Pose of the day (of mine, that is.)

Forty-two. The grass ripples in the wake of a light breeze, looking like water in the sunshine. What is the question? Which Lyta? There are so many -- which she? There are so many. Dream-logic and dances with words and meanings: these are the domain of memory and magic and mystery, houses of secrets and houses burnt down.

There's a flash of a different landscape behind the idyll, a broken wasteland of scorched trees and dry earth, stones and dessicated bracken under an overcast sky just before dawn. The woman comes into tired, dreary focus, huddled instead of sprawled, sleeping and not-sleeping as close to what's left of her tree as humanly possible. White hair, thin frame, a sickness of spirit. Lyta Hall, or-- what's left of her. Wraithlike, incomplete. Broken and just sane enough to know she's insane.

This nightmarish scene is superimposed for an eyeblink, then replaces the golden reality of the midsummer day for another, and then with the thunder of heart, that warm daydream slams back into place. Insistently and forcefully, painfully and with a resigned sorrow.

Dream of the Endless doesn't answer while this goes on; his visage cannot grow paler, but is somehow more drawn, more pinched, after this occurrance. His voice is wavy and tired in answer. (You know, Hector Hall. Go to her. Wake her. Give to her what is /of/ her; give of yourself; give what is needed. I have given all I can, but her heart is as broken as her soul is fractured.) The wavy delirium of dream-narration splits off and for a second, the King of Dreams' voice is steel. (*Waste no more time*, thou who art sire and subject both.)