Video| In all my dreams, it's never quite as it seems

[ushahin]

[When the video opens up, Ushahin is lying once again inside his bathtub. It's about five o' clock in the morning, so at least he's only waking up the resident of Hadriel up at the crack of dawn instead of the middle of the night this time. He's considerate that way.]

Does anyone else hear it? The music? It's so lovely.

[There is, of course, no music. What he's hearing is the tune he's caught from passing through someone's mind while they sleep. It's had quite the effect on him.]

Music makes everything quiet inside.

[He starts humming to himself, tapping his fingers to keep rhythm. If that tune sounds somewhat familiar, well, it might have been your mind he was tapping into.]

Comments

[lineare]

What are they?

[ There's everything fascinating about him and his stories -- all the things she never knew. ]

[ushahin]

They are both man and wolf. In form, they look like wolves that walk like men. Their minds are strange places. They are able to communicate all they know to one another through using the earth and what already lies within them. The Grey Dam has all knowledge passed along from one successor to the next, so that the current one knows all that those before her did. I was raised among them.

[Though he hadn't properly belonged, not being of their blood, it was one of the few time he'd been happy. His mother had loved him and kept him safe, treating him as if she was one of her own pups.]

[lineare]

Were they afraid of you? What you could do?

[ushahin]

No, they weren't afraid. But I wasn't truly one of them. Acceptance was...difficult.

[The child of three races that belonged to none was what they had called him. A cruel name to bear.]

But they helped to teach me about my powers. How to enter the minds of men and control their dreams. The rest I learned when my master summoned me. I could hear him asking me one day, in my mind, to come to him. I answered his call and served him for the rest of his life.

[lineare]

It's hard for people to accept what they cannot comprehend.

[ She understands. Acceptance is always difficult, if not impossible for people like them. She can sympathise, even if something about it unsettles her. Controlling their dreams? Serving a master? ]

Served him? That doesn't sound very kind.

[ushahin]

He was one of the only beings who ever cared for me. He listened when no one else did and gave me a home. When I asked for a place for those that had nowhere else to go, those broken and touched by madness, he gave one to me. Aye, for all that and more, I served him willingly.

[He's going to conviently forget the part where his master ground his left arm down to dust and repaired it bone-by-bone. Loyalty and love can excuse even the cruelest memories.]

[lineare]

Do you miss him?

[ She works very hard not to read his mind -- he probably wouldn't appreciate it, but she's curious about him, this person who seems so broken but so... other. So unlike anyone she's ever met. ]

[ushahin]

Terribly so. All I loved from my world are dead and gone.

[Jean would find, if she went inside his, a ancient mind, fractured into little pieces like a broken mirror. Some of them were calm and sane, even wise and old in part. Others were touched by madness, consumed with repetitive thoughts that went around and around without end.]