Jordan Hennessy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impressionism) wrote2022-04-16 12:11 am
impressionism) wrote2022-04-16 12:11 am
[abraxas : memories ]
One.
Hennessy was rarely allowed into the studio and certainly never invited, so it was with awe she accepted her mother’s hand and rode the elevator to the third-floor studio. There was nothing quite like J. H. Hennessy’s studio when she was in the prime of her career. This secret world was accessible only via the coded elevator or via a dark staircase that ended at a door with no knob, just a key in a lock.
Inside it was old and new. Elderly window sashes, sleek white walls. Old floorboards, new black and white graphic floor paint. From the ceiling hung immense light fixtures, gifts from a fellow artist, messes of lightbulbs and dried grasses and leaves. From the floor grew metal floor lamps with shades cut sharply so that they threw light in geometric, lacy shapes. Gradient thumbprints dotted every flat surface, including the white grand piano, where Jay had thoughtlessly tested new paints. And of course there were the paintings, in all states of finish. The eyes were alive. The hands were alive.
Once the elevator door had hissed closed behind them, Jay took just one moment to look out one of the studio’s windows for something and then, when she didn’t find it, she returned to make a great fuss over Hennessy. She had her try on several of the dresses she had thrown on the sofa. She posed her in multiple ways in a simple wooden chair. She messed with her hair and played at braids and put lipstick on her and wiped it off. All the while she told Hennessy how pretty she had grown up to be, how wonderful a painting they were going to make together. No! Not a painting. A series of paintings. An exhibition.
It had felt like a day that happened to someone else. Hennessy sat very still in the chair, like an animal by a highway, afraid to move lest she dart from safety to something worse. She was cold in the white shift but she didn’t want to even shiver in case her mother remembered Hennessy was not usually treated like this. But the spell hadn’t broken. They’d worked all day, all evening. The next morning, Jay was still enthused. She ordered in a very grand breakfast of pastries from one of the bakeries and then they went back up for more work, this time up the rickety back staircase that ended in the door with no knob. They spent two weeks like that, with Hennessy sitting still in the chair and not shivering and her mother painting her and takeaway and delivery bags piling up in the stairwell.
At one point, Jay put her brush down and said, shocked, “I made you. One day you’ll grow up and be a woman, and I made you.” Jay looked at Hennessy, and Hennessy suddenly had the impression that Jay was really seeing her, really thinking about what it meant to be Hennessy, to be Hennessy’s mother. Jay looked from Hennessy to her painting and back again, and then she said, “How wonderful you’re going to be.”
It was the best moment of Hennessy’s life.
Two. [cw: child neglect ]
Then there was an audible slam. The front door. Bill Dower, returning from wherever he had gone. Jay leapt up so quickly that her stool clattered on the floor. Her still-wet palette was abandoned on the piano. The elevator door was whirring closed. Hennessy was alone before she even quite understood what had happened. She sat in the chilly chair for quite a while, not wanting to move in case her mother returned. After an hour, she pulled up the drop cloth to wrap around herself and wait some more (little ghost!). Finally she let herself shiver and admit Jay wasn’t coming back. With a little sigh, she padded barefoot across the cold floor to the elevator, but discovered it wouldn’t move without the code, which she didn’t have. She went to the door without a knob instead, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked; the keyhole was empty.
Hennessy was trapped in the studio.
At first she called down very nicely, though she didn’t think either of her parents would hear her over their own raised voices. Then she shouted. She banged. Finally, she gave up.
She waited. It became night. Hennessy wiped away her tears and turned on the floor lights, which threw hard, lacy patterns across the floor and walls. She went to see the canvas her mother had worked on all these weeks.
It was awful.
It was the worst painting Hennessy had ever seen her mother do. It was twee and cutesy, a straightforward and boring portrait of a daft, plucky little girl sitting awkwardly on a chair. The eyes weren’t alive. The hands weren’t alive. Hennessy, who’d been working and learning with her own art all this time, was embarrassed for her mother. It was terrible that she wasn’t coming up here for Hennessy and her growling stomach, but it felt even more terrible that anyone would ever see this piece.
Hennessy looked at the canvas for a long time, and then she counted, telling herself that if one of her parents came for her by the count of six hundred, she wouldn’t do it. Six hundred seconds went by. Eight hundred. One thousand.
Hennessy stopped counting.
