The Dream I Still Yearn To Dream

And in the end, they were the only one who remained at that lake of gold. The one who called them her sister…she probably was wondering why they hadn’t gone with.

Why hadn’t they?

Why hadn’t they even said goodbye?

Would they ever meet again?

They didn’t know. In truth, they’d only seen glimpses of the truth, too fleeting to understand what they really were. If they said goodbye, where would they even begin, and who would they even try to explain this?

“So everything worked just as I’d hoped,” a voice said, and they turned around.

A woman clad in red had joined them at the lake of gold. A tall woman with a confident smile. Yenkya, the Red Sage, the one who had guided this plan, but they’d met her somewhere before. She was walking towards them.

“You must be confused. You served well as a key, but in accordance with our deal, you will have a new role to play in the new cycle.” She placed a crimson gem in their chest, and in a moment memories came back to them.

A child who lived in a small island, creating many wonderful things, but they could never create a cure to preserve their own life. That should have been the end, and yet, as nothing but a spirit existing within dreams, they had seen far beyond that.

They saw the child called Eyi. They had appeared to her dreams and tried to comfort her at the end of the her world, and in the end she chose to sacrifice herself instead so they could save it. Yet they continued on. They had taught Viena of a way to save her world from the barren wasteland it had become, yet that too required sacrifices. There were always sacrifices.

They had become the last sacrifice. That was their deal with a woman they had long despised. They would lose their memories and become the key to Goldenlake in order to allow this world to be preserved.

And now they remembered all of this again.

“I assume by your expression the memory restoration worked as I intended it to?” the Red Sage asked, though it could hardly be called a question. Even if she asked it as such, she clearly knew the answer already.

“I need to go find Cassidae. She must be wondering where I am…” the dreamer spoke nervously.

“Cassidae, yes, the girl I allowed to connect her dreams to your spirit and give you a new identity. You’re done with her now, the cycle has been restarted.” the Red Sage’s tone was dismissive. “She’s around somewhere. But Sylfia is not. Knowledge is a thing of great value, and the knowledge of your past is not something she had bought. In accordance with our deal, her dear companion Sylfia vanished with the restart of the cycle.”

“Our deal is finished,” yet as they said that, they realized they were wrong. It was a careless deal made to save everyone, but such a vague concept might be entirely impossible. The preservation of a cycle may have been what they’d intended, but it was hardly what Yenkya meant. What was the actual wording again? So you shall follow my plan until everything has come to a proper conclusion.

The dreamer glared at the sage, yet the sage was unphased. “Oh come now, I’m not so cruel as all that. Your own wish was imprinted into Goldenlake as well, was it not?” A people called the Sel Yarii, the children of the dreamer Suyarii, a concept they only fully understood after their existence was written into that lake of gold.”You have your own role within this cycle. Let’s not cling to past identities, Sylfia was only the briefest of moments in the time you’ve lived, afterall.”

“All I wanted was to bring some measure of comfort to the people of these cycles.”

“What comfort is greater than true understanding? But you may do as you wish. So long as you exist within dreams I too shall gaze into them. Only us two still remain of Origin, but perhaps in this cycle we both shall find the dreams we still yearn to dream.”