For as long as she could remember, Yarine had been able to lucid dream. Growing up with this inherent ability, for her, dreaming seemed like just another series of realities, and likewise, waking life often felt like merely her most persistent (and most obstinate) dream. Still, she never became confused as to which was which, because items and characters from her life (either intact or transformed in some way) would often import themselves into her dreamspace, whereas such travel in the opposite direction had not proven possible. That is, not until the morning she awoke from a dream in which she'd visited a festival for the dead (one that happened to take place on an alien planet), and found herself still clutching a small blue ceramic skull with a tiny yellow flower growing out of it. Before she could even begin to process the ramifications of this random miracle, she felt very strongly that she was meant to bury the skull in the dirt, plant it like a seedling, so that the flower could grow. Why or how she knew this was also of great concern, but she figured she would have plenty of time to ponder the mysteries of her situation when she was done in the garden. Not much later, she realized that whatever had incepted the directive about the skull must have also prevented her from even conceiving the possibilities that the miracle had not been random, that the flower might grow at anything other than a normal rate, or that it might not be a flower at all.
Yarine 10D8FD