Lillian hated feeling useless. She knew that she wasn’t a mover and shaker like some of the people that ran in Prince David’s circles, but she could hold her own. She had been raised on a farm in the middle of nowhere, getting by with pure grit in their little community. Her gift may not have made her a better farmer like the rest of her family, but she put in the work.
Not dreaming felt like the bad days on the farm again. The days when her family told her that they didn’t mind if she took the day off.
It was never said with vitriol or unkindness, it was just a statement of fact. Her contributions were negligible, so she should go do something else other than farm.
The feeling of weakness and uselessness is what brought her into the prince’s fold. She never would have been happy to leave her family, but she yearned to be needed, to be useful like everyone else.
This battle had been a stark reminder of how it felt to be useless. Of course, she had contributed. She had been playing one of Joy’s games with him, and with their combined teamwork, they were able to overcome the fiery woman. But it felt hollow to her.
She was not performing at her greatest, she was not the shining example of power and responsibility that she yearned to be. She was another face in the masses. And that was unacceptable.
But what could she change? Her gift was fighting back against her, and she had no way of regaining control of it. Even the mere flashes of dreams she retained were filled with her constantly running away from Susan and her posse of nightmare creatures.
She needed to fight back in this world, but she had no real power in the dreamscape. Susan held all the power in the dreams, and now that power was leaking out into the real world.
What could she do to one-up the demon? What advantage could she muster up in the face of such overwhelming power?
A smile spread across Lillian’s face as she reached a state of personal enlightenment. She had been going about the question the wrong way, instead of letting her fear of Susan drive her, she should take control of the situation again. Susan’s power left a lasting effect on Lillian in the real world, but Lillian had an advantage in the real world that Susan did not.
The entire group was taking a short rest to let their souls be at ease after watching many friends die or run away. This was a terrifying mission that no none was taking lightly, so before they started truly pushing, Ian had allowed their group a small window of rest. Lillian was going to take advantage of this short rest though.
With a pep in her step that had been missing in the past few weeks, Lillian made her way to the healer’s tent.
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Lillian was in a dream. Especially with the latent fear she had been feeling from the dreamworld recently, the difference between reality and the dreamland felt much more visceral to her. She could feel the cotton edges of the framework of the dream caress her skin, inviting and yet terrifying to her.
She was standing on a boat made of rice. She wasn’t quite sure how that worked, but the rice boat was floating down a lazy river. The slowest moving river that Lillian had ever seen in her life. The Hearted Continent was filled with rivers that flowed throughout, but none of them ever moved this slow, it was a glacial pace.
The banks on either side were shrouded in smoke and mist respectively. A heat was on her left side, it felt like a fire was trying to jump out of that side. An emanating cold was coming from the right, the fog that covered that bank seemed to twinkle in the light, it seemed like it could freeze and drop at any moment.
Taken by a powerful urge, Lillian extended her arms out to either side of her body. The cold on one side and heat on the other slowly wormed their way into her body. They fought, but it was two siblings fighting over who got the largest piece of cake. There was no bloodshed in her body as the two forces met, more of an amicable roughhousing.
She took one deep breath and let it out. Fire and ice consumed and were destroyed by each other as she let it out of her body. There was a peace in the air around her that she hadn’t felt in the dream world for a long time.
Lillian knew that she could leave the dream with the power of fire and ice. Almost all gifts gave their user an inherent understanding of what their abilities could do. Therefore, Lillian knew that she could be content with taking this little piece of power. She would be a demoness of the battlefield, wielding fire and ice like extensions of her body.
She could feel it in her bones though. The world knew of her plans and was trying to appease her. To keep her from enacting her daring plan. She laughed at the world and its feeble attempt though.
“Trying to bribe me out of it just convinces me that it will work.” She bellowed into the mist and steam. The very fabric of reality cringed away from her as she shouted, like a puppy who had been kicked by its owner. But she knew that it was just a façade.
When she had first gotten her power, she had been afraid of it. Nightmares could come to life and attack her, but as she had grown more confident the fear had abated. Then Susan had made all that fear come back. The dreamland was an untamed realm of desire, there was no bad or good, and it would consume her in a moment’s notice if it could.
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The realm seemed to sigh around her, as if in resignation. Lillian paid it no mind, she simply continued cycling the hot and cold energies within her body, letting the power accumulate.
Susan swam to the surface of the river in front of the rice boat. Susan’s form was that of a beautiful young woman and man that had been smushed together. Each one was startlingly beautiful alone, but the two bodies being one created an abstract horror that only the dream world could create.
The woman half of Susan had startlingly red hair, while the male side of the demon had brown hair. There was a deep divide between the styles of hair, one was flowing and long red locks, while the other was short and cropped.
Susan ran their fingers through the red side of the hair while staring at Lillian.
“This is not your place human. Leave.” Susan said in a wavering tone. Only after being tormented by the demon for so many years did Lillian catch the uncertainty in their voice.
