Aurora's Dream

## Characters

* Aurora
* Lina (Aurora’s mother)
* Finn (Aurora’s late father)
* IcySky (Aurora’s brother)

## Author’s Note

This story takes place when Aurora was a very young hatchling (NOT in the present day of the Elskerverse), shortly after her dad Finn died and she began having nightmares about attending his wake.

I wrote this little piece at a virtual writing class for the prompt “write a story about a hot air balloon that can take you anywhere.”

I hope you enjoy!

## Story

Aurora shivered in her nightmare. Frost edged her vision – not the kind that made her feel cozy and at home, but rather the type that she found on a daisy in the yard that slowly withered the petals away to the earth until the flower died.

She saw herself, sometimes out-of-body and sometimes through her own perspective, walking back from where her dad lay on an open coffin. Too young to have seen him like that. Too young to process it fully. Not young enough to realize.

When Aurora had bad dreams, Lina would try and comfort her. “You just gotta take control of the dream, baby,” she would say. “Dreams are just in your head. They can take you anywhere. They can be *anything* you let them be.”

She tried it. Aurora’s mind willed the scene of the wake to melt away into a grassland, the barren gray walls to fade into open sky, for the clammy tile floor to instead be grass beneath her claws.

It was beautiful beyond what she could have ever thought herself capable of imagining. Orange met pink met purple stretching vastly above her. Her fury at losing her dad wasn’t the sweat in her balled fists walking away from his body but splashes of gold like an enraged painter swiping across the canvas with watercolor.

“Better hurry before the sun goes down,” called a voice from somewhere in the near distance. Aurora set her gaze on a hot air balloon, striped like a rainbow, resting in the grass. Near it, a wooden sign was staked into the ground, reading “FREE RIDES.”

On the other side of the balloon stood a lizard whose scales kept changing – sometimes the beaming face of her mother, or her father looking down at her with pride, or the clown she saw tying balloon animals at the carnival last summer. But it didn’t matter to Aurora who was offering her a ride; she hopped right in without hesitation.

*This is better than a wake,* she thought to herself. Upon doing so, the clouds almost reformed into benches and the wood bottom of the hot air balloon was hard tile underneath her once again – but she took a deep breath and filled her mind with the bright colors of the sunset, chasing away the memory.

“Remember,” said the voice again. The lizard who had spoken to Aurora leaned into the basket, their fluid shape pausing on Lina’s motherly smile. “Dreams can be anything you let them be.”

The balloon lifted into the sky. Aurora watched the ground grow small beneath her, the clouds rivaling her height until she, too, was kissed by the rays of the setting sun. She opened her arms and let the memories flood in.

Playing a game of dress-up with her brother where he was a princess she had to rescue from the tower that was the living room couch. Having tea with stuffed dolls in her room, but Lina said she was too young for tea just yet and filled the plastic cups with tap water. Going to the carnival with her entire family. Trying cotton candy for the first time.

Her dad lifting her up and twirling her around – and then he was twirling around Lina, dancing in the kitchen while Irish dance music thundered under their claws.

Aurora tried to imagine what would come. She saw a future where she finally got to live in a dollhouse, and Lina let her drink tea, and IcySky would want to play with her all the time. She imagined her dad in every situation. Watching like he always did, looking so warmly gratified that of all the hatchlings he could have had, these two were the ones he got.

But Aurora had never really felt that joy. She had never seen those days, and with him gone forever, never to dance through the house again or kiss Aurora and IcySky goodnight, they would never come.

The balloon hovered in the air, but Aurora’s stomach was sinking.

Her dreams could take her anywhere, except back to her dad.