The cities and villages of Melrath are as varied and diverse as they come. The capital of Raelia is the the jewel of this western kingdom, playing host to a merchants, artisans, Aesir priests, as well as a cut throat political landscape dominated by the nobles of Raelia. To the south in the depths of the Myrkvior Forest lies Melrath's second largest, and oldest city, Fensalir. Here people have learned to live alongside spirits and the natural world by maintaining their loyalty to traditions laid down the first Melrathi. To the east lies the small fishing village of Noatun, and to the western mountains rests the Mer city of Verimeer, the brewing town of Alivilda and the alpine village Vormund.
CHAPTER ONE, THE DEPARTURE OF THE RAINBOW DREAMERS
Calendar Input
28th of Vhalar 719 : “Dreams of the Rainbow Stone” Many people through-out Melrath start to have dreams about a stone that seems to be made from rainbows. It is large and about the size of an average person. It sings to them in their dreams and they feel inexplicably drawn to it. While those who have the dreams seem to be random, every single person who was Storm-touched has these dreams, and mages are likely to have them as well.
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When Ashling woke up in the morning, a vague memory of a dream lingered in her mind. It was a dream about...a rainbow? She lay in the bed, her eyes still closed. It felt like she could still perceive an imprint of that surreal rainbow. It hovered in the darkness behind her eyelids. The intensity of it fluctuate between strong and weak. For moments, the colours were vivid and clear. Then, they faded and the imprint seemed to disappear. But, as she mentally tried her best to not let go of it, the imprint returned again and she saw the rainbow of colours again.
It was dawn. Birds began singing in the trees outside the cottage and thin rays of morning light seeped in through the window shutters. There was a slight shift from darkness to obscurity in the room and although Ashling couldn’t see this she was aware of it. The birdsong foreboded the sunrise, the beginning of a new day and the end of all memories of dreams from the night.
That didn’t use to bother Ashling. Dreams could, for a moment, seem to still be there when she woke up, but they dispersed and were gone in a blink of an eye. Like other people, she used to forget most of the dreams she had at night. But, it was different this time. Albeit it had only been a dream it felt like it had also been something more. It had been something she ought to attempt to recall, investigate, interpret ... and understand. She didn’t know why she felt that way, but it seemed like the dream had been an urgent message. To not investigate it seemed like leaving an important letter unopened.
She felt that she must try and recall the dream. But, how could she do it? How? Ashling had no idea. She had never actively attempted to recall a dream before. Was it even possible to do it? But, as she thought of this dilemma, an intuition rose in her soul. It was a message from her inner spiritual familiar, the spirit who called itself Kyrie. The familiar favoured a taciturn style and kept it short but Ashling felt it in her mind, without effort.
Meditation
Last edited by Ashling on Thu Mar 26, 2020 6:41 pm, edited 3 times in total. word count: 472
Ashling felt a bit insecure and confused. Could she use meditation to recall a dream? It seemed like her meditation had always only been general and never focused on achieving anything specific. She had never thought of meditation as a means to achieve something else. To her, it had been a feeling of calm and peace and sometimes a feeling of contact with Kyrie. She hadn’t strived for it. The meditation had happened by itself, for example when Ashling had been walking in the forest.
She was still trying to keep the colourful imprint in her mind. It seemed a bit vaguer already and Ashling struggled with it. The effort made her a bit strained and nervous and made it harder to focus. Tense and worried, she put all the determination she could find in herself into controlling the experience. She tried to take charge of it and make it be as she wanted it to be. It failed.
Ashling tried her best to relax. She wished to return to the peaceful state of mind she had been in before the familiar had spoken to her. She had felt meditative before her fruitless struggle with the meditation had begun. Again, she failed. Trying to summon the desired state by willpower didn’t work. She had a method, or so she had hoped, but it hadn’t given her the result she had hoped for. A feeling of defeat began to spread in her. Ashling tried to suppress it but it didn't want to go away.
She wondered how to do to recall a dream better by meditation. Had she not been half sev’ryn and had the spiritual familiar to give her clues it might have ended there. But, once again Kyrie supported her...
Ashling still kept her eyes closed. It felt like the lingering dream would disperse and disappear if he opened them. She felt that the message from the familiar at least told her something she could try and do.
Breathe. That seemed like a simple task. Ashling breathed, but soon she wondered if she was doing it right. Breathing didn’t seem to help any. It was only something she did all the time. There wasn’t anything special with it. She attempted to take deep and slow breaths. She tested fast and shallow breaths. She investigated if holding her breath would mean anything. Nothing of all this seemed to give the effect she was looking for. The end of the dream, the rainbow feeling lingered in her mind, but nothing else came back to her. It even looked like the vague memory went vaguer the more effort she put into doing this and that with her breath.
