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He is cold in the night air.
This is not a dream and it is not a memory. It has happened before. Peripheral reality that crawls across the senses, uproots what is true into what is only maybe. Snow under bare feet, rain on parted lips. There are walls of grey stone smoothed by unknown hands and the floor is rough like gravel. Is there a temple here or is it a prison? Is it a prison, wandering across Vessel's thoughts and catching him in the drag of its gravity?
The night is cold inside, but Vessel is unsure if this place's walls keep inside and outside separate.
He takes a step and his feet slip in snow, over gravel, and he slides to lean against the plinth of a statue. He looks up and it is armored (armored, gilded, covered in slow-creeping life like an amoeba is swallowing it whole), and he looks down before the statue notices him.
The air is still until it begins to tug at him. Disjointed senses synch up to his mind again and the room lurches, trembles, settles.
Vessel looks down and white chalk streaks his hands, striping over charcoal. He is facing another grey stone wall and on it he has written –
– as though this is the primer he uses to describe himself, this truth that he embodies.
Sleep has given many things to him. Sleep has taken more, or not enough, or too much: it depends on the day, sometimes. The feeling that Sleep has not balanced him or has weighed down one side of the scale too heavy. This is a time when Vessel knows he is in flux, ebb and flow. He is disjointed again and leans against the wall, forehead pressed to the letters Sleep taught him.
Another lurch.
An ebb, pulling downwards.
(where is he? where is the world? where are II, and III, and IV?)
(a secret dread, recurrent: that there is no II, or III, or IV; that there is only Vessel, spinning in a current left by Sleep's passage through realities, swimming hard, fighting to not be left behind.)
(surely it is not so.)
The wall falls away into a doorway and there is cold air moving now, fresh against Vessel's face. The mask is light today – for now – and the clay of it drinks in cold and mist, water droplets that jewel the mask's curlicue embellishments over Vessel's mouth, dripping manna honey-sweet over his lips. He licks it away, feeling as though Sleep has made an offering to him, drip-feeding divinity like a lure.
(why will his thoughts not settle why is body mind soul pulling apart where is the world where is the world )
Senses slew sideways. Vessel tilts with it, falls, hits sand powder-soft. The mask is knocked loose, falls from him.
(a thought, sudden and shocking: he could leave it there.)
Vessel's hands dig into the sand. His fingers burrow through it, grasping onto the crumbling ground.
(god where is the world where is home where is anything at all)
He is not afraid, because fear is an animal instinct, and Vessel does not know what he becomes in this place.
( a dream a dream a dream)
Vessel?
A word. A name, or at least a definition. Sleep's voice turns the ground to a cymatic mandala, Vessel in its center. He gathers into himself, beading back together until his body responds, his mind roots in place, his soul is reeled safely back inside. He pushes himself up, looks behind: the temple is still there, the doorway he drifted out from standing open. He looks forward: a natural corridor paved with sand. Walls of weathered stone, ridged like teeth in a worn jaw. The sky above is indigo-dark, smeared with stars in constellations he doesn't know.
He wants to ask Sleep why he is here, but maybe he isn't here at all. He was not called, did not try to arrive on his own. Sometimes Vessel simply wanders off the track of the real world, neither sleeping nor waking, and passes through these places. A passing thought of his god that turns into a tether, pulling him into Sleep's in-between.
It's not death. Surely death is more orderly, less taxing on perception. Death, like time, like logic, shies away from Sleep. This is not a heaven or after. It only is, as Sleep is.
( i am that i am.)
"Cold," Vessel breathes, and the speaking makes it true. His breath fogs out in a thick cloud. "I….where?"
Come to me.
Vessel rises slowly, carefully. His vision catches up with the movement of his body – for a moment he left his sight level with the sand, staring at his mask – and he blinks as the world gains directions. The mask is in his hand and he doesn't ask how it got there, only fastens it back to his face, the weight now familiar and grounding. His mind spins up to recall who he is, where he is (or is not), who is speaking to him. Vessel pulls the edges of his overcoat over himself, keeping the cold out, keeping himself in. His hood hangs low over his face as he walks, and he tries to keep his head up straight.
The sand is littered with shells, gnarled and painted bright with mother-of-pearl. Vessel follows the path until he can hear surf, can smell salt. The corridor stops abruptly and Vessel finds himself once more on a shore. Seafoam embroiders patterns on the sand, the waves kicking close to Vessel's feet but stopping shy of touching him.
(why is it always the sea?)
Sleep wears a face like a whale's skull today, though there are extra parts whales don't have. The god's jaws open tripartite, bones ridged with baleen. Seaweed hangs over Sleep's eye sockets like veils, and Vessel cannot see the eyes he feels watching him.
