Rhea & Jules & Me
Donkey gave a grunting whistle and tossed its head, trying to catch a book as it flapped past.
“Easy, boy, you don’t know where that’s been,” Rhea said, eyes never leaving her solo play of the Spider’s Game. She made a point not to look at the man who had just entered the Dreamt Menagerie. Nearby, Ward ambled around, deeply immersed in a pamphlet about forgotten dreams. Winstead peered at taxidermized specimens presumably intended to spark intrigue. She frowned to herself, then walked over to Rhea.
“How did we get here?”
Rhea’s gaze never wavered, analyzing the paths and plays available. “What do you mean?”
“We took the ship from the Deeps of Sleep to here because Marweg knew about it and couldn’t bear the thought of missing out on seeing the animals. I’ve never seen him so excited.” She turned back to her game. “I hope he and the minotaur are having fun; I can’t see what the fuss is about.”
Rhea played another couple of moves, then asked in a hushed voice, “Is the other guy still here? Kind of skinny, collared shirt?”
Winstead turned at the sound of approaching steps. “You mean him?”
Rhea looked up to see the man approach them. “You didn’t happen to see where the caretaker went, did you?” His eyes lit on her, and a broad smile broke out on his face. “Astrid! Imagine meeting you here! And is this a friend of yours?”
Rhea shoved the Spider’s Game into her satchel. “Jules! Wow, yes, I haven’t seen you since Shadow. I’m Rhea now, and this is Winstead; Winstead, Jules.”
Jules pulled a brochure from his back pocket. “I had been told there was supposed to be some sort of tour through the reserve, but there doesn’t seem to be any staff present.”
"Our companion Marweg went off with what I can only presume was a caretaker; it sounded like they would be a few hours.” Winstead offered.
Jules slumped. “That’s disappointing. I’d hoped to see some of the infamous Nightside Blue fauna.” He gave a smile. “Well, I have several hours to kill now. What are you two doing?”
Rhea shrugged. “Would you like to explore the area? Have you been here long?”
Jules shook his head. “Here on Nightside? Less than a day. It’s a big adjustment to the senses.”
“Are you pressed for time?” Rhea asked.
He shook his head. “No, I’m on an intersun cruise. My sunship doesn’t leave from Orchard Tower until tomorrow morning.”
Rhea nodded in approval. “How long do the tours last?”
“The circuit takes a little over a month.” Jules looked back at the reserve with regret.
“What about Ward and Marweg? And Donkey?” Winstead asked dubiously.
Rhea laughed. “It’s all right, we’re not leaving the sun—we’ll come back. Besides,” she said, gesturing to Ward, “he’s buried his nose so deeply in those pamphlets that it’s likely taking root. He won’t mind us gone an hour or three. And we can take Donkey with us.”
Winstead’s face telegraphed a complex thought process, but she agreed.
Rhea smiled. “Let’s follow a current. See where it takes us.”‡
As they traveled, Rhea asked about Jules’ prior stops.
“The green sun is a delightfully alive place. Overwhelming with vibrancy, positively exploding with life.” He gave a deep sigh of wonder at the memory. “It was exhilarating.”
“We’re going there next,” Rhea said. Donkey’s slithering scuttle step pounded its irregular rhythm on the ground behind them.
“Oh, really?” said Jules, surprised. “Are you on a different tour?”
“No, we’ve made other arrangements.”
He whistled. “That’s impressive. Do you have a tour guide, then?”
Winstead gave Rhea a pointed look behind Jules’s back, but Rhea didn’t enlighten him. “No,” she replied. “Probably would have been a good idea, though.”
She looked at Jules and marveled. He stood nearly exactly as she remembered him in Shadow. And all this time, I thought Shadow wasn’t real. I thought maybe you weren’t real.
Conversation shifted, and they caught each other up a bit on where they’d been in the Actuality.
“I think the last time I saw you was after you’d moved to cash in on your big dancing break,” Jules confided. “I thought we’d just lost touch, but when I visited, you’d disappeared. There was speculation about a terrible accident, but nothing ever turned up. I’m absolutely delighted to see you again, Astrid, er, Rhea.”
“It’s lovely to see you again, too. But I just sort of got pulled back here. I began to wonder if I’d dreamed that entire time of my life.”
The wide openness of the landscape began to change as the Serpentines drew near. Caverns and tunnels spiderwebbed off of each other in every conceivable direction, spaces between walls open like cracks between coral. As they got closer, they began to feel closed in. They paused at the entrance.
“Shall we?” asked Rhea.
The tunnel twisted soon after entry. For a little while they could clearly see the way back, but it wasn’t long before branching passages and turns caused the entrance to disappear from view. But more than that, the atmosphere itself inside the tunnels pressed upon them with inchoate whispers of emotion and memory. Each room they entered changed, morphed, as though they were passing through memories of life half spoken and hardly heard. Rhea’s feet felt thirsty as she experienced a sapling’s growth, and further on she felt herself scatter in all directions in the panicked despair of a hive without a queen. She savored the feelings, trying to drink them in deeply. Winstead, too, seemed to be appreciating the experience. Rhea looked back to Jules.
He was focused on something, but Rhea couldn’t tell if he was feeling the same things she was.
Her hair rose and fell with the emotions of the charged atmosphere. She shivered, enveloped by a rushing and swirling mass of feeling and memory jumbled together. None held on for long. The sensations made little sense, lacking context or meaning.
The passage forked again. “I’m going down this branch,” she announced. “I sense something interesting.”
