Lorianne walks up and down these frequently, after almost every day she spends deep in her research. She knows the dream is her mind's way of reconciling the rafts of information she has gathered, assembling all the abstract facts into some construct she can more easily process and contextualize. This doesn't stop the experience from being entirely bewildering, but it at least tries. There is no wind, and no sound. She is neither hot nor cold, but she does occupy a body. There is a simultaneous sense of vast space and near-claustrophobic closeness as she glides up and down flight after flight, exploring the many platforms that are the only other structures in this world, and what the stairs connect.
On each of these stand a pair of figures, facing each other. They are the male and female halves of a dynasty's beginning. Surrounding them, playing around their legs and chasing each other like little orbiting solar systems, are the children that resulted from their union. Sometimes there is only one, sometimes as many as twenty. And whether the parents loved each other, or even knew each other, is irrelevant; the children are theirs only biologically, and Lorianne is very aware that there are stories going untold here, other loves and other arrangements left out by the cold impartiality of genetics.
More often than one would expect, there are multiple spouses and intersecting clouds of progeny from different parental pairs, all of which occupy the same platform. It can make things pretty crowded, and hard for Lorianne to pick her way across to get to the stairs that will lead higher into the spreading tangle of black glass. This is almost always her goal, because the parents at the bottom of the stairs also are represented as children at the top of their own particular set, being displayed also as part of the generation that came before.
This mental representation of her family has been growing for years, ever since her interest in genealogy was first piqued by her grandmother. The woman had already been very elderly when Lorianne was a small child, and claimed that their family was descended from "the bluest of bloods". Nan was always the one who could point at old photos made of thick cardboard and easily recognize old relatives regardless of the point in their lives, and she often would pull a then child-sized Lorianne up into her lap and turn the heavy yellowing page and introduce her to everyone. When the pictures devolved further back in the books, turning into little rectangles of metal, Nan would go on to describe the parents and grandparents of each increasingly distant, fading relative, going back centuries to when they all lived in castles -- or so Nan would have her believe. Nan to wanted to make sure that Lorianne never forget that was the product of multiple long processions of kings and queens. And ever since then, Lorianne's slow, incremental studies had shown that this was true.
So, on these nights, she walks the stairs of her heritage. She has found that, if she walks up to a particular ancestor -- which more often than not shares at least one facial feature the what she will see in the mirror upon waking -- they will notice her, turn toward her and smile. Then the stairway that leads up to their parents' platform will become illuminated. Not brightly, but strong enough so that it is made visible even if there are multiple black stairways blocking it from view. Then the parents' ancestral stairs will light as well, and the grandparents', the branches multiplying in a dizzying fashion as they spread ever upward and outward, from two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two to sixty-four, off into the increasingly hazy distance of nothing but stairways upon stairways. This gives Lorianne comfort.
More unpredictable is what happens when she bends down and touches one of the unceasingly dashing children. The child will stop for a moment, distracted from his or her play, and look up into Lorianne's face with the same beatific smile, and stairways below -- those of their direct descendants -- will begin to illuminate. Sometimes the light will explode downward like a burning cataract, because while every person has exactly two biological parents -- no more, no less -- they might have dozens of children. Or, again more often than one might think, no stairways light up at all, and Lorianne realizes she is interacting with the last of a genetic line never to be replicated. It may be a child who didn't reach maturity, dying of plague, or battle, or possibly became a nun or monk. She has tried to spot differences between tumbling children who go on to be parents and those who do not, but can find no easy pattern.
This gets her thinking. If Lorianne were to follow the right stairways all the way down to the bottom, she would find her own platform, and the Lorianne that stands there alone. She has not yet done this in her dreams, mainly because of what she might learn... Will there be stairs beyond hers, or will there be a dead end? And what would either possibility even mean? Maybe there will be nothing but endless void below her spot, and she doesn't particularly want to witness that either. She consciously knows she walks through a dream, a construct her mind has invented, but she also realizes that there many more stairs, far in the distance above and to the sides, that represent people she doesn't consciously know exist yet. And if they are already there, then maybe this knowledge isn't exclusively hers... perhaps she's tapping into some kind of ultimate accumulation of genetic memory. In any event, she always puts off finding out anything that might lead her toward an answer. Maybe the next time I dream this, she thinks, even as she understands that she will always be better off not knowing.
While she spends a lot of time along the thin (as in, mildly-incestuous) upward spiral of her royal ancestry, she's aware that it is because her inner vision is clearest there. She knows enough about these people, their histories fleshed out enough, to appear as what are probably fairly accurate portraits of themselves. They wear fine clothing that softly runs under her fingers when she makes contact with them, and their rougher features have been smoothed by painter's brushes to appear just as they do on castle walls and in art galleries. In other, less verified lines, features become hazier, less distinct. In some obscure places they all but fade out, until they are transparent, faceless shades, mere placeholders for people and lives that she does not know.
Sometimes this is not the fault of the ancestors themselves. Beyond one particular set of grandparents there is a particularly dark and amorphous section, and Lorianne is forced to acknowledge it will always remain that way. That particular pair came from a country horribly ravaged in war, all findable evidence of their heritage erased. Not only this, but they have themselves passed away, so any other information they might have been able to tell her in waking life is forever beyond reach. This is when the inability to interact with the specters on the stairs is most infuriating. Her grandparents seem perfectly real and clear, and she can approach them as easily as she did when she was a child. But all she can do is put her hand on their shoulders and accept their mute smiles. When she does this, the branching lightning that outlines their ancestry appears, but every flight of stairs is vague and barely existent. They are only there because of logic -- after all, her grandparents had to descend from *someone*.
Sometimes it strikes Lorianne that, although her stairs are full of people both present and past, and the whole experience feels intensely personal, it isn't uniquely hers. As time goes on, she becomes intensely aware that everyone is part of their own vast web of relations, and not only this, but all these disparately vast networks are ultimately the same one. She always awakes from the dream with the sense that she could pick out the person she has least in common with in the world -- ideologically, ethically, ethnically, physically-- and whether she knows how or not, that person is somewhere on her stairs, and she on theirs. Inside this titanic web of black glass, the idea that anyone in the world could *not* be related to every other person is revealed as utterly ridiculous. She imagines that, somewhere up near the top, the widening web narrows to the very beginning of human existence, and she's almost as reluctant to see what lies at the very top as she is about the very bottom.
Part of Loiranne's protective melancholy about this place is because what comes next. Just as a person wakes up convinced that they will be able to recall the details of the dream they've just left, she always wakes with the thought that if only she could share this vision with others, so much could be solved: wars ended, families mended and reunited, misunderstandings resolved. But just as dreams unfailingly evaporate, this conviction disappears as well. How can the vividness, the importance, the sheer *size* of what she has experienced be transferred to anyone else? In wakefulness, the impossibilities of the real world inevitably drag these lofty thoughts to the ground.
And so, Lorianne invariably spends the next day walking in and among countless family members she does not -- and probably cannot -- know. She watches them being cruel and indifferent to each other, actively alienating themselves from each other when they could be helping. They fight over trivialities, never knowing what they truly mean to each other. And so she trudges on, passing through a perpetual family reunion that its participants do not even realize they're attending.
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