Carabas

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.

I'm sitting on the edge of a bed in a small rented room, wood panel walls, watching a man kneel and lace up the boots he's just given me. I'm thinking that a chase without consequences lacks interest - we've caught each other several times now but neither of us has actually killed the other, which should be the natural conclusion here. Makes me feel tired. I think I'll stop hunting him after today. The boots belonged to a dead Nazi, and I'm wronging people by wearing them; that's the reason he's giving them to me.

Later the same day, we're standing in a very small graveyard on a green hill, and now he's giving me a green hat that I think of as going with the boots, though it doesn't resemble a military uniform. I recognize both it and the boots as part of a costume signifying Ivan, which would make him Koschei. He disagrees with this observation, says he'd rather be the Firebird. I'm thinking that he's greatly misinterpreted our story.

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 walking through the basement of a tower, grey stone walls. There's some kind of chaos going on on the main floors above me, a distraction while I was taking care of something in the dungeon on the next floor down - but now that it's time to go, I want to avoid getting caught in whatever's happening on the main level.

There's two people waiting for me with two different escape routes - neither of them knows exactly what I was doing here, neither of them knows me personally, and neither them knows about the other. There's a person I work with who'd arranged for a man to meet me by the stairs up to the main floors, but I'm having second thoughts about trusting him. And there's a woman waiting by a wooden door that leads elsewhere; she's not involved at all, she just wants to escape whatever's going on upstairs and is willing to take me with her, recognizing me as a friend of a friend. I believe she would be more sympathetic to what I was doing here, if it came out.

Deciding to go with that woman at the wooden door, I'm doubling back, passing by the stairs leading down to the dungeon. I debate whether I have time to go back down there - there had been something else I'd wanted to look into down there, though it's not a priority. I start down those steps, but it becomes so dark I can't see, and I have a vague impression of massive chains. I can hear a woman's voice crying. I decide I don't have time to be fumbling around in the dark, and I head back up the stairs.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

A man is looking at a wall recently painted green in an attempt to emulate some other place, and talking to someone about a man he knows, saying that while he wasn't looking, the man went and got married to people so unsuited - people, plural, meaning both the wife and the stepkids - people he'll have to keep secrets from.

I'm watching light play over the features of the man in question in an interesting way. He's looking at a signet ring with an image of a rose, which he's just removed from a hiding place in the base of a lamp. I'm hearing a kind of tinkling sound like a music box repeating a single measure over and over again.

There's a teenage girl who's come to me to learn her futures. I've spread them out like cards on the table, and as I hold my hand over one depicting a man she could be married to, she says she wouldn't mind that one so much, that wouldn't be so bad. I have the impression that she doesn't feel she has a choice in any of this - she might want to know what the options are, and she might have her own preferences, but someone else will be making the decision, not her.

With that in mind, I move to one of the futures on the outside edge, the more unlikely options. It's labeled Dreamer. I see her lying on a couch with an arm thrown over her head, looking at the ceiling, wasting away. Her clothes are glowing green like an absinthe advertisement. Since I think of her as wasting away here, I conclude that this is a future she wouldn't want and start to move my hand away, but that vision version of her stops me. She sings, "I listened to my dreams." This is important to her. It's not something she regrets. "They taught me how to feel." Behind her there's a glass window opening onto a balcony, from which I can see a river and the stars. There's a whale swimming through the clouds, adding to the fantastical nature of her possible future.

Previous scene had been on the subject of breaking through layers - in a futuristic setting, there'd previously been a big struggle to break through (something, either the earth or a ship - either way, the important part is that it's the ground we stand on), and we'd thought that was the end of it; now we're discovering there's another layer to break through.

In that same setting, I'm part of a team of people in uniforms, rounding up some wild animals. But most of the scene is spent in disembodied 3rd person, following one of my partners. She's watching a boar - huge thing, at least twice my height - and a voice is saying to her through some communications device, "If (something), think how much could be got from a boar of that size under good conditions."

She asks, "Are these good conditions?" She's referring to the boar's behavior.

"Best I've ever seen," is the answer.

She's nervous, but she activates this sort of mechanical set of wings she's wearing; they glow green as they lift her into the air, and she starts rounding up the boar - chasing it down, frightening it, until finally a great green light bursts from inside the boar, creating this swirling transparent sphere around it, fragments rising and dispersing in the air. The light's invisible to the animal itself. She lands on it, clings to its side and uses a vial to collect that light. It's a kind of energy we use, given off by these creatures' heightened emotions - it's the same thing that's powering the weapons we're using to hunt them.