Carabas

A woman made a deal with one of my kind, a short man in a black suit who irritates me, and so he's placed his mark on her wrist, a symbol in the shape of a sword, representing "Iudex," the judge. This will allow him to possess her, though she was unaware of this. I'm furious. He's well within his rights, but I deeply dislike him and his people who bear that symbol; I'm going to destroy his mark. It's not difficult, any changes to the lines in her skin will do the job. I ask her to choose the method (a knife) and if she wants me to do it for her or if she'd rather do it herself (she asks me to do it), three horizontal cuts distort the symbol sufficiently, and then I set out a bandage for her.

Transitioning from a scene where I'd been holding a sword, thinking about the danger of carrying a sword without a sheath, fully aware this wasn't about literal swords.

Three siblings meet on a road after a long time apart. One of the brothers is wearing armor and leading a small group of people fighting for some cause in his name; there's less than a hundred of them. The other brother and sister have just appeared hovering in the air, having traveled a vast distance in moments. The brother, I think of as a young version of myself; he's dressed in black, and says nothing throughout the scene, and there's a bloody vertical line over his heart, which I associate both with the heartless motif and with the sword in the previous scene. The sister is dressed in vibrant green, and I think of her as a witch. I'm thinking how much they've all changed since the last time they saw each other.

The brother with the small army asks his sister if he could move like they do. She says he could, but he'd have to start wearing higher collars. It's a reference to the scar over the other brother's heart, who looks uncomfortable at the mention; the implication of her words is that this isn't something to enter into casually.

I'm looking at the army traveling with him, and thinking about how much they've changed as well; I remember them with paint on their faces, thinking of them then as closer to a family rather than a lord and his followers, and I'm thinking that they've lost their identity, changing to suit the land they're traveling through. I'm thinking they were better off before they took up this cause.

I'm in an in-between place - shallow pools of water, tall dark cliffs with broken statues and bronze mirrors, and a single whole statue: a hooded figure in a position that reminds me of Mary in the Pieta. One of the bronze mirrors I think of as still working after all - it shows an image of a woman from the turn of the century, and her image moves and looks at me. There's an association with 'a mother' here, though I'm not thinking of her as my mother. I can use her functioning mirror to escape. But first, there's a small vial here of brilliantly white light that I associate with 'love' in some way, which is needed for later, for something after I've escaped; it's the reason I came here.

There's a house at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea, very pleasant, and with a forge attached. A friend of mine is working in the forge right now, helping out the man who lives here, a man who is brilliant at designing certain things but who can't work in the forge himself. Because of him, there's a sword of sorts that's been reforged - there's an association here with a legend about light, and the sword itself is yellow and semi-transparent - and I'm about to take it to a woman named Iliona. But I'm concerned about my friend working in the forge. The designer has just told me that the spirits have already released my friend from his vows to the hold - there's no need for him to help the designer with the forge anymore. But my friend says to me, "I took his brother from him. I can do this much."

Iliona lives in a small town, and as I'm walking down the hill into town, I'm openly carrying her sword in my hand. I'm met by a man who knows me well and his wife, Iliona's daughter, and they block my path, not trusting that I really am who I appear to be. I break the weapon that he's raised to me, and speak to him so that he sees I'm still myself. They let me through; they don't like it, but they defer to Iliona.

A fragment - I'd just been fighting someone who's run off, and I'm looking at the way our fight has corrupted patches of the ground, feeling regret over that.

A woman is riding in a carriage and carrying a baby, with a small tapestry depicting an angel hanging opposite. She speaks to the angel in the tapestry, referring to it as the baby's father. The angel in the tapestry speaks back.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

An odd level of lucidity. I thought of it as feeling exactly like my waking perspective, which I disliked - I felt like I was stuck halfway between something. I had difficulty controlling anything, or even flying properly, though I could float just a bit off the ground. I was at my IRL home, and since I failed to change the scene at the front door, I started walking down the road, figuring that once I got far enough that my surroundings were less familiar, the scene would change naturally.

At the end of the road - which indeed has stopped resembling its IRL equivalent fairly quickly - I come across a small construction crew, and there's immediately an accident involving a passing car and one of the machines. I'm called over to speak as a witness. Eventually the construction worker invites both me and the driver of the car back to dinner at his house, saying that it's too late to be outdoors, it's not safe.

Some barely-lucid scenes at his home in which I meet one interesting young woman with some chronic disease; otherwise I'm mostly focused on finding an excuse to avoid eating anything and keeping my appearance hidden behind the high collar of my coat, which causes people to come to some wrong conclusions about me. I don't correct them. I eventually find an excuse to step outside.

He was right, it is dangerous to be out this late - many people have been infected by something like madness or bloodlust. It's a kind of miasma. I come across infected people in the woods armed with farm equipment, pitchforks and that sort of thing; they've been waiting in this one patch of shadows to ambush whoever comes along. I enjoy this. Whatever this miasma has done to them, it doesn't affect me directly, not in the way it affects them at least; but their resulting madness is something I sort of feed off of, it's exhilarating.

At a crossroads I come across a group of four people who work for me - a blonde woman with her hair in a bun, a very pale man with long black hair, a small man wearing glasses, and a bald man with a tattoo in the center of his forehead. They've plainly been enjoying the night. As we greet each other, that young woman from the house emerges from the woods and attacks me with a sword. She makes this stunningly noble and upright figure, in stark contrast to the general miasma; I like her instantly.

