...The years slipped away, measured in the weavings Dia made at the directions of the black-robed priests. She met her white-haired friend in her dreams at the moonbright, and the black-robed priests came at the moondark, and Dia did not consider herself lonely at all. Despite Hynna’s words, she saw no harm in harvesting the flax that grew in the green, sheltered alcove of the canyon, carding it and spinning it into thread. Dia stored it, planning to someday make bright dyes and weave something just to please herself. Someday. When she wasn’t consumed with the work the black-robed priests gave her to do.

Hynna grew old, and Maran replaced her as the leader of the priests who came to bring Dia her supplies and take the weaving off the loom. Dia didn’t like that woman at all, though there was very little about her different from Hynna.

After Maran took over Hynna’s duties, Dia kept a record of time. Fourteen moondarks came and went, and she wove ten large sheets on the loom at the direction of the priests, never removing the weavings but leaving that to them, as ordered. As she recorded the moons that slipped away, Dia grew more discontent with the dull, ugly colors and the strange images she was told to weave. Bulls and rams, suns and blood, serpents and shadows that seemed to writhe as she wove them into being. What did they all mean? She began to pray as she wove, sometimes whispering aloud to Matrika for understanding and for help.

After the fourteenth moondark, moonbright also marked summer solstice. Dia stayed awake, watching the moon rise in the sky on the shortest night of the year, and prayed, bathing face and hands in the moonlight.

She had a waking dream, and her white-haired friend stepped out of the silver light to stand with her and watch the sky. Two tall shadows rose up into the sky until they threatened to block the moon. A man and a woman, they struggled though they never seemed to touch. A door opened in the sky and the man fell through into blackness. His curses and shouts and the sound of his wails followed Dia as she woke and stared at the moon and trembled. Something had changed, outside her canyon and inside her soul.

The blacksmith came to her in her dreams that night. Young, muscular from long hours spent with a hammer in his hands. Wheat-colored hair and blue eyes that glowed with inner fire. He smiled at her and held out his hand to grasp hers, but before Dia could respond, the dream faded.

She dreamed of him the next night, and the night after that, and as the full moon faded to half, she and the young man became friends. His name was Asha. He told her stories about the little village where he helped his foster-mother run an inn while he worked the blacksmith’s forge. He told her about his sister, barely remembered from dreams, whom he was going to meet soon.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he told her, as they walked through a dream-reflection of the canyon. “Is this real, these meetings in our dreams? I don’t remember you when I wake, but whenever I see you here, in my dreams, I remember everything. Am I dreaming, if I know this is a dream?” He laughed and shook his head in frustration.

“Some things are permitted,” Dia said slowly. “We are permitted to meet, but not to remember. There are things I am not permitted to remember, to protect me. Perhaps this is the same.”