POV: Aphrodite
Some dreams leave footprints.
I fall asleep at the grove's center.
Not the grief-sleep of the vigil days or the deliberate sleep of someone who has identified rest as the priority. The specific unintentional sleep of someone who has been in a space that produces the specific quality of rest at the level the space produces it — the grove's warmth and the ley-lines' ambient hum and the settled bond and the day that was the right kind of day running through the specific combination that produces sleep without the deciding to sleep.
The dream is different from the dreamspace quality of Eros's approach and from the blood-locked vision quality of the ruins.
Sun-warmed marble.
The specific quality of a surface that has been in sunlight for long enough to carry the warmth in the stone — warm in the way that the between-space isn't warm and the divine dreamspace wasn't warm, the specific honest physical warmth of material that absorbs and holds.
Roses without thorns.