One of my men intercepts her, and as she's fighting him, she's accusing me of being responsible for everything going on around here. She says she recognized me at the house - apparently I'm someone in the public eye in some way - and that she'd always suspected me of being corrupted, and now I've proven it. She's not exactly wrong. I'm not the one who corrupted this place, in fact I'm trying to hunt that person down - but I am part of the corruption, she's right about that much. When my man's got her restrained, I try to explain this to her; we have a mutual enemy. If she wants to hunt him down, my corruption could be useful to her.

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.

Scotland sometime in the 1700s, I'm in the stables brushing a horse and speaking with a young man I've just been riding with. He's about to inherit some position from his father and he's extremely uncomfortable about it, particularly about how little education he's had - less for its own sake, and more to do with how others will see him. The conversation's wandered around a bit on the subject of education, and I've just mentioned Jim, a servant I grew up with in the American colonies who's devoted to learning, more so than anyone I ever knew. Brilliant man. The man I'm talking to asks how much schooling he'd had - none. I feel vaguely ashamed about that, for my home and for myself for not thinking about this when we were younger - Jim certainly would have wanted to go to school and it had never occurred to me to think about that. If he'd been white, he'd almost certainly have gone to a college.

Two dull scenes I'm noting for the character who appears in both - at the end of the previous scene I went to sleep and "dreamed" of a long-haired old man who was a teacher in a modern classroom, who said that the two times are only nine steps apart, so it's silly to make such a fuss. At this point I was fully aware the classroom scene was a dream and had modern memories, but didn't believe the Scotland scene was a dream - I considered the classroom dream a way of communicating with this man while I was in the past. Woke up (really), went back to sleep, and some scenes later I was forging a series of swords - masterpieces. The same old man appeared, this time as the master of the forge, and was so impressed that he insisted I destroy one of them by peeling back layers of metal so he could see the core, see what I'd done.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a letter from an old friend. She's telling me she's spent the last six years in Vienna, and that she's devoting this lifetime (meaning however long this particular identity lasts her) to the study of music. She uses a word that specifically means playing instruments rather than singing, and she says she's giving her voice a break after "those swan songs" in Canada. She's studying the piano, which reminds her of me - she asks if I remember the old spinet I used to play for them.

Scene changes when I think about when and where that had been. There's an image of a little room, dark for just a second, then lit up with this golden light in shapes created by a lantern - this incredibly intricate fantasy scene, silhouettes of people and leaves, and an impression of bars, as if inside a birdcage.

Someone's been describing a group of people to me, and he's just moved on to describe two partners who are separate from all the others in some way. His description focuses on one of these two, but my memory only really picks up when he moves on to the second one by saying "Another one, always in darkness." (Or shadows, or something with a similar meaning). I see an image of him as a tall hooded figure. I like him instantly. The guy describing him says that unlike all the others, this one exists in "both long time and short time." I see him in modern clothing now, living and working at an isolated shrine. By "exists in long time," it means that this guy's forced to go through time the long way around, living through each day one at a time (that is, the way time usually works), waiting for the others to reappear. That seems tragic. I'm thinking that he must be immortal in some fashion, to be able to wait for the others' timelines to intersect with his over centuries. The guy talking references "the swords that take the end of each user's life."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm sitting on a bus waiting at an intersection, looking out the window. One of the other passengers says we've reached Las Vegas now. I see a sign on a building that includes Las Vegas in the name, but the road we're on now is in a small neighborhood, small town atmosphere. The bus is just across from a small store, and there's a guy standing by the door playing a guitar. I'm enjoying the music. So is the girl sitting on the seat next to me. There's an old man sitting across the aisle who looks over at us to make sure we're paying attention to the music. He talks about the importance of paying attention and enjoying what's going on around you, something about being open to messages from the universe and synchronicity and all that. I'm bored with this conversation, but then I think that I've been hearing that sort of thing so often lately, between work and now this guy, it's a synchronicity in itself. (Except since it's turned out to be a dream, that's no longer true. Dreaming about things from work isn't exactly synchronicitous.)

A man walks up to a wall and shouts at the guards on the other side, trying to get them to chase him somewhere. It's part of a bigger plan - but I've already seen this happen, and the plan didn't work, we need more people. So I shout to the guards too, telling them this man is a monster, send help, send backup, send everyone you've got. He turns around to look at me and is completely bewildered - he doesn't know me, he has no idea what I'm trying to do. But it works. He ends up being chased by far more people than he was expecting.

They've surrounded him, and everyone's drawn their swords. There's a small audience of people who are thinking of this as a duel, despite the difference in numbers. He's killed immediately, but I rewind time to let him try again. As I do so, I see an image of a page in a book describing this scene as though it were a story - it only describes his actions, the duel, not the part about me turning back time. He keeps being defeated, and I keep rewinding time by moments. He's the only person aside from me who's aware of what just happened, so he has the chance to adjust his actions accordingly, although that's easier said than done and he dies over and over again. But I'm giving him an infinite number of chances to succeed.

Just now he's cut the head off one of his opponents. The people watching the 'duel' exclaim over this. From his perspective that was the end of a long struggle in which he's lost far more often than he's won, but from the audience's perspective, the duel's only just started and he's completely dominating. A woman calls it horrific, the way he coldly executed his opponent. A young man who's an aspiring duelist is admiring what he calls 'the skill that comes with experience,' which amuses me, given my very different perspective on how well this fight is going.