Dream a Little Dream [Attn: several]

[mnemosyne]

The dreams continue, every night, persistent, progressive only when they seek out that movement. There are forms and they are forms and within the forms is the present. Here is a moment out of time when every other moment seems hollow, false, created rather than lived.

Now.

Now.

Nothing but the now.

And they become familiar or maddening or comforting-strange. They become ritual. They become - perhaps - a sort of hollow home.

It would be easy to drift into them. To live only here, in the strange exactitude of dawn-or-dusk, with the sky and the silent woods. The wheeling birds, dark against the sky. The upright and righteous clapboard buildings, the frizzle of snow on the bare dark earth. The smoke in the sky.

--

And it all continues, changing only when they change it, when they move the dreams forward, when the dreams move forward, until, one night,

April 30 into May 1 to be exact,

each and every one of them hears echoed across the wintry-dawn,

"You RUINED it. You RUINED it. You RUINED it. You ALL RUINED it.

"Just GO."

---

A choice. A choice. A choice.

[Damon]

Erich has just a moment, just a toss-of-a-glance over his shoulder at Thomas.

"You can go if you want," he says, all sympathetic and forgiving and it's okay if you're a coward cuz not everyone can be AWESOME, "but my friend Melantha's getting these horrible dreams every night of BODIES BURNING and I'm so close to figuring it out so I can't go without figuring it out. So I'm staying!"

-- and on that note: keeps running. Running for the forest, running for that thin line of smoke.

[Samael]

It's chilling, the words. More so than the aching cold that sets into her bones from the cols snow. You RUINED it. Just GO. It's accusing, angry.

But Keisha doesn't give up so easily. And someone lashing out like that...well, it gives Keisha a set to her jaw, a new level of determination. She isn't angry and she isn't frustrated; she's merely set on her path.

"No." And she starts her own trek to the forest line, with a last look to the bloody stump that she always finds herself at.