She had lost her soul to the repository of dreams.  How many nights had she gazed into the future, the past?  She had seen great spirals in the mountains, the grey ancient ones who still walked the high places, who drifted in the snowy clouds that hid the peaks from view.  These were peaks that she had seen only in her sleep, when her soul traveled far from the island, far from the day and her sorry state.  She was nothing to her family, just the last of the girl children, and the even the day itself was not her friend.  She was lost in its light, blinded and tense, free only when sleep took her and the miracle of flight was hers.

    Petra, daughter of the Lord Harkess, walked alone on the ridge that led north from the Monastery.  She followed a trail that wound between heavy grey rocks that protruded from the grass on the treeless ridge, along the edge of the sea-cliff.  She wrapped her black cloak tightly around her to keep out the salty winds that gusted up from the cliff, the cold winds of the northern sea, and she shielded her face with one hand.  Her skin was pale, her eyes deep and black, and her mouth was closed tight in a slit that could not let forth a smile.  So close to the sad soul of the earth had she come that no happiness seemed real to her, no joy was more than a shallow instant, an odd breath got while drowning.

    Clouds filled the grey sky above her, and she did not look back at the great wall of the world that rose up to fill the sky behind her.  Soon it would cast its shadow on the island, and her world would become ice and darkness again.  Then she would sleep and dream without the interventions of her father, who knew nothing, or her mother, who lived only in the moment.

    "You were born to commune with the Wood," her mother told her once.  "If we were still in Thane you would have become its priestess.  But you must be dutiful now, and on this island you can never be that."

     Shame, shame, shame.  This was all she felt.  They wanted her to marry, to have a child.  A son, that is.  To replace her lost brother, to lead the people of the island, to assure that they would not disappear into the mists of what has been lost to memory.  She could not do it.  The feeling of a man's hand on her body provoked only more shame, and she had stood on these same cliffs entranced by the only prospect that made her heart flutter.  This was death, the vampire, the seducer.  She knew that one day she would succumb to the whisper of relief, the promise of an end to the days, to the pain, to the thing that was Petra.

    She hated herself.  She would murder herself one day.  She had seen it in her dreams.

    Before she realized it, she had reached her destination.  She had walked the whole length of the ridge deep in thought, and now stood before the dark stone tower that her grandfather had built with his own hands.  This was her secret place, far from the meddling eyes of the Monastery or the villages.  She had always come here to escape them, drifting for long hours in the world of dreams, looking out through the only window.  This faced away from the world and out to the open sea.  This was where her grandfather had sat too, his back to the world and to the Monastery, embittered and mad, before the chill got into his bones and carried him away to the world of the dead.  Petra looked around her, at the rocky treeless ridge, the grey skies.  She imagined that the world of the dead was very much like this place: separated from the world of the living by an insurmountable wall, still and full of spite, full of fear.

    She walked around to the front of the tower.  Inscribed just above the arched entrance were the words Heart's Ease.  This was her Mericet's name for the place.  It had been his Heart's Ease, with his back to the world, looking out into the dark and cold sea of infinity.

    The tower rose up sharply from its place at the tip of the island.  Waves crashed at the bottom of the cliffs, and winds gusted violently around Petra as she slipped into the narrow entrance beneath the inscription, into the shadowy passage within the tower.  Immediately inside the tower the narrow passage became wider, and Petra stood in a dark stone room.  There was nothing in this place.  The wind whipped through it, and Petra went to the foot of the stairs, which were almost indiscernible in the half-light.  She climbed the stairs, which were narrow and cold, and which wound around inside the tower three times as they ascended.  This was all in near darkness.  She felt the places along the walls where torches might have been placed in her grandfather's day.  There was nothing there now.

    At the top of the stairs Petra came out into a confined, circular room.  It was as empty as her life.  A single portal looked out to the open sea.  To the north, where there was nothing.

    She sat down against the wall, beside the open portal, in the same spot where she always sat.  She rested her head against a curved stone that was not uncomfortable, and curled her legs up beneath her heavy cloak.  She wrapped it closer against her, and shifted herself until her body rested effortlessly against the wall.  In the empty room.

    This was her sleeping place.  Her place of flying.

    Soon she was drowsy.

    Good, she thought.  Let me discover!

    Then she slept.