blinkinglights
Lurker

So my family and a I were part of a big boisterous clan of horse-riding nomadic people. We were all gathered around that evening to watch our traditional form of storytelling play out, as performed by a couple of our young men. The way it worked was, they arrayed a set of small horse-figurines in traditional panoply on a couple of gridmarked low, square tables. We all sat around in a sort of low oasis grotto or amphitheater--I got the sense that it was rocky, dry, and inhospitable just beyond the bowl of our little valley--and as the stars came out in the sky, they started their performance. It was very stylized and involved moving the little figures solemnly one by one, while letting out great cries and noises to tell the story. Not words, just these ritualized and highly codified hoots and musical crashing and banging. Even though I think they were telling a story of some great historical war between clans or something serious, all of us assembled thought it was hilarious. And all of us were falling over each other laughing and admonishing each other breathlessly to be quiet and pay attention. The young men were very tolerant of their audience, as I guess this sort of behavior was to be expected on whatever holiday this was.

Afterwards, as dawn turned into day (it had some of the alacrity of the Minecraft day/night cycle, which I had been wrecking my nerves over just before I went to sleep. that game is fucking terrifying) we packed up. The hilarity had receded and everyone was seriously setting to the task of breaking camp. Our furniture was dark and richly finished, and it all broke down so that it could fit on some few wagons I was vaguely aware existed besides all the pack-horses, possibly drawn by camels. We had a big ponderous dining table and some other stuff. Anyway as I watched these things get broken down into surprisingly small and portable component pieces, I was having a kind of serious conversation with I think my mother or somebody else important and involved with what was coming next. I was feeling apprehensive, because soon, I was going to have my coming-of-age ceremony. Shane was "my" horse in the dream, and since we were horse-nomads, to enter adulthood I would need to symbolically complete his tack. He was all tacked up already for the occasion and all that was left to acquire for him was a bucking strap (a mysterious piece of tack I'd heard my mom talking about with the saddle fitter yesterday, I still don't know what one is. in the dream it was just a long, thin double leather ribbon).

So, I rode Shane to Wal*Mart all on my own, but I think trailing everybody in the family a distance behind so they could see how I was doing. I left Shane outside with them and went into Wal*Mart. I wandered around a little and couldn't find the bucking straps (this wasn't a very clear or important part, it wasn't a "wandering around, can't find x" dream) and eventually I found a salesperson who had an array of bucking straps in a variety of colors rolled up like belts. He was telling me about the properties of the different colors. He handed me a faded looking black one and said it was the best, and that dark black was the worst and white was better than dark black. I frowned and tried to dispute some contradictory point he'd made, like, if what he was talking about was due to pigment density, wasn't that white one the best, and not this grey one? I don't think he could answer to my satisfaction. Anyway I asked him to bring out a series of different colors and patterns--"Do you have this kind?" etc.--until finally I settled on a brown one. I said, oh good! I'll just pop out the front and test it against my horse's kit in the parking lot, and come back and buy it if it matches. But he was all, nooooo, you can't take merchandise out of the store like that. Here, chip off a tiny piece from this rivet connecting all the brown bucking straps together. And I was like, sure, and I did, and came out of the store in a stately fashion, aware of my clan all looking at me approvingly outside a ways off. I held up the crumb to Shane's saddle critically and at length judged that it matched well enough, so I went back inside, acquired the brown bucking strap, and then had a confused few moments of trying to figure out how it actually fit on the horse. I...don't think the configuration I eventually came up with was how it actually went.

Anyway, then I think we all rode home, or onwards anyway, and then we had a big party of which I was an important central figure and the last thing I remember is everyone arguing and bossing each other around goodnaturedly about who I was going to squeeze in between at that big table, which had been set up again somewhere Minecraft-forest-style close and dark, but with bright homey lanterns and stuff to keep the night back.

So in this dream, for some reason, I was a shinigami. I know it had some kind of lead-in, but the first thing I can remember is standing on a street corner out in the open, having just come out from an enclosed space like an alley in an open-air shopping center. They're big wide streets, like in California. I'm standing with a war group of shinigami. I think I'm in plainclothes, and so are some of the others, but not, like, Ikkaku. We've been talking, and as we stand there waiting for everyone to catch up (I think we just came from some sort of hideout or temporary meeting place) we're having a short conversation. I have no idea what we're talking about now but I remark to Renji like I'm making a point that his hakama aren't red, and then he stares at me blankly and makes fun of my pronunciation. Then everybody quiets down and we get ready to move forward.

