"The fourth night she stopped waiting for ready and got up anyway."
978 Words
POV: Eve
The dreams had started on the second night and gotten louder each time.
Not the Dreamveil, not the luminous charged landscape where she had met him and reached for him and felt the world shatter from the force of an almost-touch. These were older than that. Deeper. They came in fragments, pieces of a place that felt like memory even though she had never been there, and they stayed with her when she woke, clinging to the edges of her consciousness like smoke.
A garden that was nothing like Eden. Wilder, older, the trees enormous and uncurated, their roots breaking the surface of dark earth in great arching waves. Fruit that grew in colors Eden had never attempted, deep purples and blacks and reds so saturated they were almost brown, and the fruit had names she could feel without being told, the way you feel a temperature before you touch the thing that holds it. Passion. Sorrow. Deep Knowing. The kind of names that told you exactly what the eating would cost and did not apologize for it.
A woman moving through this older garden with bare feet and loose hair and the specific unhurried confidence of someone who had already made every decision that mattered and was now simply living inside them. Not Lilith as she had appeared at the wild edge, sharp and deliberate and assessing. Younger, or maybe not younger but earlier, before the rebellion had calcified into its permanent form, when it was still something tender and new and frightening that she was choosing anyway.
Eve watched her in the dream and recognized her the way she had recognized Lilith's name. From the inside.
This was the before. This was the prototype's life prior to the choosing, the last days of the first garden before the first woman decided that the terms were unacceptable and walked out of paradise into whatever came next. Eve watched her sit beside a dark pool and look at her own reflection and not look away from what she found there.
She had woken from the second night's dream with the mirror so hot against her thigh that she had thought for a disoriented moment that she had fallen asleep with a coal pressed against her skin.
The third night the dream had gone further. She had been in it this time, not watching. Standing in that older garden with the earth dark under her feet and the unnamed fruit hanging heavy around her and the first woman standing across a narrow path, looking at her with Lilith's dark eyes and a mouth that was on the verge of saying something important.
She had woken before the words came.
She was not going back to sleep on the fourth night to wait for a dream to finish a sentence.
She rose slowly, carefully, a skill she had developed over three nights of slipping out from beside Adam's sleeping form. He did not stir. His chest rose and fell with the steady rhythm of someone who had never once in his existence lain awake burning with something he could not name.
The mirror came out from beneath the silk and into her hands and its pulse was different tonight. Faster. More insistent, like it had been waiting and was done with waiting, which she supposed made two of them.
She moved to the edge of the garden's inner space, to the place where the light was most complex, where the glow of Eden's eternal luminescence met the deeper dark of the actual night sky and neither one won. The borderland's energy was not accessible from here, she was too far inside the garden, but she could feel its direction. She was learning to feel a lot of things she had not known how to feel a week ago.
She sat cross-legged on the ground, the earth cool and real beneath her, and laid the mirror flat across her thighs.
She looked into it.
It did not show her the crowned woman this time.
It showed her the older garden. The dark pool. The unnamed fruit and the enormous ancient trees and the first woman sitting exactly where Eve was sitting now, looking back at her through the mirror's surface with an expression that was patient and clear and full of a compassion that had been earned the hard way.
And then the first woman's mouth moved, and this time Eve was awake enough to hear it.
Choose, she said. Not because it is safe. Not because you are certain. Not because you know how it ends.
The mirror pulsed hard against Eve's thighs, warmth radiating upward through her hips and into her belly and lower, a physical sensation that was its own kind of answer.
Choose because you are the only one who can.
The night air of Eden moved across Eve's skin and she felt it, all of it, every degree of its warmth, every current and shift, the way she felt everything now with that hyper-awareness that had been turned on and refused to go back off. Her n*****s tightened against the thin silk. The ache between her thighs that had been her constant companion for four days pulsed in time with the mirror.
She was done lying beside Adam in the beautiful cage counting the bars.
She closed her eyes, pressed her palm flat against the mirror's warm surface, and reached for the Dreamveil with every awakened part of herself. No hesitation this time. No managing the size of the want. She let it be as enormous as it was, let it fill her completely, let it be the thing that pulled her across the threshold.
The night air shimmered.
The Dreamveil opened.
Tonight she would see what the first woman had seen when she chose herself over submission.
Tonight she was ready to look.
- Writer
