Maladaptive Hypnopompia
Prologue - The Night Before
The dreamer looked down at their feet. They had just landed in hot, peppery dirt. They had fallen a long way, but were already starting to forget the details. The dirt wisped carelessly around the soles of the leather boots they wore every day—unease bleeding through at the juxtaposition of the strange and the familiar.
In the harsh, red-and-orange light of a foreign sunset, the dreamer looked around them. They were startled at the landscape spreading out as far as their eyes could witness: red, craggy land; a desert; a giant, white-gold sun suspended over the uneven ground like a moon on the verge of crashing down around them. The dreamer wondered in non sequiturs, the language of dreams.
‘Something must have stopped it.’ The dreamer guessed it had perhaps been a net. They seemed free to move without fear of being crushed by the sky.
The dreamer’s movement was heady—the more abundant their indulgence in it or the quicker their steps, the greater the uncontrolled spin of their perspective. The dreamer slowed by necessity in this frightening place and acclimated. They felt their heartbeat growing louder, though the rhythm remained steady. Their nostrils and eyes stung from the air, adding legitimacy to the scene. Perhaps if their fear or wonder had been less, they would have questioned this very physical experience.
The dreamer walked over jagged red rocks toward the horizon for what could have been a few minutes or an eternity. The rhythm of their slowed steps soothed the loudness of their heart. Time had drained away. It was a sound that punctured the shelter of the dreamer’s focus.
They heard it before it hit their boot. A paper, crinkled by the hot wind’s suffocation, slapped against their ankle and looked like it was begging to be saved. The dreamer clutched it quickly, suffering the swing of the land around them as they moved, clutching the back of their skull. They opened the paper once the pressure in their head subsided. Clutching the top and bottom of the page, their eyes anchored to script. They drank deeply.
‘This feels like important information.’
And the page was ripped away by the jealous wind. All the dreamer could remember was the signature, which looked like an inky sword.
The dreamer heard footsteps running behind them.
‘I can’t turn!’
Fear rose in the dreamer and the footsteps beat the ground faster. The dreamer worried this might be a spell to make their heart explode. They brought their arms to their chest and face as what felt like two large hands slapped against their back, pushing them forward in a spray of black feathers.
The dreamer’s fall slowed. When their elbows hit the ground they were instantly standing again. The dreamer was amazed that the ground had flattened into something cold and hard and smooth. Their feet were steady and level. Somehow they knew they were turned around by some feathered beast. They looked around but couldn’t find a single feather.
The dreamer was surprised to see the naked body of a man, hanging a little above the newly-smoothed ground, not twenty or thirty paces away. The man’s arms were splayed out to his sides and head knocked back. It was a twisted image of a person laughing, or maybe staring at the same setting sun.
The dreamer tried walking slowly around the perimeter of the flattened earth, some distance from the man’s hovering body.
A voice in the dreamer’s ear whispered in the language of ruffling feathers: DON’T BRING HIM BACK. The dreamer whipped around again.
There was no one there. The dreamer saw only the sprawling, red desert. They returned their attention back to the suspended body.
‘A laughing prisoner…’
The man’s body kept turning as the dreamer walked in a circle around him, making the details of the man’s face imperceptible.
The dreamer hesitated, but ultimately decided to reach a gloved hand out toward the imprisoned man. They felt the familiar pang of power begin to trickle from the sac around their heart and drew upon the fluttering feeling to send it outward, searching with the energy.
‘Just a couple of words, then I’ll go.’
The dreamer’s gaze focused beyond their outstretched fingertips at the man’s head. The fact that it was still slung back and away began to deeply unsettle them.
A slicing burn of lightning hit the dreamer’s hand from the sky.
The dreamer retracted their hand and doubled over on themself, clutching the pained flesh and bones to their stomach. They tried to scream but no sound could be made.
When the dreamer looked at the ground in front of them, they saw five black tumbling shapes. They bounced on the ground like black turtle beans skittering across a kitchen floor.
Their stomach wretched and tightened in the effort to scream, but was cut short at the horror. The dreamer realized they were staring at the tips of their five gloved fingers, sliced away from their hand. They felt the wet emptiness on their shaking palm pressed against their rigid belly; felt where those digits should be.
The dreamer’s head and body began to shake with adrenaline. The dreamer slowly raised their head to examine the suspended body.
It was gone.
A strong thunderous clap landed on their left shoulder. They snapped their head in the percussion’s direction.
Hallowed eyes and a grimace invaded the dreamer’s sight before spewing a rotten stink from deep within the fiendish body. A thick, blue tongue moved like the king of all maggots in the dead man’s mouth.
“Time to go.”
Xho Chios, a lieutenant hive soldier of the Coral Crown’s Guard, woke with a start in the young hours before dawn. He was immediately relieved to see the bland ceiling of his barracks. It was a bonus to realize he didn’t rouse any of his troupe sleeping in the same cell with his startling. It had been a nerve-wracking climb to his station as lieutenant without these recurrent nightmares being discovered. He certainly didn’t need to be reported now.
