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For Raymond
THE GROVE
“How peacefully he sleeps,” Melpomene says quietly. “But there is doubt beneath this peace.” Stepping softly, she moves among the figures and places of the young man’s dreaming. There is a harmony about things, but it is the clumsy harmony of wishing, a harmony that is hoped for more than it is possessed. It is the harmony of a dream, and it is the harmony for which he dreams. She smiles with delight at this. It is always a joy to stand so near to the great desires of so innocent a heart. But this is a heart that has been wounded in its innocence and the sting of that wound is alive beneath the almost desperate wishfulness of the dreaming. “She is a greater witch than I had imagined to cast this one aside so easily. Her heart must truly be a thing of wood.” Melpomene’s eyes narrow as the old and bitter wound in her own heart, a wound over one who was not worth her love in the first place, stirs in its quiet and constant anger. Her fingers tighten around the delicate carving made from the wood that had once been Tobias. “We have so much more in common than I first had thought, my young friend,” she whispers.
She waits until the anger of her heart subsides before looking once more at the idyllic setting of the young man’s dreaming. She breathes deeply, drawing the emotions of the dreams into herself and savoring their scent. “Raymond,” she exhales his name with the breath of his own hopes. “Raymond,” she says once more and his excitement about the new possibilities he has discovered here carry his name to where he might he hear it. “Raymond,” she says again and names him now in terms of the wide-eyed day dreams of his childhood. “Raymond,” she whispers, and a panther moves with a swift and graceful playfulness across the landscape of his dreaming. “Raymond,” she repeats, “your life is calling to you and it is time to listen.”
ooc: I’ll stop here to give you a chance to respond before the really heavy stuff starts to happen [img]graemlins/blueblink.gif[/img]
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