Carabas

I'm standing in a place covered in snow that I think of as "at the edge of all things" - although all I can see is snow to the horizon, I'm thinking of this place as a kind of boundary line. I'm with a woman wearing a black fur hat, and below it some strands of her hair have come loose, the wind keeps blowing them into her face.

I've just said something half-joking to her to the effect of, it's fine, I'm used to traveling. I'm thinking about the way I arrived in this reality in the first place, tracking her.

She, entirely serious, says something to the effect of but if you do this now, you won't ever be able to stop.

I'm wading through icy water, tracking someone down. It's dark, the water looks black, and there's this mist in the air, I can't see very far. There's bodies floating in the water, wrapped in cloth. There's another man here with me, he calls me by the name of Logan. I'm focused on the dampness in the air - it caused problems earlier when we couldn't get a fire to catch.

Thinking about fire makes me see another time, standing in a large stone hall, standing off to the left of the woman presiding over some ceremony, having to remain still throughout her speech, wearing armor, uncomfortable. There were rows of people arranged in front of us, and as she called each of them up she'd hand them a lit candle, symbolic, but I was looking at those candles and thinking of them as never enough to hold off the chill.

Back in the icy water, we've found the person we were looking for in a little area surrounded by bare trees. He's standing off to one side and watching an old woman perform some kind of ceremony, something like a funeral for the old ruler here - I have a vague impression of something strung up among the trees, either the last ruler's bones themselves or at least something representing them. She knows who we are. She tells me that just because I've killed the old ruler, that doesn't make this place mine. The territory is passed down through the blood, and there's still someone with the elf blood to inherit it - the man we've been tracking down. He's not related to the old ruler, and he's more human than anything else, as is she, but that doesn't matter; this territory will remain in the hands of his people, not mine.

The man in question objects to this - this is a situation being forced on him. He tells me he's sorry. The guy who'd tracked him down with me makes some sarcastic comment, telling him to quit the humble act; but I believe him, this isn't something he'd wanted. Nonetheless, the old woman's in the right; there's nothing I can do here, we've lost. I tell him it's all right. It's only when I speak and hear the tone in my voice that I (the dreamer side of me) realize he and I (the character side of me) had been sleeping together; we're most likely going to have to end that now.

The old woman resumes her ceremony, now involving him. It doesn't take long, just a few words. There's a wreath of pale yellow flowers which he accepts from her; as soon as the ceremony's done he drops it and it falls apart in the water. I'm thinking of the moment I first met him, when he'd been locked up in a cell.

A woman and I have been tracking some thieves who stole the animals that her people raise - creatures like elephants but smaller, and with a sort of moss-like fur that grows on their backs and the top of their heads. Now the trail I've been leading her through ends at a beach. We're too late. Their ship is gone. But I'm able to pick up a mental impression of it and relay it to her - the tigers that they stole are in cages, but those other creatures have already been killed. The thieves only wanted their pelts. She sits down in the sand and starts to cry.

As we make our way back the way we came, over a mountain path, I'm attacked by some creature - it happens fairly often in this region and I take care of it easily, hitting it over the head with my staff and expecting it to run off again. She'd been hanging back before, but when she sees this she comes rushing over, though I don't think of that as necessary; she starts beating the creature, far beyond what's necessary. I stand back and watch.

I'm a demon - the long sharp teeth and writhing cloud of darkness make it hard to miss - but as we make our way down the other side of the mountain, I'm watching her and thinking that the people who tell stories about today will take one look at her and assume that two demons came down from this mountain.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm traveling through a dream with her, but at the moment we've come across an image of myself in the distant past, before I became a demon. I'd been speaking to a man dressed in armor standing in front of a sacred building, and that past version of me is saying something to the effect of, yes, I'd very much like to learn more about our people. It had been a rare opportunity - it was rare enough to meet another of my kind at all, but this was far beyond that, I'd jumped at the chance. I watch that past version of me follow the man in armor into the building.

This isn't what I brought her here to show her, it's just one of my memories intruding on the dream. I intend to continue down the road we're on, to take her to our actual goal here - but she wants to see more of this memory. So that's what we do. We follow that past version of me into the building.

Inside we're in a stone corridor; there's no sign of that past version of me or the man in armor. While the outside of the building had looked the way it had when it was new, the inside is a ruin from much later in my memories. But there's a few objects out of place, things that had been looted by the time it got to this point. I kneel down before one of them, a mirror made of bronze. I say to her, "It's a gate-"

I'd been accused of a crime I didn't commit. The charges have been dropped now, but people have formed their own opinions about my guilt or innocence. On the sidewalk I'm confronted by a group of men in dress uniform, most of them middle-aged. They call me monster, and disgusting, and one of them says, "He saw what you did," indicating a younger member of their group.

A liar, that's interesting. I wonder at first whether this is the actual criminal and if he'd been trying to frame me, or whether he's just someone who heard about the case and was trying to get in on the limelight. But he looks genuinely afraid of me, to such a degree that I realize what must have happened - he must have seen me eating. But in this era, accusing me of being a vampire would be too ridiculous, he wouldn't be taken seriously. So he came up with something more believable to accuse me of, to get me locked up. It wasn't a bad idea, I've been considering burning this identity since this mess started.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm running along a mountain path, mentally shouting Nadja's name. She came to us under a false identity, and then she disappeared in order to avoid being found out. But there was no need for her to disappear like that. I've tracked her to these mountains based on rumors of "the witch of the crags," and once I sensed traces of her, I started calling first the assumed name we knew her by, then her real one, Nadja. Following her mental trail, I reach a cliff. Without hesitating, I jump over the edge.

