Carabas

As Rumpelstiltskin, disembodied, I'm watching a woman lead a prisoner, a teenage boy, into a dungeon. She's complaining about how tired she is of hunting people down and dragging them back here across worlds. We're standing (well, 'standing' in my case, lacking a body at the moment) in a stone hallway, at the top of a staircase blocked by a door of iron bars. She locks that door behind the prisoner, and when she leaves he just sits down right there at the top of the stairs rather than going further down. He looks very confused. I'm aware he's not the only person in the dungeon, there's several people down at the base of those stairs, some of whom I feel personally responsible for, and I wonder for a moment if they've been fed today. I sometimes forget how often my guests need to eat. Then I remind myself that right now, it's not my responsibility to keep them fed - the people who took them prisoner will take care of that, they need their hostages alive. There's someone in that dungeon I want to take back, but I've got a few other things to see to first, while I'm disembodied.

The scene skips ahead in time - no memory gap, just a shift to the bottom of the stairs and an awareness that this is meant to be later. A guard's come to feed the prisoners, and when no one comes to the top of the stairs when he calls, he opens the door to bring the food down himself and check on the prisoners. But when he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he finds me sitting in the wooden chair in the center of the dirt floor. I'm wearing a hood that hides my face, but I always do. There's two kids beside me, royalty held hostage - one of them's my granddaughter, biologically but not officially, though she isn't aware of that and neither were the people who took her. But they should have been aware that I've always looked after her family. I wait until he's seen me, and until the look on his face shows that he knows who I am, and then I create a ball of fire in my hand. I enjoy this.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm returning to a tent in a military camp in some cold, snow-covered place, and there's this man who bows to me two or three times when he sees me, obsequious manner, irritating. I hear a voice as if I'm reading a line in a book: "This was the worst of ___'s nature, he told himself - a ___ who didn't know how to ___." (The blanks aren't things that I forgot after waking up - during the dream, the voice just cut out during those words. The first blank was meant to be the name of my POV character here; the other two had no mental associations.)