Chapter 138 Pretense
LUCA
I didn’t tell Bardon immediately.
Arya had asked me not to, not because she wanted to hide it but because she wanted to observe it herself for a few days before bringing in external analysis. She didn’t want someone else’s framework applied to her experience before she’d had the chance to form her own.
I respected it.
What I did do was spend a significant amount of time in the library researching Moonborne historical accounts of pregnancy, which turned out to be a body of literature considerably more extensive than I’d expected and considerably more strange.
The Moonborne had been documenting unusual experiences for centuries. The heightened power, yes, that was well established. But there was a category of account that kept appearing in different sources, different eras, described in different languages but converging on similar phenomenology.
The grandmother dreams. That was what one historical text called them. The dreamers didn't always see their grandmothers — though that was common — but the accounts were characterized by a quality of ancestral presence. The sense of being in contact with someone who’d been real and was now something other than real and was reaching back across that boundary.
I read six separate accounts.
Every one of them described the experience as intensifying through the pregnancy. Becoming more detailed, more interactive, more insistent.
Three of them described the experiences as useful. Important information, warnings, guidance from people who’d lived through things the dreamer was facing for the first time.
Two of them described it as destabilizing. The boundary between dreaming and waking becoming difficult to maintain. The dreamer losing the thread of their own present-moment experience in the pull of past ones.
One described a Moonborne who’d eventually been unable to distinguish between the voices of the dead and the voices of the living.
I closed that one and set it aside and sat with the library fire for a while.
Then I found Arya.
She was in the Institute’s preliminary workroom, which had been established in a restored section of the temple near the Moonwell chamber, working with Mira on something they’d spread across three tables in overlapping diagrams. She looked up when I came in, and she easily read my expression even before I spoke a word.
“You found something,” she said.
“Tell me what you already know first.”
She exchanged a glance with Mira. “I’ll come back in an hour,” Mira said, and left.
I sat down and told Arya what I’d found.
She listened without interrupting. When I finished she was quiet for a long moment.
“The one who couldn’t distinguish,” she said. “What happened to her?”
“The account doesn’t say specifically. It ends with her family describing her as—” I paused. “As speaking to people who weren’t in the room.”
“As if the voices of the dead had become more present than the voices of the living.”
“Yes.”
She looked at her hands.
“I’m not there,” she said. “Both dreams were clearly dreams. I woke up knowing they were dreams.” She looked at me. “But the information in them felt true.”
“In what way?”
“My grandmother saying ‘not yet.’ I don’t know what she meant. But it didn’t feel random.” She paused. “And Theron. What he said about watching. About it being what you end up doing.” She looked at the diagrams on the table. “There’s a void mechanics question embedded in that. About where consciousness goes after death. About whether the void—”
“Arya.”
She looked up.
“One thing at a time,” I said.
She exhaled. “Yes. Right.” She paused and shook her head. “Tell Bardon.”
“I thought you wanted to wait.”
“I thought I did too. But the history you found changes the calculus.” She met my eyes. “I don’t want to be the Moonborne who ends up speaking to people who aren’t in the room.”
“You won’t be.”
“I won’t be because we’ll take it seriously early rather than late.” She stood. “Tell Bardon tonight. And—” She stopped. “Tell him not to make it into a research project yet. Tell him I just need him to listen first.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She came around the table and stood in front of me. I opened my arms and she came into them, resting her head against my chest.
“I’m not frightened,” she said.
“I know.”
“But I want to stay on this side of the boundary. Whatever else happens.”
“You will.” I pressed my lips to her hair. “I’ll be here to find you if you drift. Through whatever is required.” I held her. “Wherever you go, I’m the thing that stays real.”
She was quiet against my chest.
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said,” she said finally.
“It’s also literally true.”
“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.” She pulled back to look at me. “Come on. Let’s find Bardon before I change my mind about telling him and spend the next three days pretending to be completely fine.”
“You’re excellent at pretending to be completely fine.”
“I know. That’s why I have to commit to not doing it early in the process.”