Haven: Book Seven of "The Liminality"

Chapter 9 - Picnic

I awaken to a breeze fluttering through lacy, blue curtains that Gaia seems to have conjured from her dreams. That window had been bare when we went to bed. The fluffy down comforter on the bed is also new. This girl get a chill and stuff just appears out of the air.

I sit up and look around, astonished by the level of interior detail she has created in the cottage. None of this stuff was here the night before. Gaia could not have designed all of these jars and antique bottle and knick-knacks and wallpaper motifs and doilies and dolls one by one. I get up. The bed creaks.

"Come back to bed," mumbles Gaia. "It's early."

"This room. Is this a place you knew ... in life?"

"My grandmother's flat in Stockholm," she says, sleepily. "I lived there for a time in my early twenties."

"Nice!"

"It is the setting of my dreams. Literally. Whenever I dream, this is the place. I go."

"I don't dream much," I say. "But when I do, I'm in the old house in Ohio. Before we moved to Florida. I was just a little kid."

"We don't have to keep things this way. This was just something easy for me to throw together fast."

"How do you weave more than one thing at a time?"

"It is not conscious. This is just a scene recreated from deep memory."

"Whoa. Wish I could do that. It would save a lot of time."

"I don't know what stops you. You are certainly capable."

She sighs and sits up. She is wearing a long and slinky nightgown that she had also probably conjured in her sleep. It kind of looks like the same material as the curtains.

"Would you like to work on your house today?"

"I thought we were gonna go on a hike."

"We can do both. So how do you want your house to be?"

"I want it be our house."

"I don't think you really want to live in my grandmother's flat, do you?"

"Why not? We should keep this. It's great. We can build something around it."

"You said you want a bunker? What for?"

"Something killfire proof."

She clicks her tongue.

"That is not possible. What Makers make, they can undo."

"Yeah, well. They didn't exactly undo this place, did they?"

"Not yet."

I grumbled under my breath.

"We'll see about that. We can stash some Old Ones down there. They know how to deal with killfire."

"Mummies in the basement. How lovely."

"You know better than that. They're people."

"I am just joking," she says, stepping into a pair of fluffy slippers that must have been replica's of her grandmother's. "I will make us a snack. And then we can go for a nice long walk. How is that?"

"Sounds great."

***

It took us way longer than expected to climb out of the killfire zone. Back during the siege, we were damned lucky to keep the hollow out of the killfire as long as we did. I suspect the Old Ones had something to do with that. I had personally benefitted from their communal bubbles of protection. Of course, it was their collective decision to undo one of those bubbles that allowed the killfire to get to Dad and Zeke.