Ashling gave up. She clung mentally to what remained of her memory of the dream she was trying to recall by using meditation. As she stopped experimenting with the breathing it fell back into the natural pace. She couldn’t be bothered to try and control it anymore. She let it happen and be as it was when she didn’t control it at all. The body took care of it without active efforts from her. It drew in the air, used it and blew it out, regardless of if she was awake or sleeping. The body always breathed just like the waves of an ocean always keeps rolling in over a shore. She followed it a bit and felt it in her body. Her lungs expanded when she breathed in and shrunk again when she breathed out. It was a never-ending and repetitive process.
Now ... Ashling found that when she immersed in observing the process of breathing without trying to control it, a meditative calm begun to grow in her mind. and the rainbow memory felt a bit stronger again. She continued to observe the breath, but she didn’t unlock anything new. After a while, feeling like she still was failing, she received a new intuition from Kyrie.
It had proven harder than expected to follow the familiar’s instructions. Ashling did all the things it told her to do in the meditation but she had so far not recalled the dream any better. Giving up seemed like a given loss though. It wasn’t time to give up yet.
The new instruction had been “attention”. Again Ashling focused on her breathing, with now with a higher degree of attention. She tried to feel every breath she drew in and every breath she let out. At the same time, she felt how her chest moved when air expanded her lungs, then left them again. She followed the air with her full attention as it flowed in through her nostrils and filled the lungs. From there it felt like it was spreading energy into the body. The air flowed out again and it felt like it carried an invisible waste with it.
Paying attention all the time, she continued to breathe and feel the air and her body. After a while, she also began to pay attention to how the breath sounded. Once in awhile, it felt like she would lose attention. To counter that feeling she began to count the breaths.
She lost the feeling of time passing. The sound and feel of her own breath were all she thought of. A peaceful silence opened up inside her. It reminded her of deep sleep although she was awake. She rested in a dreamlike silent space where the sound of her own breath was the only sound she heard.
She didn’t get any new memories of the dream she was trying to recall but held on to the vague feeling of a rainbow. This continued until the spiritual familiar spoke in her mind again.
In the calm state she had entered by now, she tried to understand what envision might mean. It could be to see something, she figured. She tried to imagine that she could see the dream, but the result was disheartening. She wasn’t able to see it. There was still a rainbow imprint in her yes, awareness, but there was nothing else.
Ashling continued to wait for something to appear nonetheless.
After a while, her thoughts wandering, Ashling thought of her mother Sol’ange. She didn’t know why but Sol’ange’s tanned face and kind eyes and smile was what came to her mind. It was easy for her to envision it. She had seen her mother’s face all her life. Ashling thought of it now and a warm feeling of love joined the stillness inside her.
Ashling didn’t question the familiar’s messages no matter how short they were. She followed the associations they stirred up in her. Intuition guided her. This made her continue by imagining herself telling her mother about the dream. She could see herself speak about it while Sol’ange listened and nodded. Albeit she didn’t remember the dream she imagined that she told her mother all about it. She imagined that she could see the chat they had, hear their voices, feel the contact between them.
Ashling turned her mind to envisioning her mother once again. Solange's face, her smile, her eyes and her love for her daughter. Sol’ange. Her mother. But, it was still Ashling herself who was active, telling the dream, to the imagination of Sol. It was such an interesting dream, she imagined, and she was the one who woke up telling it, telling it, telling it...
The new mental impulse from the familiar, to affirm, had been as short as the previous instructions. But, Ashling was getting used to the familiar guiding her. It kept telling her new steps in what seemed like a mysterious procedure. Ashling didn’t wonder if it would work or not or what it would lead to. She did as the familiar suggested. In her mind, she said to herself that she remembered the dream. She continued to do so until it felt like the words lost their meaning and became an imaginary sound.
She kept affirming this to herself until it felt like she had been doing it forever and would continue doing it for all eternity. At this point, her spiritual familiar intervened again and told her that it was time to end.
Completed
At this last word from the familiar Ashling began to come out of the mediation. She was feeling that she had completed it and was ready to "wake up". Ready to find her mother and tell her something she still didn’t know what it was. And so, she opened her eyes, looked around in the room and came out of the meditation.
A vague memory of a rainbow imprint lingered in her mind. It stayed with her while she dressed. Soon, Ashling left the cottage and walked over to Sol’ange’s place, the small healing house her mother owned. Both of them worked there, as healers specialized in herbalism. Sol’ange’s competence was immense. After a whole life dedicated to the healer profession and it spanned over all fields of healing. Ashling was still growing into the job. Though she had a good understanding of herbs and herbalism. But, due to lack of practice, she was a crappy surgeon.
