wildfire

The camera panned away while they were still talking to zoom in on the wall, rotating 90* so it appeared like a floor. A tiny humanoid figure stood on the wall. He had pointed ears and sharp eyes, gossamer insectoid wings, a sharp green uniform that looked like the uniform of the Royal Navy from the 1800s, and a very large hat like Puss n' Boots' hat but as wide as he was tall. He also wore a rapier on his belt. I knew that he was a Fairy. He watched as another similarly-sized figure alighted on the wall in front of him, this one like a feline woman. She wore a similar uniform, hat, and weapon, but hers were a crisp blue. I know that she was a Pixie, and that their kinds were constantly fighting. The two discarded their oversize hats, the pixie charged the fairy, and they began to fight.

The camera followed the first exchanges of their fight as they took off from the wall and began trading blows in midair with -tink- sounds like a needle hitting a tile floor. Then, the camera began to zoom out, and their fight was too swift for the eye to follow except when their blades met. The paladins noticed, though, and the older one got caught up in the fight. The student was unable to even follow their movements, but the teacher parried their blades with his rapier easily and the midair battle moved to the other side of the room.

The student asked the teacher, "Can't you stop them?"

The teacher considered the flying figures for a moment, and then said, "Why don't you try to stop them?"

The student gaped for a moment, and then nervously swallowed. He hesitantly began to suggest abilities of the paladin that he thought might help as though he were reading off a menu. He looked at the teacher and said, "Emissary of Peace?" The teacher's expression didn't waver, but he gestured to the fairy and pixie still fighting across the room.

The student slowly stepped closer and mumbled, "Passive persuasion...?" When nothing changed, he raised his voice a little and said, "Active persuasion...??"

Still, nothing happened. The battle continued to intensify, and finally, the fairy managed to stab the pixie, and her feline form began to fall to the ground. The student lunged forward and caught her as she fell. A golden light began to shine from the pixie's body, and a gentle wind began to swirl around her as the younger paladin spontaneously developed a new spell. The scattered droplets of the pixie's blood flew in reverse, returning to her body as the magic weaved into her, and her sealed shut.

The dream was shot like a movie. In it, I was following two old men. At first, both of them looked relatively normal, and were set in a normal world. One was in a long blue coat and resembled Scrooge in the Muppets Christmas Carol. The other was shorter and had a face that was similar, but it was slightly deformed and misshapen, and he had a much more barren scalp with his remaining hair sticking out in uneven white tufts, like if the Hunchback Quasimodo were an old man.

Scrooge and Quasimodo went about their daily lives. The pair were both retired and frequently played chess and went on autumn walks together around a pond in their neighborhood park. In their conversations, Scrooge often talked about his plans to do something later, or how he hadn’t gotten around to doing something yet. Quasimodo suggested golf, but Scrooge didn’t want to then; they could do it later. Quasimodo didn’t comment, but each time this occurred, there was a shot that lingered on his resting scowl as he stared at the chess board.

As the dream went on, Scrooge kept showing up late and missing things. At first, it was small occasions: he showed up to lunch in the cafeteria just as they were closing up and they had no beans left; he arrived at the supermarket just after a sale ended. Often, Quasimodo was with him, ready to go at any time, not urging Scrooge to go or saying anything, just silently staring from near the door. Scrooge kept insisting that he had enough time to make it, right up until the last minute. Each time, I saw a close-up of Quasimodo’s lumpy face, his expression unchanging, lingering for a few moments before the camera moved on.

As autumn drew to a close, Scrooge kept talking about the pair’s plans to play golf, and various people kept reminding them that the golf course would be closing for the season soon. I watched as, on the final weekend of the season, Quasimodo stood alone at the beginning of the golf course under a slate-grey sky, torn at by wind and expressionless. Scrooge never showed up. The last leaves of autumn dropped from the trees.

As winter took hold, things exaggerated. Quasimodo had less and less patience, sometimes getting up in the middle of a conversation or a game and walking away without a word. The scale of what Scrooge was putting off got bigger; he didn’t plan to see his daughter on her birthday this year. I followed long, silent, cold walks through the neighborhood. Quasimodo sat alone at a chess board, staring at it intensely. Scrooge stood outside a restaurant with a faded “sorry, we’re closed!” sign hung on the door and a notice that they had gone out of business.

