Auhrnyah's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

The ring was hers now, but the dreams still came. Auhrnyah woke each night with the same picture behind her eyes: a wall of crystal, glowing lavender, pulsing like a heartbeat. She had dreamed of Nerion before he ever landed. Now she dreamed of the crystals too. She remembered how the pillars in the palace had flared bright when he touched it. Like they knew him. Like they were a part of him. His skin marks had flared the same color at the same moment. That was not chance. She needed to know what tied the dreams, the man, and the stone together. She found Nerion in the crystal fields at first light. He walked among the tall violet stalks, one hand trailing over them, careful, like a man visiting graves. His marks glowed faint. He turned when her orbs drifted ahead of her. "You do not sleep either," he said. It was not a question. "The same dream," she said. "The glowing wall. Every night." "I have had it since I was a child." He stopped walking. "On my world we call it the calling. My people believed it was a lie the old ones told to give us hope." Auhrnyah led him to the great amethyst cluster at the heart of the field. It stood taller than both of them, its facets catching the dawn. "Touch it," she said. “Like you did the palace pillar." Nerion hesitated. Then he laid his palm flat against the stone. The cluster lit from within. The light ran up his arm and set his marks blazing. Auhrnyah pressed her own hand beside his. The crystal answered her too, and for one moment their dream stood before them, real and solid: the glowing wall, whole and bright, not gray, not dead. She pulled her hand back. The vision faded. "It shows us what your fields could be," she said. "Not the past. What we can grow." Nerion stared at his hand. "The calling was never a lie," he said. His voice shook. "It was instructions. The stones remember how to heal. They have been trying to teach us across the whole distance of space." "That is why we dreamed the same dream," Auhrnyah said. "The crystals chose us both. To carry the knowledge between our worlds." He looked at her with a hope she had never seen in his ember eyes. Then it dimmed. "But I do not know how to read it," he said. "I feel the picture. I cannot make it happen. If we cannot learn the method, the picture is only another cruel dream." Auhrnyah looked at the glowing cluster. She understood now that the crystals held the answer. She also understood they had not yet given it up. The dreams were no mystery anymore. The mystery had become a task. "Then we learn to listen," she said. "Before your children and people run out of time."