Carabas

A man confronts me at my IRL home, having tracked me down, holding me responsible for something that happened long ago. I hear a memory of something he'd said to me then - "The rule of kings is over. We will take our place among free nations." The scene shifts to show the beginning of the thing he blames me for. A procession through a city, passing by a river, soldiers in silver-colored armor, rows and rows of lances in the sunlight, the king and myself in tall masked helmets and long robes, at the corner of my vision I'm aware of a ship moving along the river with sails and oars and something golden about it, and it's all a striking image, but I'm thinking of something like Cosa Nostra.

Answering a queen's summons, I kneel before her throne and wait. Eventually, I realize she's ignoring me. Just wanted to see me kneel. That's fine. I think of an old mentor, a meditation style holding one position for hours, and settle in to be here for a while. I can hear her advisors talking to her, two nervous men with high voices pointing out that I'm waiting, using a title for me. But I'm aware she's angry about her son.

When she finally acknowledges me, she says she wants something I'd once promised her. I tell her she's welcome to it.

A deal has fallen through. Sort of. I've got a prince in my debt, but that's pointless - what I needed was for him to eventually become a king, so that a little further down the timeline, he'll be able to ask another king for a favor. But the princess I'd intended him to marry has now been burned and beheaded due to a minor demonic possession incident, so now he's useless to me.

I find another kingdom that will work, a desert. Two daughters. In the throne room, I meet the younger daughter, but that timeline doesn't interest me. The eldest is locked in the dungeon, and I take the prince to meet her instead. I recognize her, though she doesn't recognize me - I'd met a version of her in another world. She'd been a he at the time. The prince had known her in that world too, and I think that could work out either very well or very badly. She's a lot angrier this time around, something of a freedom fighter, turned against her own father. This is promising.

I gave an old woman a recipe which includes a poisonous flower. She later turns up dead by the effects of that poison - but I suspect her son took advantage of that situation to kill her himself, knowing that it would be dismissed as an error in dosage. There's an inheritance involved.

Disembodied, I'm 'standing' at the edge of the ring of a gladiatorial circus, observing a man who's now lying on the ground looking half-dead, but he's nonetheless victorious and a crowd-pleaser. I'm bored. These games have been going on for days now and it's gotten repetitive, I'm impatient for him to move on.

I shift my perspective, finding the emperor in a large private room attached to the circus. A man in armor is talking to him about the man who's won the games, and the emperor is incredulous - why should the emperor fear or make concessions? That man fears him, the emperor - the proof of that is in the way he travels from place to place and uses the name he does. (His name is a word literally meaning "dark," but associated with low, dirty things.) The man in armor raises the issue of Dark's rumored connection to the queen.

The queen's present in the room, tall and dark and with green-tinted hair, hair mostly covered by a black veil. She's legendary for her beauty and suggested to be not entirely human; there's a rumor that Dark is one of her kind, and looking for her. It's close to the truth, but not quite it - in actuality, he's a survivor of the court of her previous husband. She's unaware of this. She only survived that massacre because the emperor refused to give her up, treated her as a prize.

She joins in the conversation, teases the emperor, saying that if she ever sees this Dark, she might recognize one of her own kin and turn on the emperor. Her voice is nasally. She then speculates more seriously about what would happen if she ever really did meet one of her sisters - "Lure her to her death."

The emperor is irritated with this line of conversation, and tells the two of them that this is enough talk, focus on the tribute instead.

Later. Dark is standing in front of an open shrine, holding an antique sword in poor physical condition but with great symbolic meaning. He's telling the spirits that if he enters the dream with this weapon, with all that meaning attached, it will become something miraculous. He's lying. But in actuality, it will lead him to a cross buried in the ground - I see the cross glowing dull red - and then to a bow which will infect him with hatred for a time.

I have a body now. I'm standing in a temple somewhere bright, talking to a woman who's explaining to me that she won't leave this building. She took a demon into herself, made herself its prison. She describes how she'd been fighting someone, and when it was over, a part of herself that should have been restoring was draining instead, and she hasn't been able to stop it - she can feel herself flaking away, and if this continues, there'll be nothing left of her in a mere few thousands of years.

In the previous scene, I'd been doing shots with a man who drinks live snakes, one every day. The bartender gives me a dead one, since it's my first time; it'll go down easier. Now I'm walking around half-submerged ruins where I've been before. There's meant to be a door here, though I hadn't seen it the first time around. Now that I'm searching, though, I spot the fold in reality that's hidden it, pull it through so that it becomes solid. It's set in the base of what had been an empty stone arch.

