The Price of Living

Writers: Rochelle
Date Posted: 1st February 2009

Characters: Eleada, Dyrada
Description: Nightmares drive Eleada from her weyr to the one person who understands them - her mother.
Location: Dolphin Cove Weyr
Date: month 1, day 12 of Turn 5

The halls were cold and dim as Eleada made her way through the bowels of the weyr, the faint light of the dying glow clutched in her hand barely giving off enough to see her feet in the occasional dark patch where the hallway glows had died. It wasn't really necessary even in the dimmest halls as there was always just enough light to keep her from tripping if she went slowly, but she couldn't bring herself to set the small basket down any more than she could bring herself to loosen her death grip on the fur clutched around her shoulders.

She turned a corner and hurried down the waiting stairs, trying to ignore the way the shadows seemed to twist around her, eating at the edges of the small patches of light set out by the glows lining the corridor. The weyr was silent, eerily so, the only sound that of her own ragged breathing and bare feet on the stone. They mocked her, fleeing her, until the silence resounded in her brain with the volume of a drumtower, deafening her to anything but the sounds in her own mind.

She whimpered, and hurried even faster through the silent halls.

Distantly, she berated herself. _Hated_ herself for doing this, for fearing the darkness of the weyr, for feeling the oppressive weight of the mountain over her head, for the headlong plunge through the darkened corridors away from her dragon and the weyr she'd worked so hard to make her own. Hated herself for being so weak and foolish that she was driven from her warm bed and sleeping dragon because of a dream. Not even a dream, but a memory fashioned into one. A memory of screams.

Oh Faranth... The screams...

Eleada choked on a sob, biting back the whimper and fighting the images trying to resurrect themselves in her mind, the echoes of those screams creeping through her ears just at the edge of hearing. No. She was better than this. She was a dragonrider, and Wingthird. She was as high as a greenrider could possibly get in the weyr. There was no excuse for her to be doing this. No excuse for her to be driven from her weyr candlemarks before dawn by a simple nightmare, much less a recurring one. She was stronger than this. She faced Thread regularly, had faced her own death on more occasions than she cared to remember. There was no excuse.

But the faces, and the screams... always the screams...

When she finally reached the right hallway, dimly but clearly lit to allow the residents an easy path to the bathing chambers, she forced herself to slow her headlong rush, and leaned against the wall by the door. She took a deep breath, trying to compose herself, but not even the solid reassurance of the door to her goal was enough to relax her grip. She laughed bitterly at herself, squared her shoulders as much as possible while hunched over the flickering glow and clutching at her fur, and knocked lightly on the door.

She waited in the silence, biting her lip as she listened vainly for the sound of someone moving behind the heavy door. Shards, she shouldn't be doing this. She wasn't a kid anymore. It wasn't like she hadn't been dealing with the nightmares for turns on her own. She didn't need to go running to her aging mother's weyr in the small hours of the morning every few sevendays. She should have someone...

But there was no one, not anymore. No one she was willing to run to in the dark of the night when her weyr was echoing with the screams of her nightmares and the horrible aching knowledge that she was utterly alone. Linrary was dead, and taking another female roommate to keep the dreams at bay not only felt like betraying her friend's memory but was a surefire way to put her position at risk as well from the rumors alone. And she'd already tried the traditional weyr route of an endless stream of lovers, and gotten burned for it.

It felt like a small eternity before the door scraped open, and Eleada lifted her eyes from the floor to see Dyrada's brown eyes watching her. She managed a weak smile, feeling utterly ridiculous to be standing there in the hallway as the sense of desperation that had driven her barefoot through the halls to the family weyrs finally fled at the sight of another living, breathing human being standing before her.

"Did I wake you...?" Eleada asked tentatively as her mother silently pulled back enough for her to slip inside. She winced at how hoarse and thin her voice sounded.

Dyrada shook her head in resignation, closing the door before turning around to face her youngest daughter in the light of the family room. All the glows in her were reassuringly lit, driving the darkness that pervaded the rest of the weyr away and allowing Eleada to relax a little more. "No."

Eleada nodded, moving slowly over to set the glow on the table by the wall with a shaking hand. "Were you... I..." She sighed shakily, falling into one of the chairs. "I'm sorry."

Dyrada sighed, and pulled her robe a little closer before sitting across from Eleada. "Don't apologize for something you have no control over, Ele." She chided wearily. "It's a waste of breath."

A small smile quirked on Eleada's lips. "I know. Sorry." The smile grew a little more genuine as her mother shot her an irritated look. "How are the kids?"

"Fine. Sleeping, thank Faranth." Dyrada shook her head. "Felada had a nightmare earlier, so of course mine came back, and I figured after that it wasn't worth it going back to sleep again. I had a feeling you'd be along."

