Rose Blumen ~ Exogignesthai

(Rose)

Nightmare saw a rose petals salamander wandering not far from our new camp.

Possibly an old farm was standing there many years prior. A building made with rocks instead of bricks or concrete.

In the southern sky, I can clearly still see Eldorado, always glistening, shimmery.

Nightmare stretched, making some of her joints pop loudly, then grabbed our best knife, and ran outside.

One big lizard’ better start running fast.

Soon, I can’t hear anything but my thoughts. And Blume humming something in the back of our head, playing with other thoughts. She’s trying to assemble other invisible elements, different thoughts and information.

Both pairs of wings are asleep in a corner of the dark and cold room where we slept ourselves.

I piled up the dead moss, lichen, leaves and branches I could gather around.

I focus Blume’s power in the tip of my fingers and snap them. Sparks ignite the undefined piece of paper or cloth below, and the fire starts warming me up.

I think I have a strand of grey hair that already begins to turn white.

Seeing it makes me wonder how old I’ll be when I meet my fate for good.

The first Rose was about 82. But she was someone else, in a very different world.

At the very least, if there are no more gods to put down for a fair while, I can hope to have a life expectancy going beyond two years this time.

R – Blume?

B – Hm... I’m sleepy... I need to repair myself as well... What is it Rose?

R – What happens when I next die?

B – ... Oh Rose, you’ve gone full circle again.

She told me a few times that I’m like a broken record sometimes.

But Blume isn’t in the mood to play with my melancholia today. She shrugs it.

B – When you die... We’ll cross that bridge when we reach it.

Oddly enough, her foul mood today and her reply make me smile.

~

I’m still awake but dozing off by the fire when my sister returns.

I help her to drag the beast she caught inside the room, and hang it up.

She casts a spell underneath its head, and all the dripping blood falls not onto the ground but into a bubble of air. It’s like a perfectly invisible balloon that slowly collects the fluid.

As night has already fallen, we leave it to bleed out and cool down while we go to sleep.

Nightmare’s head and my forehead touch as we fall asleep.

She rarely brings me true nightmares now. It still happens from time to time, but I think she’s just checking that this old root of hers doesn’t shrink and atrophies completely.

There’s evolution through repeated patterns and generations that occasionally mutate.

And there’s evolution through slow but steady shifts in one’s psyche or metabolism. I forgot the names to differentiate the two and feeling sleepy doesn’t help.

When we sleep with our heads close to each other, I mean very close, sometimes I can see her dreams for a short while before falling asleep. It appears like a glow in my head, where her is. It’s like a computer screen, hazy.

And if I focus on that activity, I can look closer and closer, until the cloudiness and noise become a clearer movie of what she’s dreaming.

It’s shapes and colours without context nor logic most of the time.

But often, I can see anatomical structures and tissues, molecules of organic chemistry and metabolic pathways with varying organometallic catalysts. Folding of proteins varying rapidly, and assembly of different aminoacids into chains.

She’s dreaming about biology. How to reshape bones and muscles, how to design something, and make it sustainable out there.

And sometimes, I see herself and myself in her dreams. It’s oddly hard to recognise myself in her dreams, as I don’t look at all like what mirrors show me of myself. Not at all.

The woman she sees has much longer and frizzier hair. A more tattered skin, like centuries old book leather.

But she wears a smile that does look familiar to me. With a warmth and softness she ended up appreciating over time.

Rather than me warming up to her over time, she learnt to see what she couldn’t at first.

Dreams are always interesting to read. I can there understand her innate taste for them. Furthermore as she couldn’t dream by herself alone.

It transformed her, but clearly she enjoys having these two layers of consciousness now.

The dream I’m peeking into fades as I fall asleep myself as well.

~

I had a weird dream. Melancholic, but I don’t think Nightmare had anything to do with it.

The kind of dream that makes you feel really weird for a painful moment as you wake up.

N – What was it about?

R – ... A choice, I guess you could say. I felt I had been given the opportunity to... go back in time. To go back to my life in the old world, in 1925. And thus the possibility to make everything I’ve lived since here, but a dream soon forgotten.

Have I dreamt of being a butterfly...

N – What did you chose then?

R – ... I will tell you, at a later time.

Nightmare doesn’t like that kind of teasing at all.

Me and Blume, we do.

~

Nightmare goes to put the large orb of blood on the side. It’s a pristine glossy sphere. It has the beauty of a mirror perfectly polished, and its expected rich colour of haem.

Then Nightmare works her other kind of magic, knife in hand. I assist her.

Soon all the venison is neatly hanged to dry, cleanly cut. The skin is drying aside for a future coat.

A piece of muscle in-between her teeth as a snack, Nightmare separates all the organs and tissues neatly. She shows great interest in the liver.

I pack what will be carried raw and begin smoking the filets.

I understand now, looking at her, that there’s really far more than just efficiency in butchery to her. The way she looks at the tissues she’s precisely cutting, I can now understand she’s studying.

She shows her passion in the way she studies how muscles are wrapped and arranged in there whilst she cuts them. She’s not a hungry hunter and butcher, no matter how proficient.

She’s a passionate biologist, far above everything else.

R – Found anything new or whimsical to it?

Night replies without losing focus of her hands nor gaze onto what she’s doing.

N – the scales that turn into petals are an interesting hybridisation. Aside that, it’s pretty much like a common European salamander.

A 200kg salamander though. But nothing unusual for its kind inside.

R – I guess it is a common salamander for the area.

N – Pretty much yes.

R – I wonder where it originates from? I haven’t noticed rose bushes around so far.

B – I guess any garden where a being-like-us, a rosebush and a salamander nest have met could have been the start of this.

N – Out of the sea of chaos, it’s a cute sprout, isn’t it?

Nightmare smiles. Below her hands, the bones are laid bare.

She licks the fat out of her fingers. I chuckle.

~