Betrayal is a cruel thing that hides behind pretty lies and smiles at you with teeth like mirrors. Teeth that reflect tongues black with lies as you are coaxed to your inevitable doom. Even now you feel the sting of those teeth, those lies in your skin as you pace restlessly throughout your locked room. A collar around your neck hums with familiar wards, ones you know all too well, they're the same wards you use to fortify your bar and temporarily seal the magic of your customers to avoid any mishaps that might result in a visit from the Knights. With your magic gone, and both your Wifi and teleportation jammed, any hopes of escape seem fleeting at best. You can remember what they told you when they threw you in here.
"Its for your own good"
They want you to sleep, to rest, to dream. Your kingdom needs you, even with the winter stores full and the Parade of Souls planned, there is still so much to do. You and that sickly pale thing named Exhaustion are bitter friends, locked in a battle of wits and wills that you will surely lose. It taunts you between bursts of normalcy granted by Feferi's tea and what caffeine you can stomach without hurting yourself. Every inch of you is sore and trembling yet you refuse to rest, there are so many things still to plan and do that each moment you are not working feels like a spit in the face of each accomplishment you've made thus far. Your is head pounding, the echoes of your traitorous double heartbeat pulsating behind your eyes, rapping at your temples like some dark and dusky raven upon a lonesome windowpane. Your bed is an enemy, one that entraps you with whispers of warmth and peace, only to confine you in its silky embrace as you thrash and scream in the grips of your nightmares. They're getting exponentially worse, and often times they aren't even yours. As your eyelids scrape like sandpaper against the surface of your bloodshot eyes, you lose your battle with the fiend Exhaustion. You gaze at the empty bed with fear and longing, feeling your legs carry you towards it without your permission as your vision goes fuzzy around the edges.
Coaxed into the vile voluptuousness of your bed, surrounded by the warmth of lavender scented furs and sheets. Sleep overtakes you like a thief in the night, you cannot fight it and you do not want to. The dream pours itself into your mind like a wave and you let yourself drown in it. You stand in a forest, endless and untouched by man, surrounded by all manner of strange fae creatures that seem as familiar to you as your own children. This forest is your home, these creatures are your people, and you have sworn to protect them. You are a wild thing with antlers like tree branches that gleam like polished steel, reflecting a vast and impossible eye upon their branching surface. Everyone is hale and whole, safe and sound, you are at peace, but a journey into the dark and twisting recesses of your realm reveals a dying tree. Here the dream feels wrong, even alien as if you were peering into someone else's mind instead of your own. A badger set burrows deep beneath the tree's weakening roots, the creature watches you with warm and wary eyes that carry with them a depthless sorrow. She cries emerald tears that make all around her flourish, except the withering tree.
A serpent of unimaginable size coils around both badger and tree, her glittering blue scales are made from spent bullet casings that rattle and clack like the hammer of a gun as its cocked. Hatred flows from the beast in waves as its great head turns to face you, morphing into a human torso the moment you look away. Kiran grins wide at you, her mouth stretching past the limits of biology to display an endless array of needle teeth you know she'd love nothing more than to bury in your throat, but the badger holds her fast, clinging to the end of Kiran's long and terrible tail. Somehow you know that she won't let this beast harm you, or at least she'd try. She'd always try, she's trying for so so long. The badger slumps against the beast, tears flowing like rain, she lifts a claw to wipe them away and the snake seizes her chance. The forest is pelted with gunfire, trees splinter and explode as all you love is reduced to smoking craters and bloody smears. You can't stop her, not without killing her, not without hurting the badger. She's already hurting so much already, but you have no choice. You face the beast among the ruins of your home, prepared to strike it down, only for the badger to force herself between the two of you before the fight can begin. You watch the snake coil around the tearful creature, you hear her bones and heart break as she gives you a look that is nothing but apologetic and regretful as Kiran's gaping maw opens above the badger's head. You wake up the moment her vile teeth snap shut with all the finality of a prison door.
You've only been asleep for less than three hours, and yet you're up on your feet pacing the length of the room like a tiger in a cage, gnawing your lip all the while. In your panic your paw brushes something and sends it skittering across the floor, to smack into the nearest wall. Its a cellphone, caked with dust and cobwebs. You vaguely remember Cereza losing hers awhile back and having to buy a new one, you never found the original so this might be it. It still works when you turn it on, and manages to pick up whatever weak connection snakes past the nearby jammer. You use it to get online and try asking for help in your favorite discord server, only to be caught by Rae and have the phone confiscated. You bite her for her betrayal. Its not long before Jeanne catches wind of your tantrum and comes to deal with you in the most embarrassing way possible. She sits on you. You bite her harder than you bit Rae, you refuse to give it to this mistreatment. Unlike Rae, Jeanne has no qualms about biting you back, and soon things turn nasty. Whether the two of you are fighting or fucking is wholly unknown to you, but either way the both of you are bitten and scratched to hell and your head is firmly locked between her legs. Between the warmth of her skin and the energy expelled in your activities, you once again lose the fight against sleep and drift off then and there. Your beloved kisses your forehead with smeared lipstick before she quietly takes her leave.
The next dream is dreary and cryptic, the kind of nightmare that isn't explicitly terrifying as it is foreboding and laced with an uncomfortably tense anxiety as if waiting for whatever real fear dare rear its ugly head from the dark recesses of your fitful subconscious. There stands a girl floating in an endless expanse of sand and cacti, where the air hums with radio static and noise as strange lights darts over head in a sky watched by a great purple eye as round as the full moon. Her body is indistinct and fluid, like a heat haze on a highway, she doesn't seem to notice you as you approach, she just stands there and stares at her hands. Hands that are covered in blood, more quickly pooling in her palms and trickling through her fingers, falling to the desert floor with a serpentine hiss. There is blood on her shirt too. A dark stain, growing and spreading as an ugly hole begins yawning in her chest, widening with the sounds of gnashing teeth and breaking bones. And yet she stares at her hands, watching the blood turn to ruby sand and sift between her spreading fingers as if nothing was wrong. You try to touch her shoulder only for her to vanish into thin air. Tension hangs here, like the faint electric tingle that heralds a lightning strike, you do your best to move on across the dunes and ignore the figures with faces like static crackling beneath their shabby hoods.
Sand gives way to dirty, greasy grass that comes up to your waist, choking an old abandoned playground near swallowed by garbage and weeds. Normally this place is vibrant and green, peppered with strange doors that lead to those you have bonded with. Now there is only one door, sickly and misshapen, it opens onto a dark nothingness that calls to you and promises you nothing but fear and pain. Try as you might to run, you find yourself stuck to the spot, suffering through more nightmares that are not yours as black, spectral hands slither from the door and drag you into the blackness beyond where you know you'll never wake up, and yet you can't even scream. You claw your way into the waking world with a scream so frightened and inhuman your emotions ricochet across your links like your cry echoes off the walls. Despite everyone's best efforts, you only feel more exhausted for having tried to sleep.
