You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky when we walked in fields of gold
In her dreams, Otem was standing among swirling galaxies and shooting stars with her mother. Isopia was explaining how all life in the world could be boiled down to small atoms - atoms which Isopia proceeded to show her daughter by dispersing a cluster of planets and stars. Otem watched all of this with rapt attention, nodding along with her mother's academic cadence as if this was all second nature. Of course atoms were the building blocks of the universe, how could it be any other way? Isopia smiled down at her daughter and then abruptly looked up as a waterfall of light flooded through the universal darkness within which they stood.
"Think, Otem." Isopia warned. "Learn and be clever." Before the girl could argue, the light turned into a swell of water, which threatened to drown her. Otem gasped and her eyes flashed over but she saw nothing but blue. Her lungs breathed in water, but miraculously they seemed suddenly able to filter out the oxygen that she needed to breathe. The girl felt a hardness prong against her spine and suddenly she was moving. Her large wings, now waterlogged and useless flopped against the sands. As air - real air - pressed against her face, she saw that it was the horned man from the beach who had moved her and was now standing over her. His face was fully engulfed in flame and large batwings had sprouted from his spine. "No please.." Otem begged, her eyes squishing shut as Tilney's mouth lowered towards her suddenly full of shark-like teeth. Otem summoned up the image of her mother among all those stars, holding onto it before she was torn apart by this flaming monst-
A cooling ebb suddenly flowed through the girl, starting from the oak-leaf marking on her forhead and surging throughout the rest of her body. Carefully Otem opened one eye, wondering why she hadn't been eviscerated by Tilney's needle-like teeth, only to find him simply standing above her, looking just as he had before. "Where did the fire go? And your teeth? And Isopia-" Otem craned her head around suddenly in the wet sand, hoping naively that her mother would be standing there. Or maybe it was Otem who had died? Is that why she saw her Mother and could breathe under water and why Tilney looked normal now?
Riptide Isles
