It begins with the mouth.
Not the lips, not the voice,
the mouth.
A space. A vessel. A bridge.
A dream.
The first night they sleep beside each other in earnest, the world forgets to end the day. Time folds in on itself. There is no clock. No sleep. Just the sound of her breathing tucked beneath his shoulder, and the pulsing awareness that something ancient is watching them, not with judgment, but with recognition.
They do not touch.
But everything inside them leans.
Toward each other.
Toward the hunger they do not know how to name.
Toward the sound their bodies make in silence.
The moment she closes her eyes, she falls, not downward, but inward.
Through color.
Through velvet air.
Through light shaped like sound.
She stands in a field of names she’s never spoken.
They bloom like wildflowers, whispering syllables she’s never tasted. Some are soft like lullabies. Some are sharp like promises broken mid-sentence. All of them know her. All of them speak her.
She opens her mouth to ask where she is,
but a song comes out instead.
Not a song she knows.
Not one from her childhood or her culture or her memory.
It rises, fully formed, from the deepest part of her,
from the place her tears sleep,
from the place her lovers never touched.
The sky responds. It opens like a mouth of its own.
And he is there.
In the dream, he is taller.
Not in height—but in presence.
He glows in places men aren’t supposed to.
His throat hums with color.
His spine radiates like scripture.
His gaze wraps around her with no beginning or end.
He doesn’t speak.
He offers.
A word.
She doesn’t recognize it. But it lands in her palm, warm, trembling like a bird.
She brings it to her lips.
The moment it touches her tongue, the world inhales.
They’re standing in the same place now. Facing one another. No space between. No air, just rhythm.
He says a sentence. The first complete one.
A line of language that holds meaning, not just sound.
And though she’s never heard it before, she understands.
It means:
“I was born beneath a weeping moon, but I have never cried the way I cry for you.”
She responds.
Not in her own voice.
But in something deeper, throatier, older.
Her sentence means:
“Then let my body be the tide that gathers your salt.”
They don’t smile. They ache.
Together.
As they speak, the dream responds.
Trees unblossom.
Rivers reverse.
The stars above begin to fall, not as meteors, but as words.
Each one spelling something they once felt but never said.
The wind carries messages written in heat.
They are standing in the middle of a language that lives, breathes, moans.
And they keep speaking it.
Speaking each other.
The words have no alphabet.
But each one has a weight.
Some are heavy with grief.
Some light like stolen laughter.
Some dangerous, if repeated.
He says one by accident, and the sky rips open.
The ground trembles.
A storm forms, not above, but within them.
Their hands find each other’s arms.
Not for comfort, but for containment.
They cannot stop the language now.
It is alive inside them.
It does not ask permission.
It unfolds.
They kiss. Finally.
Not for lust. Not for affection.
For translation.
Her tongue slides past his, and the word she couldn’t speak rides the heat between them.
His lips tremble against hers, not from fear, but from recognition.
Every time their mouths move, more of the Third Language is revealed.
With each moan, a paragraph.
With each gasp, a stanza.
Their kiss is an essay on longing written in saliva and divine chaos.
And then,
They wake up.
But the dream doesn’t end.
They are awake. Fully.
In the same room.
In the same bodies.
With the same mouths.
But now, they remember.
She opens her eyes, dazed. Her skin feels electric. Her fingertips are humming.
She looks at him. He’s already staring.
There is sweat on his temple. His pulse is visible in his neck.
They don’t speak.
Because they are listening,
To the wordless echo of something that still lingers between them.
That morning, she tries to write down one of the words from the dream.
She doesn’t know how.
There are no characters for it.
No way to render its tone or temperature.
She draws a shape instead.
An asymmetrical loop, with a line cutting through it.
She shows it to him.
His mouth parts slightly.
He pulls a notebook from his bag.
On the first page:
The exact same shape.
Drawn three nights earlier.
They do not panic.
They do not try to explain.
They just stare at each other.
And then, slowly—
She begins to say the word again.
Aloud.
He joins her.
The windows fog instantly.
The room dims.
A candle flickers across the space,
And splits into two identical flames.
Each flame flickers in sync with their breath.
From that moment forward, reality shifts each time they say even a fragment of the Third Language.
Doors open before they’re touched.
Water warms to their mood.
Mirrors show not their reflections, but their dream-selves.
The world is learning how to respond to them.
Because they have entered the dreammouth.
And from this point on, they can never fully return to the realm of language shaped by logic.