The other side of the door is an in-between place, and I go slightly lucid in order to pause and enjoy the view. It's a stone bridge hanging in space, pale stone, low and sloping walls on either side, and something like coral growing over it in patches. This space has the quality of light seen from underwater, and floating above there's some enormous, amorphous, diaphanous shape, jellyfish-like. It's all very pleasant.

Along the bridge I run into two women with the tails of snakes, mermaid-like, who are frozen in place, and whose verbal words don't match the meanings I hear - the verbal words are friendly, the underlying meaning is to get me to come close enough and stay long enough for them to kill and eat me. I find them pleasant, too; I can't blame them for being hungry, this place sees so little traffic, and I don't intend to stay long enough for them to kill me, so they're effectively harmless.

When I leave the in-between place, it takes me to a scene where an Egyptian woman with a clipboard is consulting a guest list. I have to wait in line behind some snake-haired triplets while a dead human woman talks to the woman with the clipboard, trying to justify why she belongs inside, citing the royal status of her lover.

I've convinced a man to throw himself on the king's mercy. A friend had been offering to get him to safety, he knew some people who could help with that, and the man had been considering it; but I'd spoken to the king and I promised him it would work out, so he stayed.

But now that we're actually standing before the throne, the king decides to have him executed. This was not the deal. This brat, spoiling things on a whim; part of me is furious, but part of me just finds this whole situation ridiculous, that these humans allow themselves to be ruled by a man like him. I imagine speaking out, see an image of it, but in reality I say nothing, just wait for the audience to end. Now I'll have to try to sneak the man out. I should have just let him run while he could.

Talking with others, there's something we need from the palace which we haven't been able to locate. Someone points out that there's a private wing that contains the royal suite, but also other rooms of unknown purpose - process of elimination, what we need must be there. We agree to make that private wing our destination for now, and someone makes a joke about how we can wave at the timeline of our original plan as it passes us by, we've gotten so far off course.

There's a human woman who, when looking at a particular vampire through a mirror, would see a reflection of him that no one else could see - or rather a sort of different version of him, seen far off and from a distance, performing different actions. She's never been sure exactly what this means. He believes that she's been seeing something like his soul, or another side of him - he saw it as something like a hope for salvation. Right now, though, he's leaving town; he's loading luggage into a car, and both he and his sister are dressed in a drastically different, more formal style than she's ever seen them wear before - she thinks of it as out of character. But it only seems that way to her because they're destroying the personas they've been using with these particular identities and creating new ones, and she's never seen them do that before.

She's standing on the sidewalk, talking to his sister, and she's saying, but what about those visions of "the man in the glass" - how can the two of them just leave her without finding out what her visions meant? The sister says those visions were just illusions that he's ready to move on from.

I'm in a fortress that's been evacuated, watching a woman who's been advising me as she treats this survivor we'd found lying unconscious in the hall. Now that she's conscious again, my advisor comes to me and says we're in luck; the woman's the head of a noble house and she considers her loyalty as being to the throne itself, not to any particular claimant, so she's willing to pledge her sword to me. I'm aware that there was some previous meeting that had declared me the legitimate claimant to the throne, and that's what's determining this woman's decision, not that we've saved her life; if the meeting had declared in favor of someone else, she'd be supporting that person instead.

The character side of me is surprised by this statement about pledging her sword; I say to my advisor, what, again? I'd had to find three noble houses to declare their swords to me, I'd managed it, there'd been a ceremony - that part's done now, isn't it? My advisor can't believe I'd say such a thing; exasperated (rightfully so, the observer side of me thinks), she explains that I need all the swords I can get, especially now as we're making for Hightower - I have a mental image of entering a military encampment and seeing the top of a round tower of brown stones in the distance. I see her point now that she's said it, and I think about the route between here and Hightower, and all the noble households located along that route. I hope we don't have to repeat the actual ceremony each time.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm part of a group of people protesting some issue, focusing on a sort of police force in a particular community but with broader implications. Trying to figure out how best to handle this, I enter the mind of the man in charge of the police force, trying to see what would sway him, what approach he would listen to. I find that the problem isn't our approach, it's that nothing coming from this source is going to sway him - even if my group convinced every last person in the community to unite and speak up, this man sees our community as a problem to be solved, a situation to be managed. If the police force is going to change, it needs pressure from someone else.

