Quote:
6. The vines abruptly begin to move and shift in a way that suggests that they are alive, and one of them suddenly snakes around your ankle, and then another. No matter how you struggle, you are pulled back towards the standing stone. The vines are gentle: they do not hurt you, but they cannot be beaten. When you touch the stone, you are swallowed up by instant sleep and a lingering moment of awareness, if you are not a Legendary. If you are, you experience an instant of what it must be like to fly higher than the highest bird, and higher still: you see the hazy curve of the edge of the world, the rivers and oceans spread below you like threads and puddles. And then you begin to fall, peacefully and without fear.

***

You awaken where you'd fallen asleep, exactly there and nowhere else, before you'd found yourself far from home. The time you spent away is there, but the memories are strangely elusive, like snippets of a dream. You can, if you focus, call them back up, but some of them are distorted and strange.

So it was a dream, then, you think, and you rise, and are alarmed to find that your hooves ache, your legs burning (and perhaps you shed sand from your coat, or snow, or the petal of an alien flower--perhaps you feel a lingering ache where something attacked you in the dream, or taste for an instant on your own breath the foreign fruit you'd eaten), as though you have walked a long, long way...


The vines release him -- and then seem to throw him upwards, far and fast, moving without movement, without effort, without reason.

He can see the curve of the earth, wreathed in a haze: storm clouds boiling in on the horizon, he thinks, or perhaps he is looking north and those are snow clouds wrapped around the tops of the mountains totoma call home. He has never seen them, has made it only to the foothills before sore feet called him home -- before obligations dimly remembered at the back of his mind called him to return to the beach. Somehow, he is hovering on a current of wind, higher and higher still than the highest bird: certainly higher than he has ever attained in his short time wearing his gryphon shape. But this brings him no fear, not that he ever really feels that emotion -- instead, he is exultant.

He can see, far, cast far above everything, and there is no worry as to how he got up here or how he will return: he just is, buoyed gently by shifting air currents that are cool underneath his spread feathers. For a time he watches weather patterns race -- and then his vision sharpens, clears, and he can watch the minutiae of life in the swamp proceed unchecked below him, its soundtrack the whistle and buffet of wind in his ears.

And then he begins to fall.

It is a gentle descent, but one he cannot help: his wings spill air, cupping close to his body, and he is falling. But peacefully, and without fear, until he can view the rich carpet of the ground start to loom up beneath him and he

***

wakes up with a start -- and while some part of him is relieved that what he just experienced must have been a dream, a lingering notion tells him that it wasn't just a dream. What he experienced was too vividly real, the smell of the swamp and the feel of the vines. Even the sun, sending slats of hazy golden light in through the maze-like roots of the mangrove, has descended accordingly.

But life goes on, as it must, and seized with the powerful urge to pee and eat, Longstride gets up from the sucking, cool mud (which has hardened around him, he is alarmed to see) -- and then stops dead. His hooves ache, his tendons and muscles taut with fatigue; as he shakes himself, a small rain of dirt (and dried-out grass) falls from his coat. He stands on burning legs and gapes at what he sees, blue eyes wide -- they glow brightly enough they cast eerie shifting shadows at the detritus he has shed -- and then pulls himself together long enough that he can try and process what has happened. He is forcibly reminded of his own ascension with a clarity that is disturbing: and Longstride is not one given to too many moments of introspective clarity.

He makes his way quietly out from under the mangrove, steps careful: like the first faltering steps of a new foal, or staggering in from a brutal and punishing circuit. All around him the beach seems to have changed: not in any appreciable way, but as if everything has shifted slightly one inch to the left. It is an odd feeling, and anyone watching Longstride would see him suddenly bereft of the near-blinding overconfidence he normally wears. He instead looks as though he is finally, for once, shocked at something, as if he has no words, no quick comeback, no quip.

Whatever that was is important, he thinks, and the whole of the beach will start moving in its cycle around him -- ignoring, as life usually does, the sight of just one person out of the cycle. Longstride stands and lets his hair whip in a warm breeze and just watches, trying to figure out what has gone on; he watches the tide roll in, watches his children (and the other Tidewalkers) settle down for the evening. They have not once wondered where he was, and none of them do anything more than throw him a brief smile of greeting.

A few moments later all he can remember is a brief dream of flying -- and then even that is forgotten.