A dragon’s dream must always care about not turning its dreamer’s dream into a nightmare, lest one is willing to face the dire consequences. But one is never sure what could turn the nightmare, what could set the hourglass’ sand on its unstoppable race towards the bottom. Most of Cirruin’s dreams stick to Ludlun for that same reason. But I couldn’t. I, Cirruin’s most detailed dream, had to learn about men, had to acquire their knowledge.
When I manifested back into reality, I found myself enclosed in my room in Ludlun. Water was slowly rising and the door had disappeared. The window was sealed off. I felt myself unusually solid.
“Nightmare…” I muttered, not believing the fact that, over the surface of the water, I casted a consistent shadow under the lone ray of sunlight that penetrated in that place.
I willed myself to Zenvo, and, when I blinked, I was still in the room. I trudged around the rising water and decided to try and sleep to dream a way out of there. It didn’t work, I couldn’t sleep, not because of the humidity, but of a primal urgency, an inability to calm down, to make my breath steady. Desperate, I breathed fire against the wooden wall and kicked it until it gave in, and, looking at the sky, I witnessed the dark mass that grew out from Zenvo’s direction.
I took a step and I found myself unable to shift. I was moving like a pebble down a hill. Tripping every three or four steeps, I made my way to the top of nearest hill, and from it, I rushe downslope. Tripped again, fell down, and rolled over the gravel, the small boulders and the tree stumps and fallen logs. I arrived at the bottom bleeding, black and blue, feeling like a bag of demolished bones. I coughed blood, it didn’t disappear from my hand. White bright lophophores imitated lightning strikes on the darkened sky, as the cloud of bryozoans grew thicker, wider, consuming more and more blue sky. I had to hurry.
In this desperation, an idea contrary to my nature was engendered: I could wake Cirruin up. A useless idea, as without moving like a dream, I knew of no way of climbing the mountain up to where the cave was.
“Jeller, Remelias, redhead lady whose name I never learned. Someone. Anyone. Help!” I called out. “Help, for everything you care about, help!” I called and called in vain. They had nothing to care about. “Help, Ludlun, I need help!”
There was no way I could traverse all the way to Zenvo fast enough, not alone, and not in that state. And despite that, I set down on the path and crawled, and crawled, despite the dirt of the road feeling like sandpaper on my skin, despite my left ankle being twisted and beginning to swell. Despite the pain that deluged me.
I remembered the wolves, and I wished for them to be scared for dear life. But then, then I just decided to give up the course of action. What use it was if I couldn’t, in the span of minutes, reach the boulder that a walking man would in a fraction of the time, or a dream in a second. I was still several lengths of my body away from that boulder. Then, realization washed upon me. I turned my head to look at my hand, and at its shadow, as consistent as my wounds.
Sleep was impossible for me right now, but other forms of unconsciousness were at my reach. With renewed strength and a hope of dreaming, I crawled up to the boulder, and held onto it with both arms to find my footing. I had to be careful. I had to manage to do this without killing myself in the process.
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“Please, work out.” I said, pulling my head back, fighting the dizziness from the loss of blood and previous hits, and then, with some of the strength I could muster, I smashed my skull against the rock. My forehead bled, and, for a second, I felt that my head would split in two. But it hadn’t been enough.
“Not enough for a concussion…” I pulled my head back and tried again, with a bit more of strength.
I slumped to the floor, but, after a few moments of confusion, was able to recover my footing. I failed again.
“Not… again… I … must… again…” With my hair matted in blood, my hands shaken, and the stone stained in red, I tried a third time.
For a few seconds, thrown on the floor, losing use of my limbs and going blind, I thought I had worked, but no. I kept hearing the frantic noises of the escaping animals, I kept smelling the coppery scent of my own blood. I had just damaged the part of my brain that gave me eyesight. I scrambled up to my feet and, deciding death was at least as good as failure, tried one last time.
I felt my whole self shattering, pain coursing through my whole head and neck. I think the skull even gave in. I felt the warm of my blood washing over my face, but not for long. Blind, deaf, insensitive now to even the worst of pain, I must have crumbled to the ground with a dumb smile on my face.
My first avatar, not without a difficulty I had never experienced before, managed to take form over the boulder outside Zenvo that I had climbed on my first visit. For seconds on end, now that his functional eyes where mine (thus, I will refer to the experiences of this avatar in the first person), I stared confused at the hands, as if they were someone’s else. I wondered what was this pain that washed over my whole body, this hell-sent migraine.
Some drops of rainwater fell upon my hands, and, I don’t know why, I decided to taste one of them. It was salty, like ocean water. My head jerked upwards as the sense returned to me—or to this incarnation of me, anyway. The drops fell from the giant bryozoans in the sky, and, turning my gazed towards the city, I beheld The Angel.
The Angel, nightmare’s masterpiece, loomed over Zenvo. Its androgynous figure made out of an amalgamation of sea life, the kind that Cirruin knew only through my accursed eyes, had extended his wings, with support made of whale skeletons and whose membranes where threaded in wriggling marine worms, over the city. His mouth was a series of three chitinous beaks that reminded to those of cephalopods, and his tongues, that flowed out of the mouth like a bouquet of horrors, were an entanglement of morays.
His shoulders, as many of them as legs a crustacean has, were clad in crab shells, his belly was home to uncountable anemones, and, the rest, the rest was built out of corals and bryozoans.
What was this thing that had my signature all over it? I lowered my stare slowly, to gaze at the guards, and then shifted to them. At first, I thought they were covered in colorful colonies of incrusting bryozoans, so I tried to peel them off from their skin and armor. But there was no metal nor flesh underneath, just more calcareous stone. Dead bryozoans. They had not been covered: they had been replaced by the colonies. Through the open gates I ran into the city, witnessing the gallery of terrified statues they had become. The animals extended their lophophores out as if they were underwater. They seemed to be trying to catch the salty rain. I ran. Horrified, I ran towards Dariel’s workshop. It was not far from that gate. I passed by petrified mothers with their children, their horrified screaming forever immortalized by the nefarious powers of The Angel. As I ran, I tripped, and when looking back, I saw I had lost a foot: it had been left behind, petrified. The Angel had set its gaze upon me, its hypnotic eye whose pupil was a giant, deflated and deformed Night’s Piece.
“No, no, no! I must reach them! I must save them! No!” I screamed as the cursed advanced through my legs, the little lophopores clasping onto my pants and skin in an unnatural way, my obsession consuming my avatar. I tried to crawl further, but the curse also overtook the hands.
“Another. I need another one. Another one!”