There was a moment of disconnect as Miria began shouting. His vision blurred and shifted and she seemed suddenly shorter. His feelings hardened and fell away even as he stepped back in shock at the vehemence of her words. The dizzying shift of being, for that moment, the source, centre and target of all her anger left him dazed and confused. He didn’t know what was happening, he didn’t know if she wanted him to grovel on his knees and beg forgiveness or shout back. He wasn’t even certain what she was blaming him for. He had never met her, known her, loved her or trusted her before yesterday. For that matter, she had never done any of those with him either. 

It was only when she paused, and saw him again that he understood the problem. Rising from his position halfway to kneeling (that he did not recall starting), Curdle frowned and ran his fingers over his beard, concerned by the revelation. He was an interloper who could see and hear and feel everything in her dreams. But they were still [i]hers[/i]. He had no control even over who he was now. This might well mean he had no control over how he would leave, or what he might be when he did. But he was spared from worrying about that by the need to address the woman’s concerns. If she acted against him here, he did not think he’d be able to stop her. 

The trouble, really, was he didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything [i]to[/i] say. He’d seen her love a jinni and run from the same. He’d seen her lose a family and gain the one that stole them from her. He’d heard a jinni’s suffering at her father’s hand. There was nothing that could answer that and his fingers curled into fists at his sides as she stumbled and shrank to the ground. What could he do? He knew all this and yet remained ignorant of her name. Messi… Perhaps she was more deserving of that spoken courtesy than anyone he’d ever applied it to, but he’d long since learned that it did not offer much by way of comfort.

He wanted to though, oh, it held him so close that longing to give her something… better… on which to dream. But he could not move. The only sign of his own emotional turmoil was the shifting of his left thumb over his nails, as though that might ease anything.

She broke him from his paralysis with her mention of the urn though. It grabbed his attention and dragged him forward one, then two steps as she spoke of being rid of it. Not when he had only just found it again! Please! “No, messi, please do- not… Dead? No, I…” His expression shifted from worried to confused to unsure. “I do not think...”

How could he tell? He might be. He felt real, but this was her dreaming, her creation. Bringing his hands up, he frowned at them as he opened and closed his fingers, realising belatedly that there was no old ache of worn out joints as he did. Not so real then. But his body, his real body, was in a small hut in the middle of Renna. Was it dreaming too? Was he the only one dreaming? Flying and seeing everything the way he saw magic… Falling into her breath… That was the stuff of dreams. But a human and jinni falling in love, that was fantasy. Never would he have dreamed anything like it. So, it could not only be him dreaming her. But was she dreaming him? Was he alive now only because he existed in her head?

No, no… No! He fought the surge of panic that bubbled up in his chest and made it hard to breathe (did he need to now?), closing his eyes and blotting out as much as he could of his situation now. He couldn’t afford to panic. He couldn’t afford to lose himself. It didn’t matter if she was dreaming or if he was dead or if none of this was real. If it was all he could do, than he needed to make the most of it. He had to keep his head and tell her what she needed to know. The struggle to keep himself together thinned his lips behind his beard and whitened his knuckles, but somewhere, distant, a drum was beating a slow, echoing rhythm, lub-dub lub-dub. And his breast expanded and contracted. Somewhere, his body was resting, lying prone on the floor of a stucco hut and awaiting his return. The certainty settled his nerves. 

He did not dare wonder how he might manage that return.

When he opened his eyes again, they were a little harder, a little clearer. More focused on his own goals than keeping her history from engulfing him. “I am not dead, messi. It may be I cannot say the same tomorrow, but tonight…” How did one describe what he had seen and done that evening? He certainly did not think he could. “I am alive.”

“If… Messi, if you have carried the urn so far already, please do not throw it away now. I would relieve you of its burden, yet I do not know how to escape this place or the binds that keep me in Renna. Will you bring me with you when you wake?” He could not have disguised the tremble in his voice at the last question. If she wanted him to beg, he believed he would. And he was not even sure if her will and memory alone would accomplish anything. He did not know how dream travel worked. But this was his last and only chance. He had given up once already, too easily by far. He would not make the same mistake twice.