Part 4 - Otherworldly Dreams
Objectives: Decode the meaning behind these otherworldly dreams.
The dreams are as follows:
You fall into a strangely peaceful sleep, as you drift away into the dream you sort of, lift up out of your body and into a blue fire, the voices reach a crescendo before going silent one by one, leaving your body and becoming a formless mass outside of your body. They point towards a mass of crying undead, picking through the ruins of a city, locked inside broken homes. They seem excited, and you hear a comforting familiar voice behind you (from before your time in Irindor), but as you turn to face it you wake.
Your spirit sinks into cold stone, and the silent wailing of holy dead avert their eyes as you descend. You see the great emblem of the Living Shadow carved into the great cavern below, surrounded by cold dead faces each familiar yet distant.
There is an overlap between Voss and Hades’ domains and the events in Fane.
Thunder roars in the shattered sky in the maelstrom at Irindor’s heart, the lightning arcing slowly through the air towards an alter surrounded by five stone effigies: Rhea, E’san, Hades, Persephone, and a weathered faceless statue that seems familiar. When the lightning reaches the altar it arcs into the statues, until it reaches the faceless effigy which breaks.
The statues are asking you to make the right choices, listen to your heart unleaded with doubts. Find the truth break the curse, and return home.
There’s a sea of holy half-dead kneeling face down towards a tower amid a ruined city. A shattered sky and lightning frozen in time striking the top of the tower. From the rafters of the gothic structure hang four people with bags over their heads. The doors to the tower rattle loudly, something attempting to break free, “Even fate is not set in stone, Melinoe! you can break the cycle!” The lightning strikes the door and suddenly the dead look up towards you waiting. Waiting for you to make a choice. The weight of their stare turns you to stone and you feel your pulse slow to a crawl as you are trapped forever with the cacophony of voices in your head. “To hesitate is to fail, to fail is to die, a familiar burden for you is it not sister?”
They are clearly undead, but not mindless. “Holy half-dead” is something that the blood cult referred to as vampires, liches, ect. undead who kept their sapience. The blood cult is not the first to use this term but they are the most recent.
You are in a frozen wasteland, the windchill so cold your skin feels like it’s splitting open, frozen bodies circle around you kneeling with their faces downcast palms out as if begging or praying. In the distance a floating castle drifts closer, it appears familiar with towering gothic buildings and flame-scarred ruins. Lightning flashes in the sky, followed by the roar of thunder. Voices are lost among the cacophony of noise. The wind howls louder and the faces of the sacred dead look up at you all of them missing their eyes. As they open their mouth to speak they are blown apart by the raging wind and lost like ash in the storm.
“She” is me but not.
You’re in a ruined tower, a raging maelstrom overhead, the sky torn asunder. The portal overhead a peek into a realm of blue fire and gry wastes. You’re alone, the blessed half-dead scattered remain surround you. That gnawing guilt at the back of your mind. A broken statue of a familiar face laughs, “All that sacrifice for nothing.”
There is a hole in the Earth calling your name, and a familiar yet unwelcome voice beckons you home. You hate this person, though you only met them once. You consider staying to spite them, even if it means never going home again. The blessed half-dead in Fane look towards you and offer you shelter from the growing storm. “You’d you truly abandon your family to spite me, girl?”
The Earth is struck by a series of repeating lightning strikes sundering the streets of Fane. The blessed half-dead flee, to ruined homes that offer no shelter. The laughter of a familiar hated face echoes through the streets. “You bring this curse with you wherever it is you lay your roots don’t you, sister?” She waves her hand and your friends and family are blown away like ash in the wind. “You cling to mortality as if it is some sacred thing, all I’ve done is expedite the process.” The city sinks into the ocean and cracks apart. As you drown lungs filing with brine you still hear her mocking you, forever mocking you.
You sleep, and it’s just a vision of you in the burnt-out library with Bramak Blackhand in the armchair, almost as if it’s an out-of-body experience. Watching yourself.