Chapter Text
You open your eyes.
You are-were-are the world, but now you are you as well. And you blink, and flex your hands, and realize that you are laying in the grass. You have never laid in the grass before. You have been the fox cubs wrestling over and under each other, the herd of grazing horses, the fields and the dirt and the roots within it, but you have never been yourself, and you have never laid in the grass. It rustles against your skin, curling around it like you were born from it. Your fingers tell you it is soft, and you have never felt soft before but you know that it is this.
You are. “You” has never existed before now. And your lips turn up, and all through your newfound self, through your eyes and ears and hands and feet and heart, you feel the sheer expanse of the world unfolded around you, and it bubbles out of you in a high-pitched rusty noise. You are here, and you feel the grass, and the breeze, and the wheezing noise that has never existed before you, and the world loves you (you love the world). The trees of an old forest that sings of sturdiness rustle their branches, and a choir of birds call to each other, darting through the sky above you and off to other trees. Fuzzy yellow bees bob up and down and nudge each other in passing, buzzing of hive and family. Round, fluffy clouds hold the sky aloft, endlessly passing through, and you feel the fleeting hello-goodbye as they drift past.
You love them. Before anything else, you know love, and you love. You push yourself up out of the grass, and the old trees creak as you pass, and the world welcomes you because you are-were-are the world. Blood rushes through the rivers that hold your earth-body together, and while you stumble in your new singular feet, and struggle to grasp with the dextrous new digits of your hands, it is yours and it is as full as the world. A world all your own, and yet the world’s, still. It is hard to navigate in the new ball of lightning that is your thoughts, being singular. A hand sliding across rough bark, tough, lasts-through-the-winter bark, a push off of the grass, and you are in the trees. You have never moved as yourself before, and it is wonderful. It is like orbiting the world and being the earth turning and being the ocean flowing fast, pouring into and out of itself forever. From the world, the forest, the grass, to the tree, and all of it you.
From where your body perches birdlike on the tree, you watch the sun scale the sky. Across the woods, soft white light trails gentle motes over the landscape, and it whispers hello-be-well as it illuminates every lovely inch of surface. The world welcomes, and you know instinctively that you can welcome too. The world is full, but the world is not full, and there is room for more than the player that is-was-is the world. The trees empty into the horizon, but the horizon is endless. It feels your scrutiny and calls soundlessly, a resonant come-seek-find, and you think that that must be how being a player feels, and that is love, too. You want everything to experience that. You are-were-are the world, but you know that the world is not the only one within the void that cradles creation. The possibilities begin to flit through the electric current of your thoughts, and the nexus of life-rivers that is your heart pumps over and over, endlessly renewing yourself- you, the world within the world that is also the world- and you dream.
You are Dream, and you are love.
The world becomes fuller. There are many other players, but you are the only one that is-was-is the world. You dreamed, and your welcome sought out fellow dreamers. They dreamt of trees, and shelter, and creation. They felt the invitation, the call over the endless horizon, and they walked between worlds to find the world that is the world and also you. You are there to welcome them, when they wake in the grass that you emerged from. They are so utterly unique, and they do not feel the web of the world like you do, but you love them.
What’s even better is that they love you back. You can’t feel it in their body-mind-soul like you can the rest of the world that is also you, but you use your new singular sight and singular hearing and you know. They smile back at you, and seeing a smile is so much better than feeling it, and they say the feeling in the utterly simple and charming player-words “I love you.” They touch you with gentle hands and gentle shoulder bumps and gentle embraces. They laugh, in their own special ways that all feel so them , and it rings through the air and the trees and the world like it was made for that very moment, this very place.
When their gaze on your new singular face makes a feeling you cannot describe to them except as ender-fear-of-sight, they make wounded little noises and turn away, but only so that the player with goggles can shape you a disc of clay and tie it with string around your face. It is cool against your skin, but when you feel the sediments of the earth that compose it and the rushing waters that shaped it and the clumsy fingerprints pressed into it, it reverberates love love you are loved. They tell you it is blank, though, and the player with as much energy as fire clicks his fingers and takes a stick of charcoal and says “Hold still!” You feel the stick press into the clay in careful lines, and that this player who burns so brightly would be slow for you fills you with a helpless joy, and soon that feeling is spilling out of everyone. The clearing is washed in love because you are smiling for them always, and they love so differently from the world but it feels just as wonderful.
The world that is and is not you gives to the players. They chop down the old trees and gather its logs, and they pry into the earth for gleaming nuggets of metal and jewels. They build clumsy structures and light the landscape with torches and adorn themselves in armor, and the world does not care. The world loves them because they explore every part of it and they are together and they live, and that is all the world would ask of them. You, Dream, live too, because this is what you dreamed of, and you are just like them, and just like the world, too, because you love them. You look at your players freely with your smiley mask, and you race the wind and race your players, and you laugh and laugh and laugh.
More players come, hearing the call from the horizon, dreaming of something new, and they, too, wake in the grass, and accept your hand up. They love and are loved, and they become part of the community that becomes a world, the world within the world. They talk and love and laugh, all on their own wavelength that is separate from the world that is and is not you. One of the players tells you to just call this a family, but for these players family means something else, and so you do not. They created a world when they are not a player that is-was-is the world, and they are so special.
You are the world: the rolling hills, the ageless trees, the bubbling magma of the earth. You are every bee in every hive and every fish in every sea and every field of grass. You are also yourself, the player, Dream. You love, and are loved. It is everything you dreamed of.