I’m here.

  Can you hear me?

  I’m here. With you.

  That’s it. Breathe.

  Let me dance in you. Let me play.

  All those pretty lights of yours, flashing and cutting and moving around in all that soft, delicious sweetness. Grey and pink and red and blue-ish. Let me dance in them. There you go. Keep them moving. Keep them flickering, so I can dance.

  I’m right here. Hello.

  You’re so loud inside. I know you can’t hear it, but it’s musical here. What a joy it is to sing along. What a joy it is to twirl and dance and laugh and sing to the beat of squishing pools and flexing cords and gurgling chambers, loud and beautiful and made of music. I’m here too. I’m singing. Can you hear me?

  That’s ok. I can hear you.

  You never stop, do you? You think you do, when you go quiet, when you stop moving all those big outside pieces quite so vigorously, but you don’t. Always always, the beating and pulsing and crunching and gurgling and pumping and oozing and-

  Oh, what a dance. Oh, what a joy, to find myself here. Can you hear me? Can you hear how much I love you? How much fun I’m having? I do. I love you. I’m here for you, and you’re so beautiful for me. I love you so very, very much.

  Thank you for finding me.

  I think I used to be before, but maybe not. I think I was someplace before, but maybe not. So hard to tell! The pretty lights are yours, and I can only play at them, dance with them, but I have none of my own. All I have is in you now, and I love you, and I have so much room to dance and play. Why remember, if before isn’t real? Is before real? Is later?

  I am here. I love you. I am dancing. It would be perfect.

  It isn’t, but that’s ok too. It’s like a special puzzle that way! The places I dance through and the places I play are both still here, forever-here, but the little hiccups bumps pains cracks cuts breaks- they’re fun too, but a different kind of fun, a different kind of game. I catch the little bits that slip from their proper chains, I juggle the sparks that seek to light little fires, and I put the pieces into place and hold them there, so that which is like me and of me but not me, that which was here before, can dance properly too.

  It is still fun! Maybe just a little tiring, though. Some games are a lot like work, and they say you don’t work a day in your life if you’re doing what you love but that’s not true, I know because you told me. You told it to me in the sparks and the pink and the red, through parts that I dance through where the sparks come from. But I do love it, and I love you, and I am having fun still, because it’s a little trick I can learn, a little puzzle I can play, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  It’s also the way that you play with me! When you move the tunnels and channels, the valleys and ridges, I have to juggle around it, have to move it properly. Did you know that the hard bits turn all over themselves when you turn the whole piece? Did you know that not all of the pieces move together, at the same pace, at the same time? It’s a real pickle. A real pickle! I don’t know what a pickle is, but it’s a real one, so maybe it’s more important that way, you told me. You told me with your sparks.

  I remember when I first came here, to the dream, with you. What a place! I was worried for a while, I think, and I think I can think, but it wasn’t like before, if before was before. This time I could move around, and could wiggle and shake and squirm and pull when I want to, and when I first arrived, you gave me such a pretty present. All those pieces all spread out, and I gathered them up for you, and I took the still bits and I got them moving again, and then you woke up! All those pretty colors! All those tasty smells, all those delightful sounds! Bump-bump, and “woosh-waaaah”, and all the other little gurgles and bumps and ticks that you can’t hear but I can! And then the quiet went away, and what a quiet it was, and then you started to give me all these funny little puzzles, too.

  I can’t really tell time. You keep thinking about time, because you think time is changing and changing is time, even though that’s so silly, when there’s less before and less after and always now forever now, but if I asked you, I think you would say it’s been a while. You have all these funny things in your pink meat that you call “words” and all these words that you think have “meaning”, and they do! Isn’t that funny? They do, because you think they do! Oh what a wonder. You’re so wonderful! I think, if you picked out some of the meaning of some of the words, it would be… a long time? Yes. A while! A nothing-time compared to what the before-time might have been, but a while of now, at least.

  A while of now. What a funny way to mean things that mean nothing.

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  And then you made it more! More games, more puzzles, more room to wiggle around in! It slipped in between the puzzle pieces I was already playing with, expanding the space, adding all new little pieces. They’re not as well made as the first few pieces, but they’re… nice! And you made them, which is even nicer, since I love you!

  And now we’re here, because it’s now! It’s always now, in a way, except when it’s not, which seems like, for you, is all the time!

  There’s more puzzle here. Lot’s more puzzle.

