WL Chapter 2

Notes: Whenever I try to launch Dreamland, I’m informed that it’s “too unique” and readers struggle to connect with it. So, I’m trying something new. Let me know how it feels.

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I love Mother’s house, but sometimes, it’s just a little much, something I hadn’t realized until I’d met Yade.

My heart yearned for the…

      Peace I felt when her hand touched mine.

           How she never needed my light

                 How she just accepted me for who I was at any moment

                          How I could touch her without needing to conjure my soul to keep her stable.

Calm, quiet darkness surrounded me as I stepped out of the in-between, releasing Yade’s Who as her face lit the space I now existed in.

I sank into the now, a different kind of happiness filling the space inside me where my light spread from.

A slow smile widened on her slim face and her violet eyes lost a little of their glow as she focused on me, pupils growing their middle as swirls and lines of yellow, pink, and blue formed. Her silver hair was plaited with a series of braids, with at least two of them wrapped over the top of her head, the tips left dangling near her ears as they glowed with violet light. Another two draped over her shoulders, but a wild array of long waves cascaded down her back.

Yade’s favorite color was a silver green, which I didn’t quite understand, but it was the color of her dress. The harness that looped over her shoulders and around her waist, supporting her small breasts was a dark green with silver symbols etched throughout it. She liked her sleeves short and her pale skin bare.

“Lixiss,” she said with her soft voice as she reached out to touch my arm. “You’re back. How was… not here?”

A feeling of belonging and home settled over me as her fingertips settled on my arm, and as I took a step toward her to wrap my arm around her shoulders, a weight slid away. “Not here was good. I rescued not one, but two dreamers, and Mother served pink.”

“I do not understand,” she said slowly but without the pause in her words she normally had, “why Lumineers eat in color.”

“It amazes me that others do not.”

Yade lifted a silver eyebrow. “Pink is just noodles. You could just say… that you ate noodles and everyone else… would understand.”

“But the only other person I talk to is you and my family.”

She grunted, then slipped out from under my arm, taking my hand instead and bounced slightly on her feet. “Do you want to… see what I’ve done?”

Yade made the most amazing things here. She could see dream dust and was able to form it into different things. Well, she was able to build Places, the areas where Dreamlanders resided. I had never met anyone else who could do that.

She’d found what she and I called the Weft, a series of broken roads that traveled between the Dreamlander burbs. She theorized that these roads had been used before we learned how to travel through Place using Who, or the soul-call. It made sense, though it was hard for me to imagine a version of Dreamland that didn’t exist without Who. Travel must have taken so long before.

She tugged me over the rough terrain of the “road”. Each flat surface was made of long ropes of darkness that were bound together like braids that stretched into the darkness with slight glows in the distance that were burbs. To my left was Luxwood, my home town of Lumineers, and to the right was the Row, the burb for mechanics where Yade had grown up.

As we walked up a slight rise, I asked her, “How was your time here?”

“Good,” she said with a slight hop to her step. “I made…” She turned, her grin widening further as she threw out her arm, “this.”

A house.

“What?” I asked in amazement. “How did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, hugging my arm as she looked at it. “I widened this area… and it became a space that could… support more. And so I asked the dust what that meant and it offered… us a space.” She looked at me with hope and wonder lighting her face.

“Us?” I didn’t understand. “A space?”

She sighed heavily and took a step back. “We do not… fit in Dreamland, Lixiss.”

“We do. We have jobs. We have purpose.”

“You have a job,” she said, and the light of her excitement faded as she looked at the house she’d made out of dream dust. “When I go… home… I’m told I should… not exist. I’m to marry… you know?”

“What?” I pulled away from her and moved to look her directly in her face. “What do you mean?”

“They’ve given… up on… me.” Her eyes drifted to my face and then away. “I cannot… fullfill my duties… as a… mechanic.”

“You’re not a mechanic.”

“I was born… as one.”

Yade’s lapses in conversation were too distracting right then. So, I took her hand. “That shouldn’t matter.”

“But it does,” she said, her words more firmly in our space. “It affects you less because you’re a reclaimer. You light dreamers and dustmen, which isn’t… something the dream lords foresaw needing. But imagine if you’d been born with the ability to…” Her breath caught in her chest as she met my gaze. “…lit Dreamlanders.”