Eleada laughed softly. "We're a mess, aren't we?" She stated bitterly. "Commanding by day, but one nightmare and we're done for the night."

"It's the price we pay for living, Ele." Her mother said softly with another sigh. "All we can do is accept it, and go on."

"I know." Eleada rested her forehead on the table, breathing in the faint scent of varnish. Her mother must have gotten the ancient table refinished recently. She knew Dyrada was right, even though it was a hard truth to live with. The dreams she had, the nightmares she and her mother so often endured, were the price they paid for surviving the horrific disaster of the Thayan Peak earthquake. "It doesn't make it any easier though."

"If life were easy, then we wouldn't be here." Her mother answered dryly as Eleada lifted her head. "Tea?"

Eleada nodded, and her mother went over to the wall cupboard that dated from her first weyrmate, the elderly bronzerider father of Eleada's two oldest half brothers. Her other three brothers were the sons of her mother's second weyrmate, a bluerider who'd been crushed in the earthquake at Thayan when the roof over the wallow and hallway collapsed, leaving Eleada trapped alone in the dark of the back bedroom listening to his and his dragon's agonized screams until they died from their injuries, still trapped under the rubble. It was the source of the recurring nightmares the greenrider endured, added to over the years by the faces and voices of lost wingmates in Fall.

She watched in silence as her mother pulled out two cups, and moved over to the covered water jug on a side table.

The tea her mother handed her was cold, made by dumping leaves into the water and crushing them with a spoon, but Eleada didn't mind. The tea was a ritual, something she and her mother could share in silence or words as the mood struck them during the long candlemarks before dawn.

Tonight was no different. The herbs were bitter, overdried, and added little more than a thin coating of green flakes to her tongue, but the act itself, of drinking tea in a cozily lighted room with the sounds of her children and nieces and nephews breathing in the other room, was more soothing than all the hot tea and sweet-smelling herbs on Pern.

Dyrada had it right, she thought wearily. Her mother was a fostermother, raising her grandchildren by her dragonriding children, and so never had to wake alone in the dark. No, her mother's nightmares, although they were similar to her daughter's, were triggered instead by the memory of a weyr and a beloved man buried alive while she tried frantically to reach her youngest daughter in the rubble, not knowing whether she was dead like so many others. Eleada had considered having her sons move in with her, but it would be unfair to the boys and everyone else to relocate them when Eleada had little enough time for them as it was.

She swirled her tea, listening to the steady breathing of the several children in the adjoining rooms, the faint sound of snoring from her nephew driving away the last echoes of the nightmare that had driven her from her bed.

So many people had wondered since her arrival why Eleada had chosen to move back to Dolphin Cove when she clearly loved her life at High Reaches. Even more had wondered why she had taken a roommate while there, and a lesbian no less when everyone knew her dragon precluded the obvious answer. Most had allowed themselves to be fobbed off with the answer that she missed the warmth and her children after Linrary had died, although they continued to wonder.

Only her mother knew the whole answer to the question. Linrary had been her friend and practically a sister, adopted as such by not only Eleada but most of her family for her friendly personality. But guiltily, shamefully, Eleada had used her as a ward against the dreams. For when she'd discovered that her endless stream of lovers and resulting miscarriages would leave her dead if she wasn't careful, she had rediscovered the nightmares of those horrible two days trapped in the dark bedroom of her weyr in Thayan. Linrary hadn't minded, and there had been many nights when the pair had crawled silently into each other's bed after nightmares, not expecting anything more than the simple reassurance of another person's presence.

But now, at Dolphin Cove... her friend was dead, and her position meant she couldn't take another female roommate. She couldn't ask a man to stay with her without ever letting him have something in return. She had learned that all too painful lesson time and time again. So she worked herself to exhaustion with her new wingthird duties in the hope it would keep her from dreaming, and when her efforts failed and she woke to her own screams again, she swallowed her pride and went to the one person who truely understood them. Her mother.

It wasn't perfect. But it was all she could do when each bad Fall added more screams to her memories and nightmares. She dealt with the nightmares as well as she could, and when all else failed she went to her mother so they could wait together for the dawn.

"Do you mind if I stay...?" Eleada trailed off as her mother shook her head, the familiar request the same as it had been dozens of times before, the answer always the same.

She'd be a little tired at drills in the morning, but no worse than the other times she'd sought her mother's weyr in the night. And when the morning came, the children would stir and the last lingering effects of their nightmares would vanish into memory, and life would go on.

For in the end the nightmares were simply painful memories, and memories were nothing more than the price of living.

Last updated on the February 8th 2009

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The Price of Living