The dream began to get more abstract. I saw wide-angle shots of the sky, looking up at Scrooge as he walked. The pair walked through a field of mushrooms. Quasimodo stared at Scrooge from the doorway of a room, his face even more deformed and unrecognizable. Finally, it ended with a psychedellic sequence in which Quasimodo had become a monster with multiple faces wrapped around his head sporting grotesquely wide grins like a jester and wearing a striped sleeping cap and nightgown, loping along like an ape and moving frighteningly fast, chasing Scrooge who sprinted away, terrified, insisting he had more time, he had enough time. Then, the dream ended, and I woke up.

everywhere i go i see things choking to death.

i see people with hands around their necks gasping sputtering just barely forcing out the words "it's always like this -- we'll make it somehow."

i see plants with shallow roots trees confined to a tiny concrete box filtering what sustinence they can from the oil-stained earth branches reaching up between corridors of steel like the hands of children begging to an impassive god.

i see streets lined with litter cars belching grey clouds hours-long lines of pilgrims impatiently praying at the altar of the wheel.

i see animals choking on cigarette butts plants choking on rain art choking on content "will be" choking on "is."

the rain tastes of sulfur the air tastes of smog nature dies a slow and painful death at our doorstep and still no one opens the door.

Had a dream about being a pirate of sorts, in the vein of the game Sea of Thieves. At the start of the dream, I had just been killed and had lost all of my stuff, and I had just respawned. I was in a tiny rowboat rowing my way towards the island where I’d died with nothing but a simple bow and a quiver of arrows, to retrieve my loot.

As I approached the island, a heavy fog thickened around me until I couldn’t see more than five or ten meters around me. I tied my boat to the shoreline and stepped onto the sand, looking at my surroundings. The island was nothing but huge rock formations and some scraggly tufts of grass. I started walking up towards the center, looking for where I’d lost my stuff, but stopped short when I noticed a cloaked figure standing perfectly still in the mist.

The figure was facing away from me. In the way of dreams, I immediately knew with absolute certainty that this figure was an echo of me. Very slowly, I inched my way towards it, terrified of what might happen when it noticed me. Suddenly, the other-me shot an arrow at me, and I dived behind a pile of rocks for cover. I fired a few arrows of my own towards it, but it knew everything I was going to do before I could do it.

We circled each other in a deadly dance, firing and diving into cover over and over. Neither of us could gain the upper hand; we were perfectly matched. Then, finally, a noise in the fog distracted the other-me for just an instant, and I was able to shoot an arrow through its shadowy hood. With a hiss of air like steam escaping a boiler, the cloak deflated, floating to the ground. Underneath it was all of the stuff I’d lost the last time I’d died, and I quickly gathered my things.

As I worked, I realized that the noise that had distracted the other-me was the sound of another person sliding on the rocks. In the distance, I could hear more people talking to each other beyond the mist. I knew they must have heard my battle, and if they found me with all of this valuable stuff on me, I was dead meat. Worse, there was no way I would be able to get away on the tiny rowboat I had.

To give myself time, I attacked preemptively, shooting arrows into the mist near where I’d heard the voices. Immediately, shouts of confusion and alarm let me know I’d aimed well, and the silhouettes I could see in the mist hid among the rocks. I carefully snuck down to the shoreline as they cowered, piling all my loot in the rowboat in between firing arrows near where I thought the others were hiding. There were only two items I couldn’t fit in the rowboat: my bow, and some kind of trophy that I knew was valuable. It was wrapped in heavy cloth, roughly the shape of a horse’s head, and I knew that under no circumstances should I open the bundle.

I took both of these with me as I walked back towards the voices in the fog. At this point, the dream did one of those strange things where the reality shifts as though it has always been that way, and suddenly I had a partner. They were short and looked somewhat raccoon-like, and they were equally as lightly equipped as I was. We knew that once the other people figured out there was only two of us, they could easily kill us both, and if we tried to run in the boat, we would be killed very quickly. So, the two of us quietly circled our way around the island away from our rowboat and then yelled through the fog that we wished to surrender.

