• Solo • Apex of Grief and Passion

[Woe]

6th of Vhalar 721, continued from here

Like any other religion worth its salt, the Webspinners weren't without their cultural offerings. It wasn't all dark clothing, painted nails, lips, and eyes, or a blasé disregard for morality that attracted one to the fold to begin with. There was a musical aspect of the cult. A side of the religion that offered dance, revelry, music and lyrical allure to attract new followers. And while the bulk of their converts were children, whether runaways, kidnapped, or orphans, they didn't turn away those of a more maleable mind-set that were old and refined enough to appreciate these cultural gifts.

So as Woe descended into the dreamscape of the first sleeper, he couldn't ignore the familiar sound of a hymn that he'd heard often during his upbringing. It sang of one of the Fabled Hall of Temptations. Woe didn't know if those stories of Sintra's Labyrinthine realm of webbing and souls actually existed. But he'd learned enough of it's cosmology through several hymns, each dedicated to the separate Halls of the realm, and also the two other parts of the Eight-Fold realm, the Trap and the Outer Dark, that were less a part of their realm, and more the extreme inner workings or the outer limits.

This particular song spoke of the Halls of Passion. Woe tried to block out the specific words, as they dug at his psyche, threatening to overwhelm him with difficult memories that he wished not to revisit. It did occur to him, as he retrieved himself to lucidity in the dreamscape, that this person whose dream he'd entered into knew of the hymn. Was he or she then a witch hunter, or a webspinner themself? In either event, they were clearly dangerous. Woe wondered now, suspiciously, if the other dreamers might also be part of the Cult, or else similarly knowledgeable about it. It couldn't be a coincidence that this hymn was playing faintly in the background, at any rate.

Regardless of where the dreamer landed on either side of the struggle of Manipulator versus Emancipator, they knew much of the lore that Woe had been indoctrinated into in his youth. Woe found a strange sense of fortification in the knowledge that he'd garnered during that troubled youth. That he knew well how to navigate the Hall of Passion, because it's instruction had been built into many of the hymns, lessons, and general upbringing of a Webspinner. Though Sintra was a trapper and a manipulator, she loathed taking gullible people into her fold. Only those who were best able to resist such passions and temptations were worthy of the heights of the Webspinner.

So as the sensations flooded through Woe, he tried to resist following them to their conclusion. However, there was something disorganized and unusual about the way they presented in this dream. The softness of a lover's hair, the brush of warm skin and the warmth of home. These things called to Woe, begging an answer. He supposed he must respond in some way, lest they draw him along their tempting path. He had only brushed the surface of saying one thing and meaning another. When it came to communicating without words, with action or engaging the other senses, it was a new frontier.

But Woe took his experience with his son, Toutouye, and their communication through a combinatino of signed language and pantomime. When the skin was felt to brush against him, the invisible temptress was rebuffed by a solid non-verbal 'No' from Woe. He couldn't quite place how he'd delivered his command to back off, but it seemed to work.

Soon enough, he was forming more complex statements with a combination of visual cues as well as sensory ones. When at last, he felt the temptress of passion far away from him, all memory of the finer things in his life that had made it worth living, Woe fell out of her dream, having found her at the center. He walked from the bridged connection of her dreamscape, toward the next.

And there, he found an unparalleled sense of grief.

[Woe]

Thus was he almost entirely swallowed by the sense of grief that overcame him. He began to realize that something wasn't entirely correct about the dreamings of these dreamers. It was almost as if they were designed this way, but with the way that Dreamscapes functioned, from what Woe realized through his lucid state, none could yet govern their dream state. So he could only surmise that the resulting illusions and visions that occurred to him in those dreamscapes were a result of either chemical inducement to alter the psychology of the subjected dreamers, or else their minds were s affected by delirium that they couldn't help project it into their subconscious. There were other possibilities besides, and not all of them were mutually exclusive. It would've been fascinating to examine if it weren't for the immediate consequence and danger it put Woe in, as he was lucid in a wild dreamscape, where nearly anything could happen.

And happen things did. Woe found himself thrown through the dreamscape by a force that was invisible at first but then began to take shape, molded by Woe's own subconscious reaction to the sensation of grief. And who had he taken more grief from, whether intended or not, than from Mister Magpie. The blonde biqaj stood over him, not quite right in his form, but a close enough facsimile that Woe took the point. He felt the coldness in his heart as the look of accusation crossed Magpie's face. Woe knew shame, of what he'd done, what he'd brought Emilia to that night arcs ago. He'd tried to blame it away, to place the blame at the feet of Magpie, for whatever remedy he'd tried to wright upon her mind. He'd blamed his jealousy of their connection, of her newfound magic. In some ways, it was tempting to follow that line of blame. And for once in his lucid state, Woe found he could almost sympathize with Balthazar's obvious objection to Woe's action against Elisabeth.

The eyes of Magpie were a whirl of different colors until Woe felt pulled in. All the while, the hymn of grief that Woe knew from his Webspinner upbringing was playing somewhere on the sonic lattice of every sensation he felt here.

He was pulled in and brought back to the Glass Temple, where Woe had made the sacrifice. He looked Elisabeth in the eyes and thought nothing of tossing her life to the abyss, for the sake of the many. To evade the greater grievance, he was willing to take on the responsibility of one person's life.

As he looked across the barrier that Chamadarst had erected, he saw beyond her to the ghosts of Woe's past. Lottie Bird, Erastus, Labrae, and Emma Heen. All with blame on their eyes, instilling him with grief. Try as he might find the key to this piece of the puzzle, as he had with the dreamer that embodied passion, he couldn't quite understand what was expected of him to evade the consequence of utmost grief.

All he could think to do, to avoid the grief of his sins weighing down on him was to turn away from them. Yet even as he did so, their burden carried with him the messages from their accusing glances. He felt the meaning in their faces, their eyes, he saw Magpie and Emilia, sitting in a dungeon as the scene changed in this unorganized miasma of feeling. His own feelings seemed to give shape to their own dreams, or perhaps it was part of himself that influenced the dreamer now.

As he looked on Magpie, he could see the threads of his tangle rising from his hair, plain as day, showing him the context clues he'd sussed out during their session in Woe's basement. Then he looked on Emilia, and found nothing there. A dark abyss lost in the strands of her hair. There was no emotion there, no regret, only cold Logic. And it was this that he attenuated to, drawing closer, until he could nearly feel her. Then, he saw her for who she was. It was the dreamer. He laid his lips on the crown of her head, and so escaped from the Dreamscape, taking from it a bridge to the next Sleeper.

[Doran]

Woe:

Knowledge:
Socialization: Communication can be conveyed without sound, through touch and visual cues as well.
Socialization: Contextual clues can portend more meaning than mere words.
Psychology: Reading a face to understand the depths of anguish.
Psychology: A person's psyche can be fragile and very impressionable to a visiting dreamer.

Loot: -
Lost: -
Wealth: -
Injuries: -
Renown: -
Magic XP: -
Skill Review: Appropriate to level.
Points: 10

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Comments: First of all, I like the post templates that you used. They are very fitting for a dream thread in my opinion!

With that being said, I'm glad that you decided to continue this series. I found the way that you started, by telling your readers about the cultural offerings of the Webspinners, and how hearing the hymn affected Woe, very effective.

I don't know much about them, so this was fascinating!

You conveyed that dreamlike atmosphere very well in my opinion - and I loved the part of the thread where a lucid Woe faced the ghosts and the sins of his past.

There was not a single line of dialogue in this thread, but I didn't miss the lack of dialogue at all. In fact, I didn't even notice it until after I had finished reading.

This was a beautifully written thread!

Enjoy your rewards!