Chios eased his wide, dark brown eyes. He slowed his breathing from the sweat-filled indentation on his mattress. Nothing followed him from the dream. There was no hot air, or sharp granules of sand. He was back safely in the clammy air in the basement of the palace by the sea, in the faint body odor of his comrades.
The soldier ran a hand through a thicket of short black hair, pushing it off of his forehead. He had nearly reached an office that came with the type of seniority and salary in which he would be able to have his own quarters and a bit more privacy. If others began questioning these perspiration-inducing dreams they may discover his more objectionable peculiarities.
Chios knew he didn’t dream normal dreams. But this one had been unique. He had never seen a desert. He had to wonder at the more mundane symbols as he rolled onto his side.
Swords. And feathers?
The most concerning part had to be the dead prisoner.
A blue tongue, Chios felt a chill run down his heavily-muscled back. Though he chalked this up to the cold air on his clammy skin, his mind couldn’t help but wander to the Pompos Mages of old—practitioners of forbidden magic. He had never seen one, but his mother had told him stories when he was a boy.
But they were all exterminated hundreds of years ago…
He swung his bare feet over the edge of his simple, rough bedframe and onto the cool uneven stone floor, worn by generations of hive soldiers before him. Chios rubbed at the stubble poking through his golden bronze skin but stopped when he remembered part of the strange dream between sleep and waking.
He looked down at his bare hand, fingers all present. He rubbed each fingertip with his opposite hand to ensure he wasn’t still dreaming.
Deep in the heart of the Palace Logösse, several floors above the hive barracks where the Coral Crown’s Guard slept in shared monk-like cells, there was a secluded study. The Swordbearer to the Coral Crown, Erovan Wessar preferred this isolation for his academic pursuits and contemplation.
At least, that’s what he told the Crown’s Architects upon coming into his office as a young man, many decades ago. As one of the most powerful individuals in Ixoras Atoll—and the leader of one of the two most prominent churches on the Silver Isle, the Sword—no one challenged this luxury.
“When secrets are currency, privacy is as good as gold,” he had told the builders. Erovan still believed it. But in the decades since establishing his little fox’s den he had learned that secrets wield two blades: one against the keeper, and another against the discoverer.
Erovan sat mostly straight, leaned back in the chair at his desk.
The study was quiet.
The only sound was the faint mechanical motion, metered out by a brass device the size of a small drupe sitting on the wooden desk: tick, tick, tick.
There was a wall of heavy wooden shelves around the perimeter of the room, almost obscuring the single red door. Though small by palatial standards, it was an easy study to be turned around in, if absorbed in the scrutiny of overlapping texts. Markedly there were no windows in this book-spangled room. There were no other signs from the world beyond to invade his carefully crafted peace.
Most importantly there were no prying eyes to watch one of the most powerful men in all of the city as his hands clenched tightly at the arms of his leather chair. No one had to know as his dark eyelids fluttered over the white sclera of his eyes, rolled up and back into his head in trance.
He had been seated like this, traveling, for the last few hours. When the Swordbearer brought himself back to the body he had temporarily left behind in his study, everything seemed loud.
Tick.
He slowed his breathing and clenched his jaw against the sloshing in his stomach. The bitter grains he had taken for the ritual were churning. He released the tendons in his hands, unsticking his clay brown skin from the ochre leather of the chair.
Tick.
He relaxed the muscles in his back which remained strong despite his fifty-some years. He released the controlled tension in his shoulders. His nostrils flared with emotion.
Tick.
The carefully honed mask of competence he wore in the palace’s court dropped. A small, private muscle in his forehead twitched to life between his brows in concern. Erovan’s two black eyebrows knit together on his otherwise bald head.
Tick.
He placed a gentle hand over the gears of the metal device to silence it. He cradled the brass in his lap. He snaked his finger around the back of the machine and after a few tries was able to remove a black feather.
The Silver Isle’s ruler—the man who nominated Erovan for his seat as Swordbearer—Caern Menifes had been in the process of dying for over a year. A lingering death was an odd occurrence in Ixoran society. Since the resolution of the Pompos War several centuries ago, alchemists refined the science of medicine with magic, their caste rising in power and regard as a result. They had developed an artful panacea, the khreus, which came to be blessed by both major religious sects of the Silver Isle—Erovan’s lot, as well as his shamanic counterpart, the Cupbearer’s.
The khreus had become a consecration rite over the generations, a communion with their prime deities which staved off the same plagues and maladies that had wiped out cultures leagues away in the wilds of Caermarthen and the northern outpost of Conwy Rhos.
It has its costs too, of course, Erovan winced at the magic—and human—toll. It was too gruesome to calculate.
Everyone living on the Silver Isle knew that their caern was dying. The Swordbearer, undisclosed as his prophecies were, was one of a very few people in the palace that knew the man would be dying later that day.
And after the evening’s travels, Swordbearer Erovan Wessar also knew why.
What about the magic? Is it satisfying? Do you want to know more?
Some distance away, down the many winding streets leading from the palace to the ocean, Arax Kinaktok was wrapping up the day’s labor in the Scree. Though, to his and his crew’s chagrin, the work had stretched on through long hours of the night as well.
