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Cali dreams of chromatic dragons and they aren’t always vicious or greedy the way they’re supposed to be. That’s how she knows they’re dreams.
Sometimes it’s only her and the sky to the north and south and east and west of her, spanning out in every direction. She’s so far off the ground she can’t even see it, has no way of knowing which way is down, the clouds her hills and mountains. She flies, she dives, and it’s better than when she casts levitate on herself, has none of the subsequent nausea she gets when she tips tail over teacup on her slow drift towards the wooden beams of her ceiling.
In these dreams she soars beneath the shadow of a great black dragon, her belly a smooth, smoky quartz. She is magnificent and beautiful and Calianna isn’t scared to be near her as she twists through air with a thunderclap of wings, banking left and left, a spiraling black smokestack.
A grass green dragon rides the wind like a festival ribbon to her left, his tail catching each updraft to wiggle wiggle wiggle in ways that make Calianna laugh herself to tears. The leather stretch of his wings go from jade to semi-translucent blush-pink, the inside of a human wrist, the ones from the North she used to watch pass through port, like the merchants Serissa used to bring to her, red veins running roads through the map of them as the sun dapples through.
It’d be so fun, she thinks with dream-syrupy wonder, to make shadow puppets on him.
Wyverns twist around them in pods, not nearly as graceful, but jubilant and sprightly. In her dreams Cali skip-steps off their backs from one to the next, wind-walking down the staircase of them, arms outstretched for balance. Beneath her a dragon the color of the waters off Port Damali crests up from the clouds, wings never beating, with all the slow, steady silence of a shadow. Her scales sparkle white as wave caps, white as leaping rabbits, and Cali springs off the wyverns towards her. She always gets just close enough, the tips of her toes ( both half-elven, which is another way she knows it’s just a dream ) nearly brushing that glittering, sapphire hide, and then she’s waking in her bed back in Othe, the balls of her feet pressed to her coarse, white sheets, still buoyant with joy, the apples of her cheeks straining with her smile. Rain is thunderous outside her window.
She used to think her dreams were prophetic. The Caustic Heart insisted that they were, but they insisted on a lot of things, hadn’t they? She still finds pleasure in them, the dreams, and it’s that pleasure that has her sitting up at night, her arms—draconic and half-elven because she needs both to hold herself together—fastened around her legs.
“I don’t miss them,” she mumbles sensibly into her knees. Her nightgown is wet with spit, the humidity of her breath, with tears she convinces herself are mostly from shame, not some cavernous ache of loneliness for horrible, terrible people who did horrible, terrible things. “I don’t miss them. I really don’t.”
She thinks of Magda. She thinks of Grim. She thinks of Jester and Kiri and Nott-Bren and Mister Caleb. Cali digs her knees into her eyes and rocks herself, stubbornly casting out for the memory of Magda’s delicious pies, and the weight of Grim’s hand on her head, of Jester’s letters and their fancy smells and looping script and the ribbons she sometimes tucks at the bottom of the envelopes, I found this one in a SMUT shop in Zadash and I know it’s blue and you like green but I want you to remember me, okay??
Anger is an intimate, directionless knot in her chest, hot like fire and burning like acid. She keeps it inside, because that’s where it belongs when she is angry with herself.
“I miss Jester,” she says, and it’s the beginning of a familiar, comforting mantra. She pushes up on the balls of her feet, falls back roughly onto her heels. Repeats the motion, rocks herself. “I miss Beau. And Miss Yasha.”
It’s not your fault. They took advantage of you. You were a lonely, little girl. It’s not your fault. It’s Grim’s voice. It’s Magda’s voice. It’s both of them overlapping like wyvern wings, like cirrus clouds.
She doesn’t want to sleep because she wants to dream of dragons. When Cali finally drifts off again, scaled brow against her knees and tail wrapped heavy around her ankles, it’s hours later as watery sunlight is creeping through her peeling, painted shutters to crawl across the floor. Downstairs, Magda prepares breakfast.
Calianna doesn’t dream, not even once.