[RE] the nobodies

JUST A DREAM?

You're swimming.

Or flying. You can't tell.

Regardless, the world - the ocean - beneath you passes by at an alarming rate, and you fire like an arrow out to sea with only one destination in mind.

A violet hue on the horizon. An island squatting like a monster off the coast of Torchline, waiting, thriving, incubating.

Incubating?

Falling to a hovering stop directly above Starfall, you soon plummet down, past its rocky surface and strange flora, right into its core. What you pass along the way remains unknown, but there is certainly no direct path to where you're going.

Nevertheless, you arrive.

Before you at the very centre of a cavern, and enormous shard of Void Crystal erupts through the surface of the stone, shimmering ominously and bathing you in shades of black and lilac. Within the crystal, figures can be seen.

Held in stasis, vaguely humanoid, these members of the Family are not yet ready to meet you. But they will be, if you're lucky.

Beyond them, though, lies something else - something altogether much worse. A ball of condensed matter at the very deepest parts of the crystal is growing, considering, learning. Its name isn't something you can pronounce with the current tongue you possess, but you know the names of beings just like it.

You call them Vi, and Mort, and Rae.

Suddenly aware that you are very much not alone in this cavern, faces flash before you (maybe you even recognise some of them), before the world falls away entirely.

And the dream ends.

---

The following characters have experienced the above dream as part of their Lucky Dip prize (Critical Plot Information):

Talyson
Deimos
Elizabeth
Flora
Fox
Sunjata
Luka

Those present are able to see each other in the dream.

Please feel free to post a reaction in order to use this thread for levelling/MP, but no further admin action will be taken, and the thread will close in 48 hours.

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

Dreams were just dreams, until they weren’t – until it felt like reality plummeting and plunging, gateways to other things and fragments. In his sleeping, slumbering haze, recognition didn’t dawn save for crystals and the notion of the island itself, then his mind sharpening, head twisting and turning, trying to salvage meaning behind the motion of pictures and images.

Caverns. Figures. Bodies. Forms – beyond a haze of black and lilac. And then something like a core which made him clench his jaw and bite down the hazardous wakes of other wars and torments. Days of before and days of after. Of Gods, both New and Old. But these were foreign and alike all in one semblance.

Stifling something else, faces flashed, some recognizable and giving him pause (for what were they doing there? Maybe they’d ask the same of him), before everything seemed to simply end.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

He dreamed, and he fell, and he saw and--

Tal woke up gasping, drenched in sweat and with his heart racing in a chest that felt far too small to contain the thundering pressure of dread that filled him. Everything had been so clear, so frightfully real, and he scrubbed at his eyes as if he could erase the sight of the heart of that dark crystal. A shiver ran down his spine, chasing a bead of sweat, and he swallowed hard against the dryness in his mouth.

As dreams went that had been really fucked up.

And why had he dreamed of those people at the end? Flora made sense maybe; they'd been working on cleaning that Void Horror up. But the rest...

He shook his head, pulse beginning to slow as he pulled in ragged breaths and looked around at the walls of his familiar cabin aboard the half-repaired Peregrine. Boreal whimpered in her sleep beneath his hammock and he slowly lowered himself to reach down and scratch her head. "Yeah... me too, girl," he murmured roughly.

But it was just a nightmare, right? Maybe he could ask Sunjata about it when he got back to King's End...

But it was going to be a long time before he got back to sleep tonight.

Elizabeth

Nothing
ever goes away

A gasping scream jolted her out of the nightmare. The air felt too hot and cold simultaneously while her sheets were trying to suffocate her body. With a flurry of motions, Elizabeth stood in the middle of her room, shakily sipping her glass of water to soothe her raw throat. It was unclear how long she'd been trapped, suspended. The moon still lit her room in an eerie glow that gave time little meaning. 

She didn't have a lot of experiences with nightmares, but this had felt like more. There was power in dreams and this felt like a dark, evil energy had invaded her mind. 

