Dion't blame the moon, it only glows

[lest_ye_become]

Another night comes to the station. Or night cycle, anyway. And with it come the usual phantasmagorias of sleep... though tonight, there's something special. Here and there might be a shape out the corner of an eye, or a figure glimpsed dimly in the distance. Closer-up it's a thing like an adult, womanly shape, carved out of shadow and specks of

Comments

[wheelsandbeats]

The station doesn't have the proper bedding for trolls. Tavros, like all his kind, should have been sleeping encased in sopor slime, a sedative that muffles the bloody visions that plague his race's subconscious. Without it, the boy's sleep has been restless and brief, something that he puts off for fear of what he might dream. He can't hold out forever, though. His sleeplessness catches up to him at last, and Tavros drifts off in his wheelchair in a dim corridor.

He is weilding a long, black lance from astride his beloved Horsaroni, dressed in a Tron-esque suit, the uniform of the Alternian army. Around him are countless other mounted trolls in similar outfits, all bearing down on some unknown enemy ahead of them. White animals surround many of them, the guardians that they symbiotically raised and were raised by. Tavros's own small flying bovine guardian, Tinkerbull, flutters at his shoulder

[lest_ye_become]

A simple humanlike form won't do for a dream like this. Certainly not. A certain sense of spectacle is demanded-a certain grand impropriety.

Here, the shadow is a dragon, wingless and sinuous, with a body carved from dying red-starred galaxies and the darkness of interstellar space. It stays above the press of riders, keeping up with them easily, though none but, perhaps, Tavros notice that it's there.

[wheelsandbeats]

In his dream, it isn't Tavros who notices the interloper. Tinkerbull does. Unfortunately, even in Tavros's dreams, his lusus is nearly useless. The warning noises the bull offers to Tavros are drowned out by the sound of hooves and the last of the other riders disemboweling herself messily.

k1LL METhe words appear scrawled across Tinkerbull's side, this time in the blood colour they share. If he wasn't already crying his eyes out, he probably would have started again as he dismounted, walked a few steps-of course he could walk, why wouldn't he be able to?-and skewered his guardian without a moment's hesitation. As his lance hit, an infinitely long, thin lance pierces him from the sky, passing clean through his stomach and jabbing into the ground. His knees give out and the boy slides down to the ground with a cry

[lest_ye_become]

The dragon spreads broad wings that weren't there at all a moment before, and they unfold as big as the sky, edged in buzzing fractals. For just a moment they blank out everything else: there is the patch of earth against which Tavros is impaled, and then a shell of stars and galaxies, deep and beautiful. And then in shifts again: the infinity of wings withdraws from the sky and wraps around the infinity of spear, and together they dissolve into clouds of delicate obsidian-winged butterflies that whisk themselves away on secret air currents towards the edges of the world.

And so just the dragon and Tavros are left again, it giving the strong impression of watching him despite its strange living-outline nature leaving it unclear if it even has any eyes.

[wheelsandbeats]

The dream's setting seems to shift in response to the dragon's presence. Tavros is now lying on the edge of a seemingly endless expanse of blue trees with pink leaves. His friend Terezi loves dragons, so it's only natural that his subconscious would link her home forest with his mysterious saviour.

Tavros is too awed to notice the change at all. "Whoaaa," he whispers up into the sky as the world reappears in a cloud of butterflies. After boggling for a good long time, he props himself up on his arms and calls out, "Umm. Thank you!" He clears his throat and speaks again quickly, this time including that same hint of psychic suggestion. "If you want, you can come down." Tavros isn't afraid of beasts, no matter how magnificent. It's people that scare him.

Someone with less imagination might have figured out that this was just a dream, but Tavros's head is filled with adventures and magic even when he's awake. Rescue by dragon isn't exactly a regular feature of his dreams, but it is far from the most ludicrous thing his mind has

[lest_ye_become]

The dragon swoops in a circle around him, and... is it just a trick of perspective? It's like that moment when the drawing of the duck becomes an upside-down old lady instead-all at once, it is no longer a very large dragon far away from him, but a rather smaller person-scaled one just next to him.

[wheelsandbeats]

"Wow, okay, that was really awesome." Tavros's bloody dream is already fading from his mind, but the rainbow of blood splatter across his body and the gaping wound piercing his gut remain. An apparently endless river of brown blood is pouring out of him, but he doesn't seem upset by it very much at all. In fact, he is apparently too preoccupied with his rescuer to acknowledge it at all.

