Continued from the Witching Hour
5th Cylus 721, before 'dawn'.
The energy stolen from her boss felt as if it filled a fragile egg of a vessel, whose thin shell could break from the stress of such heavily laden blood. She didn’t quite know what she did… well that wasn’t entirely true. She’d stolen energy from him, but he hadn’t been harmed? Somehow she knew exactly what she had done. More than once since waking in that southern swamp two arcs ago, she was given to wonder just how she’d ended up there, with so few memories retained of any former life.
Determined to put her confusion to rest, to put her uncertainty in the back of her mind, Diana slipped into a sleeping chemise. Tossing herself onto the sleeping pallet, she threw some furs over herself and fell fast asleep. Diana would probably forget all about it in the morning, or so she could hope.
Her bare feet walked along the ankle-deep snows, strolling through the streets of the external portions of the fortress in a thick, woolen robe. Her hands and feet weren’t clad with anything, neither sock nor shoe nor boot, glove or mitten. She walked along the path, until a flower petal on the ground caught her eye. She walked over, to get a closer look. In the pale moonlight, it wasn’t easy to distinguish color, resembling the black orchids of the southern continent. It was a nigthshade, or else something more sinister, but different in color from those plants. This one was red.
Without thinking, she slipped the petal onto her tongue, tasting its poison for herself. The petal had no ill effects upon her, other than stinging her tongue with its acrid taste. She held it on her tongue for a few moments, as if it were a sacramental gesture. Then she swallowed the petal down. As she continued on her way, the environment shifted. Green shoots of growth began to wind up the barren stones of Viden’s fortress, ever so slightly. For the moment they only rose a few inches out of the snow, which was subsiding now.
Yet still the trail of red petals on the snow were visible, and she stepped closer on the way to the next one, her feet treading the increasingly slushy and icy snows. She knelt to gather up the next few petals, greedily shoving them into her mouth despite their acrid taste. In fact, the taste of these petals, and every subsequent one seemed to improve the flavor. They became sweeter, less astringent, and overall palatable as any fresh leaf of mint or benign green weed.
More of the snow began disappearing, until the petals only shone against the granite stones of this version of Viden. More green shoots emerged from the brambles that slowly climbed up from the base of the buildings. And the vines themselves grew in length, until they were near to overtaking the entire structures.
She took in the last of the petals into her mouth, at least of those that were visible on the earthen dirt that began to rise out of the ground, covering Viden’s cobbled streets. She saw no more of Viden. She was in a forest created by the canopy of those vine-like plants which rose over it all. The landscape reshaped, and altered with the ingestion of those petals, it became an entirely different place, although certainly no less cold. There were icy ponds and swamps, frozen over, their layers of ice thin and cracking and singing with the utter chill of Cylus.
Diana walked through this landscape, almost entirely lost. In the periphery of her hearing, she thought she could sense the sound of people in revelry, and more than that, the scent of smoke and open campfires. Emboldened by the promise of potential warmth, she hastened her gait, walking at almost a jog toward the source of that smoke.
The sounds and voices were increasingly legible as she neared the source. The smoke, however, rather than smelling sweetly against the frigid air, caught in her lungs and almost was enough to make her cough and retch. Diana covered her mouth as she strode forward, looking for the signs of campfires, but no light issued through the trees. Only shadows and a pale mist of smoke.
She stopped for a moment, her breath stolen by the choking vapors. A shoot of a red nightshade plant grew out of the ground, and she had the sudden compulsion to pull it out. So Diana did, and out of the ground, rather than showing roots and displaced earth, it revealed a bronze blade, dripping with dried, coagulating blood.
Somehow, Diana wasn’t shocked, but felt her memory jog at the sight of that blade. She remembered it from somewhere, but couldn’t place the memory. It did, however, embolden her to walk through the now scorched foilage, and find the source of the flames, or else those who’d caused the blaze to run through the brambles and underbrush, without a sign of fire.
The voices came in starts and bursts of understandable language. She couldn’t quite place their nation of origin. But it sounded as if she should know what they meant. But something was missing to some of the phrases that her ears caught upon. Like they were missing proper context or… perhaps body language.
She came to a large outcropping, beneath a boulder and series of thick roots. It semed a likely den for one beast or another. Diana only pondered for a few moments, before hopping down to the bottom of the geological formation. Her feet met with the soft yet scorched leaves at the ground level of the depression. And once she reached the bottom, what Diana saw surprised her. There were green and red shoots of the same nightshade variety she’d seen elsewhere. Dozens of the plants, growing out of this depression, from scorched earth.
The Mortalborn knelt down on the ground to inspect the flowers, taking their petals in her hand. As her skin met with the red flowers, they felt hot without burning, the green leaves cold without freezing. She furrowed her brow, and bent down farther to sniff the flowers, to see if she could identify them that way. She was almost on her belly, flat on the ground and inspecting the flowers, where she felt vines winding their way around her wrists and ankles. At first they only grazed her limbs gently, but then began to tighten, grasping harder until their twines began pulling her into the earth.
Suddenly, down was up, and up was down. Diana was dragged beneath the blood, bloodied sword, robe and all and deposited upon another layer within the forest. Here, everything appeared alive, and there was no sign of scorched earth, nor of the Red-petaled nightshade. The vines relented their grip of her limbs, and the woman curled up, putting her legs beneath her before coming to stand, rubbing the parts of her wrist where the plants had chaffed against them.
She could hear more clearly now the voices, speaking of sacrifices, hunger. Of darkness, decay, and the thrill of predation upon mortalkind.
She cast about, looking for the voices, as they sounded like they were very near. But no lights shone in the darkness, and no faces revealed themselves to her. Still, frustrated at her inability to find the lost souls, she cried out, ”Come on out! Let us hear what you have to say?”
But still no vision was paired to the voices. Only a sensation of dread and angst filled her bellly. Diana held her sword up, and warned against the disembodied voices. ”Tell me what you are, and I may put down my sword.” Diana growled in swiftly evaporating patience. The sounds and voices that assaulted her ears did so now more insistently, although now there were too many of them to distinguish any unifying meaning to them. Their voices reached a crescendo, nearly screaming in unison into her ears, when she took the sword, lifting it to inspect at eye level. The sword transformed then into a large nightshade plant.
Diana’s eyes widened as the great plant then shot toward her face, burying its roots into her skull as visions and memories of another life entered her mind.
It was those visions and memories that remained with her from the dream, when she awoke the next morning. She could hear one of her Hexmates snoring from all the way in her own flat. Yawning, and stretching out the kinks from her body, she rose from bed, and reflected on the very strange dream. She’d recovered and been subjected to the rememberance of a dream of long ago, but it couldn’t be her memory. And afterall, it was only a dream. Dreams weren’t real, were they?
She seemed satisfied with this explanation, and yet was still careful to keep space between herself and any potted plants on the way to her work.