She searched the drawers by the wall and collected all the paints she wanted. Then she moistened her mother’s oils again on the palette, picked up the brush and began to paint. After a few minutes, she dragged over the full-length mirror from beside the sofa, and she redid the portrait’s gormless face with her actual wary expression. She overpainted the boring shadows in the white shift with subtle colors instead. She shrugged the shoulders of that chilly girl just a little, not quite shivering, but wanting to. At each step, she got up to compare her brushstrokes to the other paintings in the studio. She made the eyes alive. She made the hands alive. She painted the portrait that Jay should have painted.
It took all night.
It was another day after that before her mother came to get her, and by then Hennessy was fitful and burning up with a fever that had come on during the second night. Bill Dower had gone again. “This turned out better than I thought,” Jay said, looking at the canvas, hovering her fingers over her signature in the corner, painted by Hennessy hours before. “Oh, Jordan. Stop complaining. I’ve got some paracetamol downstairs. Come on, what a trial. Next time don’t hide so long and you won’t feel as awful.”
Hennessy’s first forgery was of herself.
Three. [cw: suicide]
Ten years before, J. H. Hennessy had shot herself.
One shot, .45 caliber. The gun belonged to a friend of the family, reports said. It was registered, everything north of proper except for the part where it killed someone, and maybe even that, because isn’t that every guy’s fitful dream? There was music playing when it happened. An old jazz recording, some woman’s voice pitching and lilting along as the sound fuzzed and popped.
Jay was in a large closet. The lights were out. The only illumination came from a small, high window, and everything it touched was gray. She was dressed in a bra and underwear and a robe. Mascara was drawn down her face. She was holding a gun to her own head, and she was listening for the door to open.
This was not in the reports, but Hennessy knew it because she was the one who opened the door.
“Mum?” Hennessy said.
“You won’t miss me,” Hennessy’s mother said.
“Wait,” Hennessy said.
The gun barrel flashed.
Four.
The clearing became dark. This was how the dream began: in darkness.
There was no sound. There was the vast movement of time and space, which had its own substance in the dream, but was not exactly sound. There was nothing in the dream you could really look at. There was nothing in the dream you could really put words to. There was Hennessy, and in the dream, Hennessy knew she could manifest anything, if she really wanted to.
It was limited only by her imagination—what an impossible, terrifying, brilliant truth. She’d been given this talent when born and not told how to use it. Given this talent and watched it kill her mother, or at least not save her. She could do better with it.
If only she was dreamt of something besides …
It was there. She felt it, and then she saw it. Dark and looming, the opposite of color and understanding. Only its edges made any kind of sense. Slanted and hooked, checkered and geometric. Lacy, if they were anything at all. Mostly it was bigger. It was bigger than anything she could understand. It was so enormous and old that age didn’t apply to it. It had been there for so long that humans were bacteria to it. Infinitesimal. Irrelevant. It was so much more powerful than they that the only saving grace was that it had never noticed—
Its awareness became a thing in the dream. It saw Hennessy. She could feel how awful that weight was. How it changed everything. Now that she had been noticed, she could never be unseen. There were two Hennessys, the one who had lived without knowing this thing existed, and more importantly, without it knowing she existed, and the one who was seen.
Now that it had seen her, it hated her.
It was going to kill her. It was going to kill her like this: It was going to get inside her, it promised, and it was going to kill her just by existing there, because she was so small and porous, and it was everything.
She couldn’t hold it inside her. Or she could let it out, and live.
She would never let it out. She was not strong enough to keep it from moving toward her now, but she was strong enough to never let it out. She wasn’t so weak that she would let anyone else have to live with it looking, seeing, touching, invading—
Five.
One figure returned quietly to the rose garden. There was a proud line to the shoulders, to the lifted chin. A coiled power to the walk, which was more like a stalk. The eyes were intense and bright. But the shape of the mouth was at odds with the rest of it. Something about the expression there was miserable. Vulnerable.
Jordan Hennessy.
“You have my sword,” she said, stopping among the ruined thorns of the old roses. Warily, Farooq-Lane stepped in front of Liliana. She put her hand on the hilt warningly. Her heart was beating fast again; who knew what deadly dreams this Zed might be carrying. “I don’t want to fight. We’re not here for you.” “I know. I’m here for you.” Hennessy made a big performance of turning her pockets inside out and showing the interior of her leather jacket. Then she held her hands out on either side of her like a reveal. “I’m giving up. This is what it looks like when I give up.” “How do I know this isn’t a trap?” Farooq-Lane asked. “Life’s a trap,” Hennessy said in a sort of bleak, funny way.
