28th Light beneath the eleventh Moon

3761 Cycles beyond the Dark

722 Years after the Repentance

Entry: 1/050 – The Dream

Dear self,

This day had quite a different way of playing out than I expected. It started in the dream as you might have guessed, or at least it started as the end of yesterday at the least. Long story short I had passed out from the waking world suddenly in a hallway. It’s a little hard to remember things from right before you fell asleep, so you will have to trust second hand knowledge in this case. You might look back and condemn me for not remembering my physical condition immediately, but frustrating as these things are we mortals often fail at the most basic of trials; even immortals do. I am no different, and you will not be either. Even Mystics have regrets after gaining hindsight, despite their foresight.

It was just us three unsuspecting within a peaceful dreamworld. Me, the humble lizard that is Rahph, and the little goddess I decided to try teasing. I was bored, so I grabbed her and dangled her over Rahph and let him lunge at her fiery warmth. Her voice actually became less audible as her tone became more frantic. I could barely hear a high-pitched squealing. Rahph was still larger than he should be in the waking world, but his raised head only went as far as my shoulders and I could keep the shrieking Vamera away from his jaws if I jumped when he lunged. If anything, her frantic whining must have been as audible as normal to him because he only seemed to become encouraged.

Annoying a wild animal is never a good idea in real life, and both me and Vamera became munched on when Rahph became too annoyed with me. That would have hurt a great deal more in real life. Vamera escaped faster than did as well so she could shout what I assume was some sort of satisfaction and watch me getting chewed on from afar. She was quite indignant for a while.

It takes you a while to realise that something might be wrong just from letting time pass by without anything happening. You see, dreams are only a short part of the sleep cycle, even if their whimsical nature is able to make them feel as if the lasted ages, so if you spent as much time as this in a single dream you should now there is a reason out of the ordinary. The previous dreams had only lasted a few hours at any one time. This one lasted longer. It lasted much longer.

A longer sleep also means you don’t need to spend as much of it waking up or going to sleep, and thus you have more time for dreams. Being properly unconscious isn’t normally something that produces dreams; unconsciousness harms your mind in the waking as well as the dreaming world. This was something more. The nebulous body that is my mind had become divorced from Materiality.

I would praise Vamera for how quickly she turned from peeved to being sober. She was no mortal youth to mistake between foolishness and seriousness. She immediately got to examining me on a subtle level.

Not to get into the fine details of subtle anatomy, but my “mind” had become separated from my body due to intrusive interference. It was highly evanescent so only Vamera could sense it while to others it might have just been an inexplicable phenomenon without discernible cause. If you recall that is how we had perceived it prior to my passing out. My ego was still connected to my body, and my spirit remaining attached helped my “mind” to sustain awareness without integration with m brain. There were shards scattered in the place my nebulous mind should have been attached to my vital body, and Vamera hadn’t noticed before now because my spirit was as intact as could be.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

We believe it to have been an Illusory attack on an arcane level. They were crudely designed to circumvent the standard defences of the mind and then create a powerful invocation through which their owner would have been able to replace my intellect with their own domination without needing to damage my physical or subtle body.

It was eldritch in nature, so I had no hope of countering it or even detecting it on my own. It would not have succeeded other than being harmful to me. It was exclusively capable of controlling creatures without a vital brain. On a fleshy being like me it would just render me completely unconscious without an interface towards the vital body to guide it. It would have been fantastic at manipulating Outer being who tend not to have very sophisticated minds or any reliance on a vital form, but on me it’s reduced to merely being damaging instead of controlling.

You can already sort of guess what had caused it. Having an asura at hand at such a time is a good way of avoiding any sort of consequence. Halting the progression of the shards was easy for Vamera, and I would have been well and hale in a matter of hours. We had caught it in time that I would be in no personal danger. The only consequence would have been that I spend a day without waking, and then everything goes back to normal and we maybe make sure no one has a similar problem.

So I didn’t tease Vamera about being weaker than me in the dream again. She got quite smug about having saved me, and you should feel guilty if you even entertain the thought of ever toying with someone who had helped you in such a way. We had a long chat about things with me being trapped in the dream for hours and hours. She seemed to brighten with time spent in company. I could see Rahph leaving the dream for once. Him spending so much time asleep is clearly a part of his species, he is lazing around no less time for having begun recovering from the cold.

I eventually got around to more current events. She was interested in the fact that Ahtu left two Rifts unsealed in some sort of hurry. He does sound like a controlling type of person. Eldritch beings running around was also a minor cause of concern. The Solacium would have intervened if it was anything significant, so it wasn’t of severe concern or anything.

Getting to the question of the second Interloper, she suggested we observe the memory in case we could find the creature in Illusory space. We walked off to the edge of the dreamscape where the night sky began vanishing into white emptiness. Finding this edge was something much more deliberate than just wandering around in the dream would have been. You can only do this if you are dreaming vividly.

She used her strength to recreate the scene where the monstrous mole was holed up in a dimensional pit. This involved more me allowing her to do so by removing the “impediments” than just her normal power. She spotted the thing for me. It was hidden among the trees and rapped around the bark with coloured textures that made it seem as natural as the flora itself. There were about eight trees encircling the pit and every single one had a thin ethereal tendril tangling across them. It was insidious and crawled over the ground and between the shrubbery. It was invisible in the snow.

The memory had an image of me frozen in the air leaping away from the mole. There were more tendrils wrapping around parts of the monster and starting to climb up my leg, even one of the tiny robed guys had a thread winding up their cloak.

The creature might not have been large in mass and volume, but it was clearly efficient in how it used the little mass it had with extended threads of minute thickness and prodigious length. I didn’t even know where the centre of its mass might have been.

I now knew one thing; this thing is much more dangerous than just being cautious around an unknown monster allows. This thing needed to be dealt with. This was a very serious favour to ask of Vamera, but I needed to get awake immediately. The party from yesterday was preparing to face a monster, and they were going to go in blind without me. They wouldn’t wait for an apprentice like me to go deal with something as urgent as a Rift synergising with a monster, they were leaving as soon as they could.

Vamera did hesitate at helping at first, hastening my recovery was not without costs, but we both knew she would be needing my help for a while. She was as decisive as I could hope for after seeing that people might be in danger.

That is how I woke. Still confused from a prolonged sleep and starving from a long fast without food nearby, but in an urgent hurry. I ran into the heavy snow clutching my Levinspark potion and yanking a bottle of Stargleam from the shelf. I was chanting the beginning of a ritual the entire way.

Hope we fare well.

Regards,

Me.

~*M*~