Was the connective tissue between those things something to do with youth or my past, with that sparring and bloody nose outliers being a moment I’d already forgotten, where I reminisced about being young or studying?

Was it a kind of education instead? Each thing connected by a theme of me learning things? Learning things about myself? In that case, the photos and videos were a kind of study of my past self. The sparring exercise and bloody nose something tangential to that? Coming to terms?

My life, facets of me, arranged by something else’s sorting system.

Sveta walked up behind me, her face sharing the image. The images became incoherent, choppy, with the wrong lighting, like a television screen with the darkness cranked all the way up. A lot of the scenes seemed to be from the dream she’d just had.

A fleeting image appeared, disappearing before I could even open my mouth to remark on it. A fishing village surrounded by tall trees, perched on an outcropping of black rock that had been scratched or painted with swirls in white. It moved like the viewpoint was swimming or in a boat.

“My sibling and I were like Tristan and Byron,” Sveta said. “I got mad, went to work on my own, draw.”

“Even then, huh?”

Sveta shook her head. “I dreamed about drawing on blackness when I was in the hospital, I mentioned it to Jessica. It’s why I picked up the painting.”

I remembered something like that. I knew she’d dreamed about things and wanted to paint them, but I hadn’t known the painting had been in the dream.

She indicated the pane, which was showing more images from my memories, now. “I slipped and fell. It wasn’t from some tree onto the parking lot. It was from black rock onto black rock. We both got taken away. We both got vials after that, but I was the one to survive.”

“Are you remembering this now?”

“More or less,” Sveta said.

It showed more blurry, fractured images from Sveta’s memories. Darkened, incomplete, stuttering.

“I’m so… so angry, all over again,” she whispered. “Like when I first heard about Cauldron and what they were doing.”

I thought of my own fit of fury directed at Amy, in Rain’s dream room. “They’re monsters. Depending on how this goes, maybe they’re monsters we can vanquish once and for all.”

“It’s not that simple,” Sveta said. “You’re thinking of Teacher?”

“Yeah. Maybe Citrine and the Harbingers, depending on their perspective.”

Sveta nodded, watching the scenes. She stepped a bit to the side, to see what other facets were revealing. “It’s not so simple.”

I nodded.

“I’m really glad you’re okay,” Sveta told me.

“I’m… more or less there,” I replied.