Shifting Leaves

[Sumnner]

(Open to one serious role player. PM for review.)

His dreams came hot and fast, violent and stinging. Flickering like a dying flame, they came too fast for recognition, to sudden for understanding. His eyes rolled behind his tightly squeezed eye lids, his brow drawn tight, his mouth twisted in fear. Some, those that flashed the most, those that stung the worst, bubbled to the surface of his subconsciousness, bursting into being, hovering long enough to snatch glimpses.

He was standing in a metal boxed, packed wall to wall with people. Long, slender metal poles extended from ceiling to floor, their polished surfaces marred by countless hands. Hard plastic seats, rows stacked close to one another lining the walls, gave a grim feel to an already cold environment, even if it was boiling hot with all the collective body heat. People stared blankly into the distance, some staring into the folded pages of stacked paper, others into cracked books, others still into slender black plastic glowing screens. Everyone was quiet, but the box was filled with noise. A click-clack, rhythmic to the point of annoyance, followed by a loud screech that pierced the skull and vibrated his cornea. The metal box slowed, the first sign that it had been moving, and then stopped, the metal doors to either side sliding open with a mechanical hiss. He stepped forward, and there was a flicker.

He was standing now in a surreal scene, filled with green and yellows and browns. Leaves he realized, shifting slightly in a light breeze blowing from his left. A loud buzz hung in the air, piercing sirens, wailing gears and screeching metal. Laughter mixed into the buzz, screams and shouts, barks and squeaks. His eyes flickered left and he saw the long flowing form of a golden dog racing across a field of green grass, chasing a floating red disk. It leapt into the air, its jaws opening wide to close around the floating disk and it landed smoothly, turning sharply as it did so. Back it raced, the way it had come, into the waiting arms of a person, their face blurred and misty. People began moving all around him, his eyes flickered right and the world flickered with them.

He was standing in a building, the smell of aged wood and harsh polish filling the air. There was a heavy quiet around him and a man was standing before him, garbed all in white and black, with slashes of blue and gold and red. A pristine white collar stood prominent on his black shirt. He was saying something, his blurred face pointed in his direction. He felt his lips move, but no sound came forth and he felt himself smile. He turned to his left and the world flickered.

He was standing alone in the center of a long, empty road. The double yellow lines pocked and scared as they raced forward into the distant mist. The thick black clouds over his head boiled, rolling around like a storm ravaged sea. A wind howled and a fat raindrop fell from the heavens to land with a sting on his cheek. His eyes flickered left, then right. Tears, long in the forming, flowed down his cheeks and he felt his chest tightening as pain long buried welled up within him. He squeezed his eyes shut and he felt the world flicker.

Over and over, again and again, the dreams assault his mind. His body twisted beneath the thin blanket covering him, writhing in silence even as he wished to scream. His hands clenched into tight fists, loosened, tightened and loosened again. His head rocked side to side, and his legs flailed as if running. Suddenly his left arm snapped out and struck the nearby wall with a loud smack. He grunted but did not wake, the hand remaining where it was, pinned against the wall as if nailed. A moment later, amidst the twisting, flailing, his right arm shot up, smacking hard against the wall near his head. He grunted again, but again did not wake, his right hand remaining like the left. A few more moments passed when his body constricted and for a few moments he was perfectly still before, in one violent shove, his body uncoiled and he sent himself spinning off of his makeshift bed onto the floor some three feet beneath him.

He woke then, with a cry of surprise, mixed with fear and pain. He lay still for a brief instant before curling into a tight ball, drawing his knees to his chest and grasping his feet tightly in his throbbing hands. He buried his face in between his knees and before he could stop them, tears long in the forming burst forth and he was instantly caught in a storm of pain filled sobbing. He did not know for how long he cried, only that it was for a long time, but after he lay still, his body still clenched tightly into its ball, his eyes squeezed shut. Slowly he unwound himself, stretching painfully, working the cramps from his legs, arms and chest. Rubbing his eyes with the palms of his shaking hands, he slowly pulled himself into a seated position. He sat for a long moment, breathing deeply, trying to banish the still lingering nightmares from his mind. They faded slowly, ever so slowly, but after a time he was left with just himself. Shaking his head slowly he pushed himself to his feet and cast about for his belongings.

