spreading through her chest was a blanket that dragged her down into the mattress.
She watched the wolf-eyed woman through swaying pupils. Her heart wanted to hammer against her ribs. But the heat forced it into a slow, drugged rhythm. She pushed the words past teeth that felt made of wool.
"Wha… who even... are you?"
The woman squinted, pressing her eyes into dagger-like slits. "Do you truly not recognize me?"
"No…? Are you famous..?"
"Why haven't you felt my name?"
Aspen jolted.What?
Felt?
Oh, I'm dreaming for sure.
I just had one of those wake up in another dream moments. I had to have.
She tried to count. One mushroom, two mushrooms, three—it was what she did on the bus when her chest got tight, when the world felt like too much—four mushrooms, five—but then she lost count.
What the fuck do you even mean 'feel your name?' Am I supposed to sme—
A spark of heat shot up Aspen's chest. Then there were hundreds. They hit the back of her throat—not as a smell, but a frequency. Her tongue translated that rhythm to a texture.
The texture on her tongue was a thick velvet blanket. Like she'd forced a fleece coat into her mouth. It then dissolved into the bitter tang of crushed flower stems. Sharp in parts, like a rose stem. Peppery in others.
Her tongue played with that texture. Pressed into it. The flavor forced her mouth to shape a word she hadn't ever spoken. The syllables bloomed on her taste buds, distinct as a bruise.
"High Priestess. T-That's your name. Holy shit—what was that? Did I actually just—"
"I see."
Huh? You see? This is too much, and are you trying to look cool? "What do you mean, you see?"
The woman sighed, speaking so monotonously Aspen nearly wanted to laugh. "You've either lost your memories… or you're an entirely different person."
Oh yeah. Yep. FUCK YOU!
Can I wake up now? Where am I? What kind of dream is this? Or... am I in another world? No, impossible. Come on, don't be stupid. Be rational. What am I thinking?
Aspen's lips cracked open, faltered, and pressed again into a thin line. Her jaw grinded against the silence. "That's… that's not possible. I just… did I hit my head? Is this a concussion or something?"
A frown tugged at the corner of High Priestess's mouth. "Con… cussiion? What are you saying?"
Why did she say it like that? Does she not know the word? "Yeah?" Why would a dream character not know a word I know?
Or is this... really not a dream? Aspen swallowed the thought back. She squeezed her eyes tight, expecting the dark to take her.
All she got instead was the sound of her breath. And that warmth in her chest. It itched. She grabbed at High Priestess's arm, trying to push it off her chest. "Can you stop touching me now?"
"It's how I'm keeping you calm."
"So you're… what? Keeping me calm? And still, I'm calm enough. I don't want it. Just let go." Aspen's grip tightened.
"This is more efficient. Raine told me you woke in a panic and fainted."
Aspen's muscles began to tense. Biceps pulled tight as she pushed with her wrist. "Anyone would... faint... just let me… go!"
The arm didn't budge. Aspen looked into High Priestess's eyes again, her thoughts whirred for a few moments.
I've got it! Her lips spurred to action.
"There's something wrong with your hands."
The woman raised a brow. "Like what?"
"Uh... they're stabbing me. It really hurts."
"Why would I believe something like that?" The woman didn't smile.
"I'll lick you then."
Her hand shot back from Aspen's chest.
Aspen's mouth hung frozen for a few moments, then she shot up. Her lungs seized the thin air, powering her heart. Energy pulsed into arteries, neurons, bones and muscle—mind and body coordination. Fight, flight or freeze.
Her eyes zipped to her surroundings. For the next three seconds, her body chose to freeze.
No no no.
1.
The room wasn't built; it was hollowed out.
It was a silo of that same gray, knotted wood. It cursed upward into a dizzying, tapered point far above her head. There were no corners, no seams where the wall met the ceiling. It was all one continuous and calcified piece of wooden flesh. Like she was sitting inside the ventricle of a petrified heart.
Her skin tingled. Was she really keeping me calm?
2.
Clusters of the glowing mushrooms clung to the walls. Like barnacles. Their gills pulsed with a rhythm that matched a thrumming behind the walls. They cast long, watery shadows over furniture.
Or what looked like furniture.
To her left, a desk—if it could be called that—grew seamlessly out of the wall. And the bed she was in…
It wasn't a frame. It was a shallow basin sustained above the floor, lined with layers of silk so thick it felt like foam. She was lying in a nest.
Her chest caved in.
3.
She vaulted from the bed. She expected the thud of her heels against the floor. Instead, her knees folded on impact and she pitched forward. Her chin cracked against wood. Damn it!
Her eyes shot back to High Priestess—but the woman simply met her gaze and sighed.
Aspen's center of gravity shifted dangerously high in her chest. She forced her knees under her, pressing them down like springs. Then she shot up—before lurching to her right. Her foot slipped on—
Wing. Insect wing. Under my foot.
Her right shoulder blade screamed. Something pulled from inside.
T-That—there's—oh my god. She careened into a tall, spiraling something. It looked like a giant wooden funnel balanced on spindly legs. I really have wings?!
Her shoulder slammed into the rim, tipping the whole structure. A deluge of dried gray powder and sticky silk cascaded over her face. She thrashed. The thread tightened. Her feet slid against the floor, she forced them to find friction.
Come on! Come on! I'm so close! She blasted out from the entanglement and rushed. Raced! So close! To the nearest door-like blur ignoring the fuzzy sounds behind assheflewthroughthedoorlikeameteor—
No, she was caught by High Priestess before she even escaped the threads.
And there was no door. Instead, there was a curtain that replaced the doorway.
"L-Let me go!" Warmth soothed her diaphragm. Her muscles ignored her screams. Her eyes met High Priestess's and she saw not herself reflected there…
But a face she didn't recognize, lemon-yellow eyes wide with her flavor of terror. Rimmed by a smoky haze of gray hair that stopped at her shoulders.
That's not my face.