Rivers of Reverie

9. The True Face of the Dream

"Can I ask you something?"

Her guide did not reply, but Liryl decided to keep going.

"You told me before that only the myrri are allowed down here," she asked, somewhat hesitantly. "How come?"

Part of her was afraid of getting no answer ... or of getting an incomprehensible one.

"Me and the others who live in these caves don't communicate through words," the myrri replied, however, after a few moments. "We communicate through the voices of our souls."

Liryl listened, intrigued. "And I too would be able to communicate in this way?"

"Not enough to do away with words," he replied. "Not all nymphs, though, are myrri as well. I believe only those among you who speak with spirits are."

"Those who speak with spirits ... the priestesses?" Liryl guessed.

"I believe so. I don't know your language enough to tell."

Liryl looked at the myrri with a puzzled expression on her face. "My language? You mean that you use another language to communicate?"

"We don't have a language, because we don't need it," he explained. "Even 'myrri' is a word of your language."

She nodded. The spirit which saved her from the sea devil did not speak her language either, and yet she was able to understand what it told her anyway.

"But if you speak my language, too, why did you not let my friend in as well?"

"Few among us can speak and understand your tongue," the myrri replied. "I am among those, and this is why I acted as your guide. But even I sometimes don't get what you're saying."

"I-I'm sorry," Liryl apologized, embarrassed.

"Don't worry," he reassured her, though. "I only have to listen to your soul to understand what you're saying, even when I don't understand your words. Even the other myrri who live here understand what you tell them through your soul, that's why they're not disturbed by your presence."

Liryl looked around, surprised. Until that moment she had believed that those little girls were simply ignoring her. At first, the idea of having conversed with them all along, without even realizing it, scared her. But her discomfort gradually vanished. After all, even as she walked through the forest, sailed on rivers or swam in the sea, she came in contact with the animals and the spirits around her, often without being aware of it. Indeed, this invisible thread was what reminded her, every day, that the world around her was not a dream.

"But ... Sanya?" she asked then. "I mean ... my friend," she corrected herself right after to avoid any misunderstandings.

"Your friend does not communicate like you do," the myrri said. "Her soul is silent."

Liryl looked perplexed. "I don't get it. Why then ...?"

The myrri, however, anticipated her question. "How would you feel if you found yourself in front of somebody who can't understand the most important part of you?"

***

The most important part of me ...

Liryl often thought back to those words, as she ascended the steep slopes of the mountain. There was something, in that last question the myrri asked, which spoke directly about her most intimate feelings.

Ever since she started being tormented by nightmares, she had never stopped feeling alone. Of course, Sanya had always been by her side, and Eris had helped and counseled her, but this had never fully dispelled her loneliness. No matter how many times she told about what she saw in her dreams, in fact, her interlocutors had not seen what she did. They lived what she had lived only through her own words, but everything beyond those words was doomed to stay trapped inside her heart, unheard. As if she was forced every day to speak a language unlike her own, a language which could not translate what only her native tongue could express. Probably, her encounter with the myrri helped her understand this, as well.