Chapter 3: Chapter 3: The Waking Dream – In Which Corina Slips into the Dream Realm

       “Actually,” Corina said with sudden venom in her voice, directing it all at the man across the seat from herself as she lifted her head from her arm, “What I really need is for you to never tell me what to do again. I need you to never speak down to me, touch me, or lead me around like a child.”
       
       The Duke raised both hands in surprise at her tone and sudden forwardness. His countenance was more akin to a prey animal in this moment, than any elegant nobleman. “As you wish, Your Highness,” he said, obedient and polite in his reflexive confusion. There was a certain sibilant quality to his words, though, and Corina frowned. The way his words reverberated against each other was a tell-tale sign that she’d slipped into the liminal world. Again.
       
       Corina pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. No wonder she’d felt so unrestrained and empowered as to take that tone with him. On some level, her subconscious always recognized when she’d slipped over the threshold from reality to liminality, even if her waking mind took a bit to catch up. Holding onto conventions from the waking world only lent itself to frustration and sadness, here.
       
       With this in mind, she took a closer look at the Duke, watching as his outline wavered and parted. Now there were two superimposed Dukes: one bored, with a vague curl in his lips as he looked over at Corina and another, shocked and alarmed, like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Corina reached out with her will, touching first one Duke and then the other with her Dreamweaving power.
       
       In the waking world, her powers were limited to the point of uselessness. Invisible and weak, they could not even work to entertain small children. But here? In the seat of her power? Corina’s will manifested as tendrils of liquid gold, snaking out and impaling both Dukes. The bored Duke sighed, twitching his lips to the side as if he’d experienced a slight static shock as his features and outline came into focus. The taken aback Duke faded into translucency, then shattered when impaled.
       
       It was as she thought, Corina realized as her hopeful what-if of a Duke faded away. The Duke had no vested interest in her. How could he? He didn’t know her, not when she’d been isolated and exiled to Pasior’s tower for the last fourteen years. No one knew her. And she knew no one. A good thing to remember as they traveled and as she was reintroduced to court, Corina reminded herself.
       
       Idly, Corina turned to look through the windows, moving out of and away from her body to do so. Her body remained slumped against the carriage seat, and Corina marveled at the way it felt to be attached to an anchor in a moving vehicle. A new experience, as Corina had so rarely left Pasior’s tower, and Pasior himself had been careful to keep their experimental and educational forays into the liminal realm free of as many variables as possible, so that Corina could learn control.
       
       For those with magic in Farleigh, the mantra of their education was always “control, control, control.” There was no magical aptitude or talent gained without a certain amount of tragedy in one's life. Tragedy of such proportions that it marked a person with the ability to manipulate the Weave often left that person more than a little unstable. Rattled, even. Half of walking the path to become Mage Adept was learning to come to terms with the event that made one a mage. The other half, obviously, was learning to flex a new muscle adroitly and efficiently and effect your will on the weave of the material realm, otherwise known as reality.
       
       Meanwhile, the gilt-trimmed windows revealed a bizarre view. The road through the forest existed in a small space around where the wheels of the carriage touched the ground, but structure akin to what Corina might see in the real world only existed in a small radius around her body, not unlike the light a torch might throw out into the darkness. Beyond the fragile, flickering edges of form and thought was…the true liminal realm.
       
       Today, in this location, the liminal world was a soft, dream-like purple-blue, like lavender blooms bleeding into the dark sky of  an early morning that had already come to pass. This liminal dream realm was also flat, contrary to the deep old growth forest that Corina knew they were traveling through, though the edge of the circle of enforced reality blended seamlessly with the flat plain beyond, somehow. There was no rain here, except as far as Corina’s anchor could force the sensation of the rain around it in the physical world, but that rain did not spread very far and it was more like the memory of the sensation, rather than real rain itself.
       

       Unlatching the window, Corina stuck her hand out into the weather, watching the rain splash against her skin a moment too late, as if it had briefly forgotten that water could, and should, splash. It also forgot to make her wet, disappearing into nothing after that brief delayed impact of water on skin.
       
       Corina made a fist with her hand, always a little upset at how energized and strong she felt when dreaming here in the liminal space. She knew with just a little push on the weave, with just a little flex of magical muscle and will, she could make the rain remember to be wet, to impose the forest she rode through onto the space around her. It was a testament to her training, her control that she did not flex her power for fun, but remained merely content to exist this half-space between realities, soaking up the energy. She was going to need it.
       
       Pasior and Corina had had long talks on the various theories and etiquette of dream weaving. Pasior argued—and now that Corina was thinking about it, she could hear the faint strains of Pasior the Solemn’s gravelly speaking tone floating through the purple mist around her — that there was no such thing as social niceties to follow in the liminal world, only rules of a magical or scientific nature that you must follow to keep yourself safe while traveling through the realm-that-wasn’t.
       
