This was the part of the dream that she had experienced many times before—walking alone at night, a sudden understanding that she had a purpose, even though she didn’t know what it was. But before tonight, she’d always woken shortly thereafter. This time, she had continued to walk for a much greater distance than ever before, traveling blind until the darkness gave way to the fragile light of dawn.
The ascending sun cast a yellow pall across the ground, which, to Miras’s astonishment, was coated in something spongy with an undercurrent of subtle prickliness—something green.She knew what it was, but only from books, from her brief school rotation through the agri program.
In the distance, not far from a deep stand of wood—real, living trees—she could hear noises, not mechanical, not humanoid, but soft gruntings and cluckings that she recognized as being from animals, from livestock. She was drawing close to a farm. But Cardassians were not farmers, and Miras began to suspect that she was no longer on Cardassia Prime at all. It was then that she recognized she must be dreaming, the most realistic dream she could ever remember having.
She walked through the misty, early light. It was cool, but not uncomfortably so. She marveled at the scene unfolding before her. A farmhouse stood near the copse of dark trees—she’d never seen so many trees together. There were animal pens, a broad stable, a vegetable garden, variations of things she’d seen in captures but never in life—and yet everything was astonishingly detailed, the dirt floor of the yard, the strange, rich smell of growing things. Insects fluttered up from the ground cover, which was everywhere.
She approached a farmhouse, a sturdily built cottage made of clay bricks, black clay like that which could be dug from Cardassian mountains. But she had already decided that she was on another world, and became more certain when she saw the figures moving beyond the windows of the small house. Though she couldn’t make out their features, they were not Cardassian—they were leaner and more graceful than any Cardassian she had ever seen. And yet there was something familiar about them, too…
One of them emerged from the house then, and Miras felt her breath catch. The woman wasa Cardassian—or, at least, she had the same Cardassian cranial ridges, with dark hair and pale gray skin.
She’s Hebitian.The awareness dawned on her like the early light that played across the fertile land. An ancient ancestor, from the first great civilization to arise on Cardassia Prime. Miras had been to see the Hebitian ruins, and she realized suddenly that she was not on another world, after all. She was in another time.
The woman was carrying a jug, fashioned from the same ebony clay as the bricks that made up the farmhouse. Her long, obsidian-black hair was loose about her shoulders, and she was dressed in a white linen garment, cut on the bias to grace the curves of her body. She teased a strand of hair around one of her slender, tapered ears, and then she turned. She saw Miras, and smiled at her. Raised her hand.
Miras was startled, having somehow assumed that she was only observing. This attempt to interact…Her dream was realistic to the point of uncanniness. Couldthis be real? Could she have been drugged, somehow, and brought here without her knowledge? It was absurd to even think such things, but she was helpless not to, it was all so realistic.
The woman began to speak, and Miras could not at first understand her. The Hebitian seemed to realize it, spoke slower, more minimally—and Miras suddenly found that she could understand her perfectly well, as though she’d just remembered that she already knew the language.
I do.The words the woman used were presumably Hebitian, a language that all schoolchildren learned the fundamentals of, as their modern language was built upon it. She’d studied linguistics at university, as well. The third time the woman repeated her simple statement, Miras understood it perfectly.
“I have been waiting,” the woman said.
“Do you mean—you have been waiting for me?”
“I have been waiting.”
Miras looked around for any evidence that the woman could be referring to another—and was struck anew at the strange, rich beauty of this long-ago world, understanding now where she was. The landscape was hilly, but the hills were gentle and rolling, not the usual needle-sharp crags of obsidian that made up her Cardassia. The grunts and screeches of animals were clearer now, more pronounced, mingling with the sounds of a trickling brook somewhere in the trees and the chir-chir-chirof what she imagined were wood-crakes, birds that most experts believed had been extinct for centuries.
“I have something to show you. It is something precious.”
“What…what is it?”
“It is for your eyes only, Miras.”
Miras followed her into the farmhouse, not surprised somehow that the woman had called her by name. The room they entered was clean and filled with light, aesthetically pleasing in a utilitarian way.
The woman went to a wood table that sat against one wall. She opened a flat obsidian box that lay atop it, reached inside—and as she started to lift out whatever was within, the edges of Miras’s perception began to blur. The colors of the room became indistinct, began to meld into the cacophony of unfamiliar sounds and smells. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again—
—and found herself sitting in her own room, kicking at the bedclothes and pulling her sweat-soaked hair away from the back of her neck.
She closed her eyes again, took another deep breath. Tried to hang on to the indistinct image from the dream’s very end, wanting to know what the woman had been about to show her. Something larger than the palm of her hand, something flat with a slight curve, made from dark polished wood and adorned with bright pigments. The object was heavily carved with an ornate design, a design that resembled…a face. It was a mask. The Hebitian woman had been trying to show her a mask.
What does it mean?Miras lay back in bed, closing her eyes again, but she slept no more that night.
Opaka Sulan settled for the winter at a large camp near the northernmost edge of the Sahving Valley. There had been a city here once, Genmyr, that had extended almost to the edge of the forest, more than twenty kellipates away. Genmyr had been a major textile exporter, in Bajor’s simpler industrial times. The majority of the residents—those who had stayed behind, who either couldn’t afford to leave when the occupation had turned ugly or had still believed the Cardassians meant to treat them fairly—had chosen to resettle after an “accidental” fire had swept through the city many years before. The fire had destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of families, made the greater community even more reliant on their oppressors. There were people who said they’d actually seen a group of Cardassian soldiers set the fire, but of course word was not proof and even if it was, there was no recourse.
Many of the broken city’s natives had made camp here for more than a decade, year round. There were temporary shelters here, like Opaka’s fabric tent, and there were a few more substantial dwellings, though nearly all the buildings had a transient quality, lending a kind of anxiety to the camp, as if all its inhabitants expected the day to come when they would have to pack up their families and move on.
The land itself was still mostly barren, but the valley was sheltered from the worst of the cold and there was a river only a few minutes away. It was a good place to winter, and many families came each year, seeking community in the hard months. The camp had already swelled to twice its size since the leaves had begun to fall, since the last of the meager crops had been harvested, and the former vedek knew that more would come—many more, to hear her message of unity. She hoped she was up to the task. The people here had embraced her as their guide in matters of spirit. Many were already coming to her for direction, alone and in groups, and while she did the best she could, offered advice from the heart and spoke what she believed, she was often afraid of faltering.