Carabas

I'm talking to a man, a great inventor or artist of some kind, who's been given an arena to work in. The structure is very white and the sky is very wide and very blue, and the arena's filled with shadowy figures he's been given to work for him, something like automatons, not alive. Human-shaped, but when I focus on them they look a bit like something that's been burned to charcoal, flaking at the edges, except for their teeth, which are white and sharp; inactive right now.

Until this moment I had a lot of contempt for this man. But he's saying to me, "I'm not an idiot," and that he knows he's already made his last great work. Though he's currently working on a project, and though his masters who gave him this arena have great expectations of him, he doesn't expect to live to complete it. His bitterness makes me think a little more highly of him.

Working for these things was a mistake. I don't say this to him out loud. There are a couple floating hooded figures with white masks in the arena, and we're both putting on something of an act for them. They're not his bosses, or guards, exactly, but they are effectively monitoring him at the moment. Something more like citizens, as opposed to slaves like him, however honored a slave he might be. He turns off the music he's been listening to while he works, and he's trying to give the impression that he's simply stopping work for now and going to bed as usual, that there's nothing wrong.

I'm traveling with a woman who most recently has been climbing these giant stairs cut into the mountains, leading a very large group of people, guided by her visions and signs. Now she's reached an old shrine that's of great personal importance to her. But that's not what she was looking for - she thought her visions were guiding her to a place where all these people could be safe. Now it seems it was just something personal. She believes she's led them all this way for nothing.

I'm extremely frustrated by all this, because the place I've been trying to guide her to with those visions I've sent her is still further on - I wanted her to see this shrine first for personal reasons, because I like her and I thought she deserved to know this part of her past, but it's not our final destination. Unfortunately, the stairs end here; there's no easy path after this point. How am I going to convince her to keep going now that she's doubting the visions? I'm almost tempted to just suggest scouting ahead myself and then conveniently 'finding' the place - but I need her to be the one to discover it, not me. I'll think of something, but I need to talk to her privately, and there haven't been many opportunities for that on this pilgrimage.

Right now she's busy talking with a priest I dislike - I'm not fond of priests on general principle, but this one in particular irritates me. She's apologizing. She's saying she shouldn't have rejected the idea of divine guidance - maybe if she'd believed, she wouldn't have gotten them lost like this. The priest reassures her, saying, "You delivered what would not be prayerful."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Still in that same mountain range, but this time I'm working separately from the main group, it's just me and a couple of her soldiers. I'm talking with a slave trader - he's got a group of people I've been looking for and I need him to release them. He says he can't possibly do that, they're an extremely sought-after species. He shows me a cage with a human man and woman instead, and a falcon that comes with the woman, and says that he'll give me one of them as a sign of good faith - he'll even trade me all three, the two humans and the falcon, if I'd be willing to give him one of my soldiers. He has a buyer who likes that specific shade of skin. Incredulous, I tell him this isn't a negotiation. He's going to release the people I came for, I'm not going to give him anything, and I don't care about his humans or whatever else he's selling.

But then he takes the hood off the human woman - white hair and a young face. I know her. I'm shocked, and she looks just as shocked to see me - I'd thought she was dead. Last time I saw her, she'd sacrificed me to her people's gods. It didn't work obviously, I can't die that way, but there was no way she could have known that. When my 'death' didn't stick, her people reacted very badly. I'd seen them holding a funeral for her later, but I'd been watching from a distance - they must have held the ceremony without a body. I'd just assumed they'd killed her. I'd liked her a great deal, sacrifice aside.

There's this pair of vampires in an apartment, a young white girl and a tall black man, and today slavery has officially ended. There's celebrations in the street, fireworks. But the sense of time's a bit off - although the vampires and the apartment look like the 1800s, at some point in the conversation it's mentioned that this is 1933, and the view outside the window looks it. The girl turned him a long time ago and they've been traveling together since. It's been a good deal for both of them - since she looks like a kid, she needed someone who looks like an adult to get by in the world; and under slavery, he needed someone to pretend to belong to. Now that's over, he intends to leave. The kid was surprised by this, hadn't expected it at all - they're close, it's not just a convenient arrangement for survival, so it hadn't occurred to her that he'd want to be on his own if he could. They went straight from celebrating to fighting.

He's saying, "You don't think I prefer another kind of life for-" I'm not certain which pronoun he used then - I wrote it down as 'you', and I think he'd been talking about his concern for her at this point, but she responds as if he'd said 'myself.' She went cold and distant before answering. By another kind of life, he'd meant as opposed to vampirism, and she doesn't take that well. So after a long pause, she says, "But you've got mine."

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm Howl, a version with black feathers cropping up - a patch of it at my throat at all times, and mixed in with my hair - speaking English throughout the scene, but no Welsh accent. I speak very mildly and seem distant - it's an affectation, particularly when I'm annoyed, and at the moment I'm very annoyed.

