I awaken from my nap, well rested. I'm lying in my bed of soft silks and feather pillows, within a sphere of airy water. All fatigue has been removed during my sleeep, as I expect, as is my right and my duty.

I remove the sleep from my eyes, using only my fingers, no water or magic. I remember, as if for the first time, that my Whim is Water, Water is Removal, and I am the Aspect of Water in Worlorn.

Perhaps all my fatigue is not Removed? Memory...Center yourself, center, remember the garden of Flowers, I am the Grand Master of Flowers. Centered: I am the Prince of the Watersea of Worlorn. Centered. Centered: I'm Dylan Llyr. I am Dylan Llyr, Named by my Familiar after Champion Made Me Whole.

Why is it strange to think of myself as Troy Ounces Made Whole? Am I not the most completely arrogant and powerful of the Trojan Princes? Have I not achieved more than any who once were simulacrums of the first Troy? I'm the Prince Who Was 1000, a thousand names, a thousand years, a thousand places and times: One Thousand Moments of bliss before I stopped counting...

A thousand curses! Damn me! Cinnamon is dead, Oh God, how can I forget for even a moment that her body lies torn in her mausoleum below the palace? Her Blood stains my hands still, my reminder, my oath to Bring Her Back. What, how, what? There is something amiss in my world, something aside from this grief that I cannot remove. I would remove my discomfort, but some things take time and study.

All of Watersea appears normal, if not perfect. The Core Powers are at Rest. It isn't Watersea. I must regain my center. Let me try a kata. Yes: Three bees open the flower. A kata to bring me back to center. I am Dylan Llyr, Grand Master of Flowers, and a kata will calm me.

The tapestries and rugs decorating the bedroom outnumbered people who had ever slept inside. Lined it was, all four walls with no windows or doors revealed. Quilted silk kerchiefs from the women in Tara started from the far corner and segued into sturdy cotton bolts woven by men of Innyrn. The floor was carpeted in wools from the north: Enseljos, Anarb, even Obray's Station in Tranodeli counted among the cities who's rugs padded the floor, three and even four deep by the bedside.

Cloth covered wall and floor with equal fervor; at no place did the murals permit stonework to show; none of geometries of the rugs gave way to simple obsidian floor. A red velvet chaise with gold tasselated trim sat in the midst of the rugs. One black banner bowed across the entire ceiling, depicting the constellations from the era it was embroidered.

Peridot eyes watched from the corner, from beneath red-gold hair. An emerald veil wrapped across her nose and mouth, behind her neck, back around to split over her breasts and tie finally in back. Green silk pants flowed down her legs, revealing pale skin from inner thigh to knee, more below until tying at her ankles. Her feet and arms were bare. Right hand cupped her left elbow, propping left index finger and thumb suddenly frozen in the act of reaching under her shoulder-length hair, perhaps pinching her earlobe. She wasn't breathing.

The sleeping man's white robe was stark against the surroundings. Where his hands, feet and face extruded from his wrap, they were the color of coffee with cream. He tossed in his sleep, almost rolling from the chaise before returning to his origin and rolling the other direction.

His motion was a volatile eye to a stagnant maelstrom of color. Eventually his writhing discovered the limit of the couch and he rolled to the floor. The woman fell to her hands and knees as if in sympathy, and reached out. She touched his cheek with the back of her fingers, but snatched her hand away, as if burned. A moment of silence, then a plea: "Beloved, No!" She dropped heer gaze to the rugs, and choked, or coughed, "Sister, be kind," she said, and vanished as the man sat up, awakened by his fall and perhaps her touch.

The man encompassed the room with a wild fearful glance, but swiftly closed his eyes. He settled into full lotus there on the rugs next to the chaise. He lay his wrists on his knees, and his long fingers opened, opened wider, then extended almost fully. His breathing became immediately slow, and regular. Calm eyes opened at ten breaths. At twenty breaths he smiled. At thirty, he stood, unfolding smoothly from lotus without using his hands, or rocking.

Once standing, the man slowly raised both hands above his head, pushing up the night sky embroidery but not touching stone. He lowered his hands slowly together, as if pushing down a large baloon from face-level to below his waist.

Suddenly the man bent at the knee, turning slightly and lowering his right hand under and behind as if reaching for something on the floor. His right hand made as if to grasp something, only to pull it forward and throw it down. The man's eyes were closed.

During this, the man had extended his left hand palm-up at waist level. He spun from the hips slightly to the right, adding force and granting his right hand more reach. He exhaled sharply, almost vocalizing. Otherwise his breathing was smooth as his other motions.

