She didn't realize until about halfway through that it was a dream, and then, it was only because it was too beautiful to be real. Before that moment, it had that hazy quality that seems like it could be life, just slightly out of focus, as if seen through eyes still recovering from sleep. In dreams, things that are impossible seem inevitable. Like the fact that she could fly. Of course she could fly; why shouldn't she? And as soon as the idea of flight occurred to her, it became inevitable, and she was flying.

She soared over a landscape that seemed more like a painting than an actual place. The colors were too vivid, the shapes somehow abstract; and yet something about it called to her heart with a certainty that reality could not afford, like a pauper trying to make a golden crown out of the leavings in the sewer drains. Physical truth could never be as real as this.

There was something important about the land below her, and she wished she could see it more closely, and so, of course, she could. Thought and action were not merely connected, they were different words for the same thing. Maybe not even different words. She was closer, and shapes began to resolve. Lines, curves, existence on a scale that made no sense and yet was the only possible truth. The land below her was a creature. A creature of incalculable power, of importance too great to be captured within mere flesh. A creature who could... was it possible? Could the answer she'd been seeking all these years be there, below her, all around her?

Closer and closer she came, and the beauty became too great for mundane eyes. That's when she realized this could be nothing but a dream. The realization was, itself, the only thing tinged with the unreality of dreams. It was true, but only in the sense that the things one learned in a classroom were true, things like how the size of a city compared to the size of a walnut was the same as the size of the Basin compared to the size of the space between aetherbubbles. You couldn't say it wasn't true, you knew it was, but everyone knew it was nonsense, too. It did not touch, could not reach, was not even straining towards, the beauty of the power of the beast below her.

As the beauty became too sublime for her mortal eyes, it began to unravel. But not by dissipating; far worse, she began to see into the shape, as she grew closer to it, and it was not, and was, and was not, a creature. It was an outline, the shape of a being of power, and the shape was made of lines, and the lines were made of walls, and the walls stood in a sea whose waves churned and lapped between the walls like blood and power coursing through the beast's body. The walls were a maze, and at its heart, at the creature's heart, was the source of its majesty, the light of understanding its mystery.

She landed effortlessly atop one of the walls, and her eyes swept the horizon. Beneath her feet, waves caressed the walls, reached up towards her boots but did not dare to touch them. All around her was the beast, and yet, so close to it, she could no longer see it. Her heart began to tear itself apart with the loss; she could touch the beast and yet it was as if it was gone. All there was now was walls, water, a maze. Already, she was forgetting the shape of the creature.

Her eyes cast side to side, seeking the power she'd sensed before, the beauty, the light. Nothing changed about the world, yet slowly it grew flatter, more colorless, as if it were being frozen slowly into... into what? Not crystal, not ice, for even these things were real, they gave off sensations, they bore beauty within them, even if it was sterile beauty. No, the world was turning into what was left when there was no world into which possibility could form and take shape like butterfly wings.

The darkness of the dream, the unreality of it, started to close in on her, but then there was a glint of that light. It had no color. It was not even really light; that's only the nearest thing she could think to call it when she told herself what she saw. But whatever it was, it swept over the waves, over the walls of the maze, as if it itself were searching for something; and wherever it touched, it brought back the possibility, the changeability, that allowed reality to be real again. It danced just out of her reach, and for a time, she ran along the tops of the walls of the maze, trying to catch it and finding herself incapable of touching it.

And then when she stopped chasing it, it found her. The beam of potentialities engulfed her and filled her with the shifting of paradigms, the interconnectedness of perceptual reality and objectivity. During the instant between instants, the time while her heart was neither beating nor still, she was the creature, she was the power within it, she was the waves that carried its understanding through the outline of its flesh, she was the butterflies taking wing over the walls that made the maze, she was--

And it moved on, and she was nothing again. The waves were like old parchment rubbing against beach sand. The walls were bricks made of clay and disillusionment. There never was a creature; it had been only an impossible image in an impossible dream. She ached to grasp what had been, but the harder her mind gripped it, the more it was gone, and with the dry crack of a desiccated twig in the first frost crunching under a boot...

She was awake. Racing to capture memories of the dream before they fled. The first thing to escape was the creature; already she could not remember what kind of creature it was. Minutes ago she was beholding its beauty, and she had known, absolutely known, what kind of creature it was. But now... was it a wyvern, a butterfly, a dragon, a humble mouse, a twisting cloud of cloiers, a dancing pixie? She couldn't even begin to guess. She could see the waves, the walls, the maze, and yet she could not make a shape out of them.

But the light that was not a light: this she grasped with her mind and would not let go. It flapped feebly and tried to escape but she let everything else slip away so that she could keep this one thing. Slowly, it gave up the struggle, it took form in her mind. It had no shape, it had no body, but it became clear, and...

And slowly she realized she knew it. It was the most mundane of things, a particular shape, a flow of sand and light in the desert she had crossed as she walked to the city in which she now dwelled. She had passed it and given it no thought. But now, with a certainty that was bigger than her body could contain, she knew it somehow contained all the answers she had been seeking. Nothing else mattered now.

She shrugged her cloak into place, and slipped out into the slowly dawning day, sand between her toes. She had far to walk now, but for the first time, she knew where she was going.