Sophie got fed up with me and left after a day or so in the castle. But now my spells have alerted me that she's back in town - just sitting there, inexplicably, not coming home. I'm seeing an image of her sitting down on a low stone wall somewhere, grumbling to herself. Since she's gone to the trouble of coming back to town, we both know she'll be back at my door eventually, she's got nowhere else to go - I'm convinced she's just refusing to come back now out of sheer stubbornness. So I spell her back, have the winds scoop her up and carry her through town, into the house, and drop her in a chair at the table. She complains about this of course, but now that I see her up close, it occurs to me that possibly she couldn't physically walk back to the house - she looks tired and sore.

I'd been in the middle of making dinner when she turned up, and I bring her a plate while she complains at me. Talking about dinner and ridiculous stubbornness, at some point I compare her to my brothers, and she looks aghast at the thought of me having brothers. Did she think I sprang from the ether? "Monstrous. How many of you are there?" I have quite a few brothers actually. Our mother's immortal, like myself - I've visited her just recently as a matter of fact. Sophie says, "You're like rats in a field."

When someone characterizes me as a monster, my habitual response is to prove them right, so I'm leaning into her from across the table in a way that's not physically humanly possible. "Our father's place is human," I say, very mildly. And in response to something else I know she'd been wondering about, I add, "And I'm a married man." I retract back to my side of the table. The point there was less a reference to my wife, who's out of the picture, and more a reference to the existence of my son, confirming that the boy whose pictures she'd been looking at earlier is my son.

(Woke up. Side note: It's been ages since I've had a Howl dream, so when I saw the HMC task of the month I'd hoped it would spark something like this. Success! Not a success at the TOTM of course - this wasn't the task, or lucid at all - but a non-lucid dream with the plot I wanted is even better.)

And a quick dream from yesterday: As Rumpelstiltskin, I'd been following someone who'd stolen something from me. I used a spell to keep the light from falling on me, and then another for shadows to hide me. Then I'd walked myself off the road and left my body hidden among the fallen leaves while the rest of me went on. Finally I tried some spell that failed - I lit up with golden light from within with the effort of it, shining through the lines in my skin, but I was unable to succeed. Giving up for now, I call Belle. She asks, "What has (some name) got on you that-" I interrupt her. "My dagger." She goes silent. It's not the thing they stole at this moment, and they don't know how to use it, but they have it; they're a threat to be taken seriously.

I'm a man in a room full of people. A woman's being escorted into the room to pick out two of us for slaves. She's known for her harsh treatment of her people; she's got a shaved head and has two servants behind her. I'm standing a little apart from everyone else - there's something different about the way I got into this situation compared to how everyone else got here, most of them came from the same place. The woman looking us over is disappointed by us, says we don't begin to compare to the ones her settlers captured in the wild. We're a group of people selected by Dorothea, and this woman makes plain her distaste for Dorothea's preference for "pretty pets." She declares she doesn't want any of us and leaves again.

I'm lying in my IRL bed, looking out into the hall, and I seem to see movement, as if there are several small creatures on the floor. It's too dark to be sure my eyes aren't playing tricks on me. I reach for the lamp - as I do so, I think I see one of the maybe-creatures-maybe-tricks-of-the-eyes come into the room and look up at me - but the lamp won't turn on. Although I'm aware the bulb could just be out, I suspect this is a dream.

To test it, I will myself to float up into the air, but nothing happens. I close my eyes to test whether I can see through them anyway, and I can't (in fact, after closing my eyes here, there were no more visuals for the rest of the dream). But I'm still convinced this is a dream. As one more test, I reach up and touch the ceiling, sure that it won't be solid. I encounter solid material, but it's spongy, my finger sinks into it, creating a depression, and then reaching some limit - the material breaks, creating a small hole. For a second I consider whether this might not be a dream and I've really poked a hole in the ceiling. But I keep digging at it until I create a larger hole, large enough for me to pass through, and I climb up into it. As I pass through, I find I'm now moving downward, not upward - and this makes me wonder if opening up this hole was really a good idea. I have a vague thought about moving down into a basement which stores unpleasant things. But once on the other side, I become aware that I'm lying in bed, and that I've woken up.

Fragments from later (insomnia's been killing me this past week and my recall's a mess):

A desert in a futuristic setting. I'm talking to my wife about some intrigue going on within an elite group of all-female guards who work for us. They're slaves, and I'm thinking about the tensions created by relying on people while keeping them in slavery.

Different scene, same POV character. I'm in a small spaceship, with the pilot - a good friend who works for me - to my left, and a boy whom I'm kind of mentoring sitting behind us. I'm explaining to the boy about a weapon I'm expecting our enemies to use, something that increases the heat of a star. It's related to the lifespan of the star, and the boy deduces that since the star in this system is very young, the effect will be very great. He sounds horrified, but I'm not feeling particularly concerned; it's just one more thing to take into account.