I travel to the mind of that man's superior, a political position. He's more sympathetic to the issue in the community, but he won't act just based on sympathy; it's important to him that he make "impartial" decisions about where to focus his limited time and resources. If public opinion among the area he serves as a whole was pressuring him to focus on this issue, or particularly influential groups or political powers, then he would focus on it. He considers this the most responsible approach.

Following the trail of political influence, I eventually come to the ruler of the country. He would be surprised to be asked about this issue at all; he considers it outside of his jurisdiction. This is the church's responsibility.

I come to the leader of the church, the equivalent of a pope. She also believes this isn't up to her; this is an issue for each nation to decide.

I'm entering a large garage, looking for the owner. Off to the right I see a white truck I recognize from the first time I met him, when he'd kidnapped the queen. There are three vases full of red roses sitting in the truck bed now. The man I'm looking for is further into the garage, off to the left, along with another man who I also met during that kidnapping incident. I exchange the usual greetings with this second man, then walk up to the one I came to see. He's an incredibly big guy, tall and muscular, and he doesn't turn from what he's doing to look at me. Neither of us say anything for a moment - I have a hard time deciding how to talk to him - and then when we do speak, both of us start talking at once.

He asks about the queen at the same moment I say, "(the queen's name)'s sick." Dying, most likely.

He's shocked and horrified, as expected, and asks me a bunch of questions about her. As we talk, we raise the question of whether her sickness is a reflection of the state of the land, or whether the land's sickness is a reflection of the state of the queen - that they're linked is obvious, but which one started it, which is the cause, that's the question.

The other man joins in the conversation at this point. They'd been tracking the changes in the land on their own, not realizing what was happening to the queen; and comparing our information, the two of them become convinced it started with the land. That second man shows me one of their maps on a computer screen, showing when a giant creature associated with cold moved into the far northwest and burrowed deep into the earth - that was the first one, the one that started it. They'd already been planning to remove or kill it. It goes without saying that I'll be coming too.

As I'm looking at his data, I'm thinking, amused, how convenient, making this into a problem that can be solved with our skillset.

A phrase: "Catherine, and the first dream of a 2000 year-"

There had been a queen long ago named some variation on Selene - I admired her, and I've been looking after all the generations of her descendants ever since. In a few rare circumstances I'll even take one of her descendants in and raise them myself. Some resemble her a great deal, others don't - I think about bloodlines. Now one of her descendants is in love with me, and she's upset that I've told her I would be happy with a platonic relationship or otherwise, leaving the decision entirely up to her - she wants me to feel more strongly about it. She says if I would be happy with a platonic relationship, I can't really care about her. But I've been a presence and an influence in her life since she was born, and I foresaw this moment before she was born - I've had too much influence. I want to influence her as little as possible in this at least. It has to be entirely her decision.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I've had too much to drink, and I'm making my way back to my hotel room with some woman, past the now-abandoned maypoles in the lobby, litter from the party on the floor. My vision's blurry, and I have this mental monologue about how I must be getting old if the drink's messing with my vision like this. She pushes me onto the bed, and my vision blurs more - through that blurred vision, her hair's much longer now. Also she has wings, white feathers. Fuck, I know this demon. There goes my night. She sits on the edge of the bed and tells me she wants what I promised her on the night I abandoned my child. I have a memory of taking him (? I think it was a him) to a border of some kind and making him cross, so that he'd be safely out of my reach. The demon's crawled onto the bed now, and when I tell her she's out of luck, the thing we got that night is already gone, she phases her hands through my chest, squeezes and twists something inside that shouldn't be squeezed or twisted.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Setting's a fantasy version of ancient China, a king in his bedroom talking to a priestess all in white via a vision in a mirror. He was telling her about people who will be coming her way, intending to use a sacred object in her care. But she's saying that what they want isn't possible - they've misunderstood its purpose. The portal it opens can't be used to take them to the divine realms. She says, "(something) and onyx must not overlap."

As Rumpelstiltskin, disembodied, I'm watching a woman lead a prisoner, a teenage boy, into a dungeon. She's complaining about how tired she is of hunting people down and dragging them back here across worlds. We're standing (well, 'standing' in my case, lacking a body at the moment) in a stone hallway, at the top of a staircase blocked by a door of iron bars. She locks that door behind the prisoner, and when she leaves he just sits down right there at the top of the stairs rather than going further down. He looks very confused. I'm aware he's not the only person in the dungeon, there's several people down at the base of those stairs, some of whom I feel personally responsible for, and I wonder for a moment if they've been fed today. I sometimes forget how often my guests need to eat. Then I remind myself that right now, it's not my responsibility to keep them fed - the people who took them prisoner will take care of that, they need their hostages alive. There's someone in that dungeon I want to take back, but I've got a few other things to see to first, while I'm disembodied.

