Carabas

I'm listening to a man die while I remain in hiding. I'm thinking that maybe I should have moved sooner and saved him, even though I'd have risked being seen - but I don't have any particular emotion about this, except maybe a little irritation at myself. I've been sent into this old stone ruin of a fortress, and I'd intended for only five particular men to be spared. Now I'm down to four. It's not ideal, but I'll have to live with it.

I couldn't hear her very clearly from my hiding place under their bed, but the woman who stabbed him said something to the effect that he should have recognized her. Some personal revenge thing - none of my business. Now I'm seeing the sort of smoke haze of colors passing before my eyes that I associate with life leaving a body. I watch it dissipate in the air, and I'm irritated at the waste. Waiting around is pointless now - and the woman should be directly above me. I stab up through the mattress.

When she dies, my perspective shifts. I'm floating in the void, with this massive black slab of a door in front of me, as wide as it is tall, some kind of geometric symbol across it. It's standing on this sort of grid far below, like a chess board where all the squares are black, with the door as a line across the center of the board. There's a few gravestones occupying some of the squares of the grid - that's new. I realize immediately they represent the previous targets the door sent me after - one of them must represent that woman whose death brought me back here. The door's saying something in my head about bringing it wisdom for the dead.

A setting based off the Victorian era or thereabouts. A man who belongs to some organization or secret society made a deal with another member, who is now dead. Now the man's been debating whether he'll bother keeping his end of the deal, since the other party's dead and thus isn't in a position to know or object. Right now he's in the dead man's home, in a type of storage area, going over some of his belongings that relate to that organization they're both in - that was part of the deal, disposing of some of these things according to the dead man's wishes. One of those belongings is something I think of as a 'cookie', though it's dry and tasteless, makes me think of hardtack. He decides to eat it after all, keeping up his end of the deal. Eating it causes him to become immortal.

That same man at a later date, confronting his wife in her home, a basement room with brick walls but with several potted ferns and a table set up holding a large, beautiful book - her journal. She believed him dead, there was a funeral. He's standing over her journal, and he's asking why she hasn't been writing. He says, "You're not a (his family name - Bowman or Barrow or something like that), you don't (something along the lines of being driven by a consuming passion)." He feels that the changes and upsets in her life - such as his own 'death' - shouldn't have shaken her disciplined, well-ordered approach to her tasks. She's also immortal, in a different way than he is, but linked to him in some way. The nature of their immortality means they can't possibly live together again, even if they'd wanted to.

That same man again is being pinned to a wall, held off the floor, by his daughter. They'd been talking relatively calmly earlier, but he realizes she's become a vampire, and her eyes glow blue and then gold, and now she's got him pinned to the wall. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she has the same face as a pirate woman who'd died in this man's arms long before his daughter was born; the pirate had been Chinese and the daughter's a white Englishwoman, but I think of them as having the same face and being in some sense the same person, and I have a vague impression of a third woman, a servant in England, who also has the same face. The daughter says to him, "You know what to do. Then come get me!" He stakes her, and she crumbles into dust. He's still stuck hanging on the wall.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm standing between a coyote and a bird. The scene after this discusses the coyote as wandering and gathering a pack of odd strays - other species, including housecats.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a woman, a leader of witches, who's given me some instructions to carry out, something I'm meant to do with her grave after she's been buried. Now I'm digging down through the loose dirt in her grave, sinking into it. I'm afraid of it closing over my head and suffocating me. I get out of the grave and fetch my staff, and use that to probe through the dirt, waiting for it to hit something.

After a few other scenes, mostly involving the witches but gradually transitioning into scenes with IRL characters, I'm walking through a bookshop and I spot a book with a title that mentions one of my lucid goals, the one I'd intended as my task for the day. I immediately become lucid, but realize I'm already waking up.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There's a group of people getting together at a restaurant, taking up the second floor, a sort of balcony area looking over the main room. The owner of the restaurant's friends with the leader of this group, and he's saying as he escorts them in, "You're the one who wanted to do this here. If you wanted privacy, you should've-" The tone's good-natured. There's a table set out for three: the boss, his wife who hasn't yet arrived, and a prostitute. The restaurant owner's wife comes over to talk to them, and she knows the prostitute, they exchange some friendly words. The prostitute's asking what this is about; the leader's got some plan in mind involving her, but they're waiting for his wife to arrive before he'll talk about it. The rest of his people are arranged at the surrounding tables, waiting and watching the main table quietly.

There's a woman who rose from the dead. Her girlfriend's explaining to her that this has all happened before, repeatedly: they meet, after a few days this woman dies, and then a little while later she'll turn up again and 'meet' the girlfriend again, with no memory of this having happened before.

An advertisement for a Christmas event called the Forest of Lights; Christmas shopping in a small store that has cookies out on display, someone exclaims over them, saying that they're just like the ones his grandmother used to make, which he hasn't been able to find since she died, not knowing what they were called.

A grandmother talking to a baby which is also herself: "You're going to be just fine." She's a woman who grew up in the present era, then somehow mentally time-traveled to the past and became trapped there, and wound up living out the life of her own grandmother. She's at a family gathering now and talking about a business she owns, when she has to sit down abruptly, and then holds out her hands and comments on how they're shaking. She's sure this is the moment when she dies. She's very calm about this, to the point that the people around her think she must be joking. There's a narrator then, saying something about how a part of her always expected that when she died, she would simply wake up back in her real body in the present. But she doesn't. It was a mind-soul transfer, the narrator says. When she died, she died. That was it.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm looking at a grave marker in Erana's garden, and examining the spell on it; and then admiring the spell over the rest of the garden that makes it a sanctuary, and noting how even the water of the two rivers which flow around it are affected by the spell when they come into contact with it. Looking at all that running water, I'm having doubts about whether this will be the best place for Olivia to stay over the next few days, even though we're on her native soil, and even though it's otherwise ideal. The river running under the bridge at the entrance to the garden is just a trickle at the moment, but there's an image in my mind of that river growing wider, turning the garden into an island. I start to walk into the woods, and I pass Rogerian coming the other way with an animal he's caught for the two of them to eat. Olivia wakes up and says something about the meal, sounding delighted.