SLEEPING BEAUTIES: DREAM LOG

[yourkeepers]

Bewitched by the thorn's touch, you have been ensnared in the deepest of sleep. Fortunately for you, the world of Faerie doesn't end with the waking.

The world of your dreams is brighter now, more clear than you've ever witnessed it. You've been it before, you think, there fragments of yourself become reality. But now you are somehow more lucid in its presence, and it's more real - something you can reach out and touch.

You find yourself in this world, and you are not alone. Your dreams and those of other join at the edges, pulling into each other along similar threads.

And you are watched by something even greater.

Comments

OTA!

[familicide]

"What...?"

He was terrified.

It was a creeping, smothering, all-consuming kind of horror, not cold and dead but alive and fantastically cruel. Those few echoes he'd felt of it while awake were nothing compared to this insidious, roaring dread and the searing fingers it wrapped around his heart.

It had a face. It had a name, though he couldn't remember it.

It was after him.

"Wait - "

The man couldn't have been a man at all; he towered twice as tall as any mortal and blistering smoke, stinking of sulfur and scorched earth, poured from between his mangled jaws with every bellow's breath that he took. Heat simmered around the molten cracks that opened up the cavity in his great chest, pouring torrid light across his surroundings, at times a baleful crimson, at others a pulsing, tainted gold, pale and painful as old scars. Every step he took shook the room; his eyes were wreathed in wicked fire.

If he had had the wherewithal to notice, he might have taken stock of his surroundings, the interiors of the temple awash with soothing blues and a misty, unsettling darkness. He might have noticed a figure to his right, standing outside of the center ring and more indistinct than the mist, shrouded in a brilliant light that obscured their features. He might even have realized that for the first time since his wakening, he was not only clothed but armed as well, a golden polearm engraved with ornate designs. He might have, and in a way he did, but only the most distant part of him really noticed or cared.

The monster that bled fire started toward him.

"Father."

[ ooc: A quick note! The Image of Deathwing, as I'm calling him, can't be defeated. The Mysterious Figure will heal grievous injuries and prevent death, but this is a match that can't be won. You can flee the temple, with the untouched dreamscape right outside, but, while delayed, the Image will pursue a certain dragon whelp to whatever other dream he enters or shares. ]

[intothehedge]

He is not alone with his dream-images, but the woman who's joined him here is harder to notice than either of the imagined figures he has to contend with, keeping as she does to the edges of the room, to the shadows. Her own dark form, with its strange blue markings, almost matches the surroundings, but she does not belong here.

She is here all the same though. She watches, her black eyes gleaming, and for now she does not intervene.

[familicide]

There was, a faraway version of himself noted, a considerable lack of context for the whole affair. Only the place, utterly unknown to him, the figure in white that he could not really see, the misty lanterns and the soft hiss of fog, the blazing tide of awful fire - and the word, the name, no no more like a title.

Father.

His father wanted to destroy him; him, and what had to be the whole world, because the fury in those eyes couldn't be measured. When that massive mace, as big as he was and twice as heavy, swung, all he could do was lift his own weapon and block it, the impact traveling down his arms and driving one knee into the floor.

Fight. I have to fight.

He'll kill me if I don't.

Shuddering, muscles screaming - and that struck him, it struck him in the pit of his stomach because he was flesh and blood - he strained against that mace, pushed, and slipped past the impossible weight of the mace to thrust his polearm at his enemy. The figure in white lifted their arms, light spilling from them to create a sigil all of gold on the stone floor beneath his feet.

The second figure - he didn't see them at all.

[intothehedge]

She breathes in deep as she watches, as if there's something refreshing about the air here.

"Stop," she says, simply.

The dream figures do stop, both of them, like statues, and the woman starts to step out of the shadows.

[familicide]

He stumbles. It's not quite his fault, his momentum had all been driving forward, and so he trip and nearly drops to a knee, only catching himself at the last moment with the tip of his spear. For a second the shock keeps him silent, the remains of terror and exhilaration driving his heart to wicked speeds, but he sucks in a harsh breath, turns--

There's someone else there.

"Who are you?!" The shout is angry, accusatory, a little fearful. It's followed by a growl and he drags himself and his weapon around, holding the lancehead level in front of him.

[intothehedge]

She doesn't seem threatened or offput by the weapon – she keeps walking towards him in spite of it.

"The only real person here besides you," she says. She seems amused. "You're dreaming."