You dream so deeply today.
"I'm sorry."
Why?
Vessel doesn't know. It always feels like the right thing to say, and he always wants to repeat it when it isn't. Sleep offers a limb like an invitation – it is not a hand, not a tendril, not anything Vessel knows, but it is offered all the same. Vessel is pulled towards Sleep, kneels in the shallows before his god. He dips his hands into the water, watches as chalk and charcoal swirl off his skin.
"Is the world still there?"
Sleep does not hesitate: it is not in the god's nature to be a comfort, but Sleep knows when to be an anchor.
Yes.
You have stepped outside it for a moment.
Do you want to go back?
Yes, Vessel thinks. Yes. Dreaming is too much today, too eager to split him into the elements of his existence, to hold them separate from each other like playing cards fanned out over a table. Instead he asks, "Why does this happen?"
Because I fill you. In your cracks and corners, traces of me pool inside. In your mind there are nerves that drink me in like roots. In your soul there are corners that reach for my seas.
(the sea the sea why is it always the sea)
Does it displease you, to be host to me?
Vessel leans forward. Sleep's limb – a whale's fin without flesh, wet skin stretched over the frame of bones – slips over him. A leviathan, sheltering.
"Sometimes," Vessel whispers. The honesty feels treacherous, but Sleep doesn't rebuke him for it. "I don't think we're made for this."
Humans, containing divinity. A flawed vessel. Sleep makes a low sound and the water shivers in fractal wheels.
Perhaps not, Sleep says. Vessel tries not to wince at this. But it is all I am given to use. I know how to use it.
"Are you using me now?"
In a fashion. When you leave me, this will leave you, this spindrift moment. It is not real to you as it is to me. The fin moves; Vessel looks up, sees the fleshless limb split into new appendages, liquid-edged and embracing. A tendril-tip curls under Vessel's chin and tilts his head back. There is no love in the touch, but a keen understanding. Vessel's love for the god has only ever been reflected back at him, and even then it is dimmer than what he let himself give. He has learned to temper it. Sleep has learned to do without.
A god uses their adherents, Sleep says. A god makes space for them inside. Is the flaw in the vessel or what is poured into it? How can one hope to be on even ground with the other?
"It's not always this way."
Did you want to be here?
"No."
Do you know why you are?
"No, I…"
Do you think I would bring you to me in pieces, as though that would make your service to me better?
"No, but–"
The limbs withdraw. The whale skull flexes its jaws; a smell like salt and snow curls up from Sleep's throat.
This is nothing at all, the god says. A passing. Your eyes will move, your lungs will catch on a breath, and you will be gone again. I am in you but you cannot hold me. There is no world here. There is only me.
Vessel bows his head: this is dream logic, spiraling tight within itself into no reason or truth. "Am I daydreaming?"
Your soul scraped onto a tooth of my mind. This is its way of working loose, so that your flesh does not tear.
"You make it sound like you're a splinter in me."
Perhaps I am, the god muses. Is that not what a body does? Finds an intruder and forces it out? Am I not a trespasser?
"I let you in," Vessel says. The words are very faint.
It's true. But a body is a body. A vessel can overbalance if it is not filled correctly.
You have simply tipped over. Right yourself, and come to me again when you rebalance. I am never far from you.
Something in the god's words makes Vessel's throat tighten.
"I know."
Jaws flex, a slow rhythmic scrape of baleen against bone. Sleep's breath fogs into clouds that stream like smoke into the sky, but do not dim the stars. The god waits, waits: Vessel is silent, because after a long moment, Vessel has gone. The god pulls back, traces a limb that has reformed into a bony fin, knuckles of phalanges like the trunks of trees stretching skin tight.
Sleep spoke true, because the god always speaks true. A passing moment, an unbalanced dream. Vessel is back in the world without ever realizing he left it, speaking of things Sleep knows matter to humans but hold no interest for a god.
Vessel has asked these questions a thousand times, in these moments of tipping. Sleep is inside him, soaked into nerves, dancing along the curves of cells. It has always been this way, through vessels past to present. Sleep, who does not consider itself patient, who does not consider adherents equal, knows to be patient with this. It was a passing dream, a flicker of existence Sleep takes as an offering, because humanity brims with the need to be acknowledged.
Vessel has gone, but a sense of being cared for, almost comforted, will follow him today, vague and sourceless. The god gives no gifts, but Sleep knows the importance of balancing.
Sleep opens whalebone jaws, closes them. The god dissolves into the shallows Vessel knelt in, and the disjointed dream Vessel built turns to saltwater, to foam, to nothing.