The pirates approached us warily, seeming to buy that we were really surrendering. They decided not to kill us—yet—but they did take everything we had on us, including the trophy. I got an incredibly bad feeling as they started to unwrap it, and I tried to warn them that they shouldn’t. They just laughed me off and pulled the wrappings off anyways.

Underneath was something indescribably foul. Picture the head of a pure white unicorn wearing the skin of a different black horse, partially rotted and ill-fittingly stretched over it, with a large bone like a femur sticking out from the stump of the neck. Now, imagine that the outer skin has huge, bulging, sightless yellow eyes, filled to bursting with pus and pink-and-black ooze that dribbles out from the corners and tear ducts. That is roughly what this “trophy” looked like. Even in the dream, it almost made me vomit at the sight of it. And that was before it started moving.

As soon as it was freed from the bundle, the trophy’s eyes started to roll in their sockets, squeezing pus and ooze out from the overstuffed sockets with every thrashing motion. It opened its mouth and let loose the most terrifying noise I have ever heard, in real life or any other dream. It sounded like an industrial sawblade cutting through steel, nails on a chalkboard, and a horse shrieking in pain all at once. It was so loud it shook the very earth we stood on.

Instantly, I panicked and sprinted away. Hands on my ears to try to block out the awful screaming, I stumbled my way to the rowboat, barely conscious of my surroundings. I half-fell into the boat and didn’t even wait for my partner before heaving away. Luckily, my partner was right behind me, and they jumped in just as I pulled away from the shore. We rowed with a vigor born of absolute terror, the awful, blood-curdling scream whipping us to move faster than we ever had before. The fog blinded us, but as we rowed away we could hear rocks scraping and something huge moving around on the island and rampaging. We didn’t stick around to find out what; we just got out of there as fast as possible. I soon woke up in a cold sweat, wondering what had just happened.

Had a dream that felt much more dreamlike than usual. I was in a public restroom, and I was cornered by a seven-foot-tall man that looked a bit like Steve from Smash Mouth. He was very aggressive, threatening to beat me up, but despite his size I wasn’t even the least bit afraid. Even when he started attacking me, it felt more like when an elementary schooler is mad at you and just ineffectually slapping at you. I barely felt his punches, and when he picked me up and threw me to the ground, the tiles cracked but I wasn’t hurt at all.

I kept trying to ignore him and just leave, but he kept attacking me each time I got up. I knew if I really turned on him, he definitely wouldn’t be shrugging off my hits like I could his, so I was trying my hardest to keep calm. After the third time I got up and he hit me again, though, I finally snapped and turned on him with my fist raised, fully intending to put him out of commission. Immediately, I woke up, and sat there for a while feeling angry and vaguely dissatisfied.

Had a dream in which I was a historian from the future, and I was on a mission to go back in time to see what had caused World War III to start. I appeared in a semi-forested area, somewhere with a good view of an American city sprawling in the distance. I knew this was where the first bombs had been dropped and the first cities erased, so I was here to watch exactly how it went down. But as the time of the bomb dropping approached, I looked up and saw an unmistakably American bomber plane passing overhead. The hatch on the bottom opened, the bombs fell, and I realized with mounting horror what had happened.

The United States had started the war by bombing itself. They had then used this as an excuse to start a global nuclear war that had plunged the world into ruin.

I couldn’t just stand there, even though I knew as a historian it wasn’t my place to mess with things. I ran towards the city to try to help. The bomb they dropped had been enormous, but it wasn’t nuclear, so the city wasn’t completely leveled. The alternative, though, was so much worse. I trudged through a rain of follow-up bombing runs, taking shelter under whatever I could each time a plane passed overhead. The air was filled with the hellish screams of people tortured by injuries, pinned under buildings by spears of steel and concrete that rent flesh and left their organs spilling out onto the cracked pavement. Agonized cries of people holding the lifeless, twisted bodies of their loved ones assaulted me on all sides. At some point, I myself had gotten injured, and I trudged through the flaming ruins with a hand to my gut, forcing myself onwards. Eventually, the dream ended, and I woke with bile in my throat.