I'm wearing a sword at my side. It's....at my right side, which is the wrong side, in retrospect, since I am right-handed. It's high on my right side at my natural waist, like they carry them when they're in uniform. It's tilting too far forward like to slide out, so Renji reaches out with a frown and fixes it for me. Nobody seems perturbed that I suck or am new. My sword keeps wanting to slide out; I fiddle with it. It moves in the scabbard silently with a heavy, well-oiled motion. I have a vague gun-range worry that I shouldn't be playing with it or letting it slip out even an inch like it keeps doing, but I notice everybody else keeps doing it too, and decide letting it show a little must help focus everybody's evil-sensing abilities. I do it again on purpose and this great ear-ringing silence falls for a moment, like a massive explosion or heartbeat or the space in between Inception Noises. We're all running now, stringing out. What I've just sensed worries me, especially as a moment afterward I feel it again without the aid of my sword as if I am now attuned (it's very unsettling).

I drop back briefly to try to remember Ikkaku's name so I can nervously remark something to him about what I've noticed, and he answers me shortly but not impolitely. Scratch that, without heat, since he's always impolite. After I get confirmation that what I sense is real, I start getting, you know, super worried, so I try really hard to move to the front to catch up with Rukia, since she's a total badass and I feel like I'd be the safest in her vicinity. I can still see the back of her round head and her narrow shoulders really clearly as I ran after her.

The attack hits us from the side, the right flank. This part is hazy and I've forgotten it now, because I woke up with this dream in like the middle of the night, but was too tired to get up and write it down. Essentially, we lose one by one to this huge rotund eggplant-suited Hollow thing. In retrospect it was dressed kind of like a clown but that wasn't, like, the point of the thing, I mean that was just it's character design, and in aspect it wasn't actually particularly frightening. It was just canny, and in the end stronger than us. I think it immobilized me early on, and then the others, and then it came around taking our left eyes out and casting a really dread spell on us to make us its nasty minions. There was something about seeds here, like maybe it planted a seed where the eye used to be, but I just remember hearing everyone cursing and screaming at it (lol maybe I was next to Ikkaku?) and then it was my turn. Since I was myself in this dream and super out of my depth, my character was basically an enormous coward, and only a little tricky, but as I looked at this horrible creature and its horrible hand descending to take out my eye, I guess I remembered that the key to breaking spells is, like, always love, so I was all, very seriously, like, crying and knowing I was gonna die and shit, "I love you" trying to fill up with the feeling of "love" so that maybe bits of me would survive whatever was going to happen. And then LOL it took out my eye, with its FINGERS, which was freaky but hurt in a different, deeper way than you'd expect.

And then later, as it was gathering us all up and we were vacant-eyed and brainwashed, it told me in its high cruel satisfied voice that what had been in my heart wasn't love, but hope--not on the same level as love, I guess--and I mulled this over for a while. Apparently I was useful in a kind of scullerymaid capacity since at this point we were in his leafy secret base in a big kind of dark refectory looking area, and me and a bunch of clones he'd made of me were all bustling around getting things done while he brooded over everybody big and useful he'd captured. He'd also captured Ichigo, which was probably why, after a bit of me wandering around this area and being part of the busy vapid camaraderie of me and all my clones tending to the others, that Rukia eventually came in to stage a big rescue of all of us I think. It was trailing off at that point, or I'd woken up a little and gone back to sleep, because I've lost most of this part, but my character, being somewhat weak and craven, definitely followed where the wind blew, and was fixing to stay with the Hollow since, as he planned to rule the shadows of...not sure what plane we were on anymore, he was going to have to destroy Aizen, too, (remember when he was an awesome bad guy and had all those dastardly plots instead of just being "THE STRONGEST, no wait ichigo is the strongest LOL"?) and considering how easily he'd wiped out all my shinigami bros I and all my clones were kind of running around hiding as the rescue went down and the other shinigami were snapped out of it one by one trying to work out how we'd stay with the Hollow. I'd like to think that this was because of being the Hollow's thrall or whatever, since, seriously, me. Not a cool life decision.

tl;dr it was really awesome walking around like a badass with a sword and a bunch of bros in the beginning. All this recall is really helping the clarity of my dreams, I could definitely feel the smoothness of the scabbard and the weight behind the hilt and everything, it ruled. Also that wasn't anything how I thought magical-sensing powers would feel, which made it even better, it was like hearing in another color you've never seen before.

