And light came. But not any familiar light. Not the clean white light she’d wanted. This was a pale greenish light that clung to her hands and illuminated… well, very little. Nemienne knew she stood on stone because she could feel it underfoot. She knew that somewhere far away water was dripping into a pool from somewhere very high above. But the light she had found did not press back the darkness very far, and she could see nothing else.
Then a glimmer, up ahead of her, turned out on a second glance to be Enkea’s white foot. The cat was just visible, standing like a statue at the farthest boundary of Nemienne’s light. She turned her head and looked at Nemienne over her shoulder, and her eyes flashed green as the light—greener: green as the shade under beech leaves, green as the light that filtered through the sea… The slim cat turned again and walked away into the dark.
Nemienne walked forward, following the cat through her dream. The pale light that clung to her hands trailed behind her as she moved, ribbons of light that undulated through the dark like waterweed through the moving sea. Nemienne felt that she herself drifted like that through this dark, as though it had as much substance and body as water and she almost swam through it rather than walked.
It occurred to Nemienne, as she followed Enkea, that behind the dripping of the water, she could once more hear the breathy, delicate sound of pipes. The music was not loud, but the pipes possessed a pure fragile voice—no, two distinct voices. One was pitched low, to match the weight of the surrounding darkness. The other was pitched high… to match light? No, of course not, she realized at once. The higher voice of the pipe was pitched to lay a path through the dark, but not a path into light… Nemienne hesitated, drawn to follow that strange harmony and yet doubting suddenly where that path might lead.
Ahead of her, Enkea turned her head again and mewed, a thin sound that slipped through the dark without disturbing it. Nemienne hurried forward after the cat. In the way of dreams, she was suddenly running… She no longer felt the stone under her feet, but the sound of each water drop striking into whatever pool hid in the darkness echoed around Nemienne like the stroke of a brazen bell.
Ahead of her, she suddenly saw someone. In the way of dreams, she knew at once who this was. As though this knowledge brought her through all the darkness and across all the distance that separated them, she found herself immediately at her sister’s side, reaching out to grasp Karah’s hands. She was only tangentially aware of someone else, another presence, a man, a stranger… but whoever he was, she did not know him, and while she clung to her sister’s hands, he walked away from them both, following the music of the pipes into the darkness.
Karah, Nemienne knew, had also been following the voices of the pipes. And, without understanding why, Nemienne knew her sister must not follow that music. That neither of them dared follow it, or like the stranger, they would vanish along the path the music laid down into the dark. As though the very realization broke some strange spell, the sound of the pipes faded into the distance… faint and fainter, and then gone. And as though the vanishing sound of the pipes took confusion away with it, Nemienne realized that she was awake.
In the greenish glow of light clinging to Nemienne’s hands, Karah blinked, shook her head, and blinked again—much as though she herself was waking from a dream. A shape half hidden by her hair stirred, and Nemienne saw that her sister carried a kitten on her shoulder. The small animal seemed made of silver and smoke. Its eyes were green as water. It peered down from Karah’s shoulder toward Enkea, who sat with her tail coiled around her feet and blinked up at it in calm disdain.
“Karah?” Nemienne said, and was surprised by how self-possessed she sounded. Almost as if she spoke with someone else’s voice, someone older and much more experienced. She could not, after all, decide whether she was dreaming or awake. She pinched the skin of her wrist between her fingernails, blinking at the sharp pain.
“Nemienne?” Karah said in return. She gazed, bewildered, at her sister and the greenish light, and then around at the powerful darkness that surrounded them both. Then she scrubbed her face with her hands, shook her head again, and asked, “Where are we? What is this… place?” The last word sounded doubtful.
The kitten leaped down from Karah’s shoulder, dashed toward Enkea, flung itself flat on its side, slid across the stone, and wound up nearly underneath the adult cat, reaching up with one little paw to bat at her nose. Enkea drew herself up to her feet with an affronted hiss and stalked away, pausing only to glare back commandingly over her shoulder at Nemienne.