wado

It was bright, like every other dream I've had this week. Bright, with shining skies and large, round clouds on every horizon, and I was approaching a bowl, just a gigantic object with a huge mouth, resting among other impossibly big structures, and there was the girl inside, just sitting on the lip, a lance resting against her hip.

Her right leg dangled down, kicking the air noncommittally. The other she'd bent with her foot resting on the edge of the bowl, her thigh close to her chest. Her arms were long and bare, and her hair was tied back. It is always the same girl in these brightest of dreams, and I never actually know who she is until the moment when I meet her, later, at another time and in the waking world.

The lance, that single remembered affectation, makes the place, completing it the way a brilliant red pebble in a sandy stream gives every other particle an identity. The lance was the key to the past. It carried all those notions of history and myth, the ideals of golden ages and the fallen glory of empires. The lance made the structures a ruin, the bowl some inspiring monument worthy of intense scrutiny and study, stories and legends, about its purpose, and the wider world's proximity.

That she had the lance, here, now, with her, as casually as the breeze blowing at our backs, gave evidence of her station. It was the charm of her magic and the supremacy of her awareness in this place, and I new her as master from it.