Chapter 11.2 - The Ropewalker

That night she dreamed she was walking on a long bridge. It was made of gossamer and glowed with the strange shimmery dust that was still stuck on Claire’s fingers. 

It crossed a deep chasm, high up in the clouds, and stretched so far in both directions that she couldn’t see the end of it. She tried to look down to find out how high up she was but she couldn’t make up the world below it in the mist, and the call of the void made her dizzy and lightheaded. She jolted back, instinctively holding on to the railing for dear life, unsettling the bouncy surface in the process. The bridge wavered for a while, flimsy and immaterial; its substance appeared ready to tear at any moment, without warning, but for some strange reason Claire wasn’t afraid, just curious and filled with the hum of anticipation. 

Somewhere in the distant mist she could distinguish vague shapes and she really couldn’t tell whether they were mirages of the fog or real beings advancing towards her.

She started running towards them but it seemed that the faster she ran the farther they got to be from her, although that was surely an illusion, because she could see their faces clearly by now, she could see their welcoming smiles even from that distance.

Those beings, whoever they were, had something important to share with Claire and she worried in her dream that she won’t be able to get close enough to them to find out what that was.

The closer she got to the midpoint between her and them the more her body became immaterial, she could see through her hands now, and through her feet, and through the bridge beneath them. There was nothing there, she was walking on nothing, she was made of nothing, she was the same essence with the nothing. 

She made a note of that and kept running as if it didn’t matter at all, as if she had finally understood that she was more than that body and that this place responded to different laws than those that ruled regular reality, and what essence she was or was not made of was just a detail. An ever changing detail.

As they approached her, the beings of the mist took on corporeal substance, growing more solid with every step, and by the time they met in the middle she was so insubstantial she passed through them, like wind through a sieve, and found herself behind them, melting into the mist.

She turned around and ran after them, gaining substance in the process, and stopped when she figured out what their message was. She played with her bodily state for a while, walking back and forth on the bridge to turn from solid to immaterial and back, and when she felt confident enough that she could turn her body solid at will she walked into the mist, eager to find out what was hiding inside it.