'They wish to go back home?' Kaneq's voice echoed in Anaya's mind. The dragon surveyed the group as they packed up their camp. Madiza was huffy, almost violent as she tugged down her hammock. Kimo was no help at all, sulking by the shore.
"Oh, yeah, totally," Anaya said, keeping her voice low. "They're... getting really homesick and stuff. You understand?"
Kaneq turned her long head to face her. Deep emerald eyes bore into her, like they could see right through her soul. Maybe they could.
'I know that you are lying,' the dragon finally said. 'I can feel your emotions seeping through our shared conscoiusness.'
"Oh," said Anaya. She hadn't really thought this through.
'But what I don't know is why you would lie about this.'
"Can't you just... feel that as well?" she asked. "Look into my brain to see my thoughts."
Kaneq was silent for a moment. There was an energy pulsating from her and standing next to her made Anaya feel strong, but also weak.
'I could,' she finally admitted. 'But that's bad manners. And potentially very dangerous for you, with how new and fragile our bond is.'
"That... makes sense," Anaya said. "But how come I can't feel your emotions at all?"
'Because I have millenia of practice. And as before, our bond is fragile. I do not wish to burden it any more than necessary.'
She thought about that. It felt unfair to her. That she was the one burdening their bond with her emotions, when Kaneq was able to keep hers in check. And while she was the kind to wear her heart on her sleeve, there were still things she wished to keep private in her own mind. Dragon or no dragon.
She took a deep breath and tried to focus on the "shared consciousness" as the dragon had put it. It was weird to say the least, simultaneously a part of her but also separate from her. It felt a bit like a magically extended limb, where the magic was hers but not really her. Except this wasn't an extra hand, but an extra... extra... what? She couldn't find the words to describe it. But she needed something, if she was to learn how to work with it.
She sat down. She wasn't feeling dizzy, not at the moment, but she didn't want it to creep up on her, making her fall down. Kaneq settled on the ground with her, the dragon's long body looping around her, creating something akin to a barrier around her. And all the while the eyes never strayed. Anaya closed her own eyes. It was easier to focus on her thoughts that way.
She imagined her mind as a garden. A large expanse of space, littered with flowers and trees and bushes -- thoughts and feelings, ideas. She imagined herself in it, the gardener. She imagined a fence around it. The edge of what was her. Where someone else began.
She imagined a gate. She opened it.
'What are you doing, little one?' a flower flew through the open gate. The gardener picked it up and turned it around in her hands. It was covered in amusement, but underneath the petals, she found worry.
"I'm... trying to understand this connection better," Anaya said out loud. She probably didn't need to say it out loud, but she wanted to. Out loud meant a connection to the real world.
'You have quite a way of thinking about things,' a few mangoes rolled inside. She stared down at them.
"I don't think this metaphor is working quite like I intended," she said. A gentle breeze of amusement blew past her. She took another deep breath and tore down the garden.
'Shame,' echoed Kaneq's voice in her head. 'I thought it was quite beautiful in there.'
Anaya's eye twitched. She felt like she was being patronized. "Maybe, but the fruit were confusing."
The garden was a great way to visualize her own mind, but that's not what she was trying to do right now. She was trying to visualize the shared consciousness. But what could she use to represent the connection?
A memory from her childhood bubbled up to the surface.In it she was sitting on her grandma's lap in her work room. In front of them stood the big loom grandma used to make tapestries and her old, wrinkly hands looked like they were dancing on the threads as she weaved into existence beautiful pictures. Anaya had always loved watching her work.
"Life is like a tapestry," she'd once told Anaya, who had frankly been too young to understand the meaning of such words. "You are the one who weaves the yarn, but unless you have good supporting threads, you won't get anything done." She plucked at one of the threads. "That is why you must do your best to maintain the connections you have in life, to the people around you who want to support you. Lest they snap and break when you need them the most." She plucked the thread again and frowned. It was fraying further down the line. "Of course, it is hard to know when the thread just needs a little extra support and when it needs to be cut out completely."
She stood up and set Anaya down on the bench alone. She cut a piece of red yarn and after rifling through a cabinet, produced a small tin. Inside was a white goop that she used to paste the yarn against the thread where they fraying was. Then she turned to Anaya with a wide smile.
"I like to err on the side of kindness," she said and picked Anaya up into her arms. "We'll let that dry and come back to it. Remind me to be mindful of that spot when we get to it in the tapestry, okay dear?"