Had an absolutely infuriating dream. In it, merfolk were real. They were much more streamlined than typical artistic depictions, with fish-like scales covering all of their skin, webbed hands, fin-like ears, and a tail that looked like a natural extension of their body. Their existence was well-known to the public, but they were still extremely rare and about to go extinct. It was thought that their natural habitat had been disrupted enough that there might not be any wild ones left. Merfolk lived for a very long time and reproduced very rarely, but there were enough merfolk in captivity to save their species with some help from conservation efforts. The infuriating part was, all the existing merfolk were owned as private property by rich people who wanted them as a status symbol to show off their great wealth. They were kept in huge tanks on display to be gawked at. Capturing or buying merfolk had been illegal for years, but because of their longevity, all the currently existing merfolk had been captured before those laws were written and thus it wasn’t technically illegal and the conservationists couldn’t get to them to rescue them. So, due to the greed of the rich, the merfolk were dying out, and there was nothing I could do about it despite the obvious solution right in front of us. I ended the dream pressing my hand against the glass of a wood-framed aquarium wall the size of a room, looking at the mermaid in the tank pressing her webbed hand against the other side of the glass, and feeling like I needed to scream at the injustice of it.

Had a very simple, calming dream. I was visiting a friend of mine who lived in a rural, snowy area. They tamed foxes, and one of them was a silver fox with a white streak through her tail named Dixie. The whole dream, all I did was play with Dixie in the snow and enjoy the weather.

Had a very cool, short dream. In it, I was on a field trip as part of a high school class outing. Between events, we (the students) were playing a cross country game in the middle of the city. Whoever had the ball would throw it, and for some reason, the ball would fly a couple thousand feet. Everyone else would run to go get it, and whoever got to it first got to throw it next. In the middle of one round, the world started to get dark, and I looked up at the sky in confusion. There above us, I saw what I thought at first was a total eclipse. Then, I realized that the sky wasn’t our sky. The source of the light was a gas giant that our planet orbited, like a sun but much smaller and cooler, and one of the giant’s other moons was passing between us and it causing the eclipse. The other moon looked like molten rock, but it had many different shining colors in it like photos from the Hubble telescope. In addition to the spectacular view of the giant and the other moon, because the sky was so dark due to the eclipse, we could see nebulas around us in space. All of it was so grand a view and so massive in the sky that when I pulled out my phone to take a picture, I couldn’t even fit in frame. So instead, I just stood there and watched it the extremely rare beauty of it unfold until the dream ended.

Had a very strange, psychedelic dream while on long-distance public transportation in the middle of the night. It was less of a coherent storyline, like it usually is, and was more of a shifting smear of different scenes that blended with the music I was listening to through my headphones. Specifically, I remember hearing Loving Free (SAINT PEPSI Remix) by Spazzkid and Memories 地平線に by Neon Dream 87’ filtering throughout the dream in an odd, distorted manner.

The first scene saw me standing in a foreign kingdom, blue-tinted sands rolling endlessly around me, coral trees sprouting from the dunes, and a shifting sky with a watery texture hanging high above. It all gave the sense of being underwater, despite the fact that I could breath and move with no problems. All I knew was that I was lost and trying to find my way home.

I decided to try talking to the inhabitants of this realm in hopes of finding out where I was. All of the people here had humanoid bodies and were dressed in sharp tuxedos or other classy outfits, but instead of a human head above their collar, they had various sea creatures stretching upwards. Every encounter with them took place like a visual novel: a flat character portrait where only their mouths and arms moved and only while they talked, and a background that seemed incongruous with the lighting and perspective of the character portrait. They also seemed incapable of true speech; they could only produce music.

In particular, I remember a quartet of seafolk that I asked for directions. The song that was playing at this point was Loving Free, and the quartet was producing each part of the song from their mouths. The seafolk in the back had extremely long, floaty limbs, black eyes like a natural pair of secret agent sunglasses, and a pair of shell-like castanets that produced the percussion. One of the side two had a head like a barnacle, and it produced the flute melody from the hole in its head. I don’t remember what the one on the other side looked like, but the one in front was the most distinctive. He was much shorter than the others, with a very smushed and square face like something between a dunkleostus and the goombas from the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie. He wore a smug, self-satisfied look on his face, and each time he opened his mouth, the distorted “che~rry pi~e” voice clips from the song floated out of his mouth as he tugged on his bowtie. Somehow, all of this registered as “directions to the palace” in my mind.

