[WP-001] Bad Dreams (Deceiver)

[Baneful]

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Deceiver typically did not have pleasant dreams. They tended to be horrible, dark and brutal affairs steeped in blood and violence. And yet, for all their darkness, they had little impact upon him, every night he waded neck deep in nightmares and even while he dreamed of murder and betrayal, he felt nothing. He treated it as if his mind was in some sort of death throes, venting the last of its weakness before it cooled into something perfect and sleek, the kind of mind that would give him pleasing dreams that he controlled.

But that night the dreams were different. They were less strange and more real, as if he wasn’t dreaming at all. And everyone there was far more fleshed out than the shapeless shadows he generally interacted with. It was strange.

The obelisk jutted up from the swamp like a splinter in a wound, and immediately he felt that it was unnatural. He had seen it in the waking world and wondered what he was looking at, but like anything else had consigned it to a mystery. But for some reason, here and now the swamp had decided to bring him to a time in the past - how far he couldn’t tell - where a ragtag band of curious kin had made their way to it and investigated the mystery they found there.

In the dream, he was one of them, watching the others do the work. If he’d been there, he would have done the same, he was curious, but curious only when it came to other people. Puzzles held little interest for him. He did however reach out to touch the strange thing with his only good hoof, wanting to know how it felt

The blast of light was unbearable as it tore past him, freezing him in his tracks, his vision completely whited out by the force of it. As his vision returned he was left looking at eleven strange distant lights that reached out across the swamp.

He expected it to end there, to fade away as all dreams did, but instead it kept him in a strange limbo, and only when dreams lapsed into their usual terror did he seem to feel he’d shaken it off.

Only this time, his normal horror was replaced with one so specific that it couldn’t have been his own. In it, a strange contorted caiman came closer and closer, snapping its wicked jaws. It was rotten, with sunken blinded eyes, but behind him was nothing but the roar of water and he knew he could back up no further. The stench of it filled his nostrils and no matter how he backed away, it came closer and closer.

When he woke, finally, he had to check a few times that he really was awake. He wasn’t really sure how he’d manage to sleepwalk here, but he was way, way too close to the swamp obelisk for his liking.

He didn’t tarry, he got out of there as fast as three legs could carry him.

He didn’t like these portents at all.

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