Anaya had nodded and then they'd gone out to get some lunch. That tapestry still hung in her room at the school, the red spot where grandma had strengthened the thread visible amidst the other colors.
'What are you remembering?' Kaneq asked her gently.
"Just... something my grandma used to tell me," she answered.
She imagined the room. Grandma's work room. That was easy enough, she'd spent so much time there as a child that even if it had been years at this point, she remembered exactly where everything was supposed to go. She imagined the shelves, stock full of different colored yarns. She imagined the small table under the window, on it a small vase with a branch from the uroxoo tree. She imagined the crates by the wall, filled with finished tapestries and fabrics, waiting to be shipped off to whoever wanted to buy them. She imagined the loom.
It was a big loom. Larger than life. There was so much emotion, so much nostalgia etched into the very being of that loom. She wondered if this was maybe a bad idea too.
'Anaya, this is amazing,' the threads in the loom plucked out.
"Really?" Anaya whispered. She was in the room too, but she was small. She knew she shouldn't be that small, but that was the only sense of scale she had.
'Yes. You've managed to create a representation of our bond that resonates with you, making it easier for you to maintain it and to learn how to master it. This is also intuitive for me to contact you.'
"Wait, are you in the room?" Anaya asked, looking around. She didn't see the dragon, or any other figure. But as her eyes landed on the loom, she saw that the tapestry was weaving itself.
'I am on the other side of the loom,' the weave told her. 'This same loom exists now also in my mind, and as such, I can communicate through it. The threads are our connection and the fabric we create together our shared consciousness.'
It made sense. It really did, somehow. But it was still making her head hurt.
'You've already done so much in such a short time. Now's not the time to push this further.'
"I know," she said. "But I feel like I'm so close to something."
'Your friend is calling you,' the loom said.
Anaya's eyes flew open. In front of her stood Tiu, brow scrunched in worry. She keps glancing at Kaneq, whose body was still encircling Anaya's.
"Are you okay?" Tiu asked. Anaya blinked a few times. It was easier to reoirent herself back into the real world than before, but it was still dizzying. "You were talking with... Kaneq?"
"Uh, yes," she said and rubbed a hand over her face. "I was just trying to figure out this connection thing a bit better."
Tiu hummed. She still didn't look like she fully trusted the dragon or the mind link Anaya shared with her. "We've packed up camp. What is the next step?"
Behind Tiu Anaya could see Madiza and Kimo idling, angry and disappointed.
'If the children wish to return home,' Kaneq's voice filled her mind suddenly. 'I can certainly fly you all over there.'
"Wh-what?" Anaya said, turning to the dragon. The threads were vibrating with amusement.
'There was a reason I originally made my way to Estirão. And I feel like I still need to go back there. So, if that's where those two are heading as well, I don't see why we shouldn't all go together.'
~x~
Anaya didn't like it. She'd wanted to get rid of Madiza and Kimo, but now here they were, all going back home. If there was something there that Kaneq needed, it's not like she could help it, but that didn't mean she had to like it. Especially with how smug Madiza had been when she'd told them the dragon would take them back home.
Kaneq followed the river, staying closer to the ground than the first time they'd taken a trip to the skys. She said it helped her stay tethered to the current time, which hopefully would keep Anaya and the others from getting too disoriented with timeshifting. Anaya did her best to not look through the dragon's eyes, focusing instead on the physical world around them. They were going significanly faster than paddling had been, but not so fast that the world became a blur. The world did become frosty however, the leaves of the trees closest to the river freezing over, a thin layer of ice snaking along the river whenever they dipped down closer to the water.
It was cold, the entire body of the dragon radiating a coolness, but somehow it didn't seem to affect them the same way it affected the world around them.
"What happened to your previous anchor?" Anaya asked after a while. She was hugging Kaneq's neck tightly and she could feel the muscles underneath her tensing at the question. She knew the answer to the question, of course. They had died, like all humans do.
'I've had many anchors over the centuries, over the millenia,' the loom of her mind began weaving. 'While we dragons exist outside time, you humans are bound by it, and so we must take care that we return to our anchors before theirs runs out. Anchoring a dragon is a task usually passed down by the old anchors to the new ones, but the dragon must also be present for it. You cannot tie an anchor to a ship that isn't there, after all.'
