The Personal Journal of Tovanii Daava, 24th of Ulsivet, 847 AC

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The Personal Journal of Tovanii Daava, 24th of Ulsivet, 847 AC

I saw her in the dream again.

I am sitting on one of the Oldgarden rocks, the ones that look like fingers sticking out of the ground, knuckle lines and nails even. Maybe they were once giant statues that were buried in the Cataclysm, or maybe the dream just makes them look sculpted. I haven’t been back home in many years. From my perch on a fingertip, I can see her, frolicking in the grass, seeming simultaneously like an 11 year child and a 43 year old woman. I kick my legs softly against the cold stone and they are spindly twigs, not the scarred and muscular legs of a unity war veteran and former Silver Nail.

There’s a swarthy man jumps through the field of grass and clover with my sister, possessed here of a sprightliness long lost in real life. His long beard brushes the grass and there is a mirroring effect, the grass from the ground and the grass from his face meeting at an imaginary horizon line, and above that horizon there’s a beaming smile, and a twinkle in cloudy viridescent eyes, and a feeling that the first time this happened he wasn’t here, that it was just Amosen in the field and it was just me, on a rock that was probably never a finger, watching for ghosts or raiders or Imperial troops. A nine-year old trying to protect his eleven year old sister and knowing that if anything actually happened then he wouldn’t be enough to stop it. That was still the case thirty years later, when someone put a crossbow bolt in her head.

Amosen stops to pick a clover flower and hands it to the man she’s with. They both turn to look at me, beaming with happiness. This is all sanitized. There’s no danger here, no death. Not while he’s here. He makes ripples, eddies, that protect me from the nightmares. The nightmares, though, are more real. The nightmares where I see her death over and over. Where I chase her ghost but she always eludes me. In reality, though, I can’t even find her ghost, and that’s the great irony. I’ve been trained so long to hunt ghosts, but never specific ghosts. Of the many, many sins of which the Silver Nails are guilty, I can’t help but think that our greatest was treating spirits as though they were fragments of a monolithic entity. Death strips away most of one’s humanity, but we stripped away any that was left when we called them ghosts, rather than spirits of those who were once humans, humans who loved, fought, cried, fucked.

I hop off the rock and walk away, and suddenly I’m back in a hospital ward. I drop the old man’s hand. His sleeping frame is gaunt, and he’s almost as white as the sheet I bring up under his beard. It is much less vibrant here, browning at the tips. His face bears no expression, no trace of the smile I just witnessed. I stand up and exit the ward quickly, thinking of the first time Amosen brought me to meet the dreamer. Back then it was a curiosity, something interesting to explore with a loved one. Now, it’s an illusion, like the grass horizon. I light a cigarette and head back to the studio, to Corrill. I don’t think I’ll visit again.

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