That night I dreamt.
A pink tide poured out of the Red Room and filled the entire cave system around it. It ran down the side of the escarpment to cover the land below. Every plant, every insect, and every animal was soaked through, and all the creatures began to move as one body. They thought with one mind.
In Ikfael’s Glen, the kids and I were already stained pink. We welcomed the tide and let it flow over us. We watched as it swept down the hills, followed the folds and streams, and traveled across the cropland and pastures. Over the walls of Voorhei it went, all the way to Albei.
Nothing approached the Glen without first having to go through miles of united consciousness. Those that threatened the pink were co-opted. What had once been enemies became allies.
Time passed, and the tide expanded outward, absorbing the new and the strange. Every consciousness added to the whole until, finally, the entire world was pink. Everyone and everything united. There were no more enemies, and danger was a thing of the past. Peace reigned.
There was nowhere left to expand. No new stories or interesting events. Every day became the same as the previous. All that was, was pink.
If Yuki took over the world by inhabiting every living thing, that was what it would be like.
Another dream began. This time, there was a pink tide, but only the area around Voorhei was affected. The unity was not as great as before. Yet, there was amusement as adventurers came to study it—until they classified the tide as a threat.
People, cities, and empires joined together to neutralize the tide. The pink fought back, but by then the world was prepared. Magic was a mysterious and potent force. It shielded the pink’s enemies and turned the tide gray, draining consciousness until nothing was left.
In the next dream, I was eating dinner with the kids when the King of Forest suddenly charged into the Glen. I grabbed my spear, spinning up Dog’s Agility, but it was too late for Aluali. His arm was torn off by the bear. Blood gushed, and he screamed. The pink only inhabited the three of us, and such limited scope hadn’t been enough to warn us of danger approaching; it wasn’t enough to protect us from harm.
My eyes opened, startled. I went to shake my head—to fully rouse myself from this latest nightmare—but I was paralyzed. My body couldn’t move, and I was trapped somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. All the while, Yuki continued to occupy my dreams. The images rustled at the back of my mind and seeped into my thoughts unabated: I glimpsed Banan striding into the Glen with his spear lifted to strike at me.
At the same time, in the real world, moonlight refracted through the waterfall, enough for me to make out Ikfael sitting nearby. One paw was tapping against her chin, while the other held her water tablet. She appeared to have been examining me in my sleep. I tried to get her attention, but I couldn’t move or speak.
Yuki, I thought. Can you hear me? Wake up.
The uekisheile had asked permission to use my dreams earlier in the evening. In the past, they’d made similar requests so that we could practice: my spear and knife forms, the qi and mana spells, the Diaksh vocabulary I was memorizing, and so on. On rarer occasions, they’d used my dreams to tap into my knowledge about life, as a place to ask questions they might have had about people and their behaviors. There was so much Yuki didn’t know about the world, and my dreams were a safe place to test cause and effect, or build scenarios and see what came from them.
What would happen if Yuki took over the world by inhabiting every living thing within it? How about just the Glen? How far should they go to protect their family? These were all good questions, and I had a growing suspicion that a lot depended on the answers. Not that I thought Yuki would turn into a pink tide per se, but it’d be best to squash the idea early.
The dream ended, and I was left with the image of a spear piercing my chest.
Okay, seriously, that’s enough.
It took a while—enough time for a dream to begin, end, and another to begin again—before I was finally able to slip back into sleep, to inhabit my own dreams once more.
I found myself immersed in a standoff with Otwei. The rest of the Albei team were arrayed behind her, and they held Billisha and Aluali hostage in exchange for the location of the Red Room. Inside me, Yuki spun up Dog’s Agility in preparation for the fight. I noted that the kids didn’t have the uekisheile present in their bodies, but Yuki had taken over some of the surrounding trees.
“Can you even do that?” I asked.
“Stop stalling,” Otwei said. “Tell us where the eilesheile is located, or else your family will die.”
“Are located,” I said. “There are many eilesheile, so you need to use the plural.”
Anxiety and alarm ran through me. My sweat smelled of fear. We had to save the children. They were our family and needed our protection at all costs.
The pressure to do something—anything—to save Billisha and Aluali was immense. Yet, the words I spoke were measured: “They’re such dangerous words—at all costs.”
I slowly drew my knife and walked toward Otwei. While my body panicked, I forced myself to disregard the sensations flooding through me. I knew it was a dream and so did Yuki, but they were caught up in the simulations they’d made.
“Stay where you are, or else the children will die!” Otwei yelled.
I ignored her, and Kuros stabbed Billisha in the shoulder with a knife as a warning. She cried out, and blood began running down her arm.
“Zasha, it hurts!”
“Zasha, don’t let them kill us!”
The children’s pained cries added to the flood within me, but I walked steadily forward, ignoring Otwei as she barred the way. I ducked under her spear, but she spun it around to stab me in the calf to slow me. I kept walking.
“Be careful,” she said. “He’s using that Anesthetic spell of his. Pain won’t affect him.”
It was almost funny—Yuki was pulling out all the stops with these scenarios. I didn’t laugh, though. What came next was going to be difficult, even if it was a dream. I took my knife and stabbed Billisha in the neck, putting her out of her misery. Then I did the same for Aluali.
The dream froze, the Albei hunters caught stepping back in shock. Otwei’s mouth hung open.
We—we killed them, Yuki said, their tendrils sprouting from the trees around us. But we thought we loved Billisha and Aluali?
“We do. We do love them.”
But then, why did we kill them?
“Because we can’t let our desires control us,” I said.
