Extra 4: Dreams of the Recovering
Retlafeh lay asleep as mockeries of his past traumas flashed through their mind, conjoined and mixed together, pain past and present amalgamated to create a new horror.
The world was smothered in dark, thick mist, so thick that the sun dared not shine its light within its domain.
All around him, the bodies of friends he once knew were strewn like trash, their faces unrecognisable to Retlafeh's dream self but their identity apparent.
There were some he had forged bonds with for only a matter of days, but Orsha’s struggle had caused those friendships to be stronger than those of siblings.
There were some he knew for years, who had been assigned to the same hardships they had faced at the hands of their many masters.
Some of these friends had been worked to death, some paid off their debt, and some were killed for trying to escape their god-given burdens.
Some took their own life.
Yet regardless of their fate, all the people Retlafeh had once known now lay dead in front of him, covered by the thick, dark fog.
All of their bodies shared the same death, one the former slave had seen only once yet could never forget, death by a Golem’s blade.
Out of the mist, their two current compatriots walked, their eyes dead and gaze lifeless.
From behind them, a dark shadow rose from the mist, ten, fifty, one hundred metres tall, four arms gripping four blades of devastating cruelty.
Retlafeh tried to look away, to distance himself from what they knew came next, but his eyes betrayed them, forcing them to look.
The blades came down, swooping with incredible speed, in an instant they knew their newest partners, who they had known for less than two weeks, would be dead.
As fate approached, Retlafeh’s vision turned to a figure next to him, the strange Golem and its unknown pet having been there all along, and begged the malformed creature to save the lives of their companions.
Yet it stood still, as still as a statue of clay.
Again, the former slave pleaded with the creature of earth to stop the onslaught, yet at that moment, Retlafeh knew the reason for the small Golem’s idleness.
Retlafeh owed the creature a debt, for freeing him of his bonds, and the death of their compatriots was the price.
As the sleeping man’s mind rebelled against him, he writhed in silent agony on the cold, cave floor.
Shreshka lay unconscious on a dust-covered floor, her body much too tired to assemble a dream of any possible comprehension.
In one instant, they were in their modest mansion in the greatest of the keroraheh, its warm embrace a familiar comfort.
In the next, they were being transported to their life of eternal servitude, a life in the honour of Orsha, a life they never wanted.
Yet these vague memories in their dreams were fleeting, as if the woman’s mind rebelled against the very thought of anything to hold onto in the tumultuous dreamscape.
In rapid succession, she found herself a little red robin swimming in a sea of sand, then a magi casting spells into an unfathomable landscape, then the wind itself whistling through an abandoned city of nonsensical structures.
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The dream changed inconceivably to any but Shreshka’s own unconscious mind, indeed, if she were to wake, the illusion would be impossible even to her, once logic and the expectations of reality took over.
But gradually, the former slave’s unconscious began to catch itself on a particular notion, not so much an idea as a feeling.
It was the feeling she felt just before she collapsed, an experience that lodged itself in her mind even through the pain, panic and adrenaline she felt.
It was the exhilaration and power that flowed through Shreshka when she completed her spell.
Slowly, more and more the feeling took over her dream, before it filled her errant thoughts near entirely.
And it morphed and changed and became something else, something the woman had not felt in a long, long time.
Something she wouldn't dare to wish for in the realm of the waking, hope.
Shreshka lay on the dust-covered floor, battered and broken, secretly yearning for some of that unconscious hope to carry over to her waking mind.
Hureheh awoke in the darkness of the night, eyes able to see little more than vague shadows of their surroundings, as cast by the embers of a long-dead fire.
His mind was foggy, unable to even recollect what happened throughout their long sleep, nor how he found himself at the bottom of a dark cave.
Hunger was the first thing that made its presence known in the darkness of the night, thirst following shortly after.
Yet there was no food or water to be found, and the man had not the energy to look for it.
And so he sat in silence in the darkness, trying to piece together their fractured memories of what had happened.
They were on a task, he remembered, though a death wish was a better description.
some fool of a merchant had neglected their duty to replace the kerumsheh torches, got a man killed in the process, and now some poor sod had to go fix their mistake.
Hureheh had caught a terrible case of wrong place, wrong time and had been selected, alongside two other equally unfortunate souls, and were promptly sent off with one of the cruller simple-landers to replace the tick repellents.
At the time, the former slave had been quite happy with the development, a true chance to get into some real danger and prove his worth to Orsha.
Yet as time went on, they found themselves increasingly disappointed.
While their “supervisor” certainly gave plenty of pain for them to fight through, as was their Orsha-given command, they could find plenty of that kind of struggle anywhere.
No grand fights with bandits or ticks presented themselves, instead they were restricted to the same, boring, task of placing the damn torches on the side of the road, again and again.
Even the danger they faced from being so close to the tick-infested grass faded quickly in the face of the annoyance that came from the relentless cold.
Hureheh supposed that the enchanted contraption was the only thing protecting them from the beasts in the grass, but he would be damned if the cold wasn't worse.
Perhaps it was a blasphemy against Orsha, but cold simply wasn't something an Orshraka was meant to deal with, command of god or not.
Even now, in the darkness of the night, and without the loving warmth of the dwindling fire, the cold of the cave floor crept into their bones.
Two sudden realisations hit Hureheh, one that, in retrospect, they should have known.
The first, they had somehow escaped from their supervisor, a decision they were not entirely sure they supported, the second, they were no longer in Reshraka, nor even its neighbouring fields, but likely the simple land of the Earliag, Careriag.
They attempted to remember the events that led up to such a development, yet they could not, apparently whatever had caused their injuries had taken them out before then.
Instead, they prompted their burdened mind to go back to the last thing they remembered.
They were doing their job, placing a torch, lighting it and moving on, while Retlafeh cranked the Orsha-forsaken contraption that was supposed to keep them safe.
In their mindless labour, they had fumbled and made a mistake, dropping a kerumsheh torch into the long grass.
The Earliag who was assigned to do nothing while Hureheh did all the work, let out an angry shout demanding that the slave go into the grass and pick up the dropped torch.
He hadn't actually expected Hureheh to do his bidding, but this was the chance the Orshraka had been waiting for, and with an air of spite he took it.
“Surely” he had thought, “if I only duck into the grass for a second, I wouldn't be caught by the ticks”.
The last memory Hureheh’s mind would allow them to remember was the sound of rapidly approaching rustling and their own screams of pain.
They fought to remember more, on the cold cave floor, but their injured body was too tired, and their mind too resistant.
Before long, a wave of drowsiness overcame them, and against their waking will, they fell back asleep, with the strangest dreams of plant-like creatures and small, malformed Golems.