Chapter One: Paper Doll's Voice
"Don't take any more Aleve, sweetie!" Her mother called up the stairs, but Emily didn't bother to answer with anything other than slamming her door.
Her mother doubted her good sense, obviously. She knew she'd hit her limit of Aleve. For the night, at least.
As she pushed in the lock on her doorknob, she could have sworn she heard her mother shout something else up the stairs, but she couldn't make out the words.
It didn't matter.
Emily pressed the button on her alarm clock that turned the alarm on, checked it to make sure it was set for 6 AM. She then went on to turn her floor fan on HIGH. The resultant noise would help her sleep, she knew. She usually couldn't sleep without a fan going.
She managed to shuck her clothes and change into her pj shorts and sleeveless shirt without turning on a light.
Light hurt so much right now. She'd never had a headache like this one. It made her feel queasy, and every time there was a loud noise or any light, her headache intensified.
Was this what it was like to have a migraine?
The knowledge that the gift had been granted to her, her wish from two centuries earlier, made her smile.
She remembered two hundred years ago, when she had been little more than five. In those days, her gifts would have come in laquered boxes wrapped in beautiful cloth and tied up with expensive silk ribbons.
Now, her gifts came cloaked only in magic, though the giver of thisb one, Arik, had cojured up a semblance of those days by wrapping a tiny magical doll and a mirror in a laquered box, wrapped all 'round with heavy hand-made paper and tied up with velvet ribbons.
She stared at the doll. It looked porcelain, but no dollmakers would paint porcelain blue. And what dollmakers could make hair of blue feathers to make the doll's hair?
"Do you like the doll, Magesse Melisande?" Arik asked. "Do but say you are well pleased with her, and she will never leave your side."
"It is a beautiful doll," she conceded. "But I asked for a doll-girl to play with and never leave me when I was but an infant. A little doll might have been an appropriate gift at that time, but I am a bit old for dolls."
Arik glared. "You are not as old as you think, and you are certainly not so wise."
"It is a doll, Arik. A doll and a mirror. This is the celebration of my second century as a Mage-- I neither play with dolls nor have much use for physical mirrors. I spin mirrors of air, now."
"You are a fool, Magesse. You should know by now that trying to condescend to someone who is your better is a vain task." Arik sighed. "I am a master at the art of making Constructs, and have been working upon this gift for you for some time. The least you could do is actually inspect the gift."
Melisande sighed as well, and looked to her mother.
Her mother's blue brow creased as she tilted her head to one side and smiled. That blue-black hair, coarse like an oriental woman's, swayed a bit.
Suddenly, Melisande wished that she could touch the clock and make time spin six centuries ahead, so that she would finally be an adult by Mage standards. She tired of her parents preferring to be her mouthpieces, tired of people treating her as though she were still an infant.
For Rain's sake, if she were to give up her all her magic and the bond to Water in this very instant, she would become a sixteen year old Silent, rather than dry bones and dust, like everybody else in the room.
"Magus Coren, I gifted your daughter with what she requested so long ago. You are aware that the clause against Construction went invalid almost exactly a century ago, yes?"
"Perfectly aware. The Fire Forum wrote it in the sky all over America. The Senate of Air was furious. Whole idiot thing damn near sparked a war."
Everybody in the room, Melisande and her mother included, laughed dutifully at Coren's pun.
"Well, that was when I could begin work on Melisande's bicentenial gift. I timed all the work exactly so that the gift would come into fruition at this time."
Melisande gasped. "Are you saying you took advantage of the American legal system and built me..."
"A construct? But how can you be surprised? That is what I am famed all over for, my dear."
Emily fell asleep quickly, once she obeyed the childish urge to pull the covers over her head.
Sleep, however, brought her neither respite from the migraine nor any real peace at all. It was summer, and she had pulled a thick comforter over her head.
She periodically woke up either feeling as though she were suffocating or as though she had a fever.
Once, she had thought the mirror across from her bed rippled, and that certainly didn't help her mood.
"How? How do I activate it?" Melisande demanded. To own one's own Construct... "Where is it?"
"The Construct isn't here." Arik smirked at her. "Creating a Construct in an atelier from start to finish, crafting flesh as well as magic, then forcing the Construct to ripen in an unnatural incubator, like a cucumber in a jar of vinegar, produces an inferior result."
"I don't understand... Ripen? Incubator? Aren't they ready when you make them?"
Arik rolled his eyes. "There are so many fallacies about Construction. So many. Of course a Construct isn't ready the instant you make it! That particular fallacy, that exact one, is why so many Mages have failed to produce a single Construct."
