Post by Joliette Thorne on Mar 12, 2010 6:47:52 GMT -5
Somewhere, In A Dream
“Gotcha!”
Lucien raised his hand, the napkin held aloft and waved like a flag. His triumph was short-lived, however; he turned his eyes to the sea, slowly lowering his prize, falling silent.
Across the waves, amid the storm, a lone and distant figure strode toward the shore.
“Lola?” Luc could not drag his gaze from the impossibility of what he was observing to check on where she was. But he wasn’t about to let her come to harm and would make sure to put himself between the girl and any danger that may come.
As the little sail was caught by the wind and blown across the dune, the brunette took after the tow-head, struggling through the sand which impeded any hasty chase. Each time she fell, a bubbly laugh echoed over the beach, pure and untainted with the insincerity and madness that would haunt it later on in her life. She wound up on the heels of Lucien when he caught the scrap of material, almost as if she seen exactly where the thing would snag and be captured. She could do that, occasionally, follow an inkling and watch it come to pass. A small part of her occasionally wondered if she willed things that way, or if things willed her that way. Then she’d get in such a muddled state, she’d give up and carry on with her play.
Her eyes followed Lucien’s to the shoreline, and her hand found his in a comforting kind of solidarity – as equals, prepared to face this curious new adventure.
The sea-walker wore a dark and voluminous robe, and Lucien thought it must be terribly tattered to blow around in long tendrils as it did. He could not make out any detail other than that. Perhaps he should run back to the hut and tell Mother, but then he’d have to explain their first visitor, which he could not, and the second one was approaching so rapidly he probably would not have time, before whoever-it-was set foot on shore.
“Who goes there?” He knew the cry from the bed-time stories his parents used to tell, and it seemed to him the only thing to do.
A child-like laugh, thin as the cry of a seabird, reached his ears. Impossible, but two blinks later the robed and cowled figure was before them, the robe revealed as being not a robe at all but a wraithlike, oily shadow wrapped about a form hardly as tall as Lola.
“Silly.”
The figure spoke in a voice Luc though he recognised from somewhere. The boy frowned. Silly? What kind of greeting was that? “Uh. Pardon?”
The speaker’s hands, small and white as chalk, poked out of the shadow-robe and rose to press the darkness back as though drawing down an oversized hood. The covering fell away, and as it did the storm ceased. It didn’t simply and suddenly ebb to clear skies, as storms at sea so commonly do; this one stopped like the ticking of a broken clock-- clouds froze mid-roil, gulls and debris hung motionless mid-air. Even the waves were stilled to sculptures of choppy, grey glass.
There was a long moment of uncanny silence, then, in which Lucien found that he was staring at himself.
“I said, ‘silly‘. I’ll tell you why, in a moment. But we haven’t got long.”
The second Lucien was closer in age to Lola and wore an air of grim maturity about him not possessed by his older double. The most marked difference and, perhaps, the most disturbing, were the glossy depths of eyes that were, sclera, pupil and iris, wholly the same obsidian shade as the robe once worn, now fallen to mere shreds that played about the doppelganger’s feet.
Luc, who’d come to dislike the sound of his whole name since it usually meant he was in trouble of some kind, instinctively tightened his grip on Lola’s hand. “What.. What’s this about? Who are you?” The other looked like him, sure, but... it couldn’t be. It had to be a trick. Didn’t it?
“Don’t waste the moments we have, wrestling with doubt.” The boy who stood on a white platform of solid spume blinked his unnatural eyes and turned his attention toward Lola. “You know who I am. Listen to me. Things are terribly, terribly broken, not at all as they were meant to be. But in the Unmaker's failure to obey the dictates of her Fate lies her victory. Much as it is, in your own case.”
He’d give her no time to respond, but said to his bewildered counterpart, “And the threads of Fate herself are cut, throwing you down like a stringless puppet, to lie lifeless or rise as you will. Only one of us shall make it out. Which one, and to where, and with whom… well,” a thin, humorless smile curled the boy’s lips. “For the first time in Creation, that’ll be entirely up to us.”
“I don’t understand.” Luc shook his head.
“Of course you don’t. But this part of you will remember and help you make your choices, and that is the gift Fate’s shattering has given to me. To us.” White features stilled, in a moment of swallowed anguish. “Which will bring about my demise, and thus offer us both a chance at freedom.”
Under his feet, pale Lucien felt the give of water returning to its natural liquid state.
Lola didn’t think Lucien silly at all for his cry of inquiry. It sounded right to her – enough so that she would have liked to try it out for herself, had the approaching Lucien not called the present Lucien silly for speaking it.
She understood as much that this Lucien was from a different place, but it was still Lucien. She could see herself in his mind, quite clearly, and she was startled by what she saw there – and older, scarier version of herself. She could not see that self’s mind, but she could see that self’s eyes, and they were haunted, mad.
Thus Lucien’s questions became her own – except one.
She understood one thing the doppelganger spoke of.
“Sacrifice.”
Her hand tightened around the boy’s.