Dream d179-s: The Owl's Last Feather

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Owl said my name, and I understood it was the first time he had used it.

He had always spoken around me, or to Lano, or to the general fact of my presence. But now he said it - just the one word, my name, from a branch that grew out over an edge I could not see the bottom of - and the sound of it tasted like woodsmoke and cold water simultaneously, two things that do not belong together and yet arrived at once.

Lano looked between us. His eyes moved the way a clock pendulum moves - steady, marking something.

The edge garden was not a garden in any sense I could easily describe. It was where the Gardens stopped deciding to be Gardens. The impossible geometry that had characterized everything here was, at the border, simply honest. Angles that made no architectural sense faded into a light that was not quite outside light but was oriented toward outside. The air had that iron-and-grass quality I had tasted the day before, stronger now, almost loud.

The Owl descended to a lower branch. Closer than he had come in many days.

"Weird," he said, after a silence that had the texture of felt.

I waited.

"From the Old English wyrd. Fate. That which turns. Not strange - fated. When something is weird it is because it is exactly what it was always going to be." He looked at the edge, at the light beyond. "Your journey here was weird. In the original sense. It was turning toward this the whole time."

A feather detached from his left wing. He watched it fall. It did not fall quickly.

"Take it," he said.

I reached out. The feather landed in my palm with the precise weight of something meant for me. It was the color of October, warm brown at the spine fading to amber at the edges. It smelled of high altitude and old paper.

"Recuerdo," Lano said quietly. Memory. Remembrance.

"Yes," the Owl said. "From the Latin recordari. To pass back through the heart. Re - again. Cor - heart. Memory is not storage. It is the act of passing something through the heart a second time." He tilted his head. "What you carry out of here will become real each time you remember it. Each remembering is a new passage."

I held the feather. Lano pressed his shoulder against my calf.

The Owl looked at us for a long time with those centuries-deep eyes. He did not say goodbye. He made a sound instead - low, resonant, the kind of sound that a very large and very old thing makes when it is satisfied with something. Then he opened his wings to their full impossible span and rose without apparent effort into the canopy, and was gone not by flying away but by becoming part of the light.

I wrote at the edge, with the outside already present in the air: