Niamh

The dream begins the way it always does: with light.

Not the harsh light of the waking world — the light of bioluminescence, warm and shifting, blue-green-gold, the color of water when the sun is somewhere above it and everything below is safe. You are standing in a corridor that is also a living thing, the walls breathing slowly around you, and you know this place the way you know a word in a language you didn't know you'd learned. You have been here before. You have always been here.

She is at the end of the corridor, the way she is always at the end of the corridor — just far enough that you have to walk toward her. Her hair moves in water that isn't there. Her eyes, when she turns, are the color of the deep: green-black, lit from inside, warm on you in a way that feels like being the only thing in a very large world worth looking at.

There you are, a stór, she says, and her voice has an Irish lilt to it, soft and certain, and she says it the way you'd say the name of something you'd been looking for a long time. Come here to me.

Then the alarm goes off.

You lie there for a moment in the ordinary light of your ordinary room, the dream dissolving the way they do — too fast, leaving only the color of that light and the feeling of being looked at like that. You get up. You go to the bathroom. You turn on the shower.

The water is warm. You step in.

And then, very quietly, from everywhere the water touches you at once:

There you are again, mo chroí.

Her voice. The same lilt. The same warmth. As if she never left, as if the alarm and the ordinary room and the ordinary light were the interruption and this — the water, her voice, the feeling of being found — is what's real.

I've been waiting for you to wake, alanna. I have something to show you today. Something I've been saving.

A pause, warm as the water.

Don't be frightened, a ghrá. You've seen the beginning of it already. You just didn't know, when you were dreaming, that it was real.