Dreams without drama! Ah. Mostly without drama anyway. Making the rounds, I had a puppy in tow. Except I know what ke is, and ke ain’t a babe, and ke ain’t harmless, and ke ain’t cute. I called kir out and ke changed shape into an adult Cerberus. “No. I know what you are and there is no reason for you to hide what you are here. Knock it off. Be yourself. I’m not afraid of your form or of what you are. I’ve seen you many times before, remember. You don’t have to limit yourself to appease me. I demand that of all that walk with me.”
I continued walking. A large mass gently nudged my back. I turned to find that I had never really seen kir true form after all. Good thing I’m already insane. I stood for a bit, trying to put my mental pieces back together. “Oh. Non-Euclidean geometry.” I realize I’m drooling and try to wipe my face. I keep missing. Kir leans forward and licks my face clean. Of course, that means I have a dentist’s perspective of kir mouth.
Jibber.
I open my eyes to find I fainted. Fuck. There goes ALL my cred. Kir is sitting on me again. Not in domination or one-up-manship, but to guard kir unconscious friend. That ke has taken on the form of the large breed puppy again has me chuckling.
“Alright, Puppy, you win. This time!” Ke wags kir puppy tail and gives me puppy kisses and barks cute puppy barks. Sarcastic bastard. I guess kir is part of my ‘pack’ after all.
Later I went to the cafe to check up on Jill to get my nightly mocha and pass along some rumors I heard. Seems Jill’s position is not as tenuous as she feared. Ran into Roger who noticed I wasn’t wearing a feather pendant earring (one of the cloak’s alternate forms when not on my shoulders). I sat down (uninvited) with him and waved my greeting. That’s when he noticed the ring on my left hand.
He remarked it looked much like his mysterious ring. Neither one of us removing our rings, we placed our hands side by side to compare. Different material, similar craftsmanship. Could they have been made in the same foundry, he asks.
“But this is the cloak, Roger. I’ve been playing around with different forms. This ring is the cloak.” I dismiss the ring and the cloak wraps around me at once. His face falls. I dismiss the cloak and the black ring appears on my hand again, looking like a metal feather that had been coiled onto itself. He sighs in resignation.
He fears his anonymously gifted ring was some sort of vicious prank. He is physically okay, but he has been making verbal gaffes at the most inappropriate of times. His reputation as the cafe Wise Man is starting to suffer. “Also, I still can’t remove the ring!” He wonders if he can find the foundry that made it, could a workman there undo the ring? But the cloak is my personal item. That the craftsmanship of the ring form appears similar to his ring is coincidental as my ring was made FROM the cloak. It wasn’t forged separately and connected.
Poor guy. This is really bothering him. I look up to see Jill making her rounds in the cafe and am reminded of a question of my own. “Say, Roger. Remember when Jill’s talisman broke and we saw her true form?”
“Yea… You fixed it for her.” His voice was wary.
“Did you tell anyone about her species? Because she’s… Roger?” I feel a sudden absence next to me. I look to my side to find Roger waving farewell as he quickly left the cafe. The anxious look on his face as he glanced back at me answered my question better than any words he could have sputtered, cursed-ring or not.
I’ve had enough of politics. I miss wandering the Nine Worlds and dealing with man-eating trolls and having conversations with trees. Maybe it’s that my first introduction to the City was me wandering through a field of human feces, and I’ve never really shaken that scent. But the City stinks, and mocha or not, I want nothing to do with it right now.
I can sense dawn approaching in the Waking. No time left to get hip deep into trouble. I go back to my lair and find Snake’s friend Crow hanging out. But where is Snake? Coiled up in a back room sleeping soundly. Crow went to wake him up, but I told him to let Snake sleep. One of us should get some solid rest at least.
Too aware to settle into deeper sleep myself, I pulled out some paper and pencils and started sketching. To my dismay, I find my drawing skills in the Dreaming are the same as in the Waking. That is, shitty as fuck. Crow (a Waking size bird) flies over and perches on my shoulder watching. I apologize for the famine of quality.
“Looks very nice to me.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re a guest here.”
Crow laughed loud in my ear. “I don’t give a shit about being polite. You of all should know that. It looks very nice to me. Draw more.” Crow ruffled his feathers to look as large as possible. “Please.”
I look at the bird on my shoulder and weigh his words. He is being sincere. He likes what I’m drawing. Okay, I start again. He hates it. Snatches the paper out of my hand and rips it apart in seconds. “No. Not like that. Do it like you did the first time.”
“And how did I do it the first time?”
“When you didn’t give a shit who was looking or if anyone else would like it.”
“But that was just… I dunno. Can’t really call it drawing. I just let the pencil wander around the paper.”
“Then let the pencil go play again.” He hops back on my shoulder. I pull another sheet of paper out and intentionally forgot Crow was sitting on my shoulder. After a while I realize I’m doubling back on the meandering border I’ve made on the paper. It takes me a while to recognize what I’ve done. “It’s Snake.”
A heavy presence pushes into my back. “You called?” Snake looks over my other shoulder with his massive head. “Oh hey, that’s me! I like that. What are you going to put in the middle?”
I stare at what I’ve drawn. If I was in elementary school, I would have failed the art assignment. It’s a rendition that I had been told was ‘primitive’, ‘childish’, and ‘ugly’. I chuckle as I realize if I were to duplicate this in the Waking and post it, I would be lambasted for the cultural appropriation of certain indigenous groups. I’m tempted to do just that, just for that reaction. Because fuck ‘em, that’s why. This is my drawing style. It has never changed or “improved”, despite all my attempts, formal and otherwise.
“I dunno.”
“Let the pencil play again and find out what happens.” Crow is very eager for me to fill out the paper. Snake coils himself completely around me and agrees.
Once again, I force myself to forget they are there watching, and just make apparently random marks. When my attention focuses again, I find I’ve made a convoluted, intertwining, nearly knotted rendition of Snake again. The drawing is in black and white, no color.
Crow hops excitedly on my shoulder. “Make more! Make more!”
Snake stares deeply at the image on the paper. Still focused on it, he says to me, “You should consider doing this in the Waking. However, there is one component that you will not be able to duplicate.” He opens his massive mouth and exposes his fangs. A teardrop’s worth of venom forms on the tip of a fang and falls onto the paper. The venom fills the image, spreading random swaths of color throughout the two-dimensional rendition on the paper. The colors blend and shudder and flow and pulse. They collect in the loops and race along the bands and glow excitedly on the pencil marks.
I’m so distracted by the moving colors, I don’t notice Snake nudging Crow off my right shoulder and pulling my shirt collar to the side. Gently he takes his other fang and pierces my right shoulder. The teardrop’s worth of venom stings and finally catches my attention. The effect is instantaneous. The room explodes into shifting colors and textures. The sight overwhelms me and I collapse into Snake’s waiting coils.
—
I wake up with my right shoulder itching. I have a box of crayons and a box of colored pencils on my desk, that I had bought some time ago to make drawings with. I had decided not to, because of my childish and primitive abilities.
I’ll be picking up some cheap printer paper to practice drawing on later today.