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"The Gods will protect you, perhaps," her mother answers solemnly. "But they will not reach you, here. They will not find you now." Her long tail conjures a storm in the distance with its motion, her bright eyes hint to a deeper meaning.
The ocean roars a soothing reply in regards to Tiamat's lost friend, a call for to his daughter: << He is elsewhere, Tiamat, but of no fault of yours. It is of no use to mourn the not yet passed. >> Whether she will understand the implication of his words is uncertain. Whether she will understand his speech at all is another matter. But if nothing else, will she at least understand the care he has for her?
After all, this is her dream. And doesn't she love them? She has spoken ill of the Aurora Basin, to its mender, for one fault only: its distance from her father. But now there is no distance, just a strange sort of happiness and the pride of two parents in the wake of an overwhelming grief. They are here for her, as much as they can be. This is what it seems like. This is how it appears.
But aren't dreams strange? And don't things appear differently than they are? How can her vision be trusted, when the living die and their corpses become islands, when oceans stretch outward eternal, and when great swaths of silks become circlets--when circlets become walls?
At the sound of Tiamat's plea, her mother's eyes turn a sharp black. "Tiamat, wait!" she calls, as if her words will end her daughter's love, as if anything could stop so powerful a force. The sky's wings lift and flourish, sending a wind that catches and casts her lover's wave towards Tiamat's feeble attempt. The water stretches up, crashing and colliding with that great sheet of silk. The cloth and the elements rise together in battle at the shore, each resisting each other, each trying to knock each other's walls down. Her parents are powerful in this dreamland, but the fabric cannot be defeated. It twists in elegant and familiar shapes, expanding higher, never breaking its circlet, even when the water forces it into a dome that covers Tiamat's island. The light of the sky's sun filters through weakly, and the water retreats in rivulets that run down and across the wrinkles in the white. As they fall, so too does this miraculous shield.
For a moment, if one is watching carefully, they can see in those folds the roman features of the buck who once bore them, the one for whom Tiamat cries, the one she exclaims she has failed. They can see a shuddering of his features, an expression as the wind ripples the white, and the mouthing of a warning. Things are not as they seem, not in this world, nor in the waking one. Ashamin's features tumble down, collapsing in a wrinkled heap that shrinks and floats again easily on the waves. The sound of their descent whispers again: "things are not as they seem. Be careful, be strong."
And perhaps Tiamat will not notice. Perhaps she will only see the expression her parents bear as they stand, defeated disappointed, at the shoreline. Perhaps she will note the slight disapproval in her father's gaze and the exhaustion in her mother's sigh, and not hear her fallen companion's insistence that crosses a mortal border.
But the matter has been made clear: The ocean, the sky, and all that lies beyond them in the dream, have no place on that island where she stands. And she, no place in their infinity.
[[@[Tiamat] Whaaaaaat I'm not stalking all your other threads noooo. Note that the ocean isn't really speaking words, to anyone other than the sky (and Tiamat if you so desire) it would just sound like the roar of the sea. I've shown everything as translated in brackets in case you want her to know what he is saying.]]
