Chapter 38
Gloria was nearly getting off the ground with her meditation. It had taken years to get this far, and she was consciously trying to clear her mind, but for months Aubade’s promise and request had been gnawing at her mind. It distracted her from her task at hand, and was also holding her closer to the ground. If she could let it go, she would not only feel lighter in her mind but also literally. Maybe she’d gain a few more inches off the ground.
She tried to look outward rather than inward as she meditated. She felt the wind move on the island before it reached her, she felt the water of the tide tickle the sand of the shore, she felt the radiating heat of the volcano. It felt like balance, as nature usually did.
She felt a tickle too, in her own mind, as if someone were trying to sneak in and observe her thoughts. Midshore.
Gloria stood up from her stool and stood in front of Midshore while she meditated. “Is there something you’d like to ask me?” she asked bluntly.
Everstar was surprised by the break in silence and came down from floating quicker than was graceful, but Midshore didn’t break her form.
“You’ve been distracted for several sessions, and you haven’t said why.” she breathed out.
“I’ve told you not to go poking around in my head! I’m allowed to have my own thoughts without you intruding on them!” Gloria huffed.
“Who is the boy?” Midshore asked, maintaining her breathing and serenity.
“Aubade? I’ve told you, he’s a refugee from the mainland. There’s nothing special about him.”
“Not him, the other. The one from your dream.” Midshore remembered the picture of him, his angled face and medium skin tone and his regal clothes.
“You’ve been looking into my dreams?!” screeched Gloria.
At this Midshore did come down from her levitation and looked her squarely in the eyes, something that unnerved Gloria. Midshore could be terrifying if you were the target of her anger.
“I saw what you were projecting. The balance within you was so skewed that your brother Robin could have understood that you were preoccupied. When you were meditating four cycles ago you were thinking about the boy from your dreams, the one who had aged. And yet you keep this from me, when you only have these dreams when the full moon is near.
“Can’t you see that it has something to do with your power? There is no place like that dream in this world, and yet you can envision it so easily. The boy is special, or you would not think of him so often, who is he?” Midshore hammered home.
“It’s just a dream!” Gloria argued back. Everstar looked nervous. “It’s nothing special. Vivid, yes, but nothing I would call important. People have recurring dreams sometimes, you should hear the dreams that Mara has. Those can curl your toes. This is a simple dream, just a space with some stuff. It’s not special. He’s not special!” Gloria lied.
Midshore looked at her face. “I don’t believe that. Whether you think he’s special or not isn’t for you to decide-” Gloria opened her mouth to object, “-it’s for whoever or whatever granted you your powers to decide.”
“It’s just a dream!” Gloria argued. “It’s not important! When was the last time you thought a dream was important? Probably not recently.”
“I receive dreams from the spirits frequently. I am their conduit. It is my path to listen to them and have them guide me.” Midshore countered.
“This isn’t my path! I don’t have a path! I am my own person, I make my own choices. You’ve said it yourself, my powers don’t come from a known source, I don't have influences on me like the rest of you. This dream doesn’t matter because I have no greater power guiding me, and a boy in a greenhouse is certainly not a message.”
Gloria tried to stop the shaking in her chest from the argument, but she couldn’t focus on anything. There was a turning in her chest and a shot of sharp heat burst down from her shoulder and out of her hand to the ground beside her. A fire spit to life and Midshore easily quelled it with her own burst of summoned water.
“You need to control your emotions, before you harm someone.” Her eyes were rocks in her skull, cold and unmoving. She still gazed at Gloria.
Everstar broke in between the two of them. “I think we should have a break. Midshore, I need to talk to you. Gloria, could you-”
“I’m leaving.” Gloria huffed.
“But we just started.” Everstar tried to dissuade her from leaving.
“I won’t be able to focus tonight, and if you want me to come back I’ll need an apology. I don’t need this.” she waved her hand to gesture at the scene.
“Gloria, you need guidance-” Everstar had softened over the years. When Gloria’s mother and Romeo had first arrived here, Everstar was the hard one, chastising Romeo for his foolish endeavor to bring back his best friend's fiance. But now she cared for Gloria as if she were her guardian, an older sibling or aunt.
“STOP telling me what I need! Stop telling me what to do.” Gloria slammed the door of the Greenhouse making all of the windows shake.
Everstar turned to Midshore. “What the nether was that!?”
“It’s not just a dream. She should realize that. It’s important. And for her to push it away could be dangerous.” Midshore stood like a pillar of stone.
“But you’ve pushed her away from it! Now she’ll not want to dream about it just to spite us! Good going.” She huffed out of the room.
~*~
Gloria rushed down to the shore and got in her boat to leave. She wanted to talk to someone about what had just happened, but no one in her family would disagree with what the Sisters said and Mara and Mable had a firm lights-out time that was long gone. She set her sights on the big island and sailed towards it.
She stumbled over to the house and pounded on the door. “Aubade! Aubade, are you up? I need to talk to you. I need to talk to someone-”
He yanked open the door and hushed her. “I share a house, remember? You’re lucky the hosts sleep like the dead or I’d be finding a new place to live.” he ushered her into the house, only a few candles lighting the main room. What time was it? She had forgotten to check.
“My neighbors wouldn’t be happy either, the walls off these homes are so thin.” he ran a hand through his hair. He had thrown on a shirt but hadn’t bothered to close it properly, and Gloria blushed a bit.
“How can I help you, Gloria?” he asked.
“The Sisters are wrong. They-” it was at this point that Gloria realised that she hadn’t told Aubade about her powers yet, and that she had to be careful about what she said. She didn’t know when she was going to tell him about them, but now didn’t seem like the time. “I have a recurring dream every full moon where I’m in a world that doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes I see a boy. When I was little I saw him as a little boy, and now I see him as he’s grown up.
“See, Midshore knows that I don’t like it when she goes poking around my mind without asking! She did it when I was a kid and she did it tonight and it’s such a breach of privacy that I can’t stand it!” Gloria finished.
“Why do they think these dreams are so special? There’s nothing supernatural about you, why would your dreams be special?” he asked.
“Midshore thinks that something is joining the boy and me, but that’s ridiculous! I know barely anything about him. Only that his name is Seneca, and he’s rather pushy, and he really wants to know who I am. But he’s just a guy from a dream. It’s not real.”
Aubade’s face became firm, though Gloria didn’t notice. It was too dark in the room to see much.
“You’re right.” He tried to make his voice as calm as possible, though he felt as if his heart were in his throat. “They’re simply dreams. And Midshore did invade your privacy, I say to just not sleep on those nights. Don’t dream about it anymore, and then they’ll have nothing to bother you about.”
“That’s what I thought too.” Gloria smiled a bit, relieved that she wasn’t alone in her choices. “I’m usually busy those nights- practicing yoga. As weird as the Sisters are, they still are good yoga teachers.”
Aubade raised his eyebrow to look at her skeptically, then gave her a comforting hug. “It’s ok, nothing has to change. The dream can’t bother you.”
I need to fix my sleep schedule, going to bed at 11:30 and getting up at past 9:30 is not doing me any favors . But I got out a chapter, so now I can write the next one! Yay!
As always, thanks for reading, and I can't wait for all the dominos to fall over in the story, so you can see the big picture that I've been painting. If you have any thoughts or theories, I'd love to hear them (as always )
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