Snow-covered mountain peaks far below me, as far as the eye can see. I pause to check if I'm still asleep enough to take control of the flight for a while - yes, I am. Forgetting about Nadja, I turn upward, enjoying the view for as long as it lasts.

I'm looking over the meat at a butcher's stall in an outdoor market, examining it very closely. The butcher's explaining something to me, but I'm not really listening - I've come to the conclusion that this isn't what I'm looking for. I duck underneath where some of his larger cuts are hanging and into the alley on the other side. I can hear him shouting at me, and Dieter saying something to him, but I'm not paying attention. The trail of what I'm looking for is much clearer now.

I walk into a house. On the floor beside the bed there's the dead body of a very large man, with rats swarming over him. The rats' behavior is unusual but familiar to me. They scatter when I come closer. Behind me Dieter asks, "Is it plague?" Plague wouldn't affect either of us directly, but it's still something to be concerned about. He came in too late to see the unusual way the rats were swarming. I don't answer him - I'm focused on something I can feel hidden in this room, somewhere in the chest of drawers. I make some comment about how the dead man had had a family, and "Three charms. One for each."

A production of Faust, I'm going over a written list of the scenery needed for each scene. One scene is described as the Altar of Hell, and I have a mental image of Faust being pinned to a circular stone by two demons; that's the contract signing scene. The next scene is set in a field surrounded by trees, and my perspective changes so I see this as the audience would.

Curtain rises on Marguerite and women of the chorus in the field; shortly afterward Faust enters from the right. In response to what the women had been singing, he sings something satirical about the dangers of love and the unfortunate fools who are caught up in it. This annoys Marguerite, and she turns away and pointedly ignores him. The women of the chorus exit, and Faust realizes how angry Marguerite is, so he jokes around in the hopes of getting back in her good graces, teasing her by singing a humorous song that starts with a verse about roosters and hens. She forgives him easily, and by the time he gets to the chorus she's joined in the song, flirting right back at him. The second verse is about deer and hunters, and she playfully leads him on a chase around the stage. As they exit, laughing, Mephistopheles strolls by in the background, keeping an eye on how things are playing out.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

There are four men, or people who were once men and are now weapons, kept chained up in their sleep. Two 'chains,' really - the collars around their throats, but also something much deeper that's never meant to be removed. I'm removing that second 'chain' from each of them. They wake up as I do so, and their first reaction is to moan about the pain, but gradually they regain a sort of awareness. It's interesting to watch - they're becoming aware of how much of their personality has been stripped away from them, but without actually regaining that personality they lost. Their master arrives then, and I expect them to attack him in revenge - that's the whole reason I freed them - but instead they cower in the corner, just looking at the pair of us.

Memory gap. Next thing I remember, I've gone semi-lucid in order to pursue that master of theirs. He's closed himself off inside a tower where I shouldn't be able to follow, with an irritatingly arrogant attitude about it - he's essentially the god of this place, it won't allow me entrance if it goes against his will. Or at least it's not supposed to. The tower's a sort of futuristic art deco confection, lots of spheres and glowing purple lights, and I'm flying around it, demanding that it create an opening. With my next pass around the tower, I find an entrance has been created, opening onto a single room containing an elevator. It signifies that this place is as willing to depose its 'god' as I am. I take the elevator up to that man's private sanctuary - the elevator doors open to show me a vast pool lined with twisted white trees without leaves, and quite a lot of statues, including some of himself. This guy is unbelievable. There's a mansion at the far end of the pool, and I expect his mental trail to lead me there, but instead it leads me off to the right, to another body of water, and I focus on a light at the end of a pier.

Two middle-aged spinsters are visiting Rumpelstiltskin/Gold just before attending some event, but he's busy with a delivery of some sort. The room where they wait for him holds a collection of various objects behind glass, and as they look around, one of them says, "Richer than the (some family name beginning with A) brothers!" The objects behind the glass are personal mementos from over the centuries, arranged and displayed in such a way as to look like a collection of history - playbills and tickets, a photo from a political protest that changed history, old forms of currency, all neatly labeled with places and dates and short descriptions. But I'm looking at the objects as a disembodied observer with Rumpelstiltskin's mindset, with fond memories of the actress depicted on that playbill, and a woman at that protest, and the profit I made when that country changed currencies. (Although I'm thinking of it as a collection of memories that stretches back centuries, the oldest items I actually see are only from the 1800s.) I think to myself, 'and I could sell it, if I chose.' As if convincing myself that I could part with it all, if I had to.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Fragments - someone involved in some industry that's often glamorized in movies, intelligence or organized crime, mentally contrasting his actual day to day life with the ridiculous movies. A rich and powerful woman who's sleeping with the hired killer who works for her. Overdue library books, a trilogy by an author who's written 156 books, these ones with covers showing caves with stalactites that remind me of fangs. Rumpelstiltskin again, spending a summer at a country estate belonging to a brother and sister he knows, looking out the window and feeling someone's suffering, the potential for a deal; following it, and finding someone in the garden, reading a journal that had belonged to Belle.