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You breathe in water.
You can afford to open their eyes slowly, but alarm makes it faster than your next inhale. Your body is eerily light, but free of pain. It makes swimming easier, or at least keeping afloat, for you neither sink nor rise from the depths. Sunlight lances clean through you, through the ruins of what looks like Voeburt below. And Myste, serene. His robes still look too big for him, his hair is spilled like milk, fading into the water’s blue. Unlike you, he breathes easy. He doesn’t need to.
“Welcome back,” he says, a smile filling in like an afterthought. “You are dreaming, before you ask.”
Your posture relaxes. If it is a dream, then there are no Fuath to take Myste away; you are not sure they would not be able to, fey as the child is. You could also stop going through the motions of swimming and float at ease like Myste does now, but the motion keeps you focused. “What are we dreaming of then?”
“I thought you would know.”
He does know. Myste is a better liar than you are, than Fray is. And in all the time you have known each other, he has ever looked melancholy but never a complete fool. You pull yourself closer to him with a kick of your feet; you stop yourself from trying to kneel to look him in the eye. You know the exact shade of blue anyways, and you know how black and gold would look like if Myste dyed the lake with his ink.
“…”
“We cannot but love you. Regardless of what choice you make. I could bring him here so you could talk a while, if you wanted.”
Myste sweeps a hand forward, the sleeve billowing and rippling as it moves. You want to take his hand, you know it to be soft, and cold as the Fuath’s lake is in the waking world. Or you could fuss with his hair, try to convince it to lay down flat as it would in dry air, no longer dwarfing its owner and making him more commanding than he has any right to be.
You gently push down his hand. Myste’s smile is unwavering; no more giddy, no more sorrowed. And you give in, a little bit, just enough to make sure his outermost coat lays as straight as it can, wrapped close to him.
“Shall it be someone else’s then? If it is a dream, then…”
Give voice to the voiceless. Let the leafmen scream in horror, or hum their working-men’s tunes as they walk unmarred streets again. Paint Ishgardian frost on the windows and fresh smoke in the fireplaces. Myste has dragged Ardbert from your heart once already; you still have to ask.
“You could?”
“He is no further away than I am, or Fray.”
You would is a pointless question. You should burns against your lips. Myste has not offered his hand again to you, but he does look up. Your hands are on his shoulder, fixing the satchel strapped to his chest, binding Caladbolg’s wound. Red stone gleams at his chest, then is covered by incongruently dry, heavy wool.
“What could you do?”
“I could show you how the Princess welcomed you, exhausted, to the very feast you helped prepare. I could show you the hidden fountain behind the baker’s and the potter’s where Nyelbert practiced with a lute but recently bought. Or the back of the White Boar Inn, one of its wooden windows permanently shut and plastered over with bills, a nu mou smoking a long pipe below and waiting for you to grant them patronage.”
You look away. You look down, where the sunlight pierces Voeburt with specks of algae and glimmering dust. This is what you know; this is what you remember. Myste’s voice is distant: you can hear him list off some more memories, and you can place them among the ruins. The lone blacksmith that could fix Giott’s helm; the Nabaathian caravan, attended by dancing blades and slowly spinning shelves with more magical reagents than you could name.
“They are not mine.”
“Not yours alone, perhaps. But you know of them all the same.”
“And those I do not?”
Myste hums in thought. It isn’t quite like Haurchefant did it, and Ysayle didn’t press the knuckle closest to her palm to her lips, and Alphinaud didn’t look to his feet when mulling something over, let alone Alisaie. It is something only Myste’s, and you are glad of it. He turns to you, looking up with his big, blue eyes, and waits.
The lake is darker around you, though night cannot truly fall upon this place. The sleeping city below turns on its lights, first along the streets and then within their dwellings. Nightblooms wake, the colors faded in the water, and thus distinctly not of the incandescent land of faerie.
“You have not found it yet, but you do. I could do it, if you asked it of me.”
Myste is certain as he speaks, not looking away even as it feels as if he has to crane his head higher to continue. He is sinking, and you with him, though the weight of memory pulls more on him than you. Or he resists it less, still as he is. His eyes fair glow blue, familiar and warm; his hair falls over his face, and you pull a hand through it to tuck it behind one of Myste’s ears for a moment before it spills free again.
“Will you?”
It is Myste that asks. Helpful. His hands reach out again, before he begins to sink into the space over Amaurot’s depths. “Will you want me to bring you there?”
You close your eyes. You know Myste has closed his too, innocent in his communion. Sidurgu and Fray never told him it wasn’t necessary and only rarely corrected you about it. It is safe here, where it’s only you, and the faint ticking of your heart.
You pull Myste up. He is deceptively heavy. The wrought-iron leaves from the city below tangle his legs; the morning brume of Voeburt fills up his chest. When your head breaks the surface, there is no Il Mheg to riot in color, only an end to the depths. Myste’s hair tangles like water lily roots, then flattens as his head rises.
“It weighs as it should.”
When Myste’s eyes open, they are a summer moon’s gold. If you had not seen them innocent, you had seen them sorrowful; both at once is startling, but Myste does not much mind. He is not your anger, or not quite as some others are.
“And I will help you bear it,” he says with a hand over the rend at his chest, your chest, heartbeat ragged and between your souls, “Even if tonight is not when, or what, you ask.”
After it all, you smile.