...
The three women were on the second floor of a convoluted, historical teahouse, in a small room filled with overstuffed chairs, beanbags, end tables, and travel books. Plinking music played overhead. They had it to themselves. It was very intimate and safe-feeling, which was the opposite of everything Hennessy had been doing for the past few weeks. Past few years.
“This is all very life-affirming,” Hennessy told them from her place in a beanbag, “enriching, and all that, but what of it? So if it’s not fair, and it’s not easy, it’s still there. There’s still this thing hanging over me every time I dream, and if Ronan and Bryde have their way, I won’t be able to stop it.”
Liliana murmured something into Farooq-Lane’s ear, which made Farooq-Lane’s beautiful face go consternated. They both looked at Hennessy. “So I understand completely if you decide to kill me,” Hennessy said, talking fast. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. On previous episodes, it would’ve been a very selfish decision, on account of my ladies and how they relied on me for their existence, but on this current run, everyone else dead, mostly, fate of the world in hands, well—”
She spread her hands, or at least the best she could, considering she had a hot chocolate in one of them. “It’s the selfless thing to do, really.”
“We have a different idea,” Farooq-Lane said.
Hennessy narrowed her eyes. “Do you mean you both had this idea, or she has an idea, and whispered it to you just now?” Liliana smiled sweetly.
“I told you she was clever.” Farooq-Lane’s businesslike expression didn’t change. “Can you dream something to suppress the ley line?”
Six.
“Where is your voice? Be present. Now look. I’ve given you a canvas and you’ve left it blank,” Bryde said, gesturing around them. Now that the Lace was gone, the dream held just their conversation, nothing else. “Laziness is the natural child of success. Who, after struggling up the ladder, feels like building another ladder? The view is already good. You’re not trying. Why?”
Hennessy’s voice was still just thought. There’s a word for someone who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. “Artist?” suggested Bryde. “You didn’t use to mind failure.”
She was annoyed that he was right.
Hennessy had spent her youth studying how pigment behaved, how badger bristles splayed paint versus squirrel versus hog versus kolinsky sable, how complementary colors accentuated each other or canceled each other out, how the human skeleton was constructed beneath the skin, working on every flat surface that presented itself to her. Trying. Failing. She’d also spent an equal amount of time, or more, on training her mind. Perception and imagination were always the weakest link in any artist’s chain. Eyes saw what they wanted to see instead of what was truly there. Shadows became too dark. Angles went crooked. Shapes got elongated, crushed. The brain had to be taught to see without feeling, and then to put feeling back in.
Fail, try again, fail, try again.
She couldn’t remember how she’d ever had the bandwidth to do that for so many hours and days and weeks and years.
“This is better,” Bryde said.
The dream had become a studio.
Hennessy hadn’t consciously thought of putting them in a studio, but dreams were crafty bastards that way. They gave you what you wanted, not what you said you wanted.
The studio was as good as reality. It smelled wonderful and productive, earthy and chemical. Multiple easels displayed canvases in all sizes. Paint glistened on palettes. Brushes stood on handles like bristled bouquets. Drop cloths covered the old wood floor. Bryde sat in a chair next to a wall of windows, his legs crossed casually, arm across the back of the chair. Jordan would have said he’d make a good portrait subject.
The view beyond him was a city of historical buildings and close-set trees and invading highways. A distant storm mounted, the clouds tattered and checkered. The dream was trying hard, in the way that dreams do, to imply that Hennessy had been to this studio before, although she knew she hadn’t. It’s Jordan’s studio, the dream said. If you don’t recognize it, it’s only because it’s been too long since you’ve seen her. Why don’t you keep up with her like you used to?
Hennessy disagreed. “She doesn’t keep up with me.”
“There you are. Found your voice,” Bryde said. “You are not two things. You are not Hennessy, asleep, and Hennessy, awake. You are more than the sum of your feelings, your id. You are also the things you have learned to do about them. Dreaming, waking. They’re the same thing for you; when will you believe it? Put something on that canvas. The ley line is listening. Ask it for what you want.”