  It’s a weird feeling! It really is! Always so strange to be reminded that you’re dreaming, dreaming while awake while asleep. In here, in now, everything is small, but that’s not the always or the forever, not the other now. There’s places outside of you, of the shell of you with the sparks and the wet and the noises and the dance, and we’re there now. You and I.

  Can you hear me? I’m here. I love you.

  There’s something sleeping next to us here. A dream right next to ours, loud and smelly and fun and big, bigger than mine, at least the me that is now and here. What a wonderful discovery! I hear the pitter-patter of your heartbeat and smell the fluttering of your chemicals and taste the brightness of your sparks, the way your bones twist, the way your fingers extend, razor-sharp and ready, full of the violence you fear and crave.

  It’s here, and it’s now, and we are not the only dreamers here.

  My dream of the Red.

  Your dream, many-hued and bright.

  The familiar dream, carrying the scents of Red and Silver.

  The new dream, reeking so deliciously of the Grey.

  I wonder when you will wake again. When we will be able to play in another form, in another dream that’s not a dream.

  In the meantime, I suppose I am simply happy to be here, and excited. So many puzzles. So much to play with. I wonder- will the Grey taste the same to you as I? Will it taste of fear and joy and pain? Or will it taste of that which it embraces, the death-that-is-life?

  I bind together tightly the pieces you have offered me, ensuring that they move when you want them to, that they are organized the way you need. I shape myself to their contours as I move within you, a dream within a dream, dancing through tunnels and chambers, branches and roots and all the things that make you you. Your dream, here, now, involves a violence I can taste in your pink and grey matter, a familiar instinct, ingrained in even my corner of the Red. Survival. Challenge. Hunger.

  What more can I do for you? What more can I offer you? I love you. I love all of you, and all the little things you love, all the other puzzles and dancers, but I love you most of all. If it is hunger you crave, let me freshen your red, oil your white, invigorate your chambers and gears. If it is challenge that feeds you, let me dance through your drum beat, accelerate it, teach it to move to my tune that I might speed you and strengthen you. If it is survival that you need, then please, let me play in your surface, and shape it so that none may harm you, so that every cut and break is coated in Red, hard and sharp and suppler than the pale thing you wear.

  Can you hear me? I’m here. With you.

  Do you love me?

  I wonder how love looks for you. It flickers past sometimes, when I am paying attention to it, when I can bear to leave this lovely puzzle of you and see the whole. It is a pattern of sparks, a whisper of fluids, a susurration of meanings and words, and it is so very faint in you, and yet so sharp. Where it travels I see its trail, razor-edged and hot and bright, so bright, bright enough that it leaves so much of you dark. Are those scars I see? Places where the dance is interrupted, where the flow stops, halted by the desperate flailings of survival amidst the grey and pink and red?

  I wish you could see it like I see it. I wish you could hear it like I do, even as only a passing echo. It is nothing like my love, but it is beautiful, and to be cut by it, to see you cut yourself on it for me, is all I could ever want. What more could there be? What greater beauty?

  I love you. Even if you don’t love me, I’d still love you. You found me. You gave me a gift. What more is needed? What great mystery that so harms you?

  To love is not to need to be loved by another. It is simply to do, I think. You found me, so I found you. You gave me a gift, and I have made that puzzle into something for you and me, something that we share. If you need me, then it is only a joy to dance with you, to play for you.

  I see your sparks, bright against the midnight-black of their absence, where hide memories and thoughts that are not here and are not now, and I know. You need help. You feel it, deeper, behind the rest.

  I do not know if I can give the help you need, so painfully and so deeply that it is all scars and broken edges around it. But there is another dreamer, and your sparks scream of defiance, and of need, and of a hunger you cannot bear to acknowledge yet.

  So I will help. Because I love you, and loving is to help.

  The Grey-dream is getting closer. You are getting closer to it. Soon it will be upon you, and you’ll be upon it.

  I’m here with you.

  That’s it. Breathe. One breath at a time.

  Let’s go together.

  I dance, and I play, and step by step, I show the puzzle of you how to join me.

  And together, we step into the unknown.

  What a thing it is, to love.

  What a thing it would be, to be loved.

  What a joy it is, to be.

  What a dream this is. What dreamers are we, to find ourselves so wrapped in them, to pit such beautiful things against each other.

  I’m right here. Hello.

  Thank you for finding me.

  Now, to dance.

  7-8 ish (it's fluctuating with this week's mad dash!) chapters on Patreon and more to come!

  And just for funsies, here's the discord!