Jason shivered, but at least he thought he understood.
All of this was an illusion, but the question was, why?
12
He stared at the walls, fingering the leaf. Once again, he let himself flow, swaying with the movement of the wind, the way that the treetops had swayed, letting that sense of power flow through and around him. Jason breathed it in. His eyes were closed, and as they were, he was there, back within the tree, back within the space with the dragon, her eyes looking at him. There was a sense from her, almost one where he thought he could understand, and yet, he wasn’t sure he could.
As she did when he was in the forest, she pressed her head up toward him, breathing out. Her breath was warm and fragrant, smelling like the forest, the scent of earth and leaves and dirt. It was a pleasant aroma, and it was not nearly as hot as he was accustomed to with the iron dragon. Yet it wasn’t nearly as biting cold as he found with the ice dragon either.
“This is real,” he whispered to himself.
He could whisper to himself all he wanted, but there was the sense of it, and it seemed to overwhelm him. Everything felt real, even though he knew it wasn’t.
He looked all around, letting the memories flood back. This had to be a memory, but it was unlike any memory that he’d had before. There was so much detail to it. He could see the individual leaves on the trees as they fluttered in the breeze, and he could see the branches as they stretched through the darkness. He could even smell the forest, the scent of it filling his nostrils.
There was sound, too. The trees swaying underneath him creaked softly. The wind moving through the upper branches caused the leaves to shake. Everything had a certain pleasantness to it.
Jason breathed in heavily and pushed away the memory, opening his eyes.
Nothing changed.
It was an illusion.
Even though it was an illusion, he wondered whether he was responsible for it or whether it was forced upon him.
He didn’t think the woman had enough knowledge of what he’d seen for her to be able to recreate a memory quite like that, which meant that it was coming from within him.
He was holding on to the leaf. He had been sitting in place, focusing on the dragon, on the way that the wind had shifted, and the power that he had sensed.
In doing so, he had been drawn in, connected in a way that he had been before.
It meant he was responsible for this illusion.
Could he change things?
He thought about the ice in the north. He thought about the wind gusting through, shards of ice and snow tearing at his clothing. He thought about the overwhelming sense of cold, and how he and his sister had barely survived an avalanche.
As he sat there, the illusion shifted. It shimmered as it had when he had been with the other woman, and not only did the illusion shimmer, but something else came to it. The leaves changed over to thick snowflakes that then shifted to icy needles streaking through the sky. They struck Jason, the force of them nearly as real as anything he’d ever felt before. The wind carried cold and bitterness.
He looked around. Snow fell all around him. He took a step, the chains on his ankles now missing, and he stepped through the snow, leaving a footprint.
None of this was real, either.
How was any of it possible?
It had to be tied to the forest dragon, but he had no idea what the forest dragon was able to do or how she could give him these images.
And it was possible that she wasn’t the one giving him the images. It was possible they were coming from him, and that they arose from some place within his own mind. As he thought about them, as he focused on that image all around him, he couldn’t help but think that whatever he was detecting was very much real.
There was another surge, another shifting.
All of a sudden, the walls formed around him once again.
A door opened.
Jason stood, gripping the leaf, holding it tightly in his hand.
The woman stood across from him.
Had she seen the snow? Had she seen the forest?
He had no idea how well she was able to observe him, or whether she was even bothering to do so. She likely believed that he was trapped within her illusion, that whatever she was doing held him in a way that would keep him from moving, and yet she had seen that he had broken through the chains once before.
“Have you sat here long enough?”
“I don’t mind staying here. I find it peaceful.”
“I could make that less peaceful for you.”
“Why use the cell for your illusion?”
She cocked her head to the side, frowning at him. “What makes you think the cell is an illusion?”
Jason looked around. He didn’t know how much of this was real and how much wasn’t, and the longer he’d been here, the harder it was to tell whether or not she was showing him anything real. He had no idea how much of her was even real. He’d begun to think that perhaps she wasn’t nearly as real as what he had first believed, but then, the more that he watched her, the more he stared at her, the harder it was to know. It was possible she was exactly what he thought, and if that were the case, then what could he do to try to see through her?
Perhaps nothing.
“When you tried to bring me out into the sunlight, that wasn’t really the sunlight.”
“Did you not feel warmth on your face? Did you not see the dragons in the sky? Did you not feel the gentle breeze?”
Jason shook his head. “I saw all those things, but none of those were real.”
“Are you telling me that you believe someone would have the power to manipulate your reality?”
He stared at her. He wasn’t sure quite what to say. “I know you were using something to try to get me to see what you wanted me to see.”
She smiled at him. When she did, there came a moment where he wasn’t sure whether he was seeing her or something beyond her. The longer he stared at her, the less certain he was. It was even possible that she was a he. It was possible she was a dragon. It was possible that none of this was what he thought.
And the more that he thought about it, the less he decided it mattered.
All that mattered was what he believed was real.
When it came to reality, and someone’s ability to shift things, to make it seem as if they were different than what he believed, did it matter what he saw and what he believed? If he thought it was real, if it seemed real to him, then it was real. It didn’t need to be anything else.
That was what the iron dragon had suggested to him.
Jason held her gaze and waited for her to admit something to him, but she said nothing. She continued to stare at him, unblinking, and he felt unsettled by the weight of her gaze.
“Tell me about your village.”
“What am I supposed to tell you?”
“I want to know how it is that someone from Gilroy would even think to question me?”
“Who are you?”
She smiled at him. “That’s a question I would imagine you’ve been asking yourself.”
He didn’t know quite what to say. It reminded him of what Thomas had said to him. Could it be that Thomas was responsible for all of this?
He stared at her, looking for any features that might suggest that she was Thomas, trying to see if his mannerisms were there, but that didn’t seem to be the case. It was too much for him to believe that she was Thomas. And it was a mistake for him to even think that she might be.
But he still believed all of this was an illusion.
Something Thomas had said came back to him. He needed to try to understand what was real and what was not. The more he thought about it, the more he knew he needed to find that sense of reality.