2014-04-02 - Starfall: The First Dream
| Title: Starfall: The First Dream | |
|---|---|
| Summary: This is an IC dream, experienced on the night of December 23rd. Everyone had it, but if you OOCly don't want to deal with it for whatever reason, it's fine to have your character forget, as dreams are wont to be. | |
| Who: The Maiden of Dreams | |
| Where: Asleep | |
| OOC - IC Date: 04-02-2014 - 12-23-2013 | |
It begins in darkness, as many dreams do.
And then there was light: a rainbow explosion that resolves into beauty, beauty as embodied in flowers and clouds and chocolates and butterflies, and also rivers and a light sparkling rain and fresh salads and baby crocodiles, because there are many eyes present to behold.
It is a beautiful dream.
But gradually perception shifts, the camera of the mind drawing back to witness not the dream, nor the dreamers, but the one bringing the dreams to them. At first, it just seems like a ball of white light, but over time the image resolves into someone distinctly female -- a maiden breathing lovely, peaceful rest into every sleeper in all the worlds, bestowing her gift upon them with gentleness and grace.
She works very, very hard. No dreams for the dreambringer; her steps grow ragged and slow over eons of work, her delivered dreams become amorphous and strange, and when she finally collapses for some badly needed rest of her own, she's so tired that all she sees is blackness, the unconscious void. She wakes up to...
...absolute and total fury.
Her long service had been interrupted for the span of a single evening, but her crime was unforgivable. Resentment blossomed everywhere like hungry, blood-red flowers, briars crawling up her, clinging to her dress, her hair, reaching for her flesh.
Horror and surprise turned to resentment of her own. She'd worked so hard, for so long, and had this for her reward?
The dreams she brought that night were nightmares, all rainbows transformed to fel inversions of themselves, the ghastliness of the visions painful to behold. And then the next night. And the next. If she wasn't allowed to rest, no one else would, either.
The Silver Lady visited her three times.
The first time, it was solicitously. She was empathetic, but not sympathetic, for while duty was difficult, was it not duty? The maiden, now not of dreams but of nightmares, was polite, but refused to change her ways. The second time, it was with a command, backed by the authority of a thousand-year Imperium. To stop these nightmares immediately, and to resume her service bringing good dreams to everyone. The maiden of nightmares grew angry, and sent the Silver Lady away. The third time, it was with a mission, and the determination that went with it.
A brilliant flare of silver light crashed into the maiden of nightmares -- she tried to stand against it, and succeeded for a time. The battle was long and ardruous. But in the end, she was shattered, shattered and swept away.
In her last moments as herself, before the seven pieces she'd become became fixtures in the night sky, to sparkle upon those she had once served, her feelings were complex.
She felt pride, that her cause had created such a clamour that it required the Silver Lady herself to intervene. Pride not unlike that of a girl shrouded in righteousness even as she was bullied.
She felt passion, passion for her story, and for the stories of all. Passion similar to that of another girl in another story, who felt so strongly that she put others before herself.
She felt fear, fear for herself, for her fate meted out at the hands of this being of justice, who was, in her eyes, no less monstrous than the visions she'd created. Fear that everything she had worked so hard to create was now going to be taken from her.
She felt aggression, anger, a desire to rip the light from the Lady standing against her and take it for herself. Aggression such as that came from suffering, from tragedy, but also from a will to survive.
She felt indecision, for some part of her regretted that things had come to this. There were so many paths she could have taken, and perhaps could someday take, similar to that of another girl with many possible future selves.
She felt ruthlessness, because she knew that even though they had, what had come after had been the only way she felt she could continue her own purpose. Ruthlessness that beat deeply in the heart of a girl determined to save the world at any cost.
And she felt homesickness, for although her essence had been sealed within an all-too-familiar constellation, she was so close and yet so far from home, and now would be, forever. Homesickness shared by one whose home had been sealed forever.
They were all that was left to her, in the long darkness that followed, glimmering points of golden light, bound, warded, chained. Separate, they intensified and deepened, corrupting themselves ever more darkly.
She had no dreams, only the unchanging, everlasting reality of her prison -- a shattered prison of the self.
The dream ends with a sense of falling, of the potential of freedom, of an incomplete escape. Falling, falling, but landing where?
Only questions remain, after.
