Echo walked into the empty room, where two patients awaited, lying asleep on their adjacent platforms. The walls of the chamber were specially designed to subdue phenomenological energy, and it warped her appearance into something that looked …
pedestrian. Echo strode over to them, donned in a gray lab-cat and laid her bare cheek against the forehead of the man on the right. As he awoke, she could sense the dream within him fade, its substance dissolve. He opened his eyes and leaned forward, “doctor, that was a good rest, but I am still feeling a little weak”. “Don’t underestimate yourself, you’re making a lot of progress”
she assured him, and playfully hit his cheek with her knuckles. The patient retrieved his clothing from underneath the platform and retreated to the outer chamber, where a hot meal was waiting for him. The empress sat down onto the platform and stared into an absent portion of the room beyond the resting woman. Before long, the two aspects of her personality that had stayed hidden for quite some time, blinked into reality. “Certain ideas are starting to appear reasonable, aren’t they? '' Visioness suggested as she made her way towards the patient, and placed her hand onto the woman’s forehead. “It’s not reasonable to act on instinct alone, as you most certainly discovered” she returned. “How can you be so shortsighted after everything that has happened?
Half of the Fiefdom is already obsolete. Think on your daughter Phantomess, the patron of the trail. But where is the trail? It may as well be a figment of history’s imagination. When this new process is complete, and all that remains are the islands of the realms, what will you become?
Nothing more than something insubstantial, looking out into a white canvas that is the annulment of being, and reminiscing about a horizon that doesn’t exist” Visioness counseled with her merciless, provoking rhetoric. At this Echo fazed back in her memory to a conversation she had with her mother Melina a mere four days ago. “That would be quite unnecessary” her mother replied, in response to her suggestion. “But mother, if I were to enter you, and be reborn into the flesh, I would become more than I am now. And we could have the others follow suit”. Melina stopped short of her work of fixing the aetheric mechanisms within a cloud and looked to her daughter “despite everything you have learned, how can you be so undiscerning? You are not going to die, my daughter, if we were to awaken from the dream, or if we were to perish. You and the rest would not flicker away out of existence. This reaction has been allowed by nature.
You would become our legacy”. “We are more than an aspect” Pelfe conceded, appearing at the feet of the resting patient, across from the other. “Then why do you suppose that we do not have the power to alter the finality of the switch. That is what we are calling it, aren’t we? Like a light switch. As soon as this patient awakes, it will dissolve like salt into water” Visioness attested.
Echo looked back and forth between the two aspects for a moment, and covered her mouth with her hand for a moment to think, “Pelfe, although you are my aspect now, you were once my sister. Visioness was born as an aspect of my grief. Did you split off an aspect yourself, Pelfe?
Perhaps an aspect of hope? Such may cure this asymmetry within me”. Visioness jumped backward and twirled around in glee, laughing, “look at this! We have an asymmetrite in our midst!”. “I think you're missing the whole point” Pelfe groaned, disheveling her hair, “this …
polarity switch, if that is a proper term for it, must simply be itself a default property”. “Then the reaction has altered the logic of the polarity switch” Visioness proposed, “It would only be the latter if the Scilysts were asleep, but they are a state that is a mixture of both”. “The ultimate trial, perhaps,” Visioness said with a sadistic grin as she brushed the throat of the patient, “would be to kill one of them, and have the dream persist afterwards”. “My darling shadow, you are a genius” Echo announced, inciting an animated response from Pelfe that was somewhat like interpretive dance. “How can you be so base!” she sobbed. “Not that, what you said earlier, Visioness. That it will dissolve like salt into water. The self-awareness surely does dissolve like salt into water in the liquid of the dream, but there is a way to counteract that. Tell me ladies, have either of you ever had a lucid dream?” Echo queried. “I had lucid dreams of Henry,”
Visioness answered quickly. “The golden land is rife with lucidity,” Pelfe added. Echo calmed Pelfe, took a deep breath and began her explanation, “Perhaps there is a route, in the absence of phenomenological energy, to do this. In a normal process, the sleeper is oblivious.. In a lucid dream, the dreamer knows the dream, and uses that knowledge to use it as a sort of canvas. This agreement activates the lucid dream state. Now consider this, that there might be a reflection of
