smallestopener | Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

Ingress had a brilliant birthday. She’s eleven. Eleven is nearly grown up! It’s also the year when children in the stories she’s read come into their own. Adventures begin, schooling starts, worlds are saved… she can hardly wait to see what will happen next.

Her party earlier was such fun. Door was almost nice to Puck; Ingress had worried a little about that after she invited him. But he was very nice and charming, and Tom was nice, too, and Puck helped Ingress steal lots of roses off the cake while Havelock talked to Tom and Door, and it was brilliant.

She ate far too much icing sugar, but Tom had the peppermint potion waiting for her when the party was over. She feels much better now. And she’s eleven!

It sounds so good in her head. Eleven, eleven, eleven.

She should have asked Mary to stay the night with her, she thinks, as she tosses and turns. She’s never going to fall asleep, even with staying up past her bedtime. Tom and Door insisted she go to bed after she started yawning. They can be so silly sometimes.

She tosses one more time, and she thinks, again, how impossible it will be to go to sleep tonight. Her eyelids flutter and close. It is not long before she’s deep in dreams.

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Gravely, "So you are."

It's not condescension. Not in the least.

But he hasn't stopped watching the shadows himself, either.

"But remember your lessons, Opener. Remember the most important thing about offense."

"You must pair it with defense," she says, and she moves into Boar Rushes Downhill.

She's always loved sword work best of all her lessons.

"Yes."

She's young, but she learns well.

"The fighter who forgets that becomes a dead fighter soon enough. Carelessness will let the shadows grow unhindered."

Or perhaps he said the Shadow. The forest is vast, silent, dream-hazed; words shift in its still air.

She nods, and her shoulders sag a moment before she stands up straight once more.

"It gets tiring, doesn't it? I mean, how do you always stay ready? How do you manage to fight for what you must when you it's such a hard thing to do?"

She'd never ask such a thing in a lesson. She doesn't think about it much. She doesn't need to yet.

But this is a dream, and sometimes you can say things in dreams you'd never speak in the waking world.

"It does."

Still calm; still grave, but there's a deeper sobriety in his voice and his stony face now.

"They say in the Borderlands," he says, "that duty is heavier than a mountain, and death lighter than a feather. But we all must carry that mountain, because the alternative is far worse."

"That is how you fight on, Herald." She's not a Herald yet -- but this is a dream, and one day she will be. "Because that is the price we pay. At times it will be the hardest thing you have ever done to simply carry on, but that price is worth the gain, so it must be paid. And so you will."

"But... even when it's hard," she says, and she slowly begins Apple Blossoms in the Wind, for she knows, even now, that she will be lucky indeed to fight only one opponent at a time.

"Even when you're tired, there's ice cream and butterflies and family and friends and laughter and tea. So you keep walking on."

"Yes." Lan doesn't smile, but sometimes the hard planes of his face lighten a little.

This is not what Lan holds to himself, in the darkest times. But it's no bad thing, for someone else who thinks of happier things than duty first.

"For all of that."

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

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