Spencer was the empath, Ashin the insensate, worlds without end, amen. That Ashin got the dream and Spencer slept marble-still was weird in the classical sense. Ashin focused on the subtle patterns and ornaments of the palatial bedroom on Eshan. Seeing things grounded her, pulled her out of her head, helped her heart stop racing.
She was cold and clammy, and tapas failed to help. Careful not to wake her wife, she slid from the bed and added a robe to her nightgown. She checked her face in the mirror and found herself the same as she'd been most of last night — the face she was born with, not one of the aliases that had let her safely spend time with her wife here for so many years. She thought for a moment of warming her hands by a lightsaber. Rationality was still catching up.
The details of the dream faded, no matter how skilled she was at short-term memory enhancement. The dream escaped her entirely. She made caf in a niche off the room with a view of the bed. As Spencer slept — peacefully, so far as Ashin could tell — the weirdness of the moment settled in.
Because Spencer had woken to Ashin's bad dreams many, many times. This one should have woken Spencer too. Starweirds tearing out Quinn's heart, Ibaris shrieking in a Netherworld rift, vast brass gears crushing Noelle and her children — yes, this one had been out of the ordinary. It felt unnatural, external, some foreign power's idea of what might motivate or frighten Ashin rather than some reflection of a century of personal demons. She'd have thought it was Empyrean or Carnifex playing games, but both of them were more imaginative in their cruelty and less inclined to waste time on the once-and-never-future Sith Empress. Which left this vision with no obvious strategic source.
Everything was off.
For all the decades they'd been together, the inside of Spencer's head was still private, not that Ashin could have infringed on it if she'd wanted to. Maybe Spencer had dreamed all this too. Maybe she'd kept it to herself for some reason — was that more plausible than that Ashin should get a vision and Spencer didn't? Maybe Spencer was dreaming it right now, or was about to.
"Notes," Ashin murmured to herself. "All comes back to notes."
She settled into one of the room's fine armchairs. She drank the caf too quickly in the dark, burnt her throat and tongue, and used the pain to focus, a minor rite of Calypho.
She tried the memory enhancement again, an equally minor skill in which she'd been considered an expert lives ago, and this time it took: in came flashes of the dream, strong enough that she set the broad caf mug aside for fear of spilling on herself. She faced the details and, with shaking hands, began to write them in a small hssiss-leather notebook for future reference.
Fear leads to anger, she wrote in the margins, a grounding moment, a flashback to her childhood as a Padawan. Fear leads to anger, so get angry.
Something made this happen, she wrote in deep-set letters. Anything can die.
She was cold and clammy, and tapas failed to help. Careful not to wake her wife, she slid from the bed and added a robe to her nightgown. She checked her face in the mirror and found herself the same as she'd been most of last night — the face she was born with, not one of the aliases that had let her safely spend time with her wife here for so many years. She thought for a moment of warming her hands by a lightsaber. Rationality was still catching up.
The details of the dream faded, no matter how skilled she was at short-term memory enhancement. The dream escaped her entirely. She made caf in a niche off the room with a view of the bed. As Spencer slept — peacefully, so far as Ashin could tell — the weirdness of the moment settled in.
Because Spencer had woken to Ashin's bad dreams many, many times. This one should have woken Spencer too. Starweirds tearing out Quinn's heart, Ibaris shrieking in a Netherworld rift, vast brass gears crushing Noelle and her children — yes, this one had been out of the ordinary. It felt unnatural, external, some foreign power's idea of what might motivate or frighten Ashin rather than some reflection of a century of personal demons. She'd have thought it was Empyrean or Carnifex playing games, but both of them were more imaginative in their cruelty and less inclined to waste time on the once-and-never-future Sith Empress. Which left this vision with no obvious strategic source.
Everything was off.
For all the decades they'd been together, the inside of Spencer's head was still private, not that Ashin could have infringed on it if she'd wanted to. Maybe Spencer had dreamed all this too. Maybe she'd kept it to herself for some reason — was that more plausible than that Ashin should get a vision and Spencer didn't? Maybe Spencer was dreaming it right now, or was about to.
"Notes," Ashin murmured to herself. "All comes back to notes."
She settled into one of the room's fine armchairs. She drank the caf too quickly in the dark, burnt her throat and tongue, and used the pain to focus, a minor rite of Calypho.
She tried the memory enhancement again, an equally minor skill in which she'd been considered an expert lives ago, and this time it took: in came flashes of the dream, strong enough that she set the broad caf mug aside for fear of spilling on herself. She faced the details and, with shaking hands, began to write them in a small hssiss-leather notebook for future reference.
Fear leads to anger, she wrote in the margins, a grounding moment, a flashback to her childhood as a Padawan. Fear leads to anger, so get angry.
Something made this happen, she wrote in deep-set letters. Anything can die.