"Are you saying that they have to develop? I've never read that in a single treatise!"
"Then you have been reading the wrong treatises.Trust me on this, Magesse. Now, instead of incubating your construct in an unnatural setting, I decided to let nature do the incubation for me."
"What did you do?"
Melisande pondered the legal meaning of his actions. If he had gotten too out of line, America would prosecute and break the ties that allowed Mages to live on this particular continent. And as this was the last continent short of Austrailia to allow the Mages to live there...
"I helped a previously barren woman, Magesse. No, no worries, nothing expressly illegal!"
"Are you telling me," her father snarled, "that you implanted a construct in a woman and told her that you'd performed a fertility spell?"
Melisande considered the possibilities of that. "So, you're telling me that your construct has been incubating inside a human embryo."
"Do you want the damned thing or not?" Arik snarled. "Unless I misgauged the timeline, you have a very, very short window in which you can awaken its Purpose. And if you neglect to act in that window, the Construction will fail and the incubator will die."
Her mother made a thoughtful sound. "A very clever trap you have us in, Arik. We either claim the Construct and an American woman makes a claim against you, or we wash our hands of the whole affair and break the Agreement."
Melisande snorted. "That really isn't a choice at all!"
"Before you tell my daughter how to claim her... gift, you must renounce all connection with the Gathering of Mages."
"I renounce all connection to the Gathering of Mages."
Melisande smiled at him. She would have a Construct of her own, soon!
Melisande listened carefully to his instructions, then hurried off somewhere private to follow them.
The world is quiet, except it really shouldn't be, because she is sitting on a blanket at the beach, watching the waves roll onto shore.
She knows this place: it is the beach her family took her to for her twelfth birthday, some place down in the Gulf of Mexico. She never actually saw the beach at night, but she knows, the way you know in dreams, that this is it.
She hasn't been here since she was twelve. She looks down at herself, and notes that she is certainly not twelve.
The water looks black in the darkness, black and inviting.
It is a stupid thing to do. She shouldn't even be out here, really. The tide could change at any minute, and she could drown.
But she does it anyways. She slips the nightgown off, not caring that she isn't wearing a bathing suit under it, not caring that the water is going to be freezing.
The water is freezing, she discovers, as she steps into it. The waves reach the shore with a gentle rolling motion in the low tide, causing foam and sliding sand to tickle her feet.
She resists the urge to giggle.
After a while, her legs acclimate to the cold, so she ventures in deeper. As she moves in, she finds another way the dream differs from memory: there was never a drop of this magnitude on the beach she visited.
And eventually, the water reaches her chest. Because almost her entire body is now submerged, she acclimates faster.
Within a moment or two, she has acclimated, and begins to swim in earnest.
She goes underwater, the salt stinging her eyes briefly, but she soon gets used to that, as well. She forces herself to paddle and kick, her hands cupped. Briefly, she thinks she must surely look like a windmill.
She swims for what feels like hours, sweeping through a dark sea that seems to roil with an inner energy.
At length, she begins to tire. She heads back to shore, but she is still some distance away when her lungs begin to burn and her arms and legs feel like lead. She forces herself to keep going, but it soon becomes obvious to her that she will not make it.
She has to rest, but she really can't afford to rest. She keeps going until she can't really move her arms.
She begins to hear the sea for the first time in the dream. She wonders what that means, but soon just gives up on moving and understanding the crazy dream.
Just as she begins to sink, somebody grabs her from behind.
"Don't worry," they whisper in her ear. What with the roaring of the sea and the quietness of the voice, she cannot tell if the speaker is male or female. "I've got you. I won't let you drown."
They pull her close to them; she can feel their skin against her own. And soon they are propelling themself with their feet. At length, they reach the shore.
Emily rolls herself onto her back and takes a deep breath, comforted vaguely by the feeling of dry sand beneath her back, even as it itches.
There is a sudden weight on top of her, and she is aware that her rescuer is straddling her stomach.
"Thanks," she mumbles."
"Are you sure you're alright?" Her rescuer inquires. She still cannot tell the person's gender. Given their apparent strength, she assumes male.
"Fine, I think," Emily replies. She still feels faintly out of breath.
"I'll take you back to your beach house, if you like?"
Emily becomes aware that she should be afraid. In real life, she would be very afraid right now. But this is a dream, and she is in the dream, that hazy emotion that has teased her throughout the dream seizes her now. "I'd like that."
The stranger accompanies her all the walk back to her beach house. There are times she slips in the sand, and the stranger helps her up.
Once, she trips over a little mound in the sand and goes sprawling.
"Why aren't you wearing any clothes?"
