Centuries passed before Maud returned to the place of her dreaming.
The mountains who still dreamt and still never knew time towered over her. She had names now for all the dreams of the mountains, but also knew that these names were meaningless. Extrusive igneous rock was not the dreaming of cooling rage over torn mountain skin; impactite was not the dreaming of a sudden visitor from the stars.
And mountains were not the dream of eternal dreaming.
Maud had searched since her sister's death for that dreaming, but it lie nowhere. Nowhere but here.
She walked past the last few stumps of the farm house, blackened by fire. She walked up the forgotten pathways, through the lost passages, and she stood before the hole she knew would be there.
Her hole. The place where she had left the dreaming, leading long and deep back to the world that never knew time. Her hole, where the mountains had waited for her return.
And the mountains broke their silent dreaming for once in an eternity.
You have committed no sin, but for love--
“I don't feel I have committed any sin.”
--so we will save you, redeem you, welcome you back into our dreaming. You will cease to be tortured and alone. Cease to be isolated. Cease to be One Who Separated. The stains upon you will vanish, and you will be as if you had never left our dreaming.
Maud stood at the opening for a long time.
Months passed as she thought. The winter snows came and buried her, then melted away in rivulets running downhill, but her choice remained before her and the patience of the mountains was as vast as their eternal dreaming.
Finally, Maud shook her head.
"I don’t want to forget," she said.
Even in their wildest dreams of rage, the mountains had never encountered confusion.
You understand what this will mean? How can you understand what you choose?
The ground trembled beneath Maud’s feet and cracks tore through the mountains, spreading out from the place they had prepared for her.
Look upon your fate!
Maud stood alone in a sun blasted wasteland. The red giant above her--gone feral in millions of years without a mistress--blazed so hot nothing survived as sandstorms whipped across an unliving and unloved rock.
Maud stood alone in a sun blasted waste. Undying, unchanging, immortal, and completely trapped. Her skin was torn by killing winds, her eyes squeezed shut against sand she would never see the end of as tears seeped down her face and evaporated in the heat.
Maud stood always alone in a sun blasted waste, abandoned by everything that crawls and dies and cut off from the dreaming solace of the mountains and unable to even escape into death like the crawling things that had all abandoned her.
Maud stood in a sun blasted waste, but she was not truly alone. Beside her, protected from the winds by her body, two names were carved into the rock. Memories carved into her own stone mind. The name she had created for herself and the name she had herself for.
And beside them, a box, long carried, filled with necklaces.
The future dream left her, and Maud wordlessly walked out of the mountains for the last time.
Behind her, the mountains raged as they hadn't since their first dreaming. The wind tore down their slopes and split open rocks, fires swept across the peaks enrobing them, and their voice continued to cry dire promises of a terrible future, but Maud was deaf to them now.
They had already shown her the only thing she needed to know.
When she returned to the ruined farmhouse, she walked into the remains of the kitchen, now marked only by an overturned bowl that had once been a sink. She’d had a family here who had accepted a mysterious child, and a sister she had made herself alive for. Sometime, she might travel again, but for now she didn’t need to.
This was enough for now.
Maud sat upon the old boards and settled into her own dreaming and looked for all the world like a miniature version of the mountains she had once been before she knew time and before she knew Pinkie Pie.