“Dreamlanders don’t dream,” I said automatically.

She nodded. “And what would happen if that changed? If we… dreamed of being different? If we… challenged the world we were created in?”

“But that doesn’t happen.”

“Are you sure?” Yade slipped her hands out of mine and walked to the house, glancing back at me. She stopped and offered her hand.

I took it, gladly not quite understanding what was going on right now. What was she saying? That we were wrong? That I was wrong? I wasn’t. And neither was she.

“What if the dream lords didn’t create… you and I?”

That was a silly thought. “The dream lords created all of the Dreamlanders to serve Dreamland in the ways they needed.”

Yade nodded. “Mechanics fix the things that break in the dreamplanes.”

“Well, in the burbs, too.”

A frown flickered between her silver brows. “No,” she said, lifting her chin and shaking her head. “I only know of one mechanic who can fix Dreamlander things. All the other mechanics only fix things broken on the… dreamplanes. And the one mechanic…” Yade tipped her head. “She’s like us, Lixiss. She was born… wrong.”

“We weren’t born wrong.”

“I agree. I think Dreamland made us.”

Dreamland was this world, this space we all lived in. It was where the dustmen resided with their dreamplanes that they brought dreamers to. It was the space where all the burbs of all the supporting Dreamlanders lived. It was where dreams lived.

“I was born to mechanics,” Yade said quietly, “but I cannot fix dreamplanes. I cannot sense… what is wrong. I can, however, see and feel dream dust and how it flows. I can fix Dreamlander spaces. I can fix… this.” She gestured to the Weft.

“Mechanics can’t do that,” I said. “That’s what makes you so special.”

“Dreamlanders aren’t meant to be… special, Lixiss. But you are. You were born to light dreamplanes… but you light dreamers instead. That is something wrong in a way the… dream lords can’t ignore.”

That made sense, but it… The thought that others would be seen as bad for existing was incomprehensible. Yade would never be bad. She was amazing.

“I think,” Yade said quietly, “that Dreamland wants us to be here. I think she wants us to be safe.”

“She?”

“I feel she is a she,” Yade said, bowing her head with a shy smile. “And I think she’s inviting us to live here.”

It didn’t make sense. “What would we be ‘safe’ from? No one is threatening us.”

Yade’s face drooped along the edges. “Your mother is always afraid that she’s going to lose another child because of you.”

“She hasn’t lost any.”

“That you remember.” Yade clamped her eyes closed in frustration and then opened them again. “It makes me so mad that we forget.”

“Forget?”

“The reason Dreamlanders don’t break,” Yade said carefully, “is because we… disappear when we’re no longer useful. And then everyone… forgets us.”

“That’s not…” Possible? “That doesn’t—we would remember.” Wouldn’t we? But—

I stopped myself. It didn’t matter. Yade and I were safe. We were okay. She could pass off as a mechanic, though, not a great one. And she spent most of her time here, rebuilding and repairing the Weft. And I was perfectly safe. No one was going to come after me.

I couldn’t make sense of it, so I said instead, “Let’s look at your house.”

Yade was quiet for a short blink, disappointment flickering across her features.

That hurt because her disappointment was in me. I was the thing she was disappointed in.

But she turned with a smile and showed me through the house she’d made.

We spent the rest of our time setting up the space so it was more comfortable for the both of us.

I wanted a comfortable room, with chairs that were fun to sit in. I wanted books, though the books that sat on the shelves she made were all blank. We’d have to fill them in with stories later as we gathered them. I didn’t know exactly how to do that, but something inside me wanted so very desperately to hear stories read from them, to have conversations about what we’d discovered by reading them. I didn’t remember why.

It must be residue from dreamers. They read. Well, some of them. Not all.

We fell into an easy cadence that was just comfortable. She would make the things and I would set them up, offering color ideas, but colors were a struggle for her. She “realigned the dust” into things it wanted to be.

“Dust doesn’t think in… colors, Lixiss,” she’d said.

So, I played around with adding colors myself, using my light. However, my light didn’t think in color either, so the only thing I really managed to do was to brighten the darkness.

When we were done, we collapsed onto the two-seater chair, our heads together as we stared up at the pattern that had evolved on the ceiling. Studying it, I could almost see how our movements had etched pathways onto the ceiling.

