Dream: Serpentine Dance

I found myself wandering in a vast meadow ringed by dark trees after dusk. The air was pleasant against my nearly bare skin. My sandalled feet stepped softly on the rough trail through the long grasses, whose windblown stalks caressed my ankles, knees, and waist. The sky above was dark midnight blue, and flecked with clear, diamond stars. All of the moons were shrouded, but the stars were more than bright enough that I could pick my way down the path, winding around and between great, grey boulders covered in lichen, and surrounded by flowered grasses, their bulbous heads waving in the soft midsummer breeze that also sent my gauzy dress waving and undulating around me as if it were alive.

I stepped off the path into the tall grasses, my fingers brushing their tops as I passed, their leaves whispering against each other when the breeze ruffled them. Ahead of me there was a great boulder, looking as if some long time ago it had been carelessly flung by some great giants hand. Lichen had taken to its grey, weathered shape, speckling it with pale, almost phospherent greens, yellows, oranges, and rusty reds. Some errant creature had carved the symbol of stars surrounded by the great serpent upon its face, the etchings thick and half lost under the splotchy lichens.

Reaching the boulder, I climbed its side, finding familiar footholds and handholds in the ancient stone, still warm with summers sunny kiss, and settled atop it, looking above to the jewel-encrusted starry sky. The stars seemed so close and so far away at the same time, as if I could reach out my hands and pluck them from the sky. I nestled atop that lonely stone in the meadow, gazing at the beauty above me, revelling in the feeling that the jewel stars were so close as well as so far away.

And then the aurora began. It started with a shimmering like of falling gold dust caught in the suns rays, flickering across the sky above, north to south. Soon pink and purple began filtering their ways into the gold, long ribbons of colour waving across my vision, as if some starry wind were ruffling those ephemeral strands. Blue and green crept in, coiling, swirling, dancing in the dark sky, the bright stars shining through the colour.

Suddenly it seemed as if the aurora was a great serpentine dragon, its coils of many scintillating hues, its beautiful, long body winding above me to the south in a strange, non-euclidean path that somehow was a circle that circled all the world, and all the stars too. Flecks of green and gold fell away from its impossibly great body, rippling and fading to nothing in the cool summer air. Pink and blue began falling away, swirling and rotating off into nothing. Finally the last of the aurora retreated to the south, passing over dark woods and distant mountains.

The stone was still warm, and the faint breeze played with my hair, toying with the strands, whispering by my ears. After a moment, I slid down from my perch upon the carven stone, its dark, reassuring bulk firm under my fingers. I picked my way through the waving, pale grasses, back to that lonesome, winding trail through the meadow. With a last glance to the silent stars above, I continued on my travels.