The waking dream seizes you with an intensity unlike any you have ever experienced. It is as if a great hand has gripped your thoughts and dragged them to another place. Colors, sounds, scents, and sensations whirl about you, and your mind is in another place, a place of darkness and half-light where dawn never comes.
There, a woman sleeps.
She sleeps as she has not slept in some time, in peace, undisturbed by nightmares, unburdened by memories, and untroubled by knowledge of the past. Hers is a rest as black and deep as death itself. It is the only reward he can grant her.
Standing by her cocoon, his visage silver-gilded by the light of stars that are not really stars, is a man with features neither old nor young. His deeply tanned skin glows faintly, casting a golden haze into the air around him. He wears his long raven black hair free from its warrior's ponytail. Like the cocoon, his eyes burn with a light that is not entirely natural. He traces the scar down his left cheek thoughtfully.
"She is safe, Llumen," he says.
"For now."
The sylvankind who materializes from the darkness next to him is also a creature of light and shadow. His heavy-lidded eyes are the same hue as the dreamstone forming the cocoon, and his skin is of polished ivory. He looks more like a jeweled carving of a man than a living, breathing person, and for good reason. When he sighs, his breath does not stir the wings of the butterflies clinging to the tree near him. It is the ghost of a sigh.
"No sorrow, my friend," says the scarred man. "Your vigil is at an end. Come and walk with me again, in the shadow of our lord and master."
"I cannot. I am a part of this place, now, Beonas."
"And he would free you, as he freed me, to serve again as we were meant to serve. If you would but allow it. If you would but trust them to keep her safe."
The one named Llumen opens his mouth to speak. He seems to be considering his words carefully. "I trust them, but I do not trust Him any longer."
"I feared as much."
"And do you? Do you trust in Ronan after all that we have done in His name?"
"As I always have," says Beonas. "That is the meaning of faith. And what of the one you love most? Will you leave her alone?"
Llumen walks toward the cocoon. In the full force of its light, it is clear how fragile his form is, how tenuous its grasp on the world. He looks like a candleflame being tossed in a breeze, ready to go out at any moment.
"She has walked these many years on her own," Llumen says. "A few more mean nothing to her kind. Your kind, now."
"Then you think he will return." Beonas's voice carries an edge of concern.
"I think he cannot help but rise again. The moment they trapped him within her mind, he became not a man, but an idea. An idea sealed away does not simply wink out like a dying star. It grows. It festers. It transforms, until it is greater than the prison that holds it. At most, we have bought time."
Beonas nods along with the assessment, his luminous features grave. Slowly, he draws the sword from the sheath on his back. It is a resplendent work of onyx and silver, with an edge harder than diamond and sharper than honed steel. He holds the hilt of the blade over his heart.
"I swear this to you. Should that time come, I will be there, and so shall the Lord of Dreams."
"Thank you," says Llumen.
"It is my honor to have known you."
With forced casualness, Llumen says, "Enough of that. Don't you have nightmares to slay, old man?"
Their laughter rings through the glade. Butterflies take to flight, swirling around the cocoon in a sea of rainbowed colors. Slowly, unbeknownst to either of the men, the woman behind them smiles.
And her eyelids flutter.
***
Another vision bleeds into the first, that of a place so dark that the darkness itself has heft and weight. Like an inky curtain, old and fetid and heavy, it drapes the place, pressing in and stifling you. Far below the stale shadows, there is a ghostly glow.
It is the sickly shine of moss clinging to stalactites many times the height of a man, answered by stalagmites sprouting from a hidden floor far below. Those are as sharp as a serpent's fangs. Both seem to stretch on for eternities in all directions.
But there is one place, a small plateau, that looks to have been touched by the works of mortals. At the center of the craggy slab is an immense serpent's head of stone, its ivory fangs bared in fury. Five crystalline pillars encircle it.
One of them winks to life, followed by another. Sparks of emerald fire, so feeble they might be missed were it not for the oppressive darkness crushing down on the platform, form in the depths of each of the pillars. The moment the last comes to life, a gout of emerald flame rushes from the serpent's head. The fire and pillars go out as one, the ghost of energy that brought them to life spent in the brief quickening.
But all is not as it was before. A skull, blackened and broken, barely recognizable as anything humanoid, lies on the platform amidst a circle of char. Neither is the cavern completely silent any longer. The skull twitches, and the sound of bone rattling against stone echoes.
What happens next is impossible.
Tissues, red and raw, begin to form over the surface of the skull. The process is slow at first, but it accelerates. A mass of gunk in one of the eye sockets twitches and pulses, forming itself into a rudimentary eye. Bleeding gums form sticky nets around the broken and melted teeth, even as the char on them begins to flake away to reveal fresh, white material underneath.
The skull makes a single sound, a wet gurgle. By now, thin patches of hair have begun to grow over slick pink skin atop it, and most of the blackened spots have flaked away. A tongue, small and twisted, lolls from the mouth, and the skull speaks again.
It manages a single, hateful word.
"Bristenn!"
Auchand
It's funnier in Enochian.