I had a whole series of dreams about the same idea--people called kindles, and what kindling entailed, etc.--until a thunderstorm woke me up, but I was so enamored of the idea that my last dream was about Tiger & Bunny and managed to incorporate it.

So, Tiger & Bunny is an anime about superheroes controlled by a television company who film their exploits for ratings and also just so happen to conveniently fund and control the criminals. In my dream, though, the bad guys were, instead of the somewhat pedestrian Ouroborous, monsters that emerged from things after being incubated purposefully by the TV company who would attack and take over people; if successful, the host became a "kindle"--after being kindled in this fashion--with no memory of his or her past, completely full of monster which had access to all his or her feelings and memories and would then begin to wantonly commit crimes unless exterminated or captured. By Hero TV, I guess.

Also in the dream Kaede was a full-fledged Hero who still didn't listen to her dad at all, and she had a really badass constellation of powers such that Kotetsu was super proud of her (he would probably be super proud of her if she opened a coffee shop, but still). Anyway, for some reason Kotetsu was growing suspicious of...everything, kind of like in the show currently. Or maybe he was completely-oblivious, Kotetsu-style, and that and his terminal nice-guyitude allowed him to be caught off guard by a monster bemoaning a coherent grievance. Anyway he was on his own when suddenly there was an emergence near him at a local mall, a huge frog monster was coming from a big glass bay of mall substrate, shattering outwards and howling mournfully. He faced it as civilians fled in droves, and by the time his teammates rolled on to the scene, there was only Kotetsu standing there. The next part is unclear but...maybe only Bunny came, and let him "escape?" Or something? Or he got allegedly-killed somehow? By Kaede who then let him escape...? Dimly I feel like Kaede was maybe working for the kindle insurgency against the TV company the whole time, because she's not an idiot...? But anyway then he was officially dead but REALLY, ALIVE and in a cool different suit just kind of wandering around not doing anything. Because he'd been told to lie low and hide out in his disguise, but he didn't have anywhere to go or anything to do, so he just kind of stood around on street corners and stuff kicking cans while everybody assumed he was a mascot for something and ignored him.

AND THEN there was a showdown with the head of the TV company. Kotetsu was hanging around in a big amphitheater/lecture hall of some sort, just chillin', lost in musical thoughts. Oh, and Kotetsu has been growing somewhat unsettling since his kindling, because in the dream, especially for this scene, I as the audience do not have any knowledge of kindling particularly, so it all comes as a series of surprises as if I were watching the episode for the first time. Anyway, Maverick comes in and he sideways-confronts Kotetsu. I mean like, indirectly. And they banter for just a little while and then Maverick sends in a team of blackclad SWAT guys, but kindle-Kotetsu reveals that he's been "listening to music" this whole time he's been hiding out (that lugubrious frog that kindled him was apparently music-based), i.e. he's been training and synchronizing with and hearing out the grievances and accusations of the monsters' side, and so with THEIR POWERS COMBINED he's about to attack Maverick, and shit, only then I'm woken up mid-monologue. And I love Kotetsu's monologues, so that was very sad.

AND THEN, THE FIRST SERIES OF DREAMS.
I think I started out being lost at the wedding of somebody from grade school, but that was lame and not epic at all. But eventually it segued into my kind of awesome dream. So: kindles.

In the dreams, kindles were hated, hunted, and desperately feared. Constant campaigns of extermination were launched against them and, under a thin veneer of normalcy, every good kindle-fearing citizen's interactions with each other were tinged with suspicion. A kindle is a person--or a demon--or some kind of hideous disease, depending on who you ask. Everyone knows someone who has been kindled and run off or been caught and lynched.

It's like this: in this world, there are people who, when killed, randomly assume, from a limited selection, the body of a nearby person (the dream told me "person near death" at this point but that doesn't make much sense--maybe my character was taught by a nice mentor, or something). The new person is then "kindled", and in that kindling is completely erased and replaced by the invading personality. Essentially, kindles swap bodies when ganked. There are enough of them that they are considered a horrible scourge, and I'm not sure if the general public understands that it only happens when you kill one. It seems sensible that that sort of information would be suppressed by temporal authorities and kindles alike.

