A Lesson in Dreaming

Log Info

• Title: A Lesson in Dreaming

• Emitter: Dolan

• Characters: Dolan, Ravenstongue

• Place: Somewhere in dreaming

• Summary: Dolan meets Ravenstongue in the dream, and while things get off to a rocky start, both Redeemer and sorceress manage to break through the nightmarish parts of their dreams. Dolan teaches Ravenstongue a bit about how to control the dream, and imparts some advice on using the totem. The two friends arrange to meet up later in the waking world to discuss some of the darkness that they've dealt with in the past.

GAME: Dolan rolls will: (18)+10: 28

It is a couple of days later when Dolan does finally appear in Cor'lana's dreams, but when he does, it is a somewhat different sight from his waking self. It is in his adventuring breastplate over a high-collared shirt, but the leather cuff across his left shoulder is absent, and his gear includes no weapons at the moment, only twin cloaks, one white edged in gold, the other a mundane gray traveling cloak. The golden gem is notably missing from the right side of his face, but there is simply no eye present, only furrowed and melted scars softened only a little bit from its true waking self. The effect is - disturbing, but he wears no eyepatch.

"Lana?" he calls, looking around at the front of the quiet house on its quiet cobblestoned street with its rustling trees.

GAME: Ravenstongue rolls Will: (5)+14: 19

Inside of the house is Cor'lana, but different than how Dolan's seen her. She's wearing a blue dress that seems like it's seen better days, the hem beginning to fray and unwind from lack of care. She wears spectacles made from dark wood, and she's quietly braiding her hair to hang over one shoulder instead of how she normally keeps it free. Her violet eyes are dark, with tears streaming down her face, and her shoulders shake with the sobs that Dolan can't hear.

But the door to the house opens, as while it seems Dolan's words aren't reaching her at the moment--there's a part of this dream that is open to them.

GAME: Dolan rolls will: (6)+10: 16

Uh-oh. Dolan's lone eye roves over the house itself, and its figure in the window, and he stares at the front wall of the house, willing it to vanish. Instead, the glint of black metal begins to appear in the cobblestones, and he shakes his head hard, forcing himself to approach the house and push on the door. Quickly, mind, even as the look of black metal begins to overtake the stone of the house, and it begins to form chains.

Seeing it open to him, he fairly runs inside, and slams the door behind him, leaning his back on the door.

GAME: Ravenstongue rolls Will: (1)+14: 15 (EPIC FAIL)

The sight that Dolan walks into is even worse once he can see why Cor'lana's crying. There's an elaborate ritual circle drawn down on the floor. A pile of ash on the other side. The feeling of powerful magic hanging in the air like static electricity. And a perch where Pothy would be sitting, perhaps, if he was here.

Cor'lana turns to look at Dolan, her hands clasped tightly around the three strands of hair. She's a little skinnier than Dolan's seen her, and that's saying something, as in reality, she's already slender and petite.

"I--I don't remember," she says, the violet eyes almost hollow as she speaks with such a soft voice. "I don't remember... who I am. Where's Mother? Is she gone? Where's the bird that flew off?"

She reaches out slowly with her hands, like she's trying to swim in slow motion. "This... None of this is real, is it? I'm... I'm not real. Was I ever?" Her voice breaks on the last word, and she sobs again, for reasons that she likely does not fully comprehend.

Behind RT, and behind Dolan, the door vanishes, and the black metal look overtakes the entire inside of the wall, becoming plain gray stone from which a thousand sets of chains - spring. All of them at once lash at Dolan, pinned against the wall, but his entire focus lies on the ritual circle. It's almost as if - he lets them have him, and they grab like a hundred nooses, chaining him inexorably, spread-eagled to the stone. Replace it! is all he can manage to force himself to think -

The macabre scene lasts for just moments, before sunlight and grass flood the house. The circle, the chair, the perch, the stone, the chains - all vanish before the flood of sunlight and grass as it unfurls across the dreamscape like a carpet.

When the wall at last vanishes, Dolan falls with a cry to the grassy field, the beginnings of wildflowers beginning to peek out of the grass in hues of yellows and blues, and lies there for a minute, crumpled in the grass, breathing hard. The clothing that had begin to vanish from him reforms, even as Lana watches.

