October 29th, 2024

Alastar

Alastar dreamed. The world wasn’t what he’d always expected it. Sure he’d always dreamed of fun and fantasy, but he’d never expected his world to become so… gamelike. He wanted to find something, be something, but the world itself had always told him he was nothing. Fiction was what told him he could be something, anything, that he wanted as long as he tried his best.

This wasn’t a truth of the world, at least not as far as he could tell, but a prat of him said otherwise. Something was clear about this game system, thai objective reality that was pushing up on his subjective vision of reality, it was pressuring him to take a path that he… well he wanted to take it. It wasn't giving him anything he didn't want, he wasn’t being forced into situations that he didn’t like, he loved his goals and all of the gifts the system had given him.

As he slept, these thoughts turned into dreams and he found himself in a dark blue void with twinkling white stars. You will be clothed in starlight. It was just a whisper, but it got into Alastar’s head. He couldn’t think as he felt himself clothed in nothing but starlight, naked to the world yet completely obscured. It felt like he was falling, or maybe flying.

The city was down below him. The city he’d seen from the top of skyscrapers and from drone footage for years. It was a beautiful sea of lights. “It’s like someone took the stars and put them upon the earth.” He said, crying out into a world wrought by his own mind. He could feel it, it didn’t feel real, something was wrong.

Stolen novel; please report.

Why do you resist? The voice asked him. It felt perfectly natural to answer the voice, but he still felt like something was wrong.

“I don’t know, somethings wrong. Why am I here?” Alastar asked, staring around him. He found himself not falling or flying, but instead standing on an invisible platform in the air.

You are here because this is where you are meant to be. The voice said. It was soft and feminine, yet somehow alien. As if it was reverberating not within the air but within his mind, an echo of cosmic power.

“Who are you? You look so strange.” The figure was humanoid, but had no face. Instead there was light shining above a robed figure who was made out more as an absence of stars than anything else.

I am important. I am here. You must listen to me, you shal be clothed in stars.

Clothed in stars? What did the figure mean? And what was it that felt so wrong. Finally there was an interruption.

Star, are you okay? Vajra. That was Vajra. That was why this odd mental speech didn’t seem so strange, it reminded him of his wayward servant.

“I’m alright Vajra, what’s going on?” The dream was crashing around him, he could feel it as the stars began to wink out and the figure began to be disrupted.

You have to wake up. Vajra said.

You have to sleep and dream. The figure said in response.

“I don’t know what to do!” Alastar said, as the dream winked from existence and he found himself, eyes closed, in a dark room. He was awake once more.