Carabas

As mostly my IRL self, I'm following a news story about a court case. The girl on trial is a minor, but the people involved in the case keep talking about her as if she's an adult; there's racial connotations. Her outlook is not good. As not-exactly-my-IRL-self, I'm thinking this is an injustice. I've allowed them long enough to work this out themselves, they've had their chance; I'm going to step in and remove her from this ridiculous trial. There's a connotation here that this means dropping everything going on in my life. I'm nearly out the door when IRL-self stops to wonder exactly what I think I can do.

I'm standing in a dimly-lit, brown-toned library where I'm meeting Mazikeen for the first time in a long time. The dreamer part of me is critiquing the way the dream is representing her half-alive half-dead status; the parts of her without skin are tinged green, and it crosses over her body, so that her left arm and right leg are dead. I think of this as a clumsy representation of the life/death mix. The character part of me is remembering seeing her a long time ago, when she'd just been made immortal and she'd been elated about it, saying that she'll be able to continue to serve as long as I need her. I'm wondering whether she'll think what I'm doing now is worth serving - or rather, what I'm not doing now; I've abandoned certain ambitions.

Mazikeen's picking up a crow for me, telling it that it's not going to get out of our deal. There's always an excuse.

"What excuse?" says the crow. "I'm not trying anything. I'm just pointing out I've got mouths to feed."

Many people do. But she counts the children in the nest, six of them. She initially seems not to care, saying something about distributing its belongings; but then she says something about giving them time to "grow into it." The crow's got one more year.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A group of people sitting around a round table, while I'm standing. There's a woman who is composed of three women superimposed over each other, two living, one dead and decayed but still conscious due to her connection to the other two. I'm speaking to one of the living ones, Lily, the one who belongs to this reality, and offering a way to separate her from the other two. She has doubts. The other two are in favor of it. They ultimately agree.

Later, I'm reading an account of the deaths of that group who'd been sitting around the table, a kind of organization I'd led. I'd made a deal on behalf of those three women, and to hold up my end of the deal, I was away for a long time; I think of this as abandoning that group. There was a fire. I'm reading a note to the effect that the group itself will reappear in some form or another, but the people I'd abandoned are dead.