As soon as she's out of the house and is standing in the field of wildflowers, Cor'lana's appearance changes. The glasses on her face fade, the braid lifts itself into the air by an unseen wind and unwinds itself, almost gently, and the dark look in her eyes fades, as she looks at her outstretched hands and sees the curuchuil mark on her left hand, and the ring with three 'stars' on her finger. She looks to be now as healthy as she is in reality, and the blue dress she wears repairs itself.

"How could I forget," Cor'lana murmurs, and her bottom lip wobbles for a moment--but she tears herself away to look down at Dolan. His crumpled-up form is cause for alarm, and she dives down to the ground beside him to inspect him. "Dolan! Dolan, it's okay. We're here. We're... We're safe."

"I - I'm here, Lana. It's okay. Phew, that was a nasty one." With an effort, Dolan pushes himself up off of the grass, not seeming to have any trouble with the operation, but still breathing hard. He turns his head towards her, and tries on a sheepish grin. "I almost forgot the first rule. It can fly out of your head quick when you're faced with some of this shit."

He turns himself to a sitting position in the grass. "So, the more you try not to think about a thing, the more you're going to think about it. To get rid of something you don't want, you have to think about something else. Replace it with something you do want."

Cor'lana holds her hand out to Dolan with a nod, smiling gently at him. "I--I was having a nightmare," she explains. "Before I realized I was dreaming. A nightmare I've had often."

She closes her eyes, and... In the distance, there's the croaking of ravens. When she opens her eyes again, a raven flies down into the field of flowers and begins to roll around in them, which puts a smile on her face. "Grandfather's birds do that," she explains. "I didn't want my nightmare to come back, so I thought of something... easy. And happy."

Despite himself, despite the dark look in the lone brown eye, Dolan's sudden grin as he turns his heads to watch the raven's antics blooms across his face. "They're having fun." He lies back down in the grass, arms behind his head, cloaks sprawled out messily underneath him. "I'll ask you more about that later, because if I ask now it'll come right back." As if on cue, the ritual circle begins to etch itself in the grass, but only half-formed. "So how much did Tel show you?"

"He showed me how he can dream and change things, in addition to spilling blood onto the totem to produce larger effects," Cor'lana said. "I could do it myself to a degree, although I never tried to change the landscape. I only ever... pictured myself having wings."

And as she says that, dark wings, like a raven's but so much larger, sprout from her back. Cor'lana genuinely smiles so widely as she gives them an experimental beat. "Like that," she says. "Grandfather told me the first of his children had wings, and... I've wanted them ever since. I have to settle for wings of spellcraft and... wings in my dreams. Like these."

Dolan's gaze goes up in awe at the mighty wings protruding from her back. "You've always dreamed about having wings, yeah? Never really even thought about it," he muses, thoughtfully. "You can change the landscape around you, you can change what you have, what you're wearing. Just - yeah, about the totems. Don't spill blood on them unless you've got backup with you. Doing that will draw attention to you. Yeah, it makes them more powerful, but it also gets attention."

The smile fades off of his face, and suddenly, blood appears on the grass around him, although it doesn't seem to be so much flowing from him as fresh stains. He doesn't appear to notice, at first. "Sometimes it can happen even if it's not supposed to."

"Then I'm not bringing mine into the dream with me," Cor'lana says, "nor am I shedding blood onto it unless I have you, Tel, and others with me. I don't want to ask for trouble when I don't have the tools to deal with it."

She looks down at the blood on the grass and on Dolan. She studies him for a moment with curious violet eyes and says, "What else can you show me?" The wings on her back beat a little again, and there's a slight sense of mischief that plays on her face, like she just might take off into the sky at any moment. She might even take him with her.

Her eyes on what's around him draws Dolan's attention, and he stares at the stains around him, but sighs when they don't readily go away. The smile fades entirely, and he gets to his feet and steps out of the bloodstained circle of grass, looking out across the grassy landscape and away from Lana. Around him, the grass and flowers are fading out, becoming half-there, replaced with - a fairly small, dark, and cluttered flat, that is again, half-there. "If multiple people picture the same thing, it becomes easier to manifest," he explains finally. "It's all about your will. But if two people are picturing different things, the form of it will be mixed, or it won't fit together, or it might shift between forms. The effect is stronger if you're a follower of the god or goddess that made the statue."

