Side A – Nia
Nia didn’t want to fight with her girlfriend. She felt like that should be a given in any relationship, but Margrada was clearly of a different opinion.
Reflecting on what she’d put Margrada through in the arguably short time they’d known each other, Nia wasn’t sure she could entirely blame Margrada for needing to work out some pent up frustrations though. She wasn’t entirely sure how putting her back into a coma would help alleviate Margrada’s stress over worrying for three days because Nia had put herself in a coma but Stonelings did think differently than Elves, and Nia had to admit that even for an Elf she’d had an unusual upbringing when it came to conflict avoidance and resolution.
“Umm, is there a reason we’re walking to the other side of camp for this fight?” Nia asked as Margrada lead her by the hand through the various wagons which made up the Shatter Band’s entourage.
Margrada did not answer.
Nor did she stop walking.
She did however turn and flash Nia the sort of cheerful smile behind which mischievous glee rather than malice lurked.
Nia was not reassured by that. If anything it seemed more worrisome than less.
Her childhood instincts arose and demanded that she talk to Margrada. Honest and open dialog were capable of resolving so many problems and preventing so many others from growing worse. She owed it to Margrada to listen to her, and take her words to heart, to admit to the wrongs she done and the unthinking failures without growing defensive or denying the truth of Margrada’s feelings.
But none of that was what was Margrada was asking for.
She wanted to fight Nia.
Because that’s what Stonelings did?
Nia turned the idea over in her head and found it was built of broken angles and misperceptions. She’d lived with Stonelings for months. They were louder than Elves. More demonstrative. But more violent?
Even with the beating she’d endured in Shale Shard, Nia knew that wasn’t true. If she’d walked down a strange alley in an Elven town, she could have met with the same fate.
People weren’t inherently violent, and societies that were didn’t hold together or survive.
So this wasn’t a Stoneling thing.
It was a Margrada thing.
Except Margrada wasn’t inherently violent either.
Angry at how she’d been treated at times? Sure. Willing to show that anger rather than fake a pleasant demeanor? Absolutely. But violent? Especially towards someone she…she cared about?
“Whose playing Keeper today?” Margrada asked a Roady at the unofficial entrance to their side of the camp.
“Grash pulled the short straw,” a lady named Jukka said. “Horgi should be there with him. What do you need?”
“I want to see if we can check out a pair of Shatter Drums,” Margrada said, casting a quick glance over at Nia to catch her reaction.
Nia was sure she hadn’t heard that right.
A fight with Shatter Drums?
In terms of ‘advisable pastimes’ that ranked several orders of magnitude worse than “knife catching”, “setting each other on fire”, and “naked cliff jumping”.
“What do you need them for?” Jukka asked, a question Nia was all too eager to hear the answer to.
“This one’s managed to avoid all the Battles of the Band we’ve been in so far,” Margrada said. “She needs to see what one’s like if she’s going to be ready to solo in the one next week.”
Side B – Yasgrid
For as difficult as it was to avoid nightmares in her sleep when she didn’t want them, it seemed equally hard to find their realms in her waking life when all she wanted was to locate one.
“You’re sure there’s a door to one of the other realms here? A nightmare realm?” Yasgrid asked, almost hoping that King would admit that he’d been playing a regal joke on her.
“It is not a door, but there is a passageway to one here, yes,” King said. He turned and settled in on himself, wrapping the end of his tail over his eyes either to block out the sunlight or to indicate that he wasn’t to be further disturbed.
Yasgrid respected that. He’d offered aid without asking anything in return – because what would a King need from those beneath him beyond their respect – but there was something in how he spoke and moved that suggested existing in the material realm with her put a far greater strain on him than King would ever admit to.
His most recent bit of aid came in the form of leading her for half a day through the Darkwood, deep into the untrodden and forgotten acres of it, to the site of an ancient chapel.
In the centuries or millennia since the chapel had originally stood, the ground had shifted, falling away under the left side of the building so that half of the once level floor lay at a sizeable angle.
Thanks to the shifting, the walls, which had once been formed from living wood, had long since toppled over and rotted away, taking with it the blight which had cast it down as well. All that remained was the frail skeleton of the structure where the ancient elves had stacked stones to help the trees grow in the shapes and directions they’d desired.
With so little to go on, Yasgrid had looked to what seemed to be the obvious entrance to the nightmare world, namely the stone arch at the rear of the fallen chapel. It lead down a still solid set of stone stairs for all of ten or so feet before running into a wall of earth where the supports for the tunnel had collapsed, burying its lower bounds and the cellar level entirely.
She hadn’t been surprised when the archway had proven to be nothing more than a pile of well placed stones, but it had been disappointing nonetheless.
She’d spent the next couple of hours inspecting the stones, approaching it from various angels, with her eyes open, with them closed, with quiet in her mind, and with screaming her desire to the heavens.
None of that had worked.
Because King was wrong?
No.
Because she wasn’t thinking like he would.
“It’s not a door,” she said, understanding finally coming to her. “It’s an entrance.”
She was never going to enter a nightmare realm by walking into it.
She had enter it via the proper means.
And so she laid down, placed her arm over her eyes, and went to sleep.