MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

010. Saints in the Eve of a Sandstorm..

"How do we perceive time? Do we say it's a line, infinitely stretching on both ends, or do we say it's sand, twisting, moving and falling by its own rule?"

This dream was different. 

From the moment he closed his eyes, Paul could tell that this vision was stranger than the rest he's had and perhaps ever will. It wasn't a blur that did not make sense, but it wasn't clear enough to distinguish everything about it either. His whole mind was pulsing and his body shivering through a fever, hunched itself in a purgatory of sensation that draped his pale skin into the tears of death, that looming ripple, gaping over him in his slumber. It was closer now than ever and after he had read piece of history, he could image death as those silly drawings of a skeleton holing a Scythe. The dark blade was at his throat and he dreamt, unable to move an inch out of his terrible grief throwing lashes over his heart, that little whimpering thing whose candle was running out. 

But there was something strangely comforting about this dream, though he could see nothing at all. It was the voice which spoke to him. That voice was his own. A lot has changed his tone, but Paul could tell that it was from his lips those words were echoing. 

"I say time is subjective."

He didn't know who he was talking to, but he liked to pretend that he was talking to himself. In this darkest hour, he needed to cling to the last person within reach that he could trust. He could trust himself, couldn't he? 

"It slows, it quickens... it has moods and throws tantrums. Time can be merciless or merciful. It can seem cruel or humane. And the strangest thing is that it can be all of that at once. So time's subjective, because it exists to be perceived differently by anyone who answers to its realm's rules."

Paul's forehead was a forest of creases in whose valley blossomed the gripping struggle of trying to understand what those words felt like to be spoken. He didn't understand what emotions laid on this unseen face he attributed to himself and finally, he saw a balcony. Empty, wind was blowing through its curtains, crimson flickers opening towards a valley of dunes and trees. Spice was dancing in the air, but somehow he couldn't smile at the sight, not even at details carved into the stone, the letters, the drawings. It all felt too empty, too lonely. 

"Time is a scream and some of us love our deafness while others loathe it."

What are you saying? Paul's mind neared the verge of explosion from the struggle of understanding anything at all from this dream. The longer it took him to find meaning, the more palpable was the pressure of the Scythe on his neck. Its very tip was digging on his pulse, whispering that it had won a game of hide and seek. His body's only defense was sweat, which inside that tent, dried immediately so it could form them drinkable water. 

"Time is subjective because times does care. It wraps memories its protection, veils them in shadows and stores them in the mind of the whole universe. Time gently brushes its finger through the present and threads the future in a thousand paths. Time is a singer and there lay its chords that I hear the melody of when I eat, when I drink, when I sleep, when I talk."

I am running of time, Paul tried to beg of himself to hurry up and do something. It was his despair clawing out his mind's childishness. There was no help, surely. 

"You can be afraid of anything, but not of time. Time," he felt a smile sneak through the words. "Our friend. My friend. She taught me that time makes memories of us all, that we exist to be memories to the future, but recently she's heard a different saying which I think she likes even more."

Paul groaned, because what else could he do at the mere allusion that Mercury was there, in some distance.

"Time flies, but we're the pilots." He may have seen nothing, but he heard the depth of his own voice distance, reshape and deform itself right into the blissfulness of Mercury's. "Paul," she called his name and his throat burned with the dragging of that Scythe across his goosebumps-covered skin. Her voice seems so close that if only he could move his head against this deadly paralysis, he knew he'd toss right into his old bed, where she waited for him smiling the softest sunrise his eyes would have ever been blessed with.