[ All text is taken from Call Down the Hawk and Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater and is here for reference only. ]
Hennessy was rarely allowed into the studio and certainly never invited, so it was with awe she accepted her mother’s hand and rode the elevator to the third-floor studio. There was nothing quite like J. H. Hennessy’s studio when she was in the prime of her career. This secret world was accessible only via the coded elevator or via a dark staircase that ended at a door with no knob, just a key in a lock.
Inside it was old and new. Elderly window sashes, sleek white walls. Old floorboards, new black and white graphic floor paint. From the ceiling hung immense light fixtures, gifts from a fellow artist, messes of lightbulbs and dried grasses and leaves. From the floor grew metal floor lamps with shades cut sharply so that they threw light in geometric, lacy shapes. Gradient thumbprints dotted every flat surface, including the white grand piano, where Jay had thoughtlessly tested new paints. And of course there were the paintings, in all states of finish. The eyes were alive. The hands were alive.
Once the elevator door had hissed closed behind them, Jay took just one moment to look out one of the studio’s windows for something and then, when she didn’t find it, she returned to make a great fuss over Hennessy. She had her try on several of the dresses she had thrown on the sofa. She posed her in multiple ways in a simple wooden chair. She messed with her hair and played at braids and put lipstick on her and wiped it off. All the while she told Hennessy how pretty she had grown up to be, how wonderful a painting they were going to make together. No! Not a painting. A series of paintings. An exhibition.
It had felt like a day that happened to someone else. Hennessy sat very still in the chair, like an animal by a highway, afraid to move lest she dart from safety to something worse. She was cold in the white shift but she didn’t want to even shiver in case her mother remembered Hennessy was not usually treated like this. But the spell hadn’t broken. They’d worked all day, all evening. The next morning, Jay was still enthused. She ordered in a very grand breakfast of pastries from one of the bakeries and then they went back up for more work, this time up the rickety back staircase that ended in the door with no knob. They spent two weeks like that, with Hennessy sitting still in the chair and not shivering and her mother painting her and takeaway and delivery bags piling up in the stairwell.
At one point, Jay put her brush down and said, shocked, “I made you. One day you’ll grow up and be a woman, and I made you.” Jay looked at Hennessy, and Hennessy suddenly had the impression that Jay was really seeing her, really thinking about what it meant to be Hennessy, to be Hennessy’s mother. Jay looked from Hennessy to her painting and back again, and then she said, “How wonderful you’re going to be.”
It was the best moment of Hennessy’s life.
Two. [cw: child neglect ]
Then there was an audible slam. The front door. Bill Dower, returning from wherever he had gone. Jay leapt up so quickly that her stool clattered on the floor. Her still-wet palette was abandoned on the piano. The elevator door was whirring closed. Hennessy was alone before she even quite understood what had happened. She sat in the chilly chair for quite a while, not wanting to move in case her mother returned. After an hour, she pulled up the drop cloth to wrap around herself and wait some more (little ghost!). Finally she let herself shiver and admit Jay wasn’t coming back. With a little sigh, she padded barefoot across the cold floor to the elevator, but discovered it wouldn’t move without the code, which she didn’t have. She went to the door without a knob instead, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked; the keyhole was empty.
Hennessy was trapped in the studio.
At first she called down very nicely, though she didn’t think either of her parents would hear her over their own raised voices. Then she shouted. She banged. Finally, she gave up.
She waited. It became night. Hennessy wiped away her tears and turned on the floor lights, which threw hard, lacy patterns across the floor and walls. She went to see the canvas her mother had worked on all these weeks.
It was awful.
It was the worst painting Hennessy had ever seen her mother do. It was twee and cutesy, a straightforward and boring portrait of a daft, plucky little girl sitting awkwardly on a chair. The eyes weren’t alive. The hands weren’t alive. Hennessy, who’d been working and learning with her own art all this time, was embarrassed for her mother. It was terrible that she wasn’t coming up here for Hennessy and her growling stomach, but it felt even more terrible that anyone would ever see this piece.
Hennessy looked at the canvas for a long time, and then she counted, telling herself that if one of her parents came for her by the count of six hundred, she wouldn’t do it. Six hundred seconds went by. Eight hundred. One thousand.
Hennessy stopped counting.
