---

„Do you want it to be true or a dream?“

„Oh. Is it a nightmare?“

„Not at all. It’s a Dream. Everything you ever wanted coming to you.“

„Dream then, I want a Dream,“ she said.

„It was a summer night, and the place was a fairytale. People? Or angels and demons? Witches and magicians from all the world are coming to have a party: Borderland, border between dream and reality.“

„And if you could have anything this night?“ she asked, her voice catching on smoke from distant fires.

„I want to forget my own name until someone speaks it back to me like they’re inventing it. I want to walk barefoot through the moss until my feet remember they belong to the earth.“

„That’s not a dream, that’s a return.“

„What’s the difference?“

„In dreams you fly. In return, you sink into black, water-soaked ground and discover you were always rooted there. Look—“

And she pointed to where bodies had begun to move around the great fire, not dancing exactly, but finding a frequency that sound bodies make when they suddenly sync to the same invisible rhythm.

„They’re not people anymore. They’re becoming the space between the flames and the darkness. Some of them won’t find their way back until dawn. Some won’t want to.“

„And you? Will you find your way back?“

„I keep three peacock eyes in my pocket from someone whose name tastes like midsummer. Every time I think I’m lost, they remind me that some stories are perfect in their incompleteness. We’re all just moths summoning ourselves to different lights.“

---

„The night has a pulse,“ she said, pressing her palm against the warm earth. „Can you feel it? Or is it my own blood I’m hearing?“

„Both. Neither. The distinction dissolves here, like sugar in rain.“

She watched the fire-dancers, their skin gilded and shadowed, becoming liquid geometry.

„I want to tell you something that happened before it happens. In three hours, you’ll kiss someone who tastes of smoke and futures you’ll never live. Your mouth will fill with words in languages you don’t speak. You’ll understand everything and remember nothing except the weight of their hand on your throat, gentle as a question.“

„How do you know?“

„Because I’ve been living this night in circles, each loop slightly different. Sometimes you wear white. Sometimes the peacock feathers turn to ash in your pocket. But always, always, there’s this moment where we stand at the edge of becoming strangers to ourselves.“

The moss beneath their feet released its green-black perfume, primordial and wet. She moved closer, close enough that her breath became visible in the space between them, not from cold but from the sheer density of what wanted to be said.

„Your body knows things your mind won’t let you believe. Listen—it’s trying to remember what it was before it learned to be ashamed of wanting. Before it learned to count the distance between touch and permission.“

„And if I don’t want to remember?“

„Then you become one of them—the ones who dance until their names fall off like old paint, who wake up tomorrow in someone else’s life, grateful and terrified in equal measure.“

---

The fire dimmed to embers, each coal a tiny universe collapsing. She felt the weight of dawn approaching, not as time but as gravity.

„Your skin remembers everything,“ she whispered, tracing the ash marks on her arms where sparks had kissed her. „Every touch leaves a map. We’re all cartography of moments we can’t quite recall.“

Around them, bodies were remembering their boundaries, but slowly, reluctantly. Someone’s laughter fractured into sob, then back to laughter—the sound of a soul returning to its cage.

„Will you remember this?“

„Memory is the wrong word. I’ll carry it in my bones, in the space between heartbeats. Some experiences don’t live in the mind—they colonize the cells, change your molecular structure.“

The peacock feathers in her pocket had turned warm, almost alive. When she pulled them out, they gleamed with impossible colors—not reflecting light but generating it.

„Keep one,“ she said. „For the next time you need to believe that this was real.“