The Return of the Traveler King
On the eastern shore, a silver-cloaked figure walked to the beat of chilled spray and squawks of puffins. The locals, creeping from their warm beds as dawn poked through autumn clouds, mistook him for a ghost dressed in grey, haunting the red sand shores. He seemed more mist than form.
Except for the glint, as that of a watch catching the light, of a silver hand, the figure’s left, which was held against his heart; a metal hand in a fist.
Silver eyes looked out over the ocean but watched another scene, far to the west and a time past. Leading his people on a hunt, voices raised in song, as they chased the white stag. He, on the back of a great elk, bounding between birch and popular, pine and aspen.
When the humans came. Appearing from a dark crack which formed in a clearing, they stumbled out, all colour and wide eyes, loud voices and hands raised in frightened supplication as the fey party approached, slower, as if handling small rabbits.
He had traveled for a thousand ages of mortals and still, he had not found his dream. Not even the fabled Book of Dreams. It was as lost as his people were in the scurry and scamper of mortals across the landscape. Building cities, towns and trains. This place was still slow but even the salt of the air did not quite smell the same. He sighed, mourning the passing of an age and his failure at finding it again. He’d hoped to locate the Book so he could teach the mortals who understood only the written word, what truth was. The scent of wet cedar after rain, the lightning crackle over white rock cliffs, the cat-whisker press of moss between toes. All he wanted was to share stories of the world but his people were gone.
He turned his gaze to the present, toward the fishing village of salt-crusted shanties in peeling paints of red, blue, green and yellow. Lobster traps sat between empty barrels and landed canoes, it was still so early few doors had cracked open. Only a few humans and their hungry hands were yet outside, shuffling about. Pointing and whispering in his direction. He ignored them and bent down, caressing long fingers over the sharp barnacles on the rocks. When he stood, the sea waved and he smiled, a half-moon and bent to its fingers. He caressed the water, sluggish and dark with fishing nets and spills. It sparkled and laughed; tossing a pearl of gratitude to his back as he strode away. His flesh hand caught the pearl as it soared in the air. It was warm and smooth. As he pocketed the gift the sea wished him a happier time.
He paused at that and snapped his fingers with a chuckle. No, perhaps not all was lost. He still walked. He still breathed. With a whistle and a lighter tilt to his head, he strode away once more, but quicker now, with purpose. He had a Behind him, the barnacles shone with a glitter and crackle of more life than they had seen in decades.
The king was here, they crinkled. The king has returned.
The world would begin to grow again. In silence, in secret the stories would hum, passed from ear and thumb, heart and foot. Even the mortals, so taut with their clocks would catch the whispers. Their children would grow with a wonder for the night, the moonlight and sunny streams. The king had not found the Book foretold, but he’d walked and walked, and to every corner he stopped, he’d left a song of old.
Finding Our Dream
No matter where we all go, we dream all our lives. We dream while we work, we dream while we play and we dream most of all; while we sleep. When the veil is at its most thin and we have shed our skins in deference to Morpheus and thousand lands he straddles. The lands of wonder, magic and beauty. The lands of horror, danger and death.
For too much of our lives, once the clothes of childhood have left, do we seek and seek for a dream, a wish, and it is a futile search. For those dreams are drawn out of childhood and once childhood is lost, like anything forgotten, it is not easy to find again, if at all. Even when we return to the place where the dream began, time will have changed it, the land will have moved left us behind like we left our childhood.
What we don’t realize is this dream is no more tangible than the reality we live in; if we only pull back the veil. Behind it we will find reality is the dream and dream is the reality. We are always, ever living our dream, just not the way it was planned when we left the clothes of childhood behind.
See, as children we run, we laugh, we start things, we end things and we leave things in halves. We catch the moment, like a firefly in our grasp and we dance. This is the dream we seek.
It is not bought, nor sold, nor built, nor grown; it lives within us all, always. Sometimes it just takes a bit of walking to find it again and usually, it will take us right back to childhood again.
So if you’re feeling as if nothing works, as if nothing moves but the world around you, even as you stand still, hop back to childhood and find a memory left in your old coat pocket.
There, you will find a pearl of thought and memory. That is dream.
ARR ~ Moony
