Where Moonlight Meets Daydreams

Prompt 1 - Crystal (475 Words)

She is trapped in a Dream.

Around her the dancers swirl, a vibrant waltz, and she sips demurely at the drink in the crystal flute, handed to her by the handsome waiter. It's taste is a mere shadow of what it should be, a sliver of summer strawberry forever trapped by eternity's neverending memory.

Perhaps it's the Dream forcing her to be so melancholy, here among the glittering masses and yet perpetually single. She forces herself to down the glass in her hand, shivering at the bitter taste of the tonic water. That comes through loud and clear, an almost shock to the senses.

A warning. Beware sparkling chandeliers and high class courtiers.

She does not fade into the shadows. That's far too simple a path.

The Dancers envelope her with ease, a blond gentleman only a few years her senior swiftly catching her eye and her hand. They twirl among the party guests, the world falling away to the simple joy of the dance.

She is getting dizzy, whether from the drink or the company she cannot tell. He is stunning, with a soft smile and bright eyes, and maybe it's not him so much as the pace he sets. They are spinning out of orbit, an astronaut falling into the event horizon of an expanding black hole.

"You look lovely tonight." His smile is crisp, clean, sharp. She can feel the pull of gravity, of attraction, of the desire to forget for a single evening who she is and what the world truly is like.

To live forever in a world of glitter and joy, perpetually dancing, eternally young.

To never face war or poverty or the neverending sorrow of humanity again.

No.

That's too easy.

Nancy breaks free from the spell of the Past, chest heaving as she comes to her senses in the empty ballroom. Dust settles where she has been waltzing with the spirits of debutantes and dilettantes, a hazy pattern so reminiscent of the figures she'd seen that a shiver runs down her spine.

She knows better than to enter an antique building so close to Halloween, so close to the ultimate thinning of the veil when her powers become tangibly dangerous.

And yet?

She does not regret the knowledge she has gained, the pride that she can break free from the desire that has plagued her so recently, the desire to disappear and never deal with another ridiculous human again, to bury herself so deeply in the Other that the pain of Reality will never touch her.

But dreams are only figments, we choose to give them weight and heft, to make ill or good of what we see.

Nancy Solo Sees the shimmering crystal dreams of the Past and chooses, forever and always, to take the dented dreams of the Present any day.