"Close your eyes", he whispers. Somehow his voice
reaches me through the wall; they keep him human, so that
he's less of a threat, but me - they prefer as an elf. My
ears are sharper than before and can catch his soft,
careful, voice. I hold his words in my mind when he is
silent, or absent. This is how I remember him now.
    "Breathe deeply... slowly. Let the walls fall away.
Forget the hard floor against your back." How he knows my
favorite position for listening.
    "Where are we?'' I ask, a little louder than he does,
for his human ears.
    "At the foots of the Boreal Ridges," he whispers. His
voice is slow. "On the eastern side, where the land belongs
to the Seris. There's a stream not twenty paces from us, it
comes from the Great Lake and its many rivers. The trees
become scarce near the stream, because the ground here is
too rocky for anything to grow abundantly except weeds and
wildflowers." His voice trails off; he's thinking without
words, creating the memory before he can share it with me.
    "What is it like?"
    "It's mid-morning. The sky is clear but for a few white
clouds that move lazily in the breeze. The trees sway
slowly, rustling overhead, dark and light green against the
blue. The grass under us is soft..." he pauses; he clears
his throat and my eyes shut tighter, waiting for the thing
he most fears to hope. "Elviera is playing by the stream...
her laughter floats towards us like the pollen of daisies...
my finger is twirling in your curls..."
    I press my palm against the wall and try to give heat.
I see him on the other side, his brows pressed into his eyes
to prevent weakness... to prevent wetness... to prevent
surrender...
    "Tell me more," I whisper. Think of something else.
Tell me about the trees. Tell me about the Boreal Ridges.
    "Your sister is near," he whispers after a long pause.
My eyes shut tight again and my fingers turn to claws
against the cold wall. Not this. Not this. "She's playing
with Elviera; she's watching over her. She's still quiet,
but she doesn't glare anymore. She's better now. She's
helping Elviera make a crown of flowers."
    But this is not what I want him to say; this is not
what I want to hear. This is not what I want us to remember.
He doesn't understand this, her: Jezbel. I don't want to
dream of her revival; I don't want to remember her when she
was a child. She is broken now, irretrievable; she is what
they want, and so she is dead. I cannot reach for her
anymore; I simply can not.
    "Tell me something else," I say.
    His voice flows once more and my claws slowly turn back
to fingers, soft palm pressed against the wall; to provide
warmth or to take it, I cannot say. But something is
cautious now, and I wait for him to trip again, to provide
something that I will not hope for.
    This is how I remember him now. His whispers turn into
my dreams, or my dreams into his whispers; our bodies
separated by walls of stone, this is how we lie awake at
night, and this is how we fall asleep.
    His finger is twirling in my hair. My eyes close
slowly; I lean back, and almost dare to dream.