Cor'lana's been in the flat before, albeit briefly, so she pictures it too, and the wildflowers give way more fully to it. The raven that was in the wildflowers flies over to Cor'lana's shoulder, giving her a bit of an unhappy merp that his flowers are gone, but she just gives the bird a little kiss on his fluffy head and provides scratches to his shaggy throat feathers... and then he disappears in a fine mist.

"That makes sense," Cor'lana says. "In other words, if we're going to beat our enemies at their game--we need to be unified wholly in intent. Unified wholly in will."

A half a quirk of a grin returns to half of Dolan's features - well, all of them, really, it's an odd thing, because his scarred features should not be able to do that. Here, though, they can, and she gets just a glimpse of what the whole expression would have looked like in the waking world. "Yeah, exactly. Hey, can we try to bring the grass back? I - kind of liked it. I see too much stone walls, I think. Could use a little dirt on me."

"I never even thought about having wings, either," he admits. "I guess I'm just an on-the-ground kind of man."

Cor'lana grins back at Dolan. "I think I prefer the grass, too," she says, and she thinks about the wildflowers, the sun on her skin, the peacefulness, the birdsong, the blue sky--

And it roils back into existence. Cor'lana's wings beat a little behind her, and the violet-eyed sorceress seems almost a little too at ease with this configuration of things. "Perhaps we could imagine a babbling brook to sit by," she says. "Perhaps a swingset. A large tree-stump to rest on. I... I could even try to bring Pothy into the dream with us, too, but he's probably asleep with his own duties to care for." Duties? What duties does Pothy have?

Dolan's smile broadens, but what he means by unified will becomes clear as he, too, pictures the same things - and much of it is the same. Grass. Wildflowers. Grasshoppers. Birdsong. But the brook, when it comes into being, can't seem to decide which way to go, and it switches between two different directions - three, no four - as it curves across the landscape. The sun is warm, but not uncomfortably so, but it switches between two different places in the sky. The tree stump can't decide whether it's a tree-stump or a tree, and it keeps shifting positions. Odd, really.

Cor'lana observes the environment trying to decide on what it's doing, and... she snickers a little, turning to look at Dolan with a sheer delight in her eyes. "Well, we're trying," she says. "Let's pick a direction for these things to go. Details are important, after all--I know as much from all of the writing I do. Let's start with... The tree stump. Only two feet high, I think. So it's convenient for me to sit on."

Dolan, too, starts to laugh as he observes the wonky environment they've managed to create together, and many of the details fade. The grass and bright sunshine remain, though. "A tree stump low enough for you to sit on, then. Picture how high you want it, and I'll match it." Something wicked lurks in the lone brown eye, though, a cheeky sort of amusement.

Interestingly, the whole field is less strong in its image to his right than to his left, but the sounds coming from it are stronger.

Cor'lana does picture it: a tree stump high enough to sit on for her petite height, only a couple of feet up from the ground, and... it settles into place. Merrily, she takes a seat there, with her wings beating behind her to find their own place to rest on the tree stump. It's like she's had them for much longer.

"It's interesting how the dream... interacts with us as individuals," she remarks, looking to Dolan. Her head tilts to the side like a curious bird might. "Do you think the tree was having problems with its size because... Well, I'm short, and you are tall, so we have different perspectives on what 'a tree stump of sitting size' might be? Things like that."

"Probably," Dolan agrees, turning himself to watch what she is doing, and staring at it intently. The tree stump remains the same size, but acquires rings in curious detail, a sharp focus. "Sunguard Zeke perceives the world through smell, so when he conjures a dream, it's a world of smells. I mean, you can see it - but it's almost overwhelming." The lone eye blinks a couple of times, remembering, but no smells are conjured, nothing beyond the usual smell of grass and flowers on a sunny day. "I guess it's about what you perceive, and what you expect to perceive, at least a little bit. Whatever you're thinking about, as you perceive it."

He watches her, and those wings. "It almost looks like they're a part of you, Lana," he offers.

Cor'lana's face blooms again in happiness, like Dolan just paid her a compliment. "Thank you," she says. "I... It's the strangest, and silliest thing, I know, but when I do have wings, and I do take flight, I feel happy. More connected with Grandfather and all of his children before me. When you've been left all alone in the world like I have before--you savor those connections that you do have."