Before long, the tunnel opened up. Rhea broke from them in excitement. Growing out of the calcified structure that surrounded them was a sprig of emotion leaves, young and with undefined potential. She pulled out her penknife and dug to uncover the roots. The knife cut into the rock with some effort, but several seconds of digging saw no end of root structure. She cut off the sprig to bring with her, the three leaves quivering.¶
Rhea turned to see Jules staring at an image seemingly projected onto the rock face. Rhea and Winstead joined him and watched the scene unfold.
It was a couple in bed. Jules lay next to a woman Rhea didn’t recognize. The woman didn’t wake as Jules rolled out of bed, opened the drawer of his nightstand, and lifted a bottom panel to pull out a manila envelope.
Rhea looked to Jules beside her. He looked discomfited but watched the scene intently.
The other Jules sat down at a desk, opened the envelope, and dumped a mishmash of papers and other contents onto the table. The woman stirred in bed but never woke.
Rhea could see the papers. Vislae script covered sections of them, while other sections were instructions written in English. She watched Jules take off his wedding ring and put it in the envelope, then read the instructions thoroughly. Then he got up, dressed, performed a small ritual consisting of gestures and a repeated mantra, and then put back everything into the envelope except for a photo of him with the Astrid she had been.
He slipped the photo into his pocket, then returned the envelope to his drawer and shut it. He walked out to his balcony and stood there, waiting. Then a member of what Rhea realized was the Hendassa faded into view and took him by the hand. He clasped their hand and disappeared.‡
The scene reset, and the image of Jules lying awake in bed next to the strange woman repeated.
This isn’t what happened to me, thought Rhea. She’d never seen the process before. Why so many instructions? I thought they just showed up and ushered people away.
Jules was quiet. He must feel a storm of emotions, Rhea thought, but said nothing. She touched her pendant and took his hand, pulling at him. At first he didn’t respond, but then he turned and walked away from the projection.
Winstead followed, hoping it gave them some space, but as she entered the next room, a voice sneered, “You thought you could get off so easy, didn’t you?”‡
“What the hell is that?” Jules burst out, startled from his reverie. Rhea stopped cold at the sound.
Winstead spun around, searching for the source. The voice couldn’t be localized, but it rang out clear and cruel.
“I’ll be back, Winstead. I’ll come back for you, whatever your name, and I’ll find Stefan too, and I’ll continue my immortality long after you’re dead, rotted, and forgotten. I will be eternal.”
“That doesn’t seem like a memory,” said Rhea, looking hard at Winstead. “That sounds like a threat.”
Winstead just stood there, flummoxed. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”‡
“We met in my story. Your friend Stefan was a poor subject, cowardly and weak, but you! You’re a much better medium for my art.”
“I’m not really that interesting,” Winstead called back. “I’m quite boring. Honest. You should find someone else.”
The voice didn’t answer, and silence rang heavily in the tunnel. Rhea and Jules looked at Winstead in alarm; Rhea’s mouth was open as though to speak, her hands crossing in stilled motion.
The threat repeated verbatim. “I don’t think that’s a person,” Winstead mused. “I think it’s a recording..” She stood silent for another second.
“Now I remember.” Winstead snapped her fingers. As it came back to her, she told Rhea about Stuart Portman, about the book and its possession, as well as her own plan to sacrifice the book to Demogan as payment to cross into Nightside Green.
“I won’t have this issue for much longer. It’ll all work out in the end,” she concluded.
“It had better,” Rhea said, finally relaxing her shoulders. “I was about to weave a spell to help. Do you want to continue?”
Winstead shivered. “Stuart wasn’t controlling me, but it was disturbing. I think I’m ready to go back now.”
Jules nodded, and Rhea led the way back. She’d nearly laid eyes on the exit when a memory made her stumble and fall against the wall.
Jules quickly dropped beside her. “Are you okay?”
Rhea couldn’t speak. She recalled the terror of realizing her magic was real. How the revelation had broken a friendship, and she had fled to Indigo to escape from the hurt unintentionally caused. A small sob broke from her lips.‡
“Rhea? Are you able to walk?”
Her hand pressed against the wall, and she slowly stood back on her feet. “Maybe,” she said quietly, “I’m not sure. It feels like…” She stopped and looked at her other hand.
It still held the sprig of emotion leaves, and all three had turned a vibrant deep blue .*
“Look!” she said, holding them up. “They weren’t giving off any emotions at all when I picked them. Now they’re defined!” A smile spread, transforming her painful memories into excitement.
She looked up at them to see them staring at the wall behind her. Another projection showed her inside the Rook, weaving the spell to make it speak. Over and over, repeated again and again, her spell gave voice to the tower, and she glanced at Jules. His expression was hard to read; no reaction, no contact, just a trace of apprehension. But he didn’t seem afraid of her.
“I wasn’t sure how you’d react if I told you,” she said softly.
“Is that why you left?” he asked.
“No, I just…” She stopped and looked at Winstead. “Can we maybe not talk about this right now?”
The return journey was subdued. Their few forced attempts at conversation fell away into silence, each one shaken by thoughts and memories made manifest.
As they neared the Dreamt Menagerie, they overheard Marweg chatting excitedly to Ward, who nodded and smiled in response.
“Guess he didn’t get eaten by a grue after all,” quipped Winstead.
Rhea’s face broke into a grin, and she turned to Jules.
“I don’t think we have to leave just yet. Do you still have some time?” she asked. “Can I walk you back to your ship?”
Jules accepted, and Rhea turned to the others.
“We’ll go when I come back, all right?”
They settled on a rendezvous point, and Winstead watched them walk off into the Blue, then went to inform the others.
‡ Silver Sun, Revolutionary (sexual tension)
¶ Rhea, +1 joy
‡ Whispering Lover
‡ Swan: NPC gets good fortune, presents an ability we didn’t know they had.
‡ Angel (rolled a 7)
‡ Jackal
* What were the gained emotion leaves?