She searched the drawers by the wall and collected all the paints she wanted. Then she moistened her mother’s oils again on the palette, picked up the brush and began to paint. After a few minutes, she dragged over the full-length mirror from beside the sofa, and she redid the portrait’s gormless face with her actual wary expression. She overpainted the boring shadows in the white shift with subtle colors instead. She shrugged the shoulders of that chilly girl just a little, not quite shivering, but wanting to. At each step, she got up to compare her brushstrokes to the other paintings in the studio. She made the eyes alive. She made the hands alive. She painted the portrait that Jay should have painted.
It took all night.
It was another day after that before her mother came to get her, and by then Hennessy was fitful and burning up with a fever that had come on during the second night. Bill Dower had gone again. “This turned out better than I thought,” Jay said, looking at the canvas, hovering her fingers over her signature in the corner, painted by Hennessy hours before. “Oh, Jordan. Stop complaining. I’ve got some paracetamol downstairs. Come on, what a trial. Next time don’t hide so long and you won’t feel as awful.”
Hennessy’s first forgery was of herself.
Three. [cw: suicide]
Ten years before, J. H. Hennessy had shot herself.
One shot, .45 caliber. The gun belonged to a friend of the family, reports said. It was registered, everything north of proper except for the part where it killed someone, and maybe even that, because isn’t that every guy’s fitful dream? There was music playing when it happened. An old jazz recording, some woman’s voice pitching and lilting along as the sound fuzzed and popped.
Jay was in a large closet. The lights were out. The only illumination came from a small, high window, and everything it touched was gray. She was dressed in a bra and underwear and a robe. Mascara was drawn down her face. She was holding a gun to her own head, and she was listening for the door to open.
This was not in the reports, but Hennessy knew it because she was the one who opened the door.
“Mum?” Hennessy said.
“You won’t miss me,” Hennessy’s mother said.
“Wait,” Hennessy said.
The gun barrel flashed.
Four.
The clearing became dark. This was how the dream began: in darkness.
There was no sound. There was the vast movement of time and space, which had its own substance in the dream, but was not exactly sound. There was nothing in the dream you could really look at. There was nothing in the dream you could really put words to. There was Hennessy, and in the dream, Hennessy knew she could manifest anything, if she really wanted to.
It was limited only by her imagination—what an impossible, terrifying, brilliant truth. She’d been given this talent when born and not told how to use it. Given this talent and watched it kill her mother, or at least not save her. She could do better with it.
If only she was dreamt of something besides …
It was there. She felt it, and then she saw it. Dark and looming, the opposite of color and understanding. Only its edges made any kind of sense. Slanted and hooked, checkered and geometric. Lacy, if they were anything at all. Mostly it was bigger. It was bigger than anything she could understand. It was so enormous and old that age didn’t apply to it. It had been there for so long that humans were bacteria to it. Infinitesimal. Irrelevant. It was so much more powerful than they that the only saving grace was that it had never noticed—
Its awareness became a thing in the dream. It saw Hennessy. She could feel how awful that weight was. How it changed everything. Now that she had been noticed, she could never be unseen. There were two Hennessys, the one who had lived without knowing this thing existed, and more importantly, without it knowing she existed, and the one who was seen.
Now that it had seen her, it hated her.
It was going to kill her. It was going to kill her like this: It was going to get inside her, it promised, and it was going to kill her just by existing there, because she was so small and porous, and it was everything.
She couldn’t hold it inside her. Or she could let it out, and live.
She would never let it out. She was not strong enough to keep it from moving toward her now, but she was strong enough to never let it out. She wasn’t so weak that she would let anyone else have to live with it looking, seeing, touching, invading—
Five.
One figure returned quietly to the rose garden. There was a proud line to the shoulders, to the lifted chin. A coiled power to the walk, which was more like a stalk. The eyes were intense and bright. But the shape of the mouth was at odds with the rest of it. Something about the expression there was miserable. Vulnerable.
Jordan Hennessy.
“You have my sword,” she said, stopping among the ruined thorns of the old roses. Warily, Farooq-Lane stepped in front of Liliana. She put her hand on the hilt warningly. Her heart was beating fast again; who knew what deadly dreams this Zed might be carrying. “I don’t want to fight. We’re not here for you.” “I know. I’m here for you.” Hennessy made a big performance of turning her pockets inside out and showing the interior of her leather jacket. Then she held her hands out on either side of her like a reveal. “I’m giving up. This is what it looks like when I give up.” “How do I know this isn’t a trap?” Farooq-Lane asked. “Life’s a trap,” Hennessy said in a sort of bleak, funny way.