these two steps. The third step shall then be called omni-dichotomy, and the fourth step shall be called counterfeit oblivion. After the four steps of the dream reflection are completed, the individual may then perform the fifth step of lucid awakening. Then, through natural means we are moving into the expanded territory of the overarching logic, or are circumventing the logic of the polarity switch. As with a great burdensome task, the phenomenological route is perhaps a shortcut, whereas the natural route is the long tread, requiring sweat and toil and hard labor. The logic of dependence and the polarity switch is given new organization, as geometries with new dimensions may find new ways to connect”. “What a cheap tactic! This dream reflection you propose is just a common inversion” Pelfe admonished. “Maybe it is, but I want to know one thing, sister. Why is it that when we fused, my consciousness was the one that became prominent?”. “This was doubtless a result of the power differential between you two” Visioness remarked. “answer me then, Visioness, what do you think was the consequence of your absorption?” Echo asked. “Perhaps ensuring that when the time is right, there may be a substantial, non-dream child born of you and Sam,” she conjectured. “I have experienced an ever-increasing degree of parenthood. First there was Mar and the generation. Then there was the avatar. Then there was she that came from my body. Then there was she that was born when I set eyes on another. Then there was she that was born of me and a mortal” Echo mused. “Exactly!”
Visioness proclaimed. After a long silence, Echo looked back at her and asked, in a gentle voice,
“What would you say was the result of the fusion of our halos? Your iris halo and my cave halo?
The substance would be combined, and that, without doubt helped in the rituals of the transition”. “That is perhaps an interesting view of my current state … aspect-mother. Was it coincidence that I was drawn to the power of the void eye, and took it for myself? It is of the dust bloodline, and you did inherit the dust-throne. Perhaps there is something you still seek to inherit from the originators, if not their flesh” she said, and almost began to raise an eyebrow with vile pleasure. Echo repressed a degree of her eccentricity, and then replied, “Within my cave then, I can call into being lucid echoes. Then that would serve as a way to phenomenologically accelerate the dream reflection”. “The two of you are getting ahead of yourself,” Pelfe interjected, “there are still unanswered questions …”. “The reflection will equate those perspectives” Echo answered. “What are the risks?” whined her sister. But Echo was in the midst of speaking out loud to herself and the other aspects, “This would go much faster with the spectrum mind wave, but I doubt rider’s reflectant would willingly allow us to exploit it, given the current climate”. Visioness gave a loud cough to gain her attention, “I think our sister was asking, quite politely, what the risks might be”. She stared back blankly at the other two, until Pelfe finally broke through, “Then we will need some better test subjects!”. The very pedestrian, gray coated doctor instructed Pelfe to play the harp, and waves of noise coursed into the well of the Iris Halo, its damp interior dripping with sensory activity. Lucid echoes swathed the patient, making her breathing rise and fall. “Did you get enough sleep, Sortjim?” the doctor asked. She rubbed her eyes and adjusted her wristwatch, “never been this refreshed before”. During the afternoon session, the doctor told both of them about a type of rare grass, florensereya, that only grows within broken egg shells. Such would be the best possibility of curing their hypo-nostalgia-ignorance. By the end of the week, in a joint session, and after instructing them numerous times about the steps, she was ready. Scientific curiosity burned intensely in her chest, so much so that she could only feel the slightest hint of natural emotion. Looking down, the two patients had quickly fallen fast asleep, but by random chance their faces had each fallen to a side of the platform, such that they were facing each other. Echo could feel the edge of her mouth curl into an invisible smile, a small unevenness against the hard mask of her face, then crawled into
the moist interior of the Iris Halo, finding within a circle of stalagmites a bed of broken eggshells, and the florensereya growing within one of them. When they came to, the doctor provided the ingredient to both of them, then brought them into her office, printing and presenting both Sortjim and Caramel certificates for their bravery during the long therapy and for overcoming the illness.