A Passenger in His Own Dream

12/1/4722

He was not the one dreaming. He knew this the way you know you are falling — not because you decided to, but because the ground is gone.

Shining Fist was dreaming. And Jorato was inside.

The eidolon’s dreams had no narrative, no sequence. Only perception — vast, lateral, simultaneous. Everything at once, sorted afterward. Being inside that felt like being a single page in a book read in every direction at once.

Jorato tried to move. Could not. His body was asleep on the Cestus. The awareness tethered here by the empathic bond had no limbs, no weight, no voice. He was an audience. A coin in someone else’s pocket, feeling every step but choosing none.

Shining Fist stood in the Moutray. Not in the water — in the river’s idea of itself, the way the Moutray existed when no one was looking. The eidolon perceived it as weight — the accumulated force of a body of water ten thousand years old, pressing against everything it touched with the patience of something that never needed to hurry.

And she was here.

The rusalka did not appear. She resolved — the way an image resolves when you realize the thing you’ve been looking at was always a face. She had been the water the entire time. Shining Fist regarded her with the flat clarity of something that had no fear because it had no body to lose.

You touched my fetch, she said. Not in words — in pressure differentials. In temperature. In the grammar of current against manifested skin. Shining Fist translated for itself and the translation leaked through the bond to Jorato: meaning without language, intent without sound.

The fetch was within reach. I examined it.

You examined me. The river shifted. The knot work is my name. The weave is my loneliness. You held both in your hands. What did you learn?

Shining Fist answered honestly. The eidolon had no capacity for deception — not from virtue, but from nature. Lying required a self flexible enough to present a false version, and Shining Fist was a fixed point.

You are grief. You are the act of holding taken past the point where holding becomes imprisonment. You do not know the difference. You have kept things so long that keeping has become your identity, and releasing would mean you cease to exist.

Jorato, trapped in the bond, felt the rusalka flinch. Not physically — deeper than that. Something in her faltered, the way a held note wavers when the singer runs out of breath. So briefly only an eidolon would catch it. Shining Fist had described her perfectly, without cruelty, with the clinical accuracy of a scalpel, and the accuracy hurt.

You are unkind, she said.

I am accurate. Kindness is my summoner’s domain. He is listening. He would be gentler.

And there — for one vertigo inducing moment — Jorato felt the rusalka’s attention swing through the bond and land on him. Not on Shining Fist. On the human consciousness riding behind the eidolon’s eyes like a child clinging to a parent’s back. She found him. She saw him. And what she saw made her do something Jorato had not expected.

She pitied. Not for Kong. For him — for the shape of a man who shared his soul with something that could not lie, could not soften, could not hold him the way he needed because it perceived love as frequency rather than feeling.

Poor creature, she said. You built a companion that cannot comfort you.

Jorato wanted to argue — that’s not true, you don’t understand us. But he had no mouth here. He was a passenger.

I could keep you too, she said. Gently. The way you’d offer a blanket. Both of you. I have room.

Shining Fist stepped between them — not physically, conceptually, closing the bond’s aperture until Jorato could no longer feel the warmth or hear her voice.

No, Shining Fist said. He is mine.

That is what I said, she whispered. About all of them.

Jorato woke to Shining Fist standing at the foot of his hammock, manifested without being called. Its form steady. Resolved. Guarding.

“She cannot have you,” the eidolon said.

Jorato opened his mouth to say thank you and stopped. Because what Shining Fist had said to the rusalka — he is mine — and what the rusalka had said back — that is what I said about all of them — sat in his chest like a stone in still water.

In its iron container the fetch doll wept. Drop after drop.

And Jorato lay in the dark, wondering which of them was the keeper and which was the kept.