Commercials full of happy-looking people "tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer."
How we think about childhood is intensely bound up in our ideas and understandings of time. To be a parent is to be always looking forward, both in our children’s lives (celebrating milestones as they acquire new skills, chalking up lines on the door frames to measure their growth, imagining what the next stage of parenting will bring) but also in how we think about ourselves, situated on a family tree stretching back into the past and onwards towards future generations. Yet while we might have long-term dreams and fears for the children in our lives, we also live alongside them in the present. When my daughter falls down and scrapes her knee, I respond to her in the here and now, not because I’m thinking about how this will affect her in the future, but because I love her and want to support her through her discomfort. I see her as the person right in front of me, not her future self.
To acknowledge a child’s personhood without invoking their potential as an adult does not mean that their future ceases to be important. We would do the children in our care a disservice to never be thinking about the years to come, just as we as adults think about our own futures too. This is why we might still insist on teeth being brushed, even when the child in front of us doesn’t feel it’s high on their priority list! But we can speak to children about their hopes for the future and how we can support them to meet these, rather than making assumptions about what a ‘good’ future life should look like. It is their lives, after all, not ours.
Down to the very cellular level, human beings are either in defensive mode or in growth mode, but they cannot be in both at the same time. When children become invulnerable, they cease to relate to life as infinite possibility, to themselves as boundless potential, and to the world as a welcoming and nurturing arena for their self-expression. The invulnerability imposed by peer orientation imprisons children in their limitations and fears. No wonder so many of them these days are being treated for depression, anxiety, and other disorders.
Slowly Falling for him
I glance at Talan cautiously. “Whose blood is on your sword?”
“Someone made the mistake of testing my patience. You’d think people
would have learned by now.”
Vague. Annoyingly so. “Another traitor?”
He cuts me a sharp look. “I won’t let anyone get in my way.”
A chill ripples up my spine as he stalks over the snow.
The air seems to grow heavier and otherworldly until the forest opens
into a clearing, a path lined with ancient statues and pale purple hedges. On
the far end of the path, the Lost Palace emerges from the wintry forest, a
haunting edifice of twists and curves. Ice and snow glaze the stones,
sparkling in the pale light. Fog billows around a frozen garden of heather
and bare yews. Moths flutter around us—not metallic, but real ones that are
bright blue. Corbinelle moths. Beautiful to look at, but they’re venomous.
Like Talan, really.
Stone arches frame a door of carved oak, peaked in the center. As we
walk closer, my gaze flicks up at the statues. I stop to stare at one of them, a
towering, crowned queen with long hair that drapes over her robes. My
gaze slides to the symbols on her wrists, and an ember of recognition sparks
in my mind. The encircled triple spirals remind me of the ones I saw in
Nimuë’s tower—and look exactly like the ones I’d seen on my wrists for a
moment in the bathtub. As I stare at them, cold magic slides over my wrists.
Talan follows my stare. “That’s Nimuë. She built this palace long ago.
She’s buried here, in fact. Did you know that before she was the Lady of the
Lake, my grandmother had that role? Before she was queen.”
I stare at the triple spirals again. Three Ladies of the Lake. “Queen
Morgan.”
Thank the ancient gods we don’t have the same grandmother in reality,
given some of the filthy thoughts I’ve had about him.
I draw a shaky
Convinced of plots against him, Richard removed Gloucester to Calais, where he was strangled with a towel, executed Arundel, banished Warwick and the Percys, and so aroused the fears and hates of his subjects that in 1399 his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke was able to depose him without a sword being raised in the rightful King’s defense. Compelled publicly to resign the crown, Richard was transferred from the Tower to a more secluded prison, where, within a year, he died of purposeful neglect, or worse.
Maps and Family
I glance at the Dream Stalker and see his dark eyes searching in the
crowd. He’s not looking at me, and yet I feel the full intensity of his
attention like an electrical charge.
He cocks his head, staring at the stage again. A lock of his black hair
rests on one of his sharp cheekbones. A chill ripples over my body.
A deep, murmuring voice floats through my thoughts, and my heart
skips a beat. It’s the phantom, sensual voice I often hear. He’s speaking in
Fey about a party he threw, and the heat of desire that made bodies shimmer
with the otherworldly colors of twilight. And the flame-haired woman so
obsessed with the pleasure of his tongue that she stripped naked the
moment they were alone together. He delighted in the poses she struck for
him that night, baring herself in every way. She likes it when he tugs her
hair. And yet, he feels something is missing…
My pulse starts to race. It’s him, isn’t it?
The voice I’ve been hearing all these years when I’m alone and tired.
The sometimes violent, sometimes sensual voluptuary who speaks to me
when I’m in that liminal space between waking and dreaming, murmuring
in a velvety voice.
Of course it would be him—the Dream Stalker. It makes sense. Dreams
are woven from our worst fears and greatest desires. And that’s what his
voice has always been in my mind.
My heart is beating wildly out of control. I’ve been hearing his poetic,
dark, and often absolutely filthy thoughts since I was about eighteen. Oh,
gods, sometimes I actually liked hearing his voice. Sometimes, it turned me
on.
How can it be? My telepathy only works by touch. How could I have
heard his thoughts all these years, even when we were thousands of miles
apart?
He suddenly seems to tighten, his thoughts more aware. They seem to
be searching for something. For
