With You in Our Dreams

With You in Our Dreams

The small city park was unusually empty. The animals had all fled. The people on the streets seemed to avoid it; specifically, the tiny graveyard. It is common for the living to avoid the dead, but that was not what drove them away. A feeling most ominous draped itself over the whole area as a new moon hung high in the sky.

Within a fresh grave, a battered female body rested. Her soul was fast asleep. Her spirit, however, remained wide awake. She was the newest among them.

Around her, other graves contained other bodies, but only some contained souls. Souls who were asleep. They also had spirits which stored things like memories and feelings that the soul could not while it slept. Spirits who were awake. Spirits who lacked something, something that could wake the souls up. Thus, the spirits drove the souls to sleepwalk among the living, in the world the living considered real. Reality was a dream to the stranded soul, but the spirit forced them to search for the truth.

Misty forms began to rise to their feet. Many were indistinct, as they were weaker. Others were more well-defined, as they had the energy to be. Aside from identity, however, they were all alike. Their eyes were closed, they all bore the same wounds their bodies did, and they were all unaware that they were dead. All but one. The girl in the unmarked grave.

Mia was her name. Mia Parker, Mage of Balance.

Mia hardly appeared misty at all, indicating that she was much stronger than any of the other sleeping souls. Her eyes, one blue and one red, were wide open. She knew she had died. And finally, unlike the others, her soul didn't sleep because she couldn't move on.

Her soul slept because she was still alive.

In fact, she had to go on.

Despite the different circumstances she was under, however, her still spirit behaved like the others. Her soul still needed something to wake up, even though it didn't necessarily have to wake up. This was because Mia was experiencing reincarnation, a process which would allow her to continue living once her body was fully repaired and suitable to be dwelled in once more. Her body wouldn't wait for her soul, though. It would assuredly go on living even if her soul didn't wake up. That was the way reincarnation worked. If her soul remained asleep when the body awoke, then the body would be run by the spirit and whatever else remained.

None of this had anything to do with Mia's spirit making her soul sleepwalk, however. There was so much more to it than that. Mia had things she personally had to do, even if she didn't really "have" to do them. She wasn't the kind of person to just let go of things like that.

---

That first night was a strange experience for Mia's sleepwalking soul. She spent most of it trying to figure out how to move around, as the others around her were. By sunrise she had figured out the difference between standing, sitting, laying down, ect. and she could almost make it out of the graveyard and into the park by walking. She could feel impatient unconscious instincts driving her some place all the while, but the inability to move prevented her from following them.