A captain of the Silver Isle’s armada, he warmed his hands on what was once a small thin metal sheet, hammered into a roughly conical shape. He ignored the rustic wooden toggle handle as the wind roared. His fingers hungrily sought the heat through his threadbare gray wool gloves. He blew some steam away before deciding to risk a swallow of the hot, bitter tea. His tall, lean body rode the bucking dock with each swell of the ocean tide, requiring little focus. It was the cold that seemed to bother him.
Worse than last year, he ground his left shoulder up and back to loosen the muscles and dull the ache in the bone. Sparse times for all, he thought sadly. He took a quick draw off the tin cup and let the burn in his mouth and throat distract him. A few loose strands of curly brown hair fell free from the low bun he wore, tickling his cold, ruddy ears. He tossed the hair from his eyes.
“Thanks, Birdie,” the captain smiled gratefully down at the short old dock woman who had brought him the tin. She patted his elbow with thick, loving hands, knuckles heavy with craft.
“Bring back tha tin when ye boys err done, Cap’n Arie,” she wagged a finger and pulled her thick wool scarf tighter around her neck and shoulders. Arie nodded, squinting an eye at the familiarity Birdie insisted upon. He didn’t want his crew getting any ideas.
Arie watched Birdie navigate the hitching dock with ease. He admired her, pushing on after her partner, Cavetta, left her the year prior. The two had been inseparable, maintaining the maze of their wooden moorings for countless sailors and fisherfolk.
Birdie had always been the stronger of the two mages, but when Cavetta took a job elsewhere, Birdie’s heart no longer seemed in her work. The elderly woman kept forgetting little details: Dock boards warped under foot and rainfall as she neglected a bit of magic mending, the ire of the sea gaining on her half-hearted spells to brace the load-bearing alloy dock brackets below the water’s surface after a storm. She’d lost two well-paying customers to business rivals in this way after their submersibles were damaged. Arie was always concerned with the fate of his rig, but most of Birdie’s rivals also charged a premium for extended hours. Birdie just charged him for the tea.
The sea wall beside him was craggy and resolute despite the elemental beating. The captain marked the beginnings of a storm when he saw the waves begin to swirl at the foundations. The tide pushed the dock ever-higher against the simultaneously slick and sharp natural boundary of Ixoras Atoll.
Though he was still considered a captain in rank, in such “glad times” of peace and poverty as they currently found themselves, he wasn’t captain of much more than this submersible ocean trawler. The brass vessel he had spent the last uncountable hours running back to the surface rockside, the Stygian Oud, bobbed beside the wooden landing.
His crew was exhausted but the run had been successful: Mollusks, clawed crustaceans, cod, haddock, and mackerel graced their bounty. Their haul would satisfy repeat customers across a few taverns in the third district nearest the Wheel, with some catch still remaining for street vendors. Most importantly there would remain some to feed their own families. The captain might even have enough left over to see a xyster, a bonescraper, about his shoulder.
“Plenny goin’ hungry these times, Captai’,” one of his crew had reminded him during their run on the seafloor the night prior. The more tenured crewmembers could see the captain had already begun browbeating himself about the importance of the night’s outcome when catch began to seem elusive.
Arie squinted through the mist. It soothed his eyes, hot from exhaustion. He caught the stubble just beneath his bottom lip with his top teeth in thought as he watched the dark morning’s final tasks. His crew diligently unloaded their waggling fish and slow-as-syrup crustacean into the last few barrels in the harbor. A few of Birdie’s rougher wharfies set about the work of battening his brass egg-shaped rig, spangled with blue and green patina across its crown, to make a few repairs.
“Easy on the ropes, fellas,” Arie called, rubbing a glove on the back of his neck and trying not to sound annoyed. Fiber was expensive.
Everything’s expensive.
“After unloadin’, we headed to a pub, Captai’?” Another crew member tried nudging life back into his superior as one half of a smiling duo shouldered past Arie with a freshly-packed crate of mollusks. This first one was Malver, the younger of the two: a little more resilient with no one to go home to. “Iveston here’s whinin’ on ‘bout her gout in tha storm,” he grinned and nodded his head at the woman shouldering the other half of his burden.
Arie ground his shoulders up and back behind him to stretch his sore muscles beneath his thinning wool coat and couldn’t help but smile. Two or three years ago he had been in young Malver’s shoes, begging for a little camaraderie at last call. There was still a matching spark of mischief in both men’s eyes, but the captain spared a glance to the horizon crowding with ominous shapes despite the growing light.
“Iveston’s right. It’s going to be bad. Let’s play it by ear.”
I’d love to know your thoughts! I have a short survey here to ask your thoughts on the four scenes, and which your favorite was. Thanks in advance!
As always: Thank you for your time, and please consider following me if you’re on Notes! Leave a comment below, I love bouncing ideas or hearing if I’m on the right track.
Until next time,
Nico
I’m curious about how magic ties to dreamscapes, and if there is any connection to tarot with Swordbearer and Cupbearer. So far nobody has used any flashy magic and that’s refreshing to see.