She's never really meditated before. She's done the breathing exercises. She's sat still. She's tried not to think of anything. But meditation is more than that. 

At first she thinks she's going to die.

A vision of hell erupts inside her heart, inside her eyes, inside her muscles. Rage and fear and pain just come pouring up out of her like steam through a geyser. Her heart pounds and her muscles clench and she wants to thrash and scream and scream and [i]scream...[/i]

Stroke. Stroke. Midnight wings glide through water in beat with breath and heartbeat. The air is such a harsh mistress to fly in, but the water holds you up.

Her mind is untethered from her body now. It's shaking and weeping and so, so, so tired. It just wants to stop, wants to rest, wants to solve everything and do everything and have it be done. The exhaustion crashes into manic energy like a tidal wave hitting. Everything! Everything you've fallen behind on, Adila! Everything you could be better at, every problem yet to solve, you know exactly what to do - so erupt up and do it! You're ready, you're ready now! Do it! Do it all! And then you can [i]rest[/i]!

Stroke. Stroke. Everything in slow motion, so slow that it's like she's not moving at all. The water is her timepiece - make no motion so sudden it breaks that surface. Glide through the water without the slightest splash, heartbeats slow. She can feel the point in her spine between her heart and the heart of her love. She can feel the hollow place in her mind that was thinking forever of danger.

It's not the meditation, the quiet, the dark that's created these feelings. It's all a product of her buzzing, deafening, talkative mind that's always been so noisy it could never keep its thoughts to itself. If her thoughts are so loud that others can hear them imagine being [i]inside[/i] them. Even her silence had a character like the nothing-hum of shouted quiet. And they all seemed so [i]important[/i]... That feeling, that overwhelmed, shattered feeling, that's [i]always[/i] been there. It's not new. It's [i]normal[/i].

She feels like she's sinking. Not into the water - she still flows as steady as ever through the known unknowns, heart never missing a shared beat. She's sinking into herself. Her head stills and her perspective slides, slides, slides down the long curve of her graceful neck. Without the dominating sense of her so-precious eyes it didn't seem necessary to live inside her head. She wasn't her brain, after all. If she was then how was it that she was watching those chattering, exhausted, energetic, thrashing and uncontrollable thoughts still and fade away like dreams? Her mind came to a halt and still she swam, still she loved, invisible and one with her beloved and the darkness that wrapped them both. She could hear her two heartbeats and knew that was what she was, where her spirit lived, and that wild brain seemed nothing more than an organ for cooling the blood.

She emerged from the water without once tearing its velvet surface, washed clean of all her cares and chaos. She rises glistening in diamond black so clean that not even the patter of fallen water gives her away. She is the love within the darkness, an embracing nightmare so wonderful that it can only be invisible. 

And she shares her gift.

In a motion all the more frighteningly swift for its thoughtless serenity, she lunges into the light for just long enough to knock the braziers into the water, plunging all the gremlins back into the shadows of Dandy and Adila.