He found them where he had left them when he had collapsed from exhaustion and he gathered them into his arms. Finding the door proved only a small difficulty and when he pushed it open he stared numbly into the black sky. He had only been asleep for a few hours. He felt himself sigh and pushed himself out through the door. He had not had a solid nights sleep in weeks, a few hours here, maybe an hour or two there. He was afraid to sleep, pushing his body to exhaustion every day, sometimes going days without sleep. For every time his eyes closed the nightmares came and he woke in pain, his body drained and his mind wreathed in searing flames.

His feet stumbled beneath his shaking legs but he forced them straight and shouldered his belongings, pressing ever forward. Toward what, he couldn't have said if his life had depended on it. The small village he had sought shelter in for the night quickly faded into the distance behind him, and he pressed deeper into the strange land he had woken up in, the sounds of life strangely silent around him even as he passed through it.

[Shadar]

Harpies aren't known for their pleasant calls. Replace the song of Concordia's morning birds with the shriek of a hawk-beast, and the average village wife's first chore of the day would be to launder the bedding. However, there are aspects of harpies that don't come to light in the myths, such as their inquisitive trill. It is a sound deep in the throat; long buried maiden song mixed with an awed, rising warble. For the barest of moments, one might forget that before them is an embittered pseudo-woman with talons, like a prime selection of kitchen knives, attached to her feet. Around that point in such stories, the confused human - always male - would suffer a horrible end. Social commentary at its finest.

Shadar didn’t care much for society, though, especially when it felt the need to comment. So, it was with a bemused grin that he lifted his eyes from the road and looked to the bird-woman beside him. “Hm?” he droned the unimpressive half-elf equivalent of her high, childish trill.

Brigitte excitedly met his gaze, her emerald pupils sparkling and a soft smile skewing her hard Amazonian features. With a twist of her head that sent her brilliant red hair flying, she indicated the area above them. Her lack of arms kept her from pointing, though the rest of her form was shaped as a woman under the nearly all-encompassing feathers, and with an impressive amount of shape in her most womanly features.

Her companion took one gloved hand from his long coat’s pocket and ran it through his silver hair as he glanced skyward. “That’s… something,” Shadar remarked, his tone bearing the amazement that his words lacked. On both sides of the dirt road they travelled, the forest had been keeping its distance, timid boughs waving but never approaching. Except, it appeared, at the very place they now stood. The forest in both directions wedged toward the road sharply, and at the very edge a nearby branchless tree leaned clear across the beaten track. Shadar twisted to take in the whole of the organic arch over them, like a clasp straining to hold a forest-green vest around the continent’s girth.

Wood suddenly scrapped behind him, and he spun to see Brigitte climbing the inside of the arch, talons biting into the tree with each step. After a few awkward, inverted paces, she was eye to eye with him again. “I can float off the ground, too,” she chirped as she spread her golden wings like a bat about to take flight. He’d never, in her short existence, told her about bats. So, the idea must have seemed all her own, and Shadar said nothing to the contrary. He did, however, run a hand through his hair again as he diverted his eyes. Brigitte was defying gravity in the general sense, but certain naked and feather-bare parts of her were more susceptible to the ground’s pull. She didn’t seem to notice, or simply didn’t care. All she did was send him that charming smile that no other corporeal creature had ever seen from her.

Shadar chuckled, stood up on his toes, then disengaged from the ground. As listlessly as a wind-kissed leaf, he turned through the air until he came, lightly, to stand upside-down with her under the warped bark. Gravity affected him too, though in a significantly less arousing manner, by making his open coat fall past his head. The bone-white turtleneck shirt underneath turned orange in the morning sun, and the light tinted his skin as well, stealing away his ghost of a complexion.