“That’s where you’re wrong Susan. This place is the seat of my power, in this place I am an unbowed king. I had forgotten that. You made me forget that, but not anymore.” It was a soft declaration, one that was the culmination of all the fear and hatred fermenting inside of Lillian. But it struck a chord with the world around her.
It seemed to be a universal fact for a brief moment, that Lillian was strong, and Susan was weak.
The brief interaction was forced to end though. It may have been meaningless in the end, but the sides needed to air their feelings towards each other before the battle began. And no one could get angry with some pre battle banter.
Susan struck first. Moving like lightning, or maybe the world slowed down around them until their personal speed exceeded what should be physically possible. Truly it didn’t matter, the laws of physics were more like guidelines in the dream world anyways.
Susan’s claws came crashing down into the rice boat. Lillian had seen the demon move and had already started to reposition herself. The swirling energies of hot and cold mixed inside of her and she released a gout of the powerful heat energy, pushing her body out of the way of Susan’s vicious strike.
The rice boat was split in half, and whatever dream logic had kept the grains of rice stuck together faded away as the rice slowly broke apart and spread throughout the water.
Lillian sunk beneath the water but found that her breathing and movement was not hampered by it. She could move as normal while using the cold energy that swirled inside of her to create extra ice platforms to leap off.
Susan followed Lillian into the water, trying to capitalize on the initiative they had taken by attacking first. But Lillian was not so easily taken, she ducked and dodged beneath the savage swipes made by the demon, as elusive as striking the very water that surrounded the two of them.
Susan finally overextended, and Lillian let loose a gout of flames that consumed the demon where they stood in the murky water. Lillian knew that water couldn’t truly catch on fire, but this was the dreamworld, and it always did as it pleased, never conforming to anything as banal as reality.
The demon was shocked, but unphased in the long run. Pain was an ephemeral feeling in the dreamworld, so it would not stop a being as powerful as Susan.
A burning hand pierced through the veil of flames that Lillian had conjured, the hand moved unerringly towards Lillian, and she was unable to move out of the way.
The hand speared directly through Lillian’s stomach, and she puked up a bit of blood onto the demon’s face. Susan simply opened a mouth that had not been on their head before and swallowed up the gob of blood that sat on them.
The fight stopped as the combatants felt something affecting the world around them. Susan knew that if they could just kill Lillian, the battle would be over, while Lillian knew that she just had to stall out the demon and accumulate more power. Even while impaled Lillian was absorbing even more of the rampant cold and hot energies in the air around her.
Finally, in a crescendo, Lillian defied gravity herself and lifted her legs around Susan’s body. The demon tried to pull away from the embrace, but Lillian was far too strong. Simultaneously Lillian placed both of her hands on each of the two faces cheeks. It was a loving embrace, the dance of death.
In a sudden breath, all the hot and cold energies in Lillian’s body were expelled in a violent rush. The hot hand matched along with the redheaded woman’s head, while the cold energies went into the plain looking man.
Susan exploded.
The energies were harmonious inside of Lillian’s body, but this release was a violent technique, it truly and utterly destroyed. Parts of Susan’s body were frozen solid, only to quickly explode as they were violently heated up. Susan turned into gobs of meat floating along the water.
All that was left of the epic battle were a few of the larger blobs of flesh and the massive hole in Lillian’s gut. The hole in her gut however seemed to be healing at a prodigious rate.
Healers were truly an inexplicable thing; they could heal someone from nearly anything except death. A true gift of Health might have even been able to cure death, but Lillian didn’t need to beat death, she just needed one of the medics outside to treat the injuries that Susan gave her in the battle.
Lillian had been so terrified because of Susan affecting her in the real world, but she had forgotten the most important thing about the real world. She wasn’t alone in the real world. Here in the dreaming, she was always alone, and it had bled into her strategies for dealing with the problem. But she didn’t need to take care of the problem in totality, all she needed to do was fight Susan and keep them from instantly killing her, allowing the healer to do their job.
A sigh of true contentment left Lillian’s lips as she gazed out into the water and surveyed the carnage of the battle she had just fought. Chunks still floated in the water, and she could see them pulsing slightly, trying to pull themselves back together. That was fine, there was no way to kill a dream, but she had stalled them for a time.
Lillian rose back to the surface of the water and took one last breath of the strange energy before opening her eyes.
The healer’s tent was bloody, and she felt a phantom ache in her stomach where the demon had impaled her, but she was safe. The healer gave her odd looks as they ushered her out of the tent; obviously, watching a woman’s stomach suddenly get punched out by nothing must have been a little strange for them.
But Lillian didn’t care, she sauntered over to her team with a little smile on her face. She felt mentally better than she had for a while and inside of her she could feel a strange energy writhing around. She felt the power that she held for a fleeting moment and knew that it was going to be a showstopper.