The scene skips ahead in time - no memory gap, just a shift to the bottom of the stairs and an awareness that this is meant to be later. A guard's come to feed the prisoners, and when no one comes to the top of the stairs when he calls, he opens the door to bring the food down himself and check on the prisoners. But when he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he finds me sitting in the wooden chair in the center of the dirt floor. I'm wearing a hood that hides my face, but I always do. There's two kids beside me, royalty held hostage - one of them's my granddaughter, biologically but not officially, though she isn't aware of that and neither were the people who took her. But they should have been aware that I've always looked after her family. I wait until he's seen me, and until the look on his face shows that he knows who I am, and then I create a ball of fire in my hand. I enjoy this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm returning to a tent in a military camp in some cold, snow-covered place, and there's this man who bows to me two or three times when he sees me, obsequious manner, irritating. I hear a voice as if I'm reading a line in a book: "This was the worst of ___'s nature, he told himself - a ___ who didn't know how to ___." (The blanks aren't things that I forgot after waking up - during the dream, the voice just cut out during those words. The first blank was meant to be the name of my POV character here; the other two had no mental associations.)

There's a man, some kind of ruler, lying in his sickbed, potentially his deathbed. He's speaking to two servants to either side of his bed. Circumstances are forcing him to return to a place he'd once tried to conquer many years ago, but had been forced to turn away from at the last minute. His servants think returning now will be a disaster, given his health. But he's inspired. He says that when he first marched on that place, he'd felt he was approaching the height of his power. As though if he'd reached that place, he also would have reached his dream of creating something that would change the world. I want to use the word 'technology' here, but that gives the impression of some new gadget - what the ruler is after is something as revolutionary as the invention of writing. His statement makes one of the servants focus on the symbol the ruler is wearing around his neck. It's a gold star with 14 rays, arranged much like a jack, the toy, or like a three-dimensional version of a compass rose. I, disembodied, think of alchemy.

There's a white horse and rider walking through a hall of the palace. An extremely agitated servant is trying to get them to leave, but the horse and rider brush him off. They walk through a pair of wooden double doors, into a room where the ruler who'd been in his sickbed is now up and in military uniform, going over maps. The setting looks significantly more modern than I'd thought in the previous scene, maybe as late as the 1800s.

The ruler reacts about as you'd expect when a stranger on a horse walks into your room. The rider asks, "Don't you recognize me?" And his face changes - now he's identical to the ruler. "Though when we last spoke, it was more..." And his face changes again, growing younger. Very little changes, really - skin's a bit tighter about the jawline, mostly. The rider reaches up to feel that jawline, and compliments the ruler on how well he's aged. Perhaps that's the result of easy living. This is sarcasm - an accusation. The rider says "we" expected greatness from the ruler - but what has he done with their gift in all this time?

The rider says, "We convene in the morning. I expect you there." And he leaves.

A young woman's confronting this guy, a friend of hers, though she's annoyed at him at the moment. He's arranged things so as to create this sort of antichrist kid - it doesn't really have anything to do with her, but she's angry about it anyway, and is feeling tricked and betrayed by him in general. She asks him if he's Lucifer, expecting the answer to be yes.

"Nope. One of the major demons." He says it casually, he's smiling easily through this whole conversation. He's doing some kind of work in a manhole, and she's standing up on the surface with her arms crossed.

"What did you (word that means both infect and possess) my boyfriend with?"

"La'ulb. But it's clean, and I can take it off."


There's this young musician trying to get permission to leave a royal court - he wants to travel to a different country. He has to make a plea before the king, and he's deliberately trying to emulate the speech of an older man, a traveler passing through, who'd impressed him - as a disembodied observer, I'm amused, but I think it's a bad idea; it'll just make him sound artificial. He makes a comparison to a young bird having its wings clipped.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

After a short scene in which I'm reminded that cheating on a god out of boredom is not the best of ideas, followed by a shapeshifting fox turning up at my IRL door, I've wound up in a bit of trouble.

I'm now heading for the rear exit of a theatre, trying to avoid being seen by the group of women - not humans - who are coming up behind me; but through the glass door, I can see a pair of fox demons approaching - a pair of women all in white, dripping in silver jewelry. After hesitating, I decide I'd rather take my chances with the fox demons. There's a crowd of people, mostly girls who work here, coming in through that door, but I don't feel very optimistic about my chances of getting lost in the crowd - until one of the girls quickly slips off the blue robe she'd been wearing over her clothes and wraps it around me, and someone else puts an arm around my shoulders, pushing my head down so my face can't be easily seen.

