User blog comment:Promestein/Starcross - Birthday/@comment-28644276-20190302062404

Still on Edith, while this part does show that Alice also longed for the more intimate sides to romance, the conclusion of the scene ultimately tells me how she wants "warmth". It's sort of funny when you think about how she adopts a name related to the Sun when she herself had sort of been a "star without any warmth" or acceptance.

I think everything up to this point seems to build up as her traumaa even while sleeping grows more and more like too much for her to remain reliving it. Also her indignation at the world at this point finally starts showing the destructive sides towards others as well when she doesn't stop short of envying them - she also displays the first glimpses of wanting to be far more than any of what they have (while sort of simultaneously undermining their own experiences).

It's a sort of very subtle turning point where she goes from "wanting as much as others/any person can have" to "I'll have far more than this/what they have". Not sure if intentional, but it works very well.

The transition to her awakening from this dream (well, more like a nightmare) is pretty nice, too. It feels like her sense of reality is breaking down along with what she had been perceiving as true dismantling along her psyche (this happens so much in one of my stories (Mirage Saga) that I love nearly every depiction of such things).

The worst part about awakening from such vivid dreams is that terrible fear that what you awakened to is not the actual nightmare. What if you are still in that hell, and what you see now is a delusion your mind has created to distract itself. Sort of feels like that as Alice, now SOLSTICE finally awakes and gets physically (negatively) affected by it.

Of course, when this had been her reality for so long... It's certainly not something to just be forgotten. And with EQUINOX who once was her means of "escape" from such memories turning to yet another set of nightmares as things have turned out, I can only admit that it definitely becomes harder and harder to distinguish reality from the nightmares - even when her eyes are wide open.