Mel straightened, and she nearly tripped against her own leg, as she was still uncoordinated like I remembered, and I laughed.
I did not mean to laugh; the sound came out of me before my mind had finished assembling it, and the laugh was the laugh of a ten-year-old, light and unmarked.
The laugh kept going for slightly longer than the situation had earned, but the laugh was carrying more than my amusement; it also held my intense relief, and for a moment, I was ten years old, and whatever life I had lived that sent me to the Academy and on that expedition was a dream, and now I was awake.
Mel watched it happen with the slightly suspicious air of a sister who suspected she was being laughed at for the wrong reasons, and normally, I would expect her to hit me with a stick, but there must have been something in my laughter that held her back.
My sister was far more perceptive than most people realized, and it always surprised me that her Anima Sensitivity was almost nonexistent, as she would make an exceptional mage.
"You are being weird," she said.
I stopped laughing and replied, "I know."
"It is not your birthday, weird. It is a different weird, like you are sad and happy at the same time."
I paused and nodded, "I know."
"All right." She slid off the bed and tucked the stick under her arm with the air of a small general retiring her scepter. "Get up. I am going to go char the porridge."
She left, and my smile went with her.
I sat on the bed in my body that was not the right body and looked at the room, and it was exactly the room I remembered. The carved wooden box at the foot of the bed was where I kept the stones and feathers I had collected from the river.
Above it was the picture my mother had stitched of the family, herself, dad, me, and baby Mel.
This was my eighth-year birthday gift that I had hung above the small writing desk because I did not know how a person was supposed to acknowledge something that beautiful without pinning it somewhere it could be looked at every morning.
The desk itself, with the inkwell my father had carved from the offcut of a piece of leather work, the surface still showing the fine scratches where he had practiced a new tooling pattern before committing it to a paying piece.
All of it was where it had been, and I did not understand what was happening.
I placed my head in my hands. The demon had asked me a question, and I had used my staff to escape the answer.
However, it seemed as if I had woken up from that escape into something that was not the loop I had been living in for what now felt like a year of subjective time.
However, something told me that I had not gone that far back, and I was inside a memory. As much as I wanted everything that had happened before now to be a nightmare, my Anima Depth and my soul had grown, and there were things that could not deceive me for long unless I allowed it to happen.
I understood that my mind was fleeing into a memory to save itself from madness, and even though I recognized this, I did not flee from the memory because I knew this was a safeguard from my soul, giving me the chance to heal before the madness came.
I could see it at the edge of my vision, a certain wrongness creeping into my mind, and thinking more about it would shatter this fragile dream.
So I did the thing the memory expected of me. I got out of bed, wore the ordinary clothes that were folded on the chair, and walked out of the room and down the short hallway and into the kitchen, where Mel was, in fact, charring the porridge.
Any other time, I would be furious and give her a tongue lashing, but today, I smiled and accepted my food, and I was not surprised that the porridge was bad, yet it was the sweetest thing I had ever placed inside my mouth.
The analytical part of my mind began thinking of this porridge, trying to piece out what made it bad, as I kept spooning more into my mouth under the wide-eyed stare of Mel.
This porridge was bad in a different way than Aldis’s porridge was bad. Aldis’s porridge was bad from indifference. Mel’s porridge was bad due to ambition.
She had attempted to add things. I could see the small jars of dried spices on the counter that she had clearly used too much of. The smell was complicated, and the texture was worse.
Seeing that I cleared off one bowl, the little munchkin, looking at me with suspicion, served me another bowl,
"Hmm, now you are acknowledging my greatness, here, I am blessing you with more," she said.
I tried it without flinching from the bad taste, savoring every bite that seemed to be healing my mind, and looking at her expectant eyes, I did not want to lie, and so I said, "It is interesting, Mel."
She frowned, "That is what people say when they cannot say good. I know this because Mum says interesting to my poems."
"Your poems are excellent."
"My poems are dreadful, and we both know it. I am writing them anyway because I am developing my craft. You are saying the porridge is interesting because the porridge is bad, and you are too cowardly to commit."
"Mel."
"What?"
"I love you."
She looked at me with the stick still under her arm and the round cheeks and the missing front tooth on the left side and her eight-year-old eyes that had not yet seen anything she could not handle, and I watched her decide how to respond to a brother when nobody had asked him to.
"You are definitely having one of your dreams," she said. "I am going to tell Mum."
"Tell her later." I laughed, "Eat your porridge."
"My porridge is excellent, but I would reserve the tasting of that excellence for later."
"Yes, interesting things should be savored slowly." I nodded as if that made sense, and she laughed, the pure laughter of a child, and I stopped myself from crying at this beautiful sound.
I sat at the table in my parents’ kitchen and ate the bad porridge and watched my sister laugh, and I did not want to leave this dream.