The formation of the ritual circle from the house in the beginning of the dream begins to appear on the stump, but it fades as Cor'lana looks at Dolan square-on. "I... Forgive me. I've never found the right words, and that's an awful shortcoming for a poet to have. But in the context of our current situation: how does it feel here, in the dream? For you to see."

Sympathy writes itself across Dolan's features. "Sounds pretty awful," he says, plopping himself comfortably in the grass at the base of the stump, heedless of the potential for grass stains, not that such is likely in a dream. "Can't say I've ever been there, but you aren't now, are you?"

"Seeing? Well, sometimes I can see on that side in my dreams, and sometimes I can't. I can't right now. I grew up being able to, so it's not weird. It's only been gone the last couple of years?" The topic doesn't seem to trouble him at all. "I'm used to it either way, and it doesn't bother me like it used to. I mean, it's not going to change. That eye's gone forever, and - I've gotten used to not having it. The artifice helps. The enhancement's gotten better, but I can't always have it. I mean, if there's no magic, or we can't have magic items, or something happens to it? I can fight without it pretty well. I can hear where they are, even if I can't see them. Most people are louder than they realize."

He pauses, then turns his head more fully towards her. "I don't like not being able to see people I don't know real well. If me and Andie are together, she'll stand on my right, and that's why. She guards my blind side. I know where she is and I don't have to ask. But - I've gotten used to it. Yeah, people still look at me weirdly a lot." The easy, comfortable look fades. "I guess to some people I am a monster. But - there are people who love me no matter what I look like. And - it's like Pothy said. I can't just mope. Even when I hurt, I've got a job to do, yeah? Besides, sometimes being scary-looking is kind of useful." The grin that blooms across his face again takes on a wicked note.

Cor'lana frowns a little at even the mere suggestion of Dolan being a monster. Her wings bat a little behind her, too, as though they signal their own brand of sympathy. "But you aren't," she says. "A monster, that is. You just have something that you deal with, something that's more visible than what I've gone through and emerged with. If the circumstances were different--"

Her violet eyes darken, but then she shuts her eyes. A plush toy of Pothy forms in her arms, and her expression brightens as she squeezes the dream-toy version of him. "But there's not much use thinking on what would have happened," she says, "and... Pothy is right. As he often is, when he's not busy eating snacks."

"There really isn't, is there? All that wishing doesn't change a thing." Dolan continues to watch Lana, even as she snuggles the plush toy close to her. "Pothy's your comfort, isn't he." It's said quietly, but it isn't a question. It's a keen observation, and a thoughtful one. "I don't want to make you relive anything," he goes on, more gently. "Just tell me honestly. There's stuff Tel doesn't know, isn't there."

Dolan's words make Cor'lana cuddle the Pothy toy a little tighter, and she offers a sort of bashful smile, not quite meeting the Redeemer's gaze when he asks for the truth. "Tel knows," she says. "About my childhood. About Mother's passing. The two years after. And... Of course, you both were there for the necromancer. But..."

She takes a hard sort of breath. Cor'lana leans down and kisses Pothy-plush on his head. "He will never truly, truly understand the pain of it all. The loneliness. The grief and the feeling that I was simply alive only as a means of torture. Not knowing who I was, not knowing where I belong, not knowing what family was like or what friendship was like. And I do not ever want him to be able to understand to that level, because I was broken for a long time."

Cor'lana lifts her head up to Dolan and offers him a sort of sad smile. "You will know some of it better. Not all, but some. But... Here is not the place to discuss it. Lest the nightmares come again. Come visit me in the waking world and we might speak of it some more."

"Yeah. I had that feeling. Tel can know - but he doesn't really understand. Like you, I don't want him to ever find out." Dolan nods slowly at the mention of the necromancer, the memories all too clear. "I'll come by sometime when he isn't home, yeah? I might know better than you think. Get some real sleep, Lana. I'll tell you more when we meet in the waking." With an effort, he rolls up to his feet, and prepares to turn and walk away.

Cor'lana nods from where she sits on the tree stump, still holding the Pothy toy in her clutches. "See you later," she says, watching him return to his own dreaming, and she looks down to the Pothy in her arms.

"You're cuddly, but I like the real thing better," she mumbles. So... with a final beat of her wings, she murmurs a farewell to dreaming.

And a hello to the waking world, where Pothy can surely be bribed into a snuggle with the requisite amount of snacks.