He was about to speak when the oddity of their situation stilled his tongue. It wasn’t that they were doing their best impressions of nocturnal flying mammals above a Concordian thoroughfare. That was, though not normal, a pleasant diversion from their meandering, eternal pilgrimage. What worried him was that the moment had yet to be ruined by a certain immaterial companion of theirs.

Shadar’s smile turned sly as if, within this whimsical moment, he had reached closer than ever to a cruelly forbidden fruit.

[Sumnner]

He was numb. Caught firmly between full wakefulness and deep sleep; a shambling zombie, his face pale, his eyes hooded and his step faltering. The world around him might not as well have existed, for all the attention it was granted by him. His body was ploding forward automatically, the effort now engraved wholly into his subconscious. He was a ghost, a zombie, destined to roam endlessly, destined to never fully die.

A great rushing of air, like a screeching wail, slammed into his left side and he pitched violently to the right, his feet wrapping themselves around one another. His hands flailed in an effort to catch his tilting body, but they were wrapped in the shoulder strap draped across his chest. He tried to yell but his throat had long since tightened from lack of water and all that escaped his abused wind pipe was a breathy wheeze. The ground rushed up to meet him and only a wild twist of fate saved him from slamming head first. He didn't feel the impact of weary flesh to hard packed dirt at first, but after the second bounce, pain blossomed in his left side and he groaned.

The groan only got half way out of his throat when it caught and transformed into a loud cough. New pain exploded in his throat as the abused flesh, drying almost to the point of flaking, convulsed and stretched, tearing itself in many places. He coughed again, expanding the tears, ripping open new ones and increasing the pain. He coughed a third time and this time crimson blood followed the sudden out rushing of air, coating his dried throat and splattering the ground beneath him. The coughing subsided quickly then, reduced to a few dry heaves and gurgles. His free hand groped and scratched at the dirt beneath it and he felt the rest of his body clenching tight against the pain. That also quickly subsided and he lay still, wheezing, his chest heaving in and out as he gulped in the dry air and dust, before he pushed himself painfully onto his back.

He stared silently into the sky then, his eyes tracing the lines the branches made as they interwove themselves. Brief snatches of animal life were visible as well, but they were all silent, except for the occasional stirring of leaves or crackling of bark. He took it all in slowly, and just as slowly, he felt his body begin to relax, shutting down in preparation for sleep he so desperately needed. Something screamed in the back of his mind but the tranquility of the sky, of the trees, of the ground beneath him, over rode the screams, silencing them as though they had been cut by a knife. His eyes flickered open and closed, fighting to remain open even as they willed themselves to be closed. Something surrendered within him and he felt the last piece click into place as his body relaxed completely.

His eyes slid fully closed then and as quickly as that, sleep over took him. The accumulated exhaustion from his endless walk and sleepless nights had finally caught up with him. His breathing slowed and his face relaxed, his mouth slightly open, the blood splatter still wet on his lips and cheek.

He was, for the moment, at peace. Then the dreams came...

He was standing alone, the infinite stretch of road that should have long been familiar to him now but was still strangely foreign, stretching beyond the horizon before and behind him. He gazed in wonder, as he always did, at the pocked double yellow lines laid in the center of the road, and the boiling sea of black clouds raging above him. Beyond him, in every direction, the barren landscape of a world long devoid of life, stretched endlessly toward a misty horizon. As suddenly as he realized he was truly alone, he felt another presence, and he turned slowly to find it. It began to rain then, cold raindrops easily the size of a large coin, falling heavily from the boiling heavens, so cold they seared his flesh, even as they froze his soul. He spun slowly, eyes searching for the other that was there but wasn't, until he finally found them, standing in the center of the road, facing the way he had first been facing. They stood silent, still, as if dead. Draped in a bleach white gown of falling lace and soft curves, the image was almost surreal, until the streaks of crimson blood became apparent. Then the true purpose of the dream blossomed and a piercing wail filled the air.