What reason did Yuki have to run these simulations? What intention lay at the foundation of each? The answer was me and the kids, and the desire to protect us and keep us safe.
I couldn’t let love turn Yuki into a monster.
“Life is difficult,” I said. “There’s suffering everywhere, and it’s easy to get caught up in it. To fixate on chasing after our wants and cravings, the things we think will make the pain go away. But life never works out that way. Happiness is fleeting. But then so is sorrow. Both come and go. The danger is in getting stuck in either. In drowning in them.”
I sat down and gestured for Yuki to come closer. They poured out of the trees and took the shape of a small human being, about the size of Tinkerbell from Peter Pan, except this fairy was pink and made of lichen. Then, they sat on my knee and listened.
“There are two sides to desire,” I said. “One challenges us to meet the obstacles in our way and grow stronger. The other transforms into craving, and we become addicted to the things we think we want—never getting quite enough to keep pain forever at bay. Love is the same way. It can inspire us to be our best or make us smaller through jealousy and fear, turning us into monsters.”
I sighed and gently smiled, letting my love for Yuki pour forth. “Humanity is a spectrum. We become more or less human through our thoughts and deeds. It has nothing to do with DNA or biology. It’s all inside, in our hearts.”
Yuki ruffled through my memories as I spoke, and I let myself be an open book to them. They rummaged through all the broken relationships before I’d met Helen. All the painful lessons from my first family. To the web of decisions that had accrued over time and given shape to the man I’d become.
After a while, Yuki said, If… if love changes us into something we hate, then it’s not love at all.
“That’s right,” I said. “Besides, this is a dream. You know I wouldn’t really hurt Billisha and Aluali. I just needed to make a point.”
The dreams are helpful, though, to imagine what may happen.
“They are. I’m not denying that. And searching for the most optimal solution might seem like a good approach, but we have to be careful to include other people’s lives in our solutions, even if they’re not friendly or there’s a chance they’ll become enemies later. We don’t have to be nice, but there are lines we shouldn’t cross if we can help it. Maybe even never.”
Otwei intends us harm, Yuki said.
“I know. She’s angry and frustrated and has ideas about wringing the secret of the Red Room from us, but none of those ideas currently include the intention to do violence. We’re in opposition—in competition—and while her team engages in shady practices, that’s not enough reason to kill them or sublimate them into our consciousness. Now, that might change. She and the other Albei hunters may become desperate enough to actually threaten us, in which case all bets are off. We’ll respond appropriately.”
It would be simpler if she never has the opportunity to choose violence in the first place, Yuki said.
“Yes, that’s true, but that’s also the nature of free will.”
I sorted through what I knew of religion, ethics, sociology—anything that might help convince Yuki that taking over the world was a bad idea. All those philosophical approaches felt empty though. They were intellectual, without any emotional resonance.
Justice, freedom, individual rights, and responsibilities to the whole—they were tricky to explain. My mind understood the concepts, but it was my heart that provided the wisdom, the ability to feel their importance, and how they messily balanced each other. How should I encapsulate a lifetime’s experiences? The events that fed into a gestalt of right and wrong?
The uekisheile was already most of the way there. They were committed to expanding their understanding of themselves and the world, and just needed an extra push to break through.
Yuki watched as I grappled with myself. A tendril shifted on their face, making it look like a smile. You’re not going to write me an essay, are you?
I sputtered in laughter. And then my breath caught. That was a joke. Yuki’s first joke. Okay, it wasn’t that funny, but I was floored anyway. Not because they’d learned the dynamics of humor—which was pretty damn amazing—but because they’d developed enough emotional and social savvy to realize we needed humor to lighten the mood in that moment. They’d sought to help me from feeling as though I was the one and only bulwark between the world and an all-consuming pink tide.
Yuki shook their head. We wouldn’t really go through with a plan like that. We feel how much of a disturbance it would cause in our heart. We would lose… we would lose our growing humanity.
And, well, that’s when grace descended. Not the spell, but the real thing. I’d felt it twice before in my life. First, when I was in high school and thinking dark thoughts about ending it all. And then again after Helen was gone, all alone hiking in the mountains and wondering about life.
Then, and now, I opened like a flower—a communion between me and the universe. Everything that was, is, and would be flowed through me. The hard and the soft, the ugly and the beautiful, the light and the dark. All of it.
Those moments of grace were an unexpected gift, and so it was again.
Yuki shuddered as the sensations cascaded through us both. We’d grown so close. They knew me, and I knew them. That was why my fear of them had dissipated. I knew I could count on them to understand, to care, and to protect—not just my body but also my heart.
There was a part of me, though, that had always resisted, a kernel that held back because it knew too well the pain of loss. Even when our consciousnesses were merged or we were under the effects of the Grace spell, I hadn’t been able to help holding back a portion of myself.
Not anymore. I let go, and the last wall fell.
I let Yuki read whatever they wanted from my thoughts and feelings, my memories and experiences, my ugliness and beauty. All of it.
We joined as never before. Not like through the land, but as individual consciousnesses resonating with each other, the experiences flowing back and forth. We merged—one mind, not of two parts, but whole.
We extended the dream until the sun peeked into the Glen and through the waterfall. The light warmed our toes. The rest of us was chilly, though, and sticky from sweat. It would feel good to wash off.
We stretched and separated. I propped myself up and took a moment to gaze inside. Yuki glowed softly within me—a warm pulse of life added to mine. A wave of love passed through me. It rippled through them, and they cast it back doubled.
I thought I heard a sigh of relief, but when I turned my head to where Ikfael had been sitting, no one was there. I grinned, and got up. It was time to start a new day.