       “But, Pasior,” Corina remembered herself saying, and now her own voice rose up to converse in memory with Pasior’s. “There are creatures in the liminal world, right?”
       
       “Hrrmph. Beasts, you mean.” Pasior stroked his long beard, not noticing where it had been tucked into his belt. “Are you going to practice your pleases and your thank yous for the memory beasts?”
       
       “Perhaps,” Corina had said, not perturbed in the slightest at Pasior’s jab, “and perhaps the creatures that have been seen are not merely beasts. Perhaps they are capable of rational thought, or speech, at the very least. None of these tomes in the staircase have an account of interactions with these ‘beasts’. There has never been an attempt to understand the denizens of the liminal realm.”
       
       “That is because these ‘denizens’ as you call them never stray into the pockets of reality that we create, so there has never been a Dreamweaver able to question them. Hrrmph. But there has never been a Dreamweaver such as yourself…perhaps, with the proper safety measures in place…it could be possible to ascertain if the creatures beyond the edges of thought are beasts or citizens of another plane but—no, no.” Pasior shook his head, grumbling to himself in a way that echoed across the violet plains around Corina’s body. “It is too dangerous, and if you were injured or lost because of these experiments, it would be my head on a pike. No, no, no.”
       
       Corina had always wondered what Pasior had meant, that there had never been a Dreamweaver such as her. Magic did not generally run in the royal line, by virtue of hardships and trauma being kept as far away from the monarchs and their families as possible. But that hadn’t been the subject of the conversation. Perhaps it had simply been a comment about Corina’s difficulties with slipping into the liminal world with such ease as to do it by accident routinely. Like today.
       
       Glancing back at the liminal Duke, who had frozen in place with half a snarl on his face, Corina reached forward to bend the weave slightly and exert more reality in the Liminal Carriage. The image of James Porthland rippled slightly, blurring his image for a moment until the Duke became almost so sharp and real to look at that it hurt Corina’s head to stare at him for too long. She relaxed the golden lattice of the weave with a wince, watching the Duke’s edges soften as images of his physical counterpart phased in with his liminal image. His facsimile now fully synced into the dream, the Duke adopted a relaxed pose with one ankle over his knee. He’d fallen silent while staring at the sleeping Corina across the carriage from him while his book was open in his lap.

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       “What are you planning, you insidious man?” Corina mused, walking back and forth in the carriage between the Duke and her body. “Why did my family send you? Was this a favor? Or a punishment? Hm.” Corina weighed his options in pantomime, holding her hands out like the bowls of the balance scale of justice. “On one hand, the great honor of reintroducing the Princess Royal to society, the dubious power of being her lifeline and only constant companion on a long trip back to the capital, potentially winning her over as a friend.” Corina lowered one hand, as if holding a great weight to illustrate her point to the Duke who was blind and deaf to commentary as he read from his book. “On the other hand…” Corina wriggled her fingers, thinking. “…on the other hand, being sent to the ass end of nowhere to babysit a girl who is completely unknown to Court and to make the ragamuffin ready to be presentable with no guarantees of success and only guaranteed damnation on a failure…you could be being punished.”
       
       Sitting next to the Duke and leaning in to study his face—the face which in turn was studying her own sleeping form— Corina whispered, “Tell me, Your Grace, why is it you that came here?” She didn’t expect an answer from the man on the other side of the looking glass, beyond the thin seam between the dream realm and the material realm. Her breath did not even fog up his glasses as she spoke, inappropriately and intimately close beside him. She received no response as expected, but she did glance down to his hands which were now anxiously tapping a stick of charcoal against the pages of the book.
       
       No, Corina discerned suddenly, a notebook. A journal of some sort. She pressed her lips together, itching to learn what secrets resided in this journal—but the carriage was slowing and the Duke began to tuck the notebook away into his lavish red coat and reach across to wake her so with a sigh, Corina let her mind go blank as she sat back into her body, reconnecting her mind and flesh once more.
       
       “Don’t.” Corina said without opening her eyes, causing the Duke to audibly startle in a flutter of lace and ruffled collar. “Don’t touch me, I’m awake now.” It was so hard to open her eyes after Dreaming, sometimes. Most times, if Corina was being honest with herself. Her whole body felt heavy and clumsy and the temptation to go back to the Dream realm, where she was mighty and alive, was so tempting. Her mind wanted to so desperately go back to the seat of her power, to relish in the heady feeling of bending the Weave to her whims, to escape this dull reality where her bones hurt from the fatigue of simply living.
       
       And yet, Corina focused on the task at hand: making herself presentable before she stepped out into the cold and wet of…wherever they were. Adjusting her heavy, woolen coat-cloak to lay flat and smooth against her, Corina steadfastly did not not ask Duke Porthland where they were. He could tell her if he wished, but she would not ask.
       
