Dream d165-s: The Ceremony of Farewell

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the light behind me tasted like something I was about to miss.

I had already taken the step - one foot onto the right path at the fork, then the other, then the decision was a fact rather than a possibility. The descent began gently, the way cold begins gently, and I only understood I had committed to it when I turned and saw the fork clearing already distant, already softened into the middle distance of the Gardens where everything left behind became slightly mythological.

Lano followed. Reluctantly is not quite the right word. Deliberately. Each paw placed with the consideration of an animal who has weighed the options and chosen loyalty over preference.

The owl came last, or had always been ahead - with him it was difficult to tell. He settled on a branch that jutted from nothing, no tree attached, simply a branch growing from the air at a useful angle.

"Wild," he said, without preamble. As if continuing a conversation I had not known we were having. "From the Old English wilde - self-willed. Not chaotic. Not dangerous. Simply: belonging to itself. The wild thing is the thing that has not been asked to be otherwise."

The path below us deepened in color - blues that should not have been possible at this hour, or any hour, pressing upward from the ground like the ground was exhaling something it had held since before language. The temperature moved with it. Violet meant cool. The deep blue ahead meant cold of a specific kind, the cold that is also clarity.

"Mira," Lano said softly, not to me but to himself, or to the path.

I looked where he was looking. Somewhere in the beautiful darkness ahead, something was bioluminescent - not glowing exactly, more like remembering light from an earlier time and emitting it slowly, over years. Impossible geometry suggested itself in the shapes between shadows. Angles that turned corners into doorways into corners again.

"They always pause here," the owl said. "The ones who choose the deeper path. They pause and they look back and they perform a small private ceremony of farewell." He rearranged his feathers. "I have watched this many times. It is the correct thing to do. The forgetting, if it comes, comes later. This moment - the last light still visible, the new dark not yet entered - this is when you are most entirely yourself. Before the Gardens begin their work on you."

I wrote standing, notebook against my knee: