"Your character buys an antique vase, seeing that it would look nice on his bookcase full of antiques. But he finds someone's ashes inside."

There is nothing of the like. The vase is an intricate, delicately moulded piece of art that has survived many years. Decades, millennia. Time has no hold over this ob
ject.

It has sat, dusty and unknown, in a shop for a while. Curious eyes give it a glance or two, but eventually they find something more worthy of their interest. No one knows the true worth of this vase, because no one bothers to see.

Except for one girl. She is a single soul among billions, yet the single one to see unseeing.

For, you see, she is blind.

Trembling hands trace the curve of the vase, porcelain fingers over porcelain clay. She can never know the colours, never know the shapes that cover the pottery, but in the end, it doesn't matter. Under the little girl's fingers, it is whole.

She cannot see, but despite that she looks around, shoulders hunching guiltily. After a moment, when there is only silence following her, fingers dart into the mouth of the vase. It is not empty. Grit slides under her nails, powder coats her fingertips.

Endlessly curious, the girl puts her hand to her mouth.

It tastes like ashes.

------

"You wake up, and there is a room full of angry dolphins in a mini lake beside your bed. What do you do."

The water is blue – synthetic blue. It is filled with chlorine and in it, skin bone-bleached, dolphins thrash.

I want to free them, but I can't. I can't move. My heart is pounding and my limbs are frozen, immortalized in time.

Water breaks over the edge, splashes my toes and sends shivers up my spine. Waking up from an endless dream, I have simply encountered another.

Only, this dream, I cannot control.

I am not surprised these dolphins are angry. Their fury radiates off them in hot waves, sending sparks down my spine and a shiver from head to toe. I wonder, if I were to help them, if they would help me in return. Send me back to the land of endless plains and spired forests. To dark grottos filled with luminescent crystals

.But they won't. Not now, not ever. Because, in this dream, a saviour is a martyr.

And everyone knows how a martyr's story ends.