Visually, it's a kind of Witcher 2-like world, rich and verdant but also ancient and swamplike. The trees are huge and little villages tucked away beneath the branches spin well-maintained beaten paths between one another. Like The Elder Scrolls franchise, there are also a ton of different races and mixed-races. At first, I'm a yellow lizard guy, a traveling sort of person. I think I get hunted down and killed somehow--it's so unclear now, and it was the BEST DREAM EVER, wah--and after being extinguished I kindle again in the form of a strong, tall wrinkly blue kind of person with red spikes on his head. In this form I travel to a docks beside a large swamp. I sit on a barrel, prop my face on my hand and my elbow on my knee, and spare a few moments of melancholy for the person I've just destroyed in my rekindling. I think there's someone else there, some kind of younger, scaly big guy there, possibly a guardsman. He seems levelheaded. I talk to him about local stuff, and the places I've been. He seems super levelheaded and I like him. He seems pleased to have met me too. Then, motherfucking Abra walks up as I'm waiting for the raft or canoe or whatever to ferry me somewhere else. We talk for a while. I recognize her instantly, and she seems to know me too, despite my shape and lack of lucidity. It's perfectly clear to me that she's the human Abra, dreamwalker, here from another plane. I'm all strong and spiky and shit so I feel obligated to protect her from whatever dangers she faces from coming to visit someone in my position. I think the other guy is content to walk back to his post--is he a guard?--and give us space. Eventually, though, I think people from the village show up. For some reason they're suspicious of me, though I'd traveled a long ways since my rekindling and this body shouldn't be from around here. I think they want to run some sort of test, which I'm absolutely sure I'll fail. The guard is holding them off at the beginning of the pier and eventually comes to talk to me alone--I think Abra is hanging back a little--he's willing to listen to my side, not looking too happy to have this dumped in his lap considering I'd've been off his hands entirely given thirty minutes for the boat to come.

I'm...well, I'm concerned for myself too, but mostly my responsibility is to Abra. I try to explain her situation to the guard--that she's here because she's dreaming in another world, this point is very important and I remember pressing it. He's shaking his head like he doesn't believe me or it's irrelevant or he might not be able to protect her once the town takes me, but I'm insistent as the crowd works up the nerve to push closer. Abra's no part of this at all, look, fine, I'm the kindle andIjustwanttobeleftalonewe'renotlikewhatyouthinka ndalsoI'mgoingaway!...but I awake on that note due to a supremely inconsiderate thunderstorm at two in the morning.

I think I'd also awakened back when I was the yellow lizard guy whose adventures are now lost to me, at around one o'clock, but I thought the whole kindle thing was so cool I clung to it super hard and actually managed to continue it. SWEET

A Gandalf/Dumbledore kind of old evil wizard had managed to subdue every magical creature and artifact on modern-day Earth and subdue them utterly. Now everybody and everything was contained in specially-created habitats; frequently, he would address his conquests with magically-charged speeches it was of course pretty much mandatory to listen to, though lots of the rules about the place were unwritten, and you just kind of disappeared if you didn't follow them. Since there were lots of different habitats, sometimes the speeches were in person and sometimes they were over PA or whatever. The habitats were airport and mall kind of sterile places set off from ordinary human cities by minimal forest buffers.

Everyone was totally brainwashed, including myself. Most of us couldn't remember anything about who we'd been or what our powers were, we just kind of lived uneasily with the foremost worry in our lives being staying up on all the gossip about who had disappeared and for what, who was bad and who was not. I was a boy, ex-Jeremy--I don't think I could remember my name--and I enjoyed something of a special status, though I don't think I was really aware of it. I was the very last werewolf, because our overlord had killed them all in the fight to take over the world. Therefore, I enjoyed a somewhat marginal, wandering existence through the complex, skating past the consequences that overshadowed everyone else's lives, due to my value. I didn't know I was a werewolf in the dream because of the brainwashing and had no access to my other form.

I have a very clear image of dancing down the center of a long echoing airport-style throughfare. It's sparsely populated and brightly-lit. Some of the paths branching off from it are warded against trespass with danger signs. The kind of person I am in the dream is unaware of the attention of others. At some point, I wander off to a kind of shopping-lounging corner of the complex. I talk to a few pixies, short elvish people with close-cropped silky hair and tanfreckled skin. They're gossiping furiously. This is kind of a hangout for the washed-up and down-and-out. Packs of attractive, lithe, plainclothed policewomen chatter and pass through at intervals, raking their gazes across the assembled. In retrospect they seem a lot like wolves, too.