...
The three women were on the second floor of a convoluted, historical teahouse, in a small room filled with overstuffed chairs, beanbags, end tables, and travel books. Plinking music played overhead. They had it to themselves. It was very intimate and safe-feeling, which was the opposite of everything Hennessy had been doing for the past few weeks. Past few years.
“This is all very life-affirming,” Hennessy told them from her place in a beanbag, “enriching, and all that, but what of it? So if it’s not fair, and it’s not easy, it’s still there. There’s still this thing hanging over me every time I dream, and if Ronan and Bryde have their way, I won’t be able to stop it.”
Liliana murmured something into Farooq-Lane’s ear, which made Farooq-Lane’s beautiful face go consternated. They both looked at Hennessy. “So I understand completely if you decide to kill me,” Hennessy said, talking fast. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. On previous episodes, it would’ve been a very selfish decision, on account of my ladies and how they relied on me for their existence, but on this current run, everyone else dead, mostly, fate of the world in hands, well—”
She spread her hands, or at least the best she could, considering she had a hot chocolate in one of them. “It’s the selfless thing to do, really.”
“We have a different idea,” Farooq-Lane said.
Hennessy narrowed her eyes. “Do you mean you both had this idea, or she has an idea, and whispered it to you just now?” Liliana smiled sweetly.
“I told you she was clever.” Farooq-Lane’s businesslike expression didn’t change. “Can you dream something to suppress the ley line?”
Six.
“Where is your voice? Be present. Now look. I’ve given you a canvas and you’ve left it blank,” Bryde said, gesturing around them. Now that the Lace was gone, the dream held just their conversation, nothing else. “Laziness is the natural child of success. Who, after struggling up the ladder, feels like building another ladder? The view is already good. You’re not trying. Why?”
Hennessy’s voice was still just thought. There’s a word for someone who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. “Artist?” suggested Bryde. “You didn’t use to mind failure.”
She was annoyed that he was right.
Hennessy had spent her youth studying how pigment behaved, how badger bristles splayed paint versus squirrel versus hog versus kolinsky sable, how complementary colors accentuated each other or canceled each other out, how the human skeleton was constructed beneath the skin, working on every flat surface that presented itself to her. Trying. Failing. She’d also spent an equal amount of time, or more, on training her mind. Perception and imagination were always the weakest link in any artist’s chain. Eyes saw what they wanted to see instead of what was truly there. Shadows became too dark. Angles went crooked. Shapes got elongated, crushed. The brain had to be taught to see without feeling, and then to put feeling back in.
Fail, try again, fail, try again.
She couldn’t remember how she’d ever had the bandwidth to do that for so many hours and days and weeks and years.
“This is better,” Bryde said.
The dream had become a studio.
Hennessy hadn’t consciously thought of putting them in a studio, but dreams were crafty bastards that way. They gave you what you wanted, not what you said you wanted.
The studio was as good as reality. It smelled wonderful and productive, earthy and chemical. Multiple easels displayed canvases in all sizes. Paint glistened on palettes. Brushes stood on handles like bristled bouquets. Drop cloths covered the old wood floor. Bryde sat in a chair next to a wall of windows, his legs crossed casually, arm across the back of the chair. Jordan would have said he’d make a good portrait subject.
The view beyond him was a city of historical buildings and close-set trees and invading highways. A distant storm mounted, the clouds tattered and checkered. The dream was trying hard, in the way that dreams do, to imply that Hennessy had been to this studio before, although she knew she hadn’t. It’s Jordan’s studio, the dream said. If you don’t recognize it, it’s only because it’s been too long since you’ve seen her. Why don’t you keep up with her like you used to?
Hennessy disagreed. “She doesn’t keep up with me.”
“There you are. Found your voice,” Bryde said. “You are not two things. You are not Hennessy, asleep, and Hennessy, awake. You are more than the sum of your feelings, your id. You are also the things you have learned to do about them. Dreaming, waking. They’re the same thing for you; when will you believe it? Put something on that canvas. The ley line is listening. Ask it for what you want.”
[ All text is taken from Call Down the Hawk and Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater and is here for reference only. ]