"I won't disappear if I touch you, will I?" he asks, extending a hand towards the dragon hesitantly. "Like my lance did, the one that you got rid of."

[lest_ye_become]

Of course not, say the stars across the dragon's side, flowing into an elegant calligraphy that's somehow perfectly understandable despite being in a sigil-marked language five thousand years forgotten. It's a bit strange to the touch-not quite there, in the proper sense, like touching a slick, featureless plane of glass.

[wheelsandbeats]

That's all the invitation Tavros needs. He reaches out his hand experimentally, touching its smooth hide. The touch turns into petting, more for Tavros's own comfort than anything else. Hopefully it doesn't mind being painted with blood smears.

After a moment, he speaks up. "This doesn't feel like a real thing, not exactly." He hesitates again. "None of this does, actually. I think I would probably already be dead if this wasn't fake. So, uhh. What's happening?"

[lest_ye_become]

Reality rotates ninety degrees, and suddenly Tavros is in, instead of a forest clearing, a tea house decorated in a strange blend of ancient Chinese and Roman styles. (He might still be bleeding, but if so, it drains into the runnels of the paneled-wood floor somehow without leaving any stains.) A delicately feminine shape carved from stars in the same way that the dragon was is sitting across from him. It (she?) sips primly at a cup of tea before setting it down.

"You're dreaming, of course," the figure says in a gentle, chiming voice.

[wheelsandbeats]

"Oh." He takes a moment to consider this. "Oh. So, then, I'm just asleep somewhere, and none of this happened. I'm not actually hurt, not more than I always am, anyway, and Tinkerbull's okay, he's just not here. Oh, and you're fake, just like everyone else, so it doesn't have to be weird that I was petting you when you looked like a dragon instead of a, uhh, whatever you are. So that's okay."

He looks down at the circular hole in his abdomen. "Can I fix this, then, since it's just a fake thing in my head?"

[lest_ye_become]

"Oh, I'm not fake," the figure says, in a tone that's faintly amused, "but you are dreaming." It (she?) tilts its head, looking at him. "Focus enough, and you should be able to. It's not hard, once you get the hang of it. Visualize."

[wheelsandbeats]

Her tone worries him--she couldn't be real, could she? Was this like SGRUB, where his dream self had woken up whenever his real self was asleep? But that is all behind him now. Her claiming to be real is just part of the dream. Probably.

"Okay, ummmm," he tries to focus instead on getting rid of the gaping wound. He can't banish the nervousness from his face, but he closes his eyes and...

and...

Nope, he can't stop thinking about everything. The dream he just experienced was as awful as anything he's been through, and although the wound doesn't hurt, it is still very distracting to be bleeding horribly. Combined with his anxiety about the figure in his dreams, he simply cannot manage to control it like that. He opens his eyes again and looks to the figure for help. "Uhhh..."

[lest_ye_become]

"Don't try and change yourself. That's impossible," the star-figure says in a gentle, almost mocking tone of voice. "Close your eyes and think about how you have no eyes to close. You're not really here, are you?" She smiles at him, for just a moment, with shining teeth carved from the white-hot stormfronts of supernovas. "How can you be hurt, when there's nothing here to hurt? There's not even a here, in fact."

The walls of the tea-house have started gradually drifting apart, pulled on cranes, revealing the entire building to be an elaborate set on a soundstage. In fact, there's a boom mike leaning in next to Tavros, just out of view of the view of the bulky rolling camera now being pointed at him by a nameless stagehand.

[wheelsandbeats]

"That's- wow, I'll try." He's pretty awed by her demonstration. You can't argue with something like that. He follows her instructions and squeezes his eyes shut. The wound winks out of existence shortly, followed by the colourful blood smeared all over.

Although his hands are feeling his gut where the hole was moments before, he asks a question before he opens his eyes. "Did I do it right?" Although he does it all the time in his waking life, his mind is having troubles jumping through the hoops of believing in a thing while acknowledging that it doesn't exist. Doing it consciously is a lot harder.

[lest_ye_become]

The table, and the chairs the two are sitting on, start leisurely proceeding down an escape hatch into a bathyspheric submarine made of solid gold, where wide portholes give glimpses of insight into the lives of undersea mer-accountants. "You'll have to ask yourself that," the figure says. Some of the edges of the outline have melted away-what was originally hinting at the shape of an almost painfully elaborate outfit has become the rough shape of a much simpler and more casual dress.