       Trying to peer out of the foggy window, Corina inwardly acknowledged that perhaps she was shooting herself in the foot, or cutting off her nose to spite her face by keeping the Duke at arm’s length and refusing to ask him for help. Equally, though, she knew that he had a job to do: to assist her on her way to the capital. And if she was assisted poorly, it would not reflect well on him and his aspirations. He–
       
       “We’ve arrived at Frebeck-by-the-Sea, ma’am,” Duke Porthland announced, interrupting her thoughts and the no doubt tense silence she’d let him stew in. Corina wiped away the clouds on the inside of her window, watching the village below Pasior’s tower swim into view. “We’ve arranged a small celebration to recognize your Anointing here today before we return to Castle Couvell.” He paused, then added stiffly, “We won’t make it to the capital until at least the day after tomorrow, or even several days beyond that, depending on how many stops we make on the way. It was suggested that you may appreciate a more timely celebration, as well as the official one that your parents have prepared for you upon your return.”
       
       Corina smiled, blithe and sweet, at the Duke as he presented the plan to her. It was suggested. The Princess Royal kept her laugh at that purely internal. The implications of his statement were humorous, to say the least: James Porthland clearly did not support giving her a birthday party in the place that she’d grown up in, or at least had not thought of it himself. Tragic, since Corina was going to make the most of it for herself.
       
       The newest Mage Adept did not know many people in Frebeck-by-the-Sea, but the few villagers she’d developed a connection with over the years were near and dear to her heart. It soothed her quietly simmering rage at being forcefully torn away from her home by the roots again to know that there were at least a couple friends she’d likely actually get to say goodbye to personally.
       
       And it was rage that she was feeling, Corina realized, looking mentally inward for a moment. She was furious at being taken away from everything and everyone she knew and loved, again, at the whims of her family. It was not fair, though Corina knew that wallowing in that gnawing sense of infracted justice would not help her in the long run. The long and winding road to finding her place in court had only just begun. So, she took a deep breath instead of letting her fists tremble with anger, letting it out slowly.
       
       “Well,” Corina said presently as the sound of wet boots slapping against the slick cobblestones of the street surrounded the cherub-covered carriage and the beginnings of a fanfare began to bugle deafeningly close to her, “We’d better get to that, then. I would hate to be late to my own Anointing celebration.” Pointing delicately at the door with her slipper-shod foot, Corina raised a brow at the Duke, inviting him to open the door for her.
       
       It had been fourteen years since Corina had watched her mother make that very motion towards someone, but either Jordana Farleigh was still ordering people she didn’t like around with her feet and Corina was able to mimic the movement perfectly, or the sentiment that she expressed was universally understood as the Duke immediately hopped to attention, pushing the door to the carriage open so that Corina could make her grand royal entrance to Frebeck-by-the-Sea.
       
       Could be both, the princess mused, giving herself some credit as she stepped into view of her friends and populace. She kept her head high and her back and shoulders straight as she looked over the assembled crowd. The attendance here was much higher than at Pasior the Solemn’s tower. A small, coy smile played over her lips as she made eye contact with a few choice individuals in the crowd: Sarah, the silversmith’s apprentice who had an eye for the value of enchanted jewelry, Peter, the young tavern keeper who’d inherited the busiest business in town when his parents passed away last fall from a consumption, and Robin, the well-muscled baker who had abandoned their blacksmith’s apprenticeship for something that truly called to them, to name a trio of hardworking friends in town.
       
       Corina had not spent too many idle, wasteful hours with any of them, except perhaps Robin. Mostly their interactions and friendship had grown out of business transactions and the need of moment for good and services into genuine companionship. And still, while Sarah gasped at Corina’s attire, dazzled by her metamorphosis, and Peter blinked in muted surprise at her entrance, Robin just grinned in delight. They were well aware of her bloodline, having talked about it over coffee and pastries long since. There could only have been Corina in the golden, cherub-covered carriage coming from the tower, if anyone asked Robin. Though probably no one did. Despite the popularity of their baked goods, Robin's androgynous nature and refusal to conform to this rural society's expectations of the binary expected of mortals ruffled many feathers. Which was a shame, because Corina admired Robin for those very same traits.
       
       Still, the urge to call renouncing gender entirely a 'blasphemy against the Essences ran deep in the blood and bones of the elders of Frebeck-by-the-Sea. Tradition was paramount here, and since the Essences were without sex or gender, it was considered at the very least unseemly to try to imitate the divine, and at worse, heretical. Corina was pretty certain the Blessed Essences didn't give a blessed damn about it, but what did she know?
       
       The trumpets finished their fanfare and the crowd, which had previously had a growing murmur of interest rumbling through it, grew hushed and attentive. Waiting. Corina abruptly understood: this was to be her first public address as an adult Princess Royal.
       
       Corina took a deep breath, smoothing out the tension in her face and limbs as she let the air out slowly. She took a second deep breath to expand her lungs, to prepare to project. And then a third, just for luck.
       
       And then, folding her hands in front of her, Corina addressed her people.

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