At the instant his right hand released its invisible load, the man's left, hand, now closed in a fist, snapped back over his left shoulder, dropped under the elbow, and rose for a second backfist. With the third blow, the man again exhaled sharply, this time with a whisper, "hee-ya!"

His hips followed the arm motion, rotating to his left, sliding his feet on the rugs until the man faced entirely the other direction, knees bent, right hand open and low, left hand high and closed. He dropped his left hand to the carpet sightly open, so the palm smacked against the rug there while he yelled without reserve, "Ha!" A hand-print formed at the point of impact, burned through the first rug, charring the second layer, and bringing forth glowing red embers in the third layer.

The man turned back to his original facing, raising both hands above his head, and pushing the invisible baloon smoothly down below his waist again. His nostrils flared, and his eyes opened. He turned smoothly to look behind himself, but swayed and nearly stumbled when he saw the hand-print in the rugs. The panic returned to his eyes a moment before he closed them again.

The man stood tall, and remained still for ten breaths. With eyes still closed, he vanished from the chamber, like the woman before him.

"Frost!" I cried into the blizzard. I know she would have heard me even a mile below in the bedchamber, but still I yelled at the top of my lungs into the blinding snow. "Frost, where are you?" I heard in my voice a scared woman, not an archmage. I could hear the panic in my voice. Regardless, I had drawn breath for a third call, when I felt her attention slam into my mind. I'd pay for this all night and into tomorrow, and we both knew it. I felt her malice as well as her concern.

"Call my name aloud thrice and then I may slay you." she thought, striking me with her mind like a club. I staggered and my knees hit the snow, hands to my temples under the pulse of her anger. Before I could form a reply, she thought, more gently, "Oh my."

"Frost," I thought. White dragons don't say 'oh my.' They say 'yum, a manling,' sometimes perhaps 'put the sword away and I'll be merciful,' but a dragon never never says 'oh my.' I sat back on my heels and gasped. "where are you?"

"Drawing near. Yes, you are in trouble. Think to me what you know and what you remember."

"I awoke from dreams...dreams of stark light and darkness. I think I was alone. In the dreams I think I was alone in a crowd. It was dark, and I was light. I was a light. I awoke in my cell alone. Frost, I awoke and had forgotten who I was. I had to think to remember my name, and only after that did I remember Cinnamon."

I paused to gain my thoughts and steady my breathing. I counted a hundred breaths. I counted another one and whispered out loud, "Frost, I remember kata, I can list the names of the last thousand masters of Flowers, but I can't remember a single spell...my mage dream may be lost, and I can't remember yesterday. I don't know what day it is. What's happening to my mind? I burned my rugs. I burned my rugs."

"Llyr, my Prince." she said out loud, an imperious command from next to me. I opened my eyes. Snowblind, only flurious snow in the winds as far as my eye could see, broken only by my stumbling tracks for miles about me. Taking my Aspect I Removed the water from the air about me, for fifty miles all around. I squinted against the glare and made her outline in what I had taken for a snowbank. I looked away to avoid meeting her glance, but I must have been too late. "My prince," she whisered, irritation Removed from her voice without touching my mind. "What have you done?"

I felt the arctic cold, suddenly. Why else would I have started shivering at that moment? The Winds drove chill into my bones until I thought to Remove the coldness they carried. I began to count breaths again. At 134, like gentle icicles, Frost's claw closed around me. I grasped a firm hold, both arms around one of her fingers, for sure enough, a second later we were aloft. Frost never suffered a human to ride her. What was the dignity of a mere human compared to an unbound Dragon? She carried me in her fist as we flew through Greyspace.

In the grey near-void, I daydreamed for a few moments, warming my self with thoughts of roasting an anonymous dark man in a Troy's Wrath fireball. I dozed off thinking, "whoever did this to me will pay," and "They fucked with the wrong ... " and suddenly I awoke with a jolt. Wrong what? My mind turned to the thought of "Nirvanna insight into mortal sufferings allows the Lohan to overcome passions and temptations." Grand Masters of Flowers don't take vengeance. Lohan's don't torture the bad guys. What was happening to me?

Frost took that moment to drop out of Greyspace. I had only a moment to look around before we landed: mountains, a chalet. We landed and I felt the soothing aura of a Guaranteed Eternal Abelard Sanctuary... Chateau Escargot. Shit. What do I need to be here for? What do I need a sanctuary protection from? Why Margeau Escargot's sanctuary in particular?