"Oh... that's right..." She rememebers the nightgown. She left it near where she went swimming. She begins to stumble to her feet.
The stranger places a hand on her shoulder, pushing her down, then slips to his knees beside her. He pulls her face towards his. Their lips meet.
It feels nice. She's never been kissed before, except in that sorry little attempt at a french kiss she once shared with Elton. And that disgusting kiss lasted for all of a couple of seconds.
Somehow, her mouth opens wider and the stranger's tongue is inside her mouth, tasting her. She probably doesn't taste very good, considering how much salt water she wound up drinking.
Their tongues touch, and that feels good, too.
Soon enough, the stranger is straddling her again. He pushes her backwards, his own back arching as he does so. His chest, she notices, never connects with hers.
He breaks the kiss, sliding his soft, soft lips down along her chin and neck, until he reaches her chest. He kisses the hollow between her breasts, his hands reaching to cup them even as he kisses her on the lips again. His right thumb massages her left nipple.
She gasps at the feeling, feels herself blush. A warm sensation is building in her lower body.
And then his lips connect with her right nipple again. The warm sensation in her lower body intensifies.
She reaches out aimlessly. Her hand connects with his chest and she blinks.
"Greedy, aren't we?" The stranger asks.
"You're... you're a girl!"
"Yes. My name is Melisande, if you must know."
"But I'm a girl! And I'm not--"
But Melisande quickly derails her train of thought by running her hands along Emily's body, reaching her navel and then going lower. Melisande begins to tease Emily, slipping her fingers in between her legs and rubbing, then quickly withdrawing.
Just as Melisande places a kiss on her navel and begins to move lower, a loud beeping sound intrudes on the dream.
Emily woke and stared at her alarm clock. It was six AM, according to the alarm.
She blinked. Weren't dreams only supposed to last two hours?
Emily reached out and turned on her lamp.
Her skin felt clammy, and she realized that she was sweating. She rubbed her head, and discovered that her sweat was blue.
No way.That was impossible. She was seeing things, it was a reflection of the blue paint on her walls. That had to be it.
She struggled to unwrap her legs from the cocoon of comforter, managed it, and stood up. She walked, rather unsteadily, her heart beating quickly, a vein throbbing in her head, to her bathroom.
The bathroom light clicked on and she stared into the mirror as she brushed her teeth.
No blue paint here; the sweat pouring from her entire body really was blue.
"I've got to cool down," she murmured, panicking. She'd heard of people sweating blood before, but this... Was this even physically possible? Was it some sort of heat stroke or something?
The cold tap turned all the way, making that harsh squeaking sound. The showerhead sprayed cold water, and she closed her eyes as she stepped in.
The cold water felt so good, so she just stood there underneath it, the way she had just stood underneath the hot water in the shower yesterday morning.
Might as well actually wash, she thought, so she sighed and opened her eyes.
That was when she noticed the blue pouring down the drain.
"It's just Blake playing a trick," she told herself, reaching for the soap. "He poured blue hair dye into the showerhead again. I'm going to have to kill Jimmy for teaching that to him."
She found the washcloth and applied the soap, plotting what to do to Blake in return. Her skin was going to look pale for weeks, if she even managed to get the dye off anytime soon.
But as she scrubbed herself, she noticed something odd. Her skin... seemed to be wiping off. Hell, forget wiping off, it seemed to be dripping off, running off her body in rivulets, just as liquid as the ice-cold water the shower head was dumping on her skin by the gallon.
She almost screamed, but then managed to calm herself down. She'd had a freaky dream and she'd just woken up. Obviously, she was just seeing the blue dye.
But then she felt the skin on her arm drip off, the way wax dripped off a candle. Her skin fell to the floor of the shower with a wet sound. The water pounded into it, and eventually, her skin dribbled down the drain.
That was when she screamed-- or tried to scream. But her throat had closed, and no sound came out.
She watched in some sort of morbid, disgusted fascination as the rest of her skin just sort of fell off and washed down the drain.
Eager to get away from the last remains of her flesh swirling down the drain, she practically jumped out of the shower, not even bothering to turn the water off. Turning away from the shower door, she caught sight of the mirror.
The surface of the mirror was rippling.
Somewhere, in ripples, she could see a faded image of a girl-- a blue girl. The girl raised her washed-out-looking hand to the mirror.
She saw the inside of the girl's hand; looked at her own hand at her side.
Almost against her will, her hand lifted and met the other girl's through the glass.
The girl's eyes flashed, and the mirror shattered. Somewhere, in the sound of water crashing to floor of the shower, she heard two words: "Find Melisande".