It's a typical night for Zillah, which means it's towards the dawn hours when she's finally hitting the time she sleeps. The surroundings of the woman are vague as to location, but there are tall evergreens and a mountain, fires burning in the distance. Not threatening, not yet, but the heat of them can be felt against her skin. There are snips of music, sung by a voice as deep and rumbling as the sea, but completion of the song evades her. In the mis-mash of her dreamscape, the Brooklyn Bridge is just off to the East, and to the west is a looming pyramid.
A growing sense of .. something .. something rising, echoes of the ocean, of surf, waves crashing against the shore, begins to filter through the dream. Innocuous, and not at all threatening. There's something missing, though. Slowly, gradually, small things begin to stand out. Notes in the fire's distant roar are absent; phrases of music are lost; the Bridge itself seems somehow diminished, out of place, alone and without its proper situation; shadows whisper about the base of the pyramid.
At first, it's only the sounds that draw Zillah's attention. It's been too long since she's heard the ocean's crash, so long that the memory of it was something lost to her. But it comes back, and fills her up. Partially. It's that sense of being filled that makes her realize that other things are missing. A crackle of fire that isn't given fully, clips of music missing like a worn out cassette. When she turns and sees the Bridge missing context, her head cants. "That's not right," she murmurs to herself, even as she looks over sholder towards the pyramid. A furrow of brow, as she reaches out to try and find those missing sounds on the breeze.
The swelling of the waves underfoot, because they -are- underfoot, rises up, subsides, rises, subsides, but as Zillah reaches, they reach back, glimpses of ghost ships, of weed dangling from rotten spars like tattered curtains swaying in the current, lost, alone, forgotten in the dark. The whispering of the shadows deepens, takes on the cadence of voices, lover to lover, friend to friend, parent to child, more, secrets softly spoken in the night.
How did she end up in the ocean? It's a brief, fleeting thought. Too fascinated by it all, her ink-dark fingers reaching out for the waves. Fingers reaching to wrap around those floating bits, the dance they do on the tides. Her forked tongue flickering, tasting the air around her, as that mood ring on her finger glimmers darkly. Something half-forgotten as well, despite recent remembrance of it. Ears grasping at secrets, trying to follow along with conversations that are not hers.
Lost, all of them. Everything lost. Pieces missing. Lives unfold, broken lives, wives leaving husbands, children dying young, the aching emptiness of the holes left behind. Something glimmers in the darkness of the sea, deep, deep down below the last vestige of light, the inferno of the forest flickering in its endless hot/cold roar -- gaps, missing pieces and all.
The hint of presence, of glimmering, primordial power, is all too seductively -right- when Zillah reaches for the secrets, and the more she reaches, the more the lost, the forgotten, begin to flock to her. Pieces of stories, snippets of a life, but in the dream it's clear that they are only waiting to be hers -- to belong again. To have a place again. She can keep them, she can remember them, if only she can find the power.
It's something she's all too familiar with. That sense of being lost, of pieces of life snatched away. Memories. People. Things. Loves. Zillah's felt that emptiness, and she rails against it every day. Grasping on to the memories that try and slip away from her. Reclaiming some things, with an unending hunger for it. That day in the bookstore, where one of Kip's books were torn into pieces, and the focus she put into remaking it, in reclaiming all those stories that would otherwise be lost, if it wasn't for her.
Patron Saint of Velvets. Of Girls Who Wander By Mistake. Of Lost Things. Zillah feels the power in it, the draw. Those black, long fingers grasp what she can, hold them tight. Kindred, these lost things. And much as she does with her own newer memories, she focuses on them. Draws them in. Does all in her will to keep them hers.
The power -wants- to be claimed. It wants to be remembered, to be known -- to be recognised. There's a transcendant quality to holding it, to grasping it tight within her dreaming will, her dreaming soul; a deep-soft-soaring sense of uplifting, of comforting assurance, of absolute and utter certainty that -this- is real. This is true. This, this kernel of herself, this echo of primordial memory, this is where she is meant to be, what, who. The hunger to reclaim the lost is right, because that is her role -- she keeps what others toss away. She holds what falls between the cracks. The emptiness inside of her, the yawning gaps of memory, her lost and fractured life, are just as they should be: open, and waiting to be filled.
Who is Zillah, to deny such things? To deny herself?
She does no such thing. The shadowsnake opens herself up to it, to the power and that feeling, letting certainty fill her in a way that it hasn't since the day she knew she belonged to the Moon. This claiming of power, of memory, of a part of herself that was lost and just waiting to be found. She pulls it all into herself, like a mother to a child, like a lover to another, and makes it hers. The dreaming soul of her knowing what her waking self will - this is hers. This is what she is. The Keeper of Forgotten Things.
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