"Jaaaaaaaason!" He didn't flinch, he didn't move, he didn't breath. Instead his eyes blinked slowly shut, tears forming and flowing slowly down his already sodden cheeks...

He couldn't feel, couldn't hear, couldn't think but even as the dream began to unfold behind his closed eye lids, his mouth parted and a wheezing whine began flowing from his chapped lips.

[Shadar]

I… found one? gasped a voice in the back of Shadar’s mind, far from his consciousness and the tender moment in the solid world beyond. I freakin’ found one! The voice rose, lapsing between growl and guffaw, still buried too deep to be noticed by its physical vessel. Diamond Jackal’s essence vibrated with malicious glee as he forgot his current existence as a mental parasite and reclaimed the mantle of a dream demon.

It had been so long since his fall from the space between worlds, where every sleeping mind was a fragile plaything begging to be broken. It felt odd to reach out to a mind other than Shadar’s, a new expanse of thought both foreign and vulnerable. The half-elf’s mind had become armoured to him over the years. Every annoyance he inflicted was washed away as petty childishness, and every mental crack he tried to gouge open resisted as surely as stone battlements against an infantry siege. Though his vessel’s mind was a battered landscape of half finished plots and still-born psychosis, he could take no satisfaction from it. This new mind, however, was a pitiful village; the men away, the women and children waiting to be ravaged. Jackal projected as much of himself as he could from his prison in the half-elf’s mind, and he became a part of the nightmare.

He found himself on an empty highway, the otherworld implications of which instantly brought a smile to his purple muzzle. He remembered the worlds that bore those paved scars, worlds technologically advanced yet wallowing in vice. He loved vice. Casting his fiery eyes around, he expected the superficial trappings of mortals run amok. However, only a barren, dark landscape lay under the heavy rain. The bastard’s unimaginative, he grumbled as one clawed hand rose, unaffected, in the rain. So long had he been trapped in a world of physical laws that the dreamscape’s unawareness of him was disorienting. He lowered his hand and crossed his arms into the crimson robes he wore. The rain, falling through him, began to take notice. It did not wash off him as if he were flesh. Instead, it began to spin well above his pointed ears, forming a small cyclone of distorting water around him. Then, it splashed down to pavement, and the fat drops resumed their heavy descent onto the now-empty road, oblivious to the god stalking below the surface of the dream.

A name rose sorrowfully into the storm, drawing the invisible presence toward the blood-stained maiden. She was too immaculate, though, to be anything but an imagining of that other soul, a confused and wavering child in the body of a man. He had constructed this scene, but he didn’t seem to know it. Jackal’s smugness lent extra weight to the rain. He would help the fool remember by showing him another piece of his homeland.

In the distance, where the thick rain turned the road to a black void, two squares of light appeared, inhuman eyes observing the tragic memory. They drew closer, shining ever stronger as the downpour’s beat was replaced by a low rumble sounding along the ground. It was as if a great beast, caged and furious, was being born from the night. Brighter the lights grew, a sickly yellow that illuminated the space between the sources. Horizontal bars were the beast’s cage, too close to see within. Above the bars, dark panes that revealed nothing but the reflection of storm clouds, and below, round feet that spun over the road, riding the yellow line. From the side of the metal mammoth’s head, a single horn jutted out and screamed a violent, throbbing note.

As fast and powerful as a thunder clap, the otherworldly chariot charged under its halo of rebounding rain and struck the maiden. Her bloody rivulets became rapids. Her human form became soup. Her lace gown became tattered, pale snow. Then, everything that had once been her was sucked through the bars. The beast within the shell roared louder as it fed, satisfied and anticipating the taste of the man himself.