The complex has a limping sort of black market. I don't know if I'd even call it that. The overlord doesn't know the specifics of everyone he has under his control--it's not a two-way kind of power, he exerts the dominance but gets no feedback--and things and people that used to be extraordinarily powerful have a way of sifting through the cracks, totally lost without their powers and purpose, becoming society's dregs. I find a strange, diaphanous, flowing, bright-purple translucent scarf kind of thing, really huge but bunchable and foldable. It's lost and unhappy. It's really the Marauder's Map, but it's forgotten everything. People are looking for it, but neither of us really knows that. We talk about stuff I've forgotten as I move through the complex to the nearest unblocked exit. Eventually I decide to keep it with me. It's very lonely and doesn't want to be left behind, but it's coy about it. I wrap it around my fist, once unsatisfactorily, then properly. It makes some wry comments but seems happy that I'm wearing it on something I use to punch others with sometimes.

Together, we clamber over some barricades and out into the sparsely-wooded, windingly-roaded, craggy and cliffy suburbs of the main Complex. I wake up there just after my dream adds in that I am/should be wearing gloves, so that it's plausible for me to walk around with the Map unseen without actively hiding it. Everything was building up to me accidentally thwarting the overlord somehow due to the unique privilege of my position--and probably some expansion into the uniqueness of that privilege besides just "LAST OF UR KIND LOL"--but then I was woken up.

There is an island in the middle of the sea. In one of its bays there stands a sandswept ruined fort. It has been there for a very long time. It is inhabited by the remnants of a possibly extinct noble family's House staff. A galleonful of fancy-coated British-style navy men has come and camped there, with the purpose of retaking the place. Only a small percentage of the sunbleached rooms are habitable; most of the sprawling complex is blocked off. What can be accessed is filled with drifting sand and strange ruined pieces of technology, beyond the level of these modern, musket-toting men.

I am there but neither important nor in charge of anything. I think a skeleton crew of housepeople have been living in the keep, keeping up appearances; I'm speaking to a young man who's spent his life here. he's somewhat disaffected because all his friends had hereditary claim to more interesting positions but he was stuck as a butler, a job he feels is pretty useless considering the state of the place, but he's doing his best attending to the officers of the exploration team, etc. He's practicing treating me with grace, but from behind him a dry voice corrects him in his use of honorifics, recommending some better and more fluid ones. It's a small, palm-sized black robotic spider. The young man seems to respect its contribution and I think he tells me a little about it.

George is the mad old ruin of the House's main computer, the original butler or chamberlain. I think this guy had to learn the ropes from him, even, but the spider-machine is so crazed and dangerous now that it's never turned on all the way and has to be watched in case it attempts to plug any of its disconnected cords into any still-functioning outlets. Fascinated, I think I talk to him a little. He can respond but it's clear he's mad.

The main expeditionary force swiftly occupies every accessible corner of the keep, keeping the House's ancestral staff busy tending to their needs. I walk through the place observing. We seem to be planning to break in to several of the sealed galleries, and are setting up digging teams. I don't feel one way or the other about this, though the staff seem nervous--yet reassured at the same time, possibly at the obvious might of the Royal Navy. I return to George, who I believe is unresponsive. I pick him up--he's the size of a small dog now--and carry him through a long, broad, pillared hallway to a meeting room where the generals are planning their incursion. At intervals, as we pass by particularly shadowed or watermarked areas, George arches and writhes weakly like he's trying to escape. I just hold him tighter, uncomprehending.

Once we reach the meeting room, I sit down in a corner, out of the way but watchful. George is important so I want to be somewhere official where I can get high-level approval of whatever I might decide to do. I want to ask George why he was acting out as I carried him through the hall considering how lucid he was just moments before during our conversation about honorifics. As the men at the table speak and plan, I remark that George's batteries are so old they definitely shouldn't have been able to retain that much charge. Despite the hazard he poses as a security system the denizens of this place still take care of him, I'm glad to see. I ask him if he has a text-only mode, since he doesn't have enough power left to speak--possibly it's rare for people to be able to read in this era, which is why he hadn't tried it already; or he's just crazy--and he does. A little screen flips up and words and sentences flow across it far too fast for me to catch most of them. They're all exasperated, desperate warnings about the places we'd passed in the hall.