Elizabeth placed the cold glass against her face, attempting to calm her thoughts enough to gather the information. Grabbing a notebook, she jotted down the facts in case they decided to vanish as quickly as they'd come. Starfall. Cavern. Void Crystal(?). People. God(s)(?). Doom(?). She stepped back with horror evident on her face. There were too many question marks. Too many unknowns. 

A number of unfamiliar persons had passed by, making her wonder if perhaps others had seen the same vision. If she could find them, maybe they could confirm what she'd seen...

Sure that she wouldn't be getting back to sleep, Elizabeth picked lit a candle and chose a light-hearted book from her shelf to escape the disturbing thoughts. She would readdress them in the daylight hours.

until it has taught us
what we need to know.

FOX

Fox is about done with all these scary dreams of ominous portent. First the nothingness, then this... somethingness, and honestly, he doesn't know which he prefers.

Jolting awake in bed in a cold sweat, he runs his fingers through his hair and tries to still his breathing, brows knotted into a deep frown. The violet crystal, the strange shapes within... and the faces he'd seen, too.

Recognising only a couple of them - and with this being his first real brush with visions that might bear consequences for the entire world, you know - Fox doesn't for a moment believe that it's more than a result of too much work and too little rest.

With a deep and shivery breath, the hunter shakes the shape of his dream from his mind and slips out of bed. A cool glass of water and a few minutes warming his toes in front of the fire, and he'll soon be tucked up again, none the wiser.

astra inclinant, sed non obligant

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

Luka

my aloneness feels so good

Luka has skated below the radar for his entire life. Content with his unglamorous beginnings, middles, and ends. If anyone would expect portents and mysticism, it wouldn’t be him. It must be some karmic joke then for him to hold rank amidst faces both strange and familiar, bearing witness to something so profound he knows he couldn’t have dreamed it himself.

Deimos and Talyson are the only recognizable faces, and he tries to hold space for that awareness amidst the barrage of knowledge(?) that he otherwise can’t look away from. This is so far above Luka’s pay grade that he can’t even fathom the implications on the surface, let alone the complexities that surely layer deeper. But he is a witness now if nothing else, someone who can corroborate stories and fill in gaps. It’s a duty he knows waits for him before he’s even been released, and the weight feels heavier than any lumber, injured calf, or backpack he’s ever shouldered. It feels like it will break him before he’s even opened his eyes. 

But they open nonetheless, and Luka sits up in the dark of his room sweat-covered and breathing hard. He takes a long moment alone, mourning naivety and a life spent happily overlooked and unimportant. Then he throws his blankets back and emerges into the halls of his family home, eyes flinty with determination and duty. Luka knows he can’t carry this to whatever finish line may lie in wait, but the seed won’t die an early death in his hands either.

I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude

SUNJATA

In a complete opposite of everyone else that has arrived, Sunjata is not having a nightmare. Sure, it’s a strange vision with familiar faces, but the Flood has been learning recently to not let dreams (and nightmares) escape into his day to day.

The violet hue, while ominous to others, is a welcoming sight for Frey’s demigod, and where dread settled in many other’s chests, Sunjata’s harbors something akin to optimistic curiosity. His head tilts as he takes in the larger being, the way he feels as if he must respect it, and yet… He looks up, spying many familiar faces, and some he has yet to meet.

He wakes as the dream ends, confusion flaring for a brief moment before for the first time in a long while, Sunjata’s able to shake away the feeling of the slumber, and contently falls back asleep with so much ease.

we'll break our own hearts
so that someone else can't

flora

wH—

WH—?????????????????????

Without going into details about what the Doubletake had just been dreaming of, to say this was a stark and unhappy departure was an understatement.

Not one to normally make much of her dreams, as Flora awoke with thoughts of blurred purple shapes and ominous implications, it was with nothing more than a hrrumph and a violent tossing in her bed to try and claw her way back into her previous dream before her mind woke up too much for that to be possible. In the morning she'd send a letter to Deimos about how he'd been in her dreams the night before (wink wonk), but for now the queen thought nothing of what she'd seen or its potential implications.

i scream for whatever it's worth
"i love you" ain't that the worst thing you've ever heard?

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!