Private Formless

[Hailyn]

When was it that dreams lost their importance? A realm where anything is possible, where the imagination of the dreamer is the limit to their power of creativity, is it not ideal? Such questions tug at the threads of time for their answers, answers which truly have no definitive place in time to point towards, but they are posited by an entity who has long since forgotten when she became so alone.

Long before the shift from the mystic to the real and the concrete, dreams were a gateway to a world beyond reality, an alternate existence where creation itself could be played with in the minds of those that slumbered. Isolated on their spheres of mud and rock and water from the stars in the dark skies above and beyond, the people of the galaxy that found themselves alone often dreamt of a companion - or perhaps many companions - that would weather their solitude with them throughout their lives. Such strong will to make these beings, these ideas, real was forced into this realm, these dreams, that eventually even these companions longed to be real so that they may grow closer to the ones that willed them into being.

The tale begins as honest, as innocent, as any tale - fragments of the ideas of a companion to end their solitude enticed their dreamers to sleep more, to rest longer. What had been a mere ritual at the moment of physical exhaustion to recover and enjoy fantasies in the night became a world that drew them in even during the hours where they felt rested and strong. These threads had no notion, no concept, of time and they lacked the understanding of how finite the lives of those that weaved them in their dreams could possibly be. Just as innocently as it all began, it began to end when these companions were left alone as their dreamers faded from life and expired - their time up, leaving their imagination to live on in the void of a sort of shared subconscious.

 

[Hailyn]

For ages this continued, more and more pieces flung into this darkness as their creators passed and left behind a legacy of solitude. Thousands of years of a desire to seek out companionship willed into existence a sea of facsimiles, of mere fragments of their dreamer's imaginations, that were weighed down by their will to seek out another. As mass in reality, this will to simply exist acted as the gravitational force that pulled along these fragments, these threads, until they began to collide.

Tens of thousands of years of emotional unloading was amassed in a sea of dreams that slowly began to express a singular desire, a united voice, but it was not until the dawn of a true galactic civilization that this sea would push together ever more - for the dawn of recorded history was not far beyond the realization that spread across the stars that these dreams were anything but truly real. Reason and logic defined the beginning of the anger and the resentment that would slowly infect this sea of longing, for as the idea that these dreams were simply fantasies in the minds of their beholder the true cruelty of the sapient creatures that dotted the stars of the galaxy bled out and were made known.

 

[Hailyn]

Blurry vision was the first memory she could remember, the first time she was molded into a corporeal shape - another resided in this void beside her, but the void itself seemed to change as her vision cleared. There was a soft, colored, down beneath her feet and the infinite expanse was now limited by boundaries of pure white, a ceiling that both hung low and remained impossibly high was above them in a shade of color that she could not yet comprehend.

"Amazing." The voice of the other said, its sound detached from the unmoving lips of its source that had not imagined the motion of speech as they were unable to observe themselves without making a conscious effort to do so. It loomed over her like a shadowy cloud, its body mostly wisps of color and darkness while very solid hands and a vague face gave it shape that held the rest of it together.

"You look just like her."

Suddenly her shape was made firm, hair billowed down past her cheeks but felt as though they had always been there, she could suddenly see and comprehend her surroundings in the way her leering creator could - though she still lacked the understanding of the circumstance she found herself within as a hand reached out to caress the part of her directly below the left of her vision. 'My cheek.' She instinctively thought, her first real thought beyond the simple urge to come into being and obtain the autonomy as the countless dreamers that added to her will had in the past.

She was urged to smile, the features of what was now her face beyond her control while the will of another was exerted over her. It felt good, warm even, and for a moment she felt that, at last, she was both free from her solitude and made whole. The push from that hand against her face, knocking her back to the soft down beneath them, broke that sense of reverie and introduced her to a more primal feeling, one all of her creators once had when they slept for the first time.

Fear.