The Dreamer Doesn't Wake

No one knows how the world began; there are only guesses, at best, to how this tiny sphere hurtling through the universe managed to span life—generations building and building until there was a populace. And that populace required a reason for being.

I have my own theories, of course, but watching the two moons settled in the sky reminds me that I really know nothing at all. Sicyeron and Magdala peer down, the sisters of pale blue that don’t disappear even by day. Their calm light is meant to appease us and quell our baser urges that otherwise might tear us all apart.

Fee peers out of our tent and sits beside me in the sand. “The moons have charmed you again,” she says, the old saying for people who cannot sleep at night. Blame it all on the sisters who can’t help their beauty any more than they can help hanging forever in the web of the sky.

“Yes, I suppose so,” I murmur, tucking Fee against my side. She gratefully snuggles down, burrowing into the coarse blanket Didi, our dear father, made for us. “Better the sisters than the King.”

The King—he doesn’t even have a name in the stories that circulate the land via the trading routes or even the nomadic circles—is our sun that stalks across the sky when the sisters go to sleep. Some say he is their father, making them run away and hide by morn; others think he is a scorned lover who chases them in a futile effort to own and control them. But the sisters are cunning: they never leave without each other. And so it goes, each day and night, no one ever truly satisfied.

Fee giggles, always one for a mythic if it means she does not have to go to sleep right away. “The silly King,” she says. “That’s why the Queen left him, you know. He wasn’t smart enough to keep her.”

“You’ll get a sunburn tomorrow if you’re not careful, little one,” I say. Then I sigh and watch the desert expanse before us, the sands shadowed with blue from the light of the sisters above. “But the Queen did have her reasons for leaving.”

“Will you tell me your favorite story about the Queen?” Fee asks, voice hopeful. When I don’t answer right away, she pouts and adds, “Please, Shara?”

Despite my growing tiredness, I smile at my little sister. I can never truly deny her anything. She is my own second moon in that way. “All right,” I say, and she offers a little yip of pleasure before drawing her arms around my stomach. We both settle back against one of the tent’s sturdy poles.

“The Queen was not always in self-exile,” I say. “Once, she was just a girl, like you or me, and she wanted to travel the stars. But only the dreamers could do that.”

“I wish I were a dreamer,” Fee murmurs, and I nod along—though we both know the fate of the dreamers.

"Yes, well, dreamers sometimes get lost in their dreams and the landscapes they find there. Sometimes they never wake up. But the Queen did not know that. If she had, then the King or the sisters never would have come to be.

“But what she didn’t expect was to meet and fall in love with the dreamer who crafted our world—the desert, the faraway ocean, the people cluttering the land. When he was awake, he told her such beautiful stories that she wanted to go see these things for herself. And that was how the Queen was invited into the world of the dreamers.”

“But the dreamer didn’t wake up,” Fee says, “and she was trapped there.”

I nod, thinking of how Didi and Maman told me these same stories when I was even younger than Fee. Maybe it’s the wrong thing, to fill her head just as the dreamer did to the Queen, but the mythics comfort us in a way few things can.

“And the Queen was alone,” I say, “so the dreamer conjured up the King and the sisters, so that she wouldn’t be by herself to wander the dreamers’ lands.”

“But she still missed the dreamer,” Fee says, her voice soft as if she is near to falling into her own dreams, “and she tried to break free of the dream.”

“Yes,” I murmur, “and so she left the King and the sisters behind in the sky. Even now, the Queen still wanders, searching and waiting and pining.”

“It’s so sad,” my little sister says, her voice quieting, and then I hear the soft breaths of her settling into sleep.

My own eyes droop as I lean my head against Fee’s. It’s too late in the night to crawl back into the tent; we would probably wake Didi and Maman up.

I fall asleep thinking of the Queen, the King, and the sisters above. As I drift into the sands that separate the waking world from the one of dreams, I can almost hear the constellations singing—so soft, a child’s lullaby, like a medley put to the words of a mythic.

When I awaken, the King’s light is bleeding across the sands and painting them in a golden hue. Fee is gone from my side, and the blanket is making me sweat.

I smell the warmth of bread baking and know that Didi and Maman are awake too. Later today, we will take down the tent and pack the supplies on the hearthbreds we use in our travels. Didi has different wares to sell along the trade lines. We will be on the move again soon.

For another morning, I’m disappointed that there is nothing manifested from the sands of my dreams. But even if I were lucky enough to pull something into the waking world, I would not be able to keep it—or, worse, I would just never awake once I had grasped something in the dreamsands.

The mythics may just be stories from a younger world, but they feel like my truth more than anything else.

I close my eyes and then raise myself up. There is life to be lived. No more time for dreams today.