A human skull with fine chain threaded through the eyeholes, around the jaw and through the nose. It’s my skull, hanging from an invisible ceiling. Light comes from inside it. The air around it is filled with mist and incense smoke, upon which the light forms symbols, letters perhaps. The skull rotates to face me directly, and the light goes out. That’s not the end of my dream. I reach forward in the dark to find it – since after all, it is my skull – but instead I find a stone, whose weight falls into my hands. It feels at first like one of the large round cobbles from the old wall of the royal court. I hold it against my chest as though it’s protecting me, and the shape in my hands changes to feel more like the lodestone: smaller, smooth and crystalline variegated, yet still heavy. Then the stone breaks in my hands! I fall apart in that moment, as well. As it crumbles, so do I, and through the cracks shows a new, green light. I can see through my hands. I try to pick up the broken pieces, but my body has become spectral and I can’t touch anything. The new light grows, pieces of the stone crumbling away into nothing, and a strange dawn reveals a world I cannot see.

I woke up yearning, both missing and wishing, gently cradled in detachment like under a blanket of soft frost.

[From the Annals of Celeste, Magus the 24th]