This morning, Ashling found her mother making tea in the kitchen. One of the windows was open and let in the air and the light. A cooking fire was burning on the hearth and a small kettle rested on an iron tripod there. Sol’ange looked up from the mortar she was crushing spices in and smiled at her daughter. Her eyes were kind in her tanned face like it had been in the vision in Ashling's mediation. Her voice was cheery when she greeted her daughter. “You are early!”
Ashling pulled out a chair and sat down at the big kitchen table.
“I had a dream.” Ashling saw her mother nod in response. Dreams were serious business to a sev’ryn. Their search for their intended spiritual familiar was often associated with dreaming. Sol'ange found it as natural to speak about dreams as about down to earth matters. She waited, her sincere interest showing in her expression. For a moment the rainbow imprint in Ashling’s mind seemed to glow clearer. It felt easier to hold on to it now. “There was a rainbow in my dream but I can’t remember anything more.”
“A rainbow ...” Sol'ange wasn't interrupting Ashling. She was only showing interest and encouraging her to continue.
“It had many colours. It was like when light refracts through a prism of glass, colours spreading out...” To her own great surprise, Ashling was able to put words on the lingering rainbow imprint. It was still all she was able to recall but she could speak of it. “Colours spreading out from a kind of pillar, or cliff, spreading out over the water ... that’s how it feels.”
Because a feeling it was. It was only a feeling of a surreal and dreamlike rainbow phenomenon. It was abstract. Her memory held no dream story with elements she could describe to Sol'ange. The vague colourful imprint and the feeling of it were all.
“Svariella,” said Solange, her voice low and respectful. “My stormtouched patients were also speaking about a rainbow in their dreams. It is leading them to the lake, they told me."
"What? Are they going to follow a dream rainbow to Lake Svariella?"
"Some have already left Ashling. They wandered away right after dawn, following their...rainbow, they said. We can’t know, but it is possible that the great spirit of the lake is calling them to her.”
A silence followed. The birdsong outdoors felt louder. So did the rhythmic sound of the mortar Sol'ange still was using. The only audible things in the room were, the low crackling of the fire and the bubbling of the boiling water.
For a moment it felt like everything was standing still.
Then the mortar fell silent as Sol’ange rose from the kitchen table to take the kettle and pour the water into a teapot. Her steps on the floor and the low sounds of her activities broke the standstill. She added the spices she had crushed. Several pinches of a mix of leaves and flowers followed. The fragrance of a herbal tea begun to spread in the air.
"The Great Spirit of Svariella?” Even as she spoke Ashling felt the spiritual familiar stir in her. The mere mention of the powerful Induk made it tremble. “What are they looking to find there?”
“Peace, they said. Peace of mind. A place where they can live without troubles and worries.”
It sounded beautiful but also deluded, like an impossible dream. This world didn't offer people such a place. Life was a struggle. There was always something to deal with. Ashling shook her head. Sol’ange, guessing what her daughter thought of, smiled at her and sighed. She put the teapot on the table together with a couple of mugs from a shelf on the wall above the table. It seemed like her mother had foreseen that Ashling wouldn't have eaten breakfast. Ashling knew without words that she should help out. She put bread and cheese and some vegetables and fruit on the table.
“It’s so weird,” she said, spreading butter on a slice of bread.
The bread was fresh and there was rosehip jam on the table. The tea was a perfect blend of herbs and spices and it felt like the taste of it chased all worries away. Ashling felt a bit privileged. She also felt a bit guilty. She got to eat such a luxurious breakfast (to her taste). But, other people had so many troubles and hardships to endure. How unfair the world was.
“You know that their condition makes them weird, Ashling. They aren’t like us. Not anymore.”
“Are they going to turn wild, like animals, living in the wilderness by the lake?”
“They aren’t becoming animals, even if they gained traits that remind about animals. Their condition is something else. Something outside of our experience. They are still people. Different people. A new kind of people? A new race even, created in one single leap of change? I can be so.”
Ashling took one more slice of bread and began to make one more sandwich. “A new race?! The Stormtouced?”
“I’m not saying that it is so. It’s only a speculation. But, I don’t rule it out.”
Comments: I like in how much detail you described Ashling waking up from her dream and how she feels afterwards – and how you incorporated her familiar into the thread. Using meditation to recall a dream is an interesting idea in my opinion. You did a good job describing her meditating and struggling to achieve that state of calm. It’s a good thing that she had Kyrie to give her instructions!