He pulls me over to a side hallway and gives instructions to one of the showgirls to fetch the change of clothing he'd arranged for with her earlier. I know him - he's vaguely sinister but not in a way that I consider a threat to me personally, and I generally admire his skill at getting things done. It's a bit like having Hannibal Lecter on your side.

There's a group of people camped out in a field. One of them's a veteran of multiple wars, very old now, and she's berating a young man who wants to leave. He's frightened; he's heard of traps, innocuous-looking pieces of paper which will curse the reader to be killed, or else to kill others until you die.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A mother and daughter in the center of a crowded throne room, with a royal baby (not either of theirs) in a basket. The daughter quickly steps to the basket and announces that like a sister she'll tend to the child with loving care. This is a calculated move. She wants it to appear to the crowd as if she's being a good loyal subject, and to appear to her mother as if it's part of their secret political power grab. The truth is closer to the former - the daughter has no interest in ruling and is trying to spare the child's life without making her mother suspicious of her.

Fragment - I'm someone describing the differences between those who fell more recently, the Grigori, and the first fall "for pride or love or whatever we're calling it now."

False awakening. I'm writing down a previous scene. In it, I'm someone in the lobby of a place where I work, and Satan's just walked in to see me. There were a number of things I wrote down as being off about his appearance - the last thing I wrote was that there was snow still on his shoes - he'd become human. I'm kind of torn about how to react to this. On the one hand, this is bad news for me - whatever happens to him affects me too. But on the other hand, this is hilarious.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm someone in an abandoned warehouse, talking with a fallen angel about his plans. We don't get along. As he's talking, a portion of the roof caves in, and through the hole I can see a human woman up there who's been listening to us. He knows her; she's part of his plan, but she's been opposing him. They have a brief shouted conversation; he says, "You won't hurt me, Jane."

I'm a young boy walking into a room which contains a sort of glass bubble, small, like a snowglobe or a paperweight, and through the glass I can see a girl the same age on the other side, who I think of as 'the princess,' a nickname. I'm aware the glass represents a barrier between worlds that we can't cross anymore, we can only meet here in between. The glass bubble now appears to be larger than me, and I walk up to it with my arms held out in front of me, as if I'm holding something like a tray - I'm thinking about bringing the princess something, though visually my hands are empty. I pass through the glass. Inside, it seems to be a little round room, and the princess is sitting at a desk; she sees me and gets up and says "Rell!", which seems to be my name; she sounds happily surprised.

I'm standing outside my IRL local library with two women. One of them needs to get something from inside the building, without getting caught. There's only one person inside to avoid being seen by, that and hiding her face from the cameras, so it seems fairly simple, but she's still worried, and she's standing around working out various plans. This seems to be something she intends to do on her own, she's not asking either of us for help, and the other woman with us is just waiting impatiently off to the side, but it seems to me this would go a lot easier and faster if I just went ahead and took care of it myself. After all, unlike her, I don't show up on video, and it'll be much easier for me to avoid that person inside - they're mostly walking around the main area near the door, so I'll just go around to the side of the building instead and walk through the wall.

The section of wall I phased through comes out in the fantasy section, off in the corner of the library and out of sight. I'm looking around at the fantasy books, and thinking about how I used to eat this stuff up, and about how much more difficult it is for me to get lost in a book now. I'm aware that the quality of the books hasn't changed, it's my own mindset - but I somehow feel sure that if I look at one of these books, now I'll find one I can get absorbed in. I pick one up and flip through. The paragraph I'm looking at now involves characters named Maedhros and Fingon - I recognize the names from Tolkien, and I note this as odd, since this isn't a Tolkien book. These aren't meant to be the same characters either; the author seems to have just stolen the names for his own characters.

The dream scene changes to a scene from that book. One character is explaining three weapons to another, and he's making a big deal out of a knife that secretly contains some kind of poison. He says there are two options with this - a whole dose inside will kill instantly, but "a thousand light touches... well, depends on how you define death." The scene changes; he's meeting a small group of people in a forest, one of them a queen, and they're coming to some agreement. He secretly places small doses from that poison in each of their drinks, which will give him some power over them - to his mind, this is simply making sure that they don't back out of the deal they've made. After they drink, they instantly realize what's happened and regret making this deal, but it's too late now.