Side A – Nia
Nia’s heart had soared at the notion that she would be training with Margrada rather than fighting her. Competitive drumming sounds so much better than fighting. That elation had lasted roughly ten seconds into their first “warm up session”.
“You can’t try to play with me, you’ve got to play against the rhythm I’m laying down,” Margrada said, helping Nia up off the ground and steadying her until the world stopped doing loop-de-loops.
“Okay, that makes sense. Let’s try that again,” she said. The temptation to add ‘and this time go a little easier on me’ was vast but even from the tiny bit of battlecraft she’d absorbed so far, Nia knew it would be a self-defeating request at best.
“Oh, we’re definitely going to,” Margrada said as though the idea that Nia could escape the fate which lay before her was the most laughable thing in the world.
Horgi and Grash were making a side-wager on the edge of the small circle they’d arranged. Nia wanted to think that one of them was betting on her, maybe Horgi?, but a more realistic part of her knew the wager had to be over something like ‘how long she’d last this time’. She hoped they’d settled on something in the double digits of seconds, but didn’t have a lot of confidence in that being true.
Not yet at least.
When the next battle began, Nia told herself she was ready for it.
She was not.
Margrada’s playing hit her like a treefall. Nia flowed with the first set of Margrada’s beats, turning the magic in her own beats into a river to carry away the force of Margrada’s magic without directly resisting it.
It was a great plan, and the best play she could have made.
Except for the part where, in swaying away from the first set of beats, she’d unbalanced herself and let her magic be pushed as far off course as she could manage to support it.
Margrada’s next set of beat descended without mercy or hesitation, hammering Nia against the walls of her own skill over and over until Nia’s magic shattered under her hands and blasted her away from the drums once again.
“That was better,” Margrada said, helping Nia up again when the world settled down once more.
“Was it?” Nia asked. “Cause that didn’t feel like I had any chance at all there.”
“That’s cause ya didn’t!” Grash’s laughter wasn’t mean, not exactly. It had the ring of someone who’d seen more neophyte drummers get dumped on their butts than he could count and was enjoying a familiar sight before Nia rapidly grew out of it.
At least that’s what Nia hoped the laughter meant.
“So what did I do wrong?” she asked.
Margrada burst out in the most delighted of grins. The most delighted and evilest of grins.
“I really couldn’t say,” she said with an infuriating wide-eyed sincerity.
“Really? Is that so?” Nia’s scowl was sincere in its own right, as she sincerely began to rethink the ‘no fighting with your girlfriend’ dictum she’d been living under.
Side B – Yasgrid
As ‘nightmare realms’ went, a wide plain of flowers and short, clean grasses was not what Yasgrid had been expecting. A strong wind blew from the east carrying with it the salty and pungent scents of the sea which cast her imagination back to summer mornings in Frost Harbor.
“I feel like the trap here is that it’s so nice no one would want to leave,” she said, the sight of the star strewn dome overhead reminding her how infrequently she’d had a clear view of the sky since she’d settled into the comfort of an elven body.
“That is not the case,” King said, winding between her legs before wandering over to inspect one of the flowers.
Yasgrid breathed in the sea air and felt her nose twitch at the sharp sting of it. Overhead the stars seemed to multiply endlessly the longer she looked at them, the light from each one making shrinking her to an ever smaller spec of insignificance.
“Right. This is an Elven nightmare,” she said.
A tremor ran through the plain. Without proper peaks above her though, Yasgrid’s long-learned concerns for rock slides weren’t triggered at all.
That seemed to incite a greater tremor to pass through the plain.
“I’m sorry,” she said, speaking to the nightmare which had grabbed hold of her dreams. “I’m not made for you.”
“She is not,” King said. “And yet she is here.”
Yasgrid wasn’t sure either of their statements would draw a response. A nightmare place should have had limited options for expressing itself and, she guessed, a limited amount of ‘self’ to express at all.
She was, of course, wrong.
“Why?” asked a woman whose skin was the grassy flowered earth and whose eyes were the endless dome of the heavens. “Why are you here if you are not mine? Why do you not slumber and fall into my embrace? Why do you not feed me until you wake?”
“I wish to know you,” Yasgrid said. “I cannot slumber or feed you or I would not be able to treat with you.”
“To know me is to be undone, or to undo me,” the nightmare said.
“Because to know you is to know an endless depth of fear and be unraveled in mind and spirit, or to overcome that fear and in so doing reduce you to something small and safe,” Yasgrid said. “And yet I am neither your victim nor your unmaker.”
“You are mortal still,” the nightmare said. “And no mortal thing can be my equal. I must grind you down or cast you out. No other existence can we share.”
And with that, the nightmare turned inwards, wrapping Yasgrid in coils of endless starry night and binding her in the emptiness of an infinite plane. No trees rose to offer her shelter, no canopy reached over her head to hold her to the world’s surface.
She was alone. Endlessly alone.