There are markings and drawings scattered all around the House in a smoky brown pigment, symbols scratched into the walls and floor; each thing we passed was a clue as to what lurks beneath the place, clues George finds painfully obvious, having lived through their dire and unstoppable propogation, but to which I was clearly oblivious, though in retrospect if I'd only been paying attention I'd have at least gotten a hint. The lurking danger represented by the mysterious graffiti is legions of horrible zombie-like monsters nesting beneath the place, making the sealed galleries unsafe; these were their clanmarks or something. I think we'd already had a few troubles with them at this point. George's grip on reality soon slips and his last messages across the cyan screen warn me about himself, rather than the danger beneath the House. He shuts down.

The leaders take George's input, relayed by me, into full account, especially the part where he'd revealed some of the easiest routes to access the sealed galleries by. We blow out a wall in some kind of dining room with a demolition team and send in a large group of armed men. Nekkerlike enemies come pouring out of black doorways in the forbidden area. Frantic, I see that we're having a hard time of it; the Royal Navy are supposed to steamroll enemies, not get into pitched battles with them. I run back for George. In his text-only mode, I beg him to help us. I entreat and cajole the last sane part of the tiny machine; surely he'll be able to resist harming us if I point him at some real enemies, real threats to the House? Grudgingly he decides to try it. I plug him in, first, I think, for a short test run, setting up his cable so it's tangled and short and he'd rip it out of the wall if he lunged for us (I think some of the keepers of the house are with me now). After the power surges through him, with great lurching rips he explodes into gargantuan metallic size. He stands there briefly calibrating and lunges for us eventually, ripping the cord out of the wall and collapsing into his tiny form again.

We argue about what to do. Since I have fourth-wall-breaking knowledge about computers--was this why I was brought along?--I try to figure out what each cable does, since there are several, reasoning that if we can, say, blind or otherwise cripple him temporarily we can lead him to the fray and then set him loose, bargaining the reattachment of whatever withheld sense for our safety. I don't think this pans out; pretty sure everyone else abandons the project. I believe I speak with George myself again, and I eventually decide to try something more dangerous. He has a pilot's seat, or, no, just a place to carry people, up front using appendages similar to a spider's fangs; possibly for carrying captured trespassers. Somehow we reach the decision, me pushing, him reluctant, that if he's focused on carrying me, that should hobble some of his more violent out-of-control guarding tendencies, since he'll have already "caught someone" and should therefore be in a mode more conducive to returning a prisoner alive.

He's a little bigger now, since I plugged in an auxilary cable to speak with him after his collapse from ripping his main cable set out of the wall. Armchair-size. I sit down carefully, my back to him, and strange machine arms carefully grab me from behind. Kind of like sitting in a car, except being held by a giant spider. At some point I've plugged him into the wall, probably not from this position. And he takes on his enormous true mecha spider form again, and thunders forward through the halls to where the Royal Navy soldiers are being slowly but surely beaten back by a wave of the enemy.

George wades in there with his eight massive bladed legs and starts stomping the shit out of the bad guys, with me whirling along for the ride. He has to be careful of his cable, stretched out taught behind him after being dragged through several convoluted sets of rooms, but his machine mind is more than up to placing each leg perfectly for the task. Eventually, the gallery is cleared. George whirrs to a halt, nominally under control. On a text readout display, he confesses that he feels better and more clearheaded than ever as the Royal Navy soldiers gather in formation to both salute George and rally for their next push forward into the forbidden galleries. I worry about them stepping on George's cable, and his ability to maneuver without catching his cable on a person with them all standing around and over it like that, but he says let them; I get the feeling he's swept up in the thrill of the battle too. After all, it is his house they're fighting to take back. He's languished so long in the throes of madness as the monsters slowly crept into and overran this place, sealing galleries to protect the ever-shrinking ranks of the keepers of house, that of course he would want to continue the fight. Having an army at his back is a nice change from when it was only he, alone, faced with the choice of protecting the keepers of house or attacking the invaders, who would surely pour through the secret passages in the walls and destroy his precious family while he was distracted. Poor loyal spider! No wonder he went crazy.

And that was where I woke up, hanging suspended in the arms of a giant ancient killer robot spider above ranks of rallying Royal men, preparing to push our advantage.