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peacefulexplorerHe knows it is a dream when he opens his eyes and breathes the air, hot and dry and granular, and closes his eyes again to the blazing familiarity of the suns that shower him with photons in duplicate. He knows the spread of alien sand in its spectrum of oranges and yellows and golds, the watery white cast of the cloudless sky, the trails of dust that hiss over his clothes and his hands and his face and the unkempt fringe of his hair that is long like it was years ago, in every rush of arid wind.
He knows it is a dream because for the first time since Manhattan, Daniel dreams of Abydos.
The sand dunes are infinite in context; finite here, in the parts of his mind that haven’t been compartmentalized by quiet avoidance of unavoidable memories, an impulse shadowed by the inescapable nature of his old grief. Abydos exists as he best remembers it, appearing uniform but merging, seamless, from one sheen of melancholic gold-bronze to another.
Everything is bright here. The suns rebound their radiant energy off the sand’s receptive topology in vast, sweeping arcs. Even here, in the shaded slope of the pyramid’s entrance, Daniel can feel the thickness of the atmosphere in xeric acuity. He breathes it in with lungs that only exist for as long as this place does, which is objectively not very long at all. Dreams here are distorted, but their dissipation upon waking is axiom.
He doesn’t want to look behind him at the pyramid’s interior, nor does he want to see the smooth silvered arch of the ‘gate he knows lies within, imposing and inert with its chevrons that are dead, unlit. He doesn’t want to think of the doorway they thought they closed that he knows will open again with disastrous results before it swallows him back to Earth in a flare of vortical bright-blue, a dragging backwards slide away from everything. Away from home. His personal definition of the concept shouldn’t be so transient and dead, but here it is, in flat defiance of the typicalities.
Quiet footsteps solidify the ache of familiarity. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't. He knows who he'll see.
His eyes slide closed, and the pharyngeal constriction of grief is almost too much to bear.
He knows it is a dream because for the first time since Manhattan, Daniel dreams of Abydos.
The sand dunes are infinite in context; finite here, in the parts of his mind that haven’t been compartmentalized by quiet avoidance of unavoidable memories, an impulse shadowed by the inescapable nature of his old grief. Abydos exists as he best remembers it, appearing uniform but merging, seamless, from one sheen of melancholic gold-bronze to another.
Everything is bright here. The suns rebound their radiant energy off the sand’s receptive topology in vast, sweeping arcs. Even here, in the shaded slope of the pyramid’s entrance, Daniel can feel the thickness of the atmosphere in xeric acuity. He breathes it in with lungs that only exist for as long as this place does, which is objectively not very long at all. Dreams here are distorted, but their dissipation upon waking is axiom.
He doesn’t want to look behind him at the pyramid’s interior, nor does he want to see the smooth silvered arch of the ‘gate he knows lies within, imposing and inert with its chevrons that are dead, unlit. He doesn’t want to think of the doorway they thought they closed that he knows will open again with disastrous results before it swallows him back to Earth in a flare of vortical bright-blue, a dragging backwards slide away from everything. Away from home. His personal definition of the concept shouldn’t be so transient and dead, but here it is, in flat defiance of the typicalities.
Quiet footsteps solidify the ache of familiarity. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't. He knows who he'll see.
His eyes slide closed, and the pharyngeal constriction of grief is almost too much to bear.
