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It’s a sensation that Merriman can never precisely describe, this feeling of being watched. Not quite heat, not quite itch or irritation; more like a pinprick of light beamed in his direction, a spark landing in the back of his mind. He has learned not to ignore the spark. Usually, it means danger; usually, it means the Dark.
He has also learned, so well, all the ways to go invisible through this mortal world: the blendings and the slippings-through and the passings-by. So rare it is, for him to do something that risks calling attention to himself for no reason other than his own indulgence... but sometimes...
Sometimes, he longs for air like a knife’s edge against his face, and the snap of his blue cloak behind him—
Sometimes, he longs to soar in the scent of mountains that are now as close to his home as he will find, this side of the Doors that cut through Time—
Sometimes, he longs only to ride the wind.
Tonight—for the first time in many, many years, though he could count them if he chose—Merriman allows himself this pleasure. He rises up on a current ice-cold and as exhilarating, the spells as joyfully ready to his command as breathing, despite their long disuse. The stars spill out above him, so that he greets them each gladly by name as they wheel on their courses, and the land spills out below. It too is marked by points of light, but these earthbound stars are scattered more sparsely, and they tremble and wink out as Merriman passes in the high beyond. The hour is very late, and the night is deep around him, and one by one the folk below are putting themselves to bed.
Then there it is: one bright pinprick, that is neither a light from above nor from below nor from any earthly source, but a sensation in his mind. He has been seen.
Yet the quality of this is different, untinged by that particular accent of the Dark. Merriman pauses, bending Time to stillness. He hangs silent in the sky until his own sight lands on the source of the awareness that has found him. It’s a young boy, standing at an open window, heedless of the chill night that surely must have been stinging his hands and cheeks to numbness before he was caught outside of Time. Merriman is too far away to see the expression on the upturned face, but he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the boy is breathless with wonder.
Unbidden images flicker through Merriman’s mind, and he is aware that they are visions of events that have both already unfolded and not yet happened. A grandfather with the roll of salt in his walk, a father taken by the sea. A white dog with silver eyes beside a white boy with golden ones. Sheep upon the mountains, callused hands upon a harp, and a white cloak swirling behind them…
This boy, Merriman realises, is not entirely an ordinary boy…
He stretches out his hand, fingers pointed stiff in the boy’s direction, and sends out the command, not unkindly: this is a dream, child. Go to bed; go back to sleep. This is a dream.
And as Time and the wind return to movement, Merriman spares one last glance for the now-empty window. We will meet again, John Rowlands, he thinks. One day.