"Frost, What are you afraid of?" I asked.

"Dylan," Frost began, thinking real soft into my mind, like a breeze in summer's heat. I knew it was real bad, She never whispers unless life sucks. Since the day Frost Named me she's never called me Dylan unless she's in awe of an Old Power or she pitys me. Both together means all probabilities are negative sum games. "You've been using Spellcraft from the Courts of Chaos again. You don't remember?" I could feel her gaze, but I closed my eyes.

"No." I admitted. "I cast a Forget on myself." I was beginning to have an inkling of what was going on. Subjectively I was only 56 hours from thinking up whatever plan I had executed. Part of the plan was to forget I had done it. Very bad Ju Ju. I hate it when I don't want even myself to know what I've been up to until it's too late to back out. "I cast a Sixth Rank spell and then made myself Forget..."

"Dylan."

"What could I have done? I mean, how many--"

"DYLAN!" her intensity in that on word would echo in my mind for at least a week. I fell down. I shut up. I rolled on my back in the snow, thinking absurdly of making a snow angel. Instead, I held my head, pressing on my temples again. For one instant I held in my mind's eye a burning palm imprint on an ice dragon's flank. "That's why," she said. "I brought you to this Sanctuary so you won't be allowed to hurt... anyone."

"Frost," I thought, "what could make me angry enough to hurt my familiar?"

"I am not your familiar. You are not Prince Llyr, though no one less than a Dreaming Dragon could say this and know it to be true." Frost continued thinking to my mind very softly now. I've never heard her think so soft in my mind. I had to direct my full attention to hear her thoughts above the distracting noise of my autonomous body thoughts: keep the heartbeat, breathe, digest, relax shoulders or become a stone. "Prince Llyr cast a thirteenth level spell from the Courts of Chaos called Jumble, and limited its duration with a Fifteenth level spell Unlimited Wish. Use Llyr's memories to explain what this does."

"Yes. I know the spell. In a nutshell Jumble mixes up all the personalities crossing in the mist and re-distributes them pseudo- randomly among the participating dreaming dragons. A fifteenth level 'Unlmited' wish incapacitates the caster for who-knows-how-long Worlorn time, but I can't imagine it would be cast simultaneously with a Jumble to do anything but guarantee me--him, Llyr--to revert back to his own original dreaming dragon after a finite duration. Maybe a wish could select which personality one could swap with..."

I imagined a divine swap meet, where supreme beings traded mortal souls, like children swapping for the prettiest marbles. I imagined myself as a marionette with the puppeteer handing off the strings to another pupetteer. I imagined a pimp allocating women. I imagined a lot of nasty things. I got very hot, and I wasn't breathing any more. I had to inhale to speak.

"Frost, all I remember is Llyr. I'm more confused, and getting angry. Tell me who Troy-Ounces-Made-Whole wanted to switch places with, switch so bad enough that there was no fucking other way to do what had to be done than steal my fucking dream from my dreamer?"

"When I looked into your eyes, my Prince, I saw the Fires of Melisse."

You fucked with the wrong girl this time...You fucked with the wrong girl this time...I counted twenty breaths before I asked, "Frost, did Llyr do this for Llyr, or did he do this for Melisse?"

I did not say the name I thought most likely, but I watched Cinnamon's face smile in my memory, and I saw her emerald eyes light up as I mussed her dark red hair one day almost a millenium ago. Then my eyes opened and I beheld the hands that were stained by her Blood when I morganti'd her the day after my memory...his hands, not mine. His memory, not mine. His mistake, not mine! But I had no first-person memories of anyone else. How could I be Melise? How could I be anyone else?

I slammed my hand into a stone on the ground next to me, and it turned to ash beneath my rage. My scream echoed among the mountains.

Melisse-light is torn from the physical universe looking at the Blood and ash on Llyr's hands. Then Melisse again is reduced to a light in a white place. Melisse feels Llyr-light stumble so very close to her. This light tries to embrace Melisse-light, but his wounded-soul is not just then capable of such complex behaviour, and fails to connect.

A now-familiar voice comes to Melisse from another, awesomely bright light. It thrusts into her ego, painfully, but as gently as it knows how. "Melisse. The next time You must bring yourself. You must act. Do not forget desire; you must not forget the world of shadows."

But then Melisse-light returns entirely to world of light and whiteness and forgets everything for a time, even the anger, forgets everything but for her own Name.

(November 30, 1996) mgg