"And this is what happens when a dragon can't get a new anchor in time," Anaya sumrised. She ran her hand through the threads of the loom. "You get stuck. Like the threads just stop."
'Usually we have several anchors at once, in case of illness or accident. But as time goes on, traditions change and are forgotten. And sometimes there isn't anyone to pick up the torch afterwards.'
"Is that what happened to your last anchor? They died before they had time to pass on the task?"
Kaneq was silent for a moment, though the weaving yarn was dripping with sorrow and regret.
'I was careless,' she finally said. 'Something was wrong with the dragons, we were... distracted. I can't really explain what was going on, but when I finally realized I only had one thread left anchoring me into the world... It was more or less too late. She was on the brink of death.
'I tried my best to hurry to her side. Some of the others tried to stop me from leaving, but I managed to evade them, and make my way to her home. I didn't expect that she had moved many, many decades ago. And before I could sense where she was...'
SNAP went one of the threads.
Anaya gasped, grabbed a hold of her head. She felt a hand on her shin. It was Tiu, straddling the dragon behind her.
'I apologize,' Kaneq's voice was soft and soothing. 'I let my emotions get the better of me.'
"It's alright," Anaya said, both to the dragon and to Tiu. Tiu didn't remove her hand. "I can't even imagine what that must've felt like."
'I was thrown into chaos. My sense of time, my sense of place, I didn't know where I was nor when, I only knew that my last anchor was gone. The only thing I could do was try to make my way towards the one thing I could still sense. That turned out to be you.'
"Because I have the potential to be your anchor." It wasn't a question.
'Precisely. At this point I don't know how long it has been since my previous anchor passed on. It could be years or decades. It could be only days.'
"I don't think anyone has seen a dragon in... decades at least, maybe even centuries," Anaya said. "I've heard tales, of course, that there used to be a lot of them, but... not recently. Not so that anyone would remember."
'I suppose whatever distracted me also distracted everyone else.' The fabric in the loom was wistful. If Anaya concentrated on it, she could almost see a picture of dozens and dozens of dragons on it. 'We all neglected to maintain our connections.'
"You can always fix a broken thread," Anaya said. She reached over to the loom, taking the ends of the snapped thread in her hands. She brought them together and rubbed them between her fingers. When she let go, where there had previously been a break was now a short length of red yarn. "As long as the thread is willing to be fixed. That's what grandma always said anyway."
'A wise woman.'
"She was," she said. "And kind too. I actually based this room entirely on her work room. She used to be a weaver."
'The loom as well? Is it precise?'
That was an odd question. "Yeah, of course the loom too," she said. Where was Kaneq going with this? "It was her prized posession, she's had it since she was my age."
'What about this?'
A soft glow eminated from under the loom. This was getting very weird. Even weirder than it already was. Anaya stood up from the bench and bent down to see what was glowing. It was a small circular carving on the leg of the loom.
"Yeah, that's been there as long as I remember," she said. She was a bit surprised she had been able to reproduce the loom to this degree of detail in her head. "Grandma said a friend of hers carved it there when they were young. Why are you asking about that?"
'Anaya, that friend was me.'
Anaya stood up from under the loom and suddenly she wasn't in the work room anymore. She was on the back of the dragon, which had descended into the middle of the town square of Estirão, directly in front of the uroxoo tree.
'My last anchor was your grandmother.'
___________________________________________________
OK so I lied, this part was also brought to you by me, Pede. But that's only because Oona has a bunch of English tests she needs to grade and we're running with a buffer of 0 atm... It's kinda funny, I said I don't have time to write half of the story, but here I am with nothing better to do during the days lol Well that's a lie, up until this point I really haven't had that much time, but now I do again so yay!
Anyway I hope you enjoyed this part! It was really interesting to kind of flesh out the mental link/shared consciousness and I really hope the metaphors make sense :DD Or at least that it's kinda clear that all the talk about the loom happens inside Anaya's head. Even though she (kinda) exists there as a """physical""" being and interacts with the loom and stuff. It's still just a very powerful visualization exercise (maybe made more powerful by the literal dragon she's sharing it with) and yeah I hope it makes sense.
I won't ramble more this time. I won't see y'all until the final part now, so like... have fun, but don't derail the story too much at this point, mmkay? I still need to be able to wrap everything up in 8 parts! See ya at the finale!
Next topic is "Purpose"
Pede out.
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