The giants were still in their slumber: they made great dreams, vast as oceans, vibrant as forests, beautiful as skies.
She lived in their dreams: from the disjointed ideas and lost memories she wrought a home for herself and adorned herself in magic. From the strength of her own imagination and the sleeping tangle of the giants' thoughts she labored her own beautiful things. She was but one dream, and with the other dreams the giants made she danced and told stories and whispered the secret things that only the children of dreams can know. And so in the fullness of time the dreams became content, and knew all things; the bounds of the giants' dreaming was reached. They labored among the trees and the beasts, and their stories became well-worn and their songs old and familiar, until the ravens came.
When the ravens came they cowered. This new nightmare was not like the dreams before, and their fury tore at the trees and the ground was thick with the flickering leaves of fallen butterflies. The angry shrieking of the birds drowned out the gentle hum of the giants' snoring slumber. They were afraid.
"This is," they said, "the end of the world."
"The giants will awaken," she said to them. "But that is nothing to fear. Not all dreams are forgotten; we must make ourselves remembered. We have forgotten what it is to imagine our own worlds, and have become comfortable here. We must tend the dreams of the giants here, as we owe them for birthing us, and then we will make our own."
Beneath the onslaught of the ravens they toiled; they tended the trees and nurtured the beasts, and felt the great heaving stirrings of the giants as they moved from slumber. Great fissures formed in the sky and the earth.
"Look!" she said. "There we will emerge from this place. The giants are setting us free."
On the day the ravens stilled, the children of dreams stood beneath the broken sky and sang: they sang of evening light and fireflies, and of one another. As the giants began to awaken, the dreams dispersed, as gently as the seeds of a dandelion. The spaces between them grew.
"Goodbye," she cried, and her voice was a whisper swallowed up in the din of the end of the world.
And now to new dreams, her own thoughts say, and to new ideas, and new places unexplored. Do not be afraid: other people are not so strange.
She drifts on that strange wind until the ravens, too, are gone; she feels the final stirrings of the giants as she clings to herself: a dream made real.
She is in a small space, a tight space; her four limbs constricted by some snug sack. Around her, the roar of cicadas and the green smell of the kudzu.
New places, unexplored.
Almost forgot this feeling of wonder.