Work Text:
You enter through the mirror, lights that are-not filling your vision. Before you, your base camp, reinforced with a candescent clandestine canopy of candle light, flickering in all the colours of the Neathbow. You step to the edge, and with a strand of apocyan flame you invoke the memory of the working model of your ship design. A trinket and marvel of miniaturisation, it would be your guide, your transport to your quarry.
With a strand of violant, you wrap the vessel, and send it down through the river of Lethe. With any luck, your quarry will find it before Hypno. You faintly chuckle as you take a breath, feeling all that Is-Not flow through you.
It does not quite listen to what you want, but is far more amicable to you than the others, who simply seek to tame and command it. The tentative peace between the many factions of Parabola are a minor miracle, a lack of such an armistice would be disastrous to finding what you need, the nightmares it would invoke…
It is not long, however, before you feel that violant string snag. With a smile you follow your invocation, leading you into the Viric Jungle. As expected, your guide is waiting, desperately attempting to free its prize. Once it sees you, it simply stops, letting out a trill of contentment. You ruffle its head as you weave a new strand of apocyan into the pattern swathing the model. It looks in understanding, picking it up, and flying off.
The path was risky, the outcome unknown, the road uncharted, but it will be worth it. You trace the flight upon the ground, memorising the feelings and memories that make up the landscape. The Cats and Fingerkings avoid you, they know better.
Eventually, you reach the point in which land travel becomes untenable, a vast emptiness turning from jungle to wilderness. You look back and in a moment you embrace the abyss, your vanes becoming one with the ethereal sky.
A sensation so sublime, an experience exquisitely empyreal. Tears flow freely as they flash freeze, it takes all you are to resist abandoning your course to simply relish this release, but you are so close.
You catch up to your guide. It looks with reservation and uncertainty. You respond with a simple scritch, looking back the way you came with assurance. It chirps with delight as the strands unravel and it brings its joy back to its lair.
In the distance, you see what you have come for. Hesitantly you approach, dread filling your chest as you wonder if it will recognise or remember.
It is not long before it grapples onto you, sending such worries away. Alas, before it can embrace you any further, it sees who followed you. It has no time for its favorite transportation when its progenitor came to visit its dreams.
The parent and child embrace, and you hear sounds you have never witnessed escape Mr Spices, a joy almost unbecoming of its history. It did not trust you nor your deal. It was unsure what to feel about you, with your form and unbecoming actions. Now, perhaps, it finally knows what to think about you.
As you look between the two, a pang of suffering echoes throughout mind and soul, a longing for what you may never be able to have. As much as it pains you, you bury the pain. The first of many reunions is not time for jealousy, it is time to embrace the joy once can still find.
You begin weaving the proper tapestry to mark the weight of this place, while not always here, you will be visiting this place of dreams far more often.
As it nears its completion, you look once more upon Spices and Transport and smile. It seems, despite everything, even in the darkest affairs of the Masters, always look to love. Always.