This is what happens when you fall asleep watching anime
Last night's dream, put into words but otherwise unembellished. Blogging about dreams is unforgivable, I know, but this one had a pretty awesome plot.
---
I had finally defeated the evil mage, after enduring many tests of strength and bravery, infiltrating the enemy’s castle, and learning the secret of how to penetrate the mage’s inner sanctum from an elderly scholar I had rescued from a diabolical curse.
Now the scholar and I stood victorious on the flagstone plaza outside the castle. Below us, the vast plains were thronged with the magical denizens of the realm celebrating the demise of their cruel overlord: centaurs and pixies, talking animals of all varieties, even sentient trees, for in this land nothing was insensate.
As banners waved in the breeze and a band of animals in military regalia played a trumpet fanfare, a mongoose official wearing a red satin sash proclaimed the scholar and me the new king and queen of the land. An entire forest’s worth of shrubs stood in formation before us, each clasping a single, fragile purple blossom, and as the trumpets played they processed forward to give me their flowers, one by one.
But the scholar and I were preoccupied; our defeated enemy lay in chains in his own dungeon, but we had not yet determined how to prevent him from doing further harm. We planned to banish him to an uninhabited realm, but lacked the magical knowledge to do so.
Anxious and frustrated, the scholar could take no more of the jubilant parades. His voice, sharp with frustration, rang out across the plains: “We need some quiet, and time to think! You must act like non-magical animals and plants, so we can work.”
The moment he gave this order, our obedient subjects complied. The band dropped their trumpets. The mongoose vicegerent meekly dropped to all four paws and padded away. The shrubs froze in place, each still holding a branch out toward me; their purple flowers fluttered in the breeze.
The plains fell silent.
We stared out at our realm. Copses of trees stood rooted to the ground in unlikely configurations, as though planted by an eccentric tree farmer. Around their roots scurried thousands of animals, silent, unthinking. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
“Never mind,” the scholar called out. “Be yourselves again. I was wrong.”
But our subjects had complied with his orders precisely. He told them to act like insensate creatures, and insensate creatures do not understand English. In accordance with his first command, they had become deaf and dumb to human language, and there was now no way to convey to them the message that they should stop pretending to be less than they were.
We had robbed the land of magic; we had robbed the creatures of their consciousness. No, we had done worse than that. We had not removed our subjects’ intelligence, but had rendered them unable to use it. Thousands of conscious souls were trapped in small, furred bodies and immobile, unbending trees, unable to speak, unable to think. Having banished the evil mage, we had wrought an evil worse than he had ever dreamed.
I woke up crying.
---
I had finally defeated the evil mage, after enduring many tests of strength and bravery, infiltrating the enemy’s castle, and learning the secret of how to penetrate the mage’s inner sanctum from an elderly scholar I had rescued from a diabolical curse.
Now the scholar and I stood victorious on the flagstone plaza outside the castle. Below us, the vast plains were thronged with the magical denizens of the realm celebrating the demise of their cruel overlord: centaurs and pixies, talking animals of all varieties, even sentient trees, for in this land nothing was insensate.
As banners waved in the breeze and a band of animals in military regalia played a trumpet fanfare, a mongoose official wearing a red satin sash proclaimed the scholar and me the new king and queen of the land. An entire forest’s worth of shrubs stood in formation before us, each clasping a single, fragile purple blossom, and as the trumpets played they processed forward to give me their flowers, one by one.
But the scholar and I were preoccupied; our defeated enemy lay in chains in his own dungeon, but we had not yet determined how to prevent him from doing further harm. We planned to banish him to an uninhabited realm, but lacked the magical knowledge to do so.
Anxious and frustrated, the scholar could take no more of the jubilant parades. His voice, sharp with frustration, rang out across the plains: “We need some quiet, and time to think! You must act like non-magical animals and plants, so we can work.”
The moment he gave this order, our obedient subjects complied. The band dropped their trumpets. The mongoose vicegerent meekly dropped to all four paws and padded away. The shrubs froze in place, each still holding a branch out toward me; their purple flowers fluttered in the breeze.
The plains fell silent.
We stared out at our realm. Copses of trees stood rooted to the ground in unlikely configurations, as though planted by an eccentric tree farmer. Around their roots scurried thousands of animals, silent, unthinking. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
“Never mind,” the scholar called out. “Be yourselves again. I was wrong.”
But our subjects had complied with his orders precisely. He told them to act like insensate creatures, and insensate creatures do not understand English. In accordance with his first command, they had become deaf and dumb to human language, and there was now no way to convey to them the message that they should stop pretending to be less than they were.
We had robbed the land of magic; we had robbed the creatures of their consciousness. No, we had done worse than that. We had not removed our subjects’ intelligence, but had rendered them unable to use it. Thousands of conscious souls were trapped in small, furred bodies and immobile, unbending trees, unable to speak, unable to think. Having banished the evil mage, we had wrought an evil worse than he had ever dreamed.
I woke up crying.