“Stay with me,” Yade said softly.

I breathed her breath, the moment solidifying between us in a place where I felt comfortable and wanted, not needed and in demand.

“Here,” she added. “In our space.”

“Okay.” The word fell immediately out of my mouth. Regret immediately chased it. I couldn’t stay here with her. She stayed here because…

Because when she returned to the Row, her father was insisting she either join an apprenticeship and become a full mechanic—and it was extremely rare for a woman to become a mechanic in the first place, and in order for that to happen, she’d have to be extremely good at it—or he was going to marry her to a master mechanic so they could create babies. They—mechanics—created other mechanics by marrying and then they produced other mechanics.

I didn’t know exactly how that worked because it didn’t work that way with Lumineers. Lumineers came from Mothers who kept the houses. Lumineer mothers were responsible for keeping the lights of their children lit.

Yade moved to support her weight on her elbow, looking down at me with her silver hair providing a curtain from the light I’d made at the windows when I’d attempted to add color to the curtains. “Do you mean it?”

In the moment I had. But… “Dreamland isn’t bad, Yade.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“We still have roles to play. We’re still needed.”

“You are,” she said. “I’m only needed to make more mechanics, and if I don’t?” She shook her head. “We disappear when we have no value.”

“No, you don’t.” That couldn’t be.

She nodded. “Edda decided not to marry. She disappeared the next day and her father didn’t remember her after that. The man she was supposed to marry didn’t… remember her. Harley and I were the only ones who recall she even existed.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Maybe,” I said, scrambling, “that’s the way the mechanics do it.”

“Then what about Elowen?” Yade pulled her head to the side and shrugged, the corners of her mouth turning down before she released them. “You made all of these books without stories because of her.”

“No,” I said with a chuckle. I didn’t know what an Elowen was. “I wanted these because…” I longed for something I didn’t remember. “I’m sure I saw them in dreams.”

“Elowen was your sister and you were very… close to her. And when she was no longer… valuable, she disappeared. And your mother made… all the books go away.”

“No. None of that happened.”

“And your comfortable room became something else,” Yade finished.

“You’re wrong.”

She shook her head. “If we stay here, we don’t get disappeared.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know.” She breathed, her breaths shallow and ragged along the edges. “I don’t know where we go when we’re no longer… valuable. My time of being erased is… getting closer. I can feel it. I—” She stopped herself.

What would life be like without Yade in it? I didn’t want to think about that. “But what about saving dreamers? That’s what I do? Do I stop doing that?”

She shook her head, licking her lips. “No. Of course not, but…” She raked her top lip with her teeth and raised her shoulders to her ears. “Maybe come back here… to me when you’re done.”

It didn’t make sense what she was saying. I shouldn’t live in fear. I had a job. I was good at my job, at what I did.

But Yade wasn’t. Thinking that out loud made it real. I didn’t know of a mechanic who wasn’t good at fixing dreamplane things. I didn’t know of a Lumineers who couldn’t light a dreamplane. I didn’t know of a cleaner who wasn’t exceptional at organizing and cleaning up dreamplanes after dreamers ripped through them.

“Are you afraid you’re going to disappear?” I asked quietly.

She nodded, touching my face with her fingertips.

Searching her violet, pink, and blue eyes, I looked for the memories she said I should have but didn’t. “I really had an Elowen?”

“You’ve had a lot of brothers and sisters you don’t remember, Lix,” she said, her slow and faltering cadence completely gone.

“I have a lot of brothers and sisters.”

“And each time you forget one, another takes their place.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“What if,” she said, her words whispering across my lips, “we create a space for people like us. And we do that here. We’re safe here. They can’t find us here.”

“But what if they come looking for us?”

“They’ll just think we were disappeared and they’ll forget about us.”

I didn’t want Mother to forget about me. Or Tolith. Or Nevan.

“Will you at least think—”

A dreamcall shattered the moment, screaming in my soul with tearing desperation.

I grabbed Yade’s face and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I will come back to you.”

Her sad smile was the last thing I saw as I grabbed the fear that consumed the dreamer and pulled myself through a 4screaming Place and landed myself on a rolling sea of darkness intent on devouring my essence.