After this… “conversation,” the dream shifted to the marble steps of the ruler of the sea’s palace. A pair of seafolk guards, still dressed in matching tuxedos, moved from their posts to block my way inside. In some wordless way, I communicated that I needed to ask for help, and from within the palace a feminine voice commanded them to let me pass. I crossed from the steps into the impossibly huge throne room, and found the monarch lounging on her seashell seat within.

The ruler of the sea was instantly striking. While every other person I’d met so far had moved with the static, visual-novel-esque look described earlier, she moved with fluid grace as she crossed one of her slender legs over the other and looked at me down her narrow nose. She seemed human at first glance, but in the same way a marble statue appears human. She was too perfect, too still, the very image of beauty and elegance and allure, and it seemed almost as though all the colour had been stripped from her. Her skin was white like porcellin, without any visible texture or even a single blemish save for the beauty mark below her left eye. All her clothes, her hair, her lips, and the irises and pupils of her narrow eyes were such a perfect pitch-black that there was no dividing line between them where they overlapped. She wore a simple sleeveless dress with a low collar and a high skirtline, thigh-high fishnets, and high heels, all the same perfect void-like black, and from her forehead sprouted a pair of twin black horns that curled around her head like a crown and jutted backwards, ending in sharp points.

From the look she wore as I approached alone, I could immediately tell what kind of person she was. She was a spoiled princess, one who expected as a matter of course that any whose eyes fell on her would immediately become enraptured and do all they could to aid her. She cared not for any of her subjects, regardless of how they hurt themselves in her service. From the moment we met, it was a given in her mind that I would fall under her spell and be subservient to her. To her, there was no other reaction a person could have.

Without even waiting for me to speak, the princess hopped off her throne, strode up to me, and demanded I pledge myself to her. Disgust curled up my throat like a thorn-coated vine, filling my mouth with burning bile. Through it, I choked out an indignant refusal, and the look of absolute shock on her face almost made up for the insult of thinking I was so driven by lust as to immediately offer myself up. I demanded to know how to leave this place, but the princess was too shaken to even respond, so I spun on my heel and left to find my own way. Everything about the meeting filled me with seething hate and, though I tried to smother it, a small flame of lust burning underneath.

After I left, the view of the dream lingered on the princess instead of following me. As soon as she recovered from her shock, she furiously demanded that her other tuxedo-clad servants find me and drag me back. No one had ever defied her like that before, and I could tell she hated me as much as I hated her. And I could tell that, like me, she felt the same creeping vine of lust take root along with the hatred. As her servants hurried out to find me, the princess retreated to her room and curled up on her seashell bed, her perfect features radiating rage and frustrated desire in equal measures.

The dream shifted back to watching me as I made my way through the seedier, darker parts of the town below the palace. I looked everywhere for somewhere to rest, or at least for something to distract me, but phantoms of the princess haunted me every step of the way. They danced to the distorted music that filled the dream and teased me, just out of reach, driving me mad.

Fed up, I stalked towards yet deeper and more desolate areas of the town. Finally, my feet stopped at the outskirts, deep enough that the watery sky had become a dark indigo nearing black. I found myself standing at the edge of what looked almost like a graveyard. A sandy hill sprawled before me, vanishing into the gloom in the distance. Scores of swords covered the hill, point-down in the sand. There was a mix of rapiers, cutlasses, and all manner of blades usually carried by seafarers. I wandered out into the middle of the graveyard, and all of a sudden, I realized someone was watching me.

They were seafolk, like the other inhabitants of this place, but their tuxedo was shoddy and old, full of rips and holes. From the collar rose the heads and bodies of four twisting moray eels, writhing over each other in an attempt to get a better look at me. The eelfolk moved with the same static, visual-novel-like animation as the other seafolk, and he spoke in a chorus of high, reedy voices that layered over each other in an unnerving cacophony.

He asked, sarcasm dripping from his voices, what I was doing so far from the beloved princess. I asked where a guy could find something to take his mind off things, and the eelfolk paused for a moment. Then, with a raucous, insane laugh, he said, “What, you looking for a skeeze?” He broke the visual novel illusion like a character shattering the fourth wall in a game and dove beneath the sand, and suddenly, I realized that the swords around me were a map of the city, with each sword representating a point of interest. The eelfolk’s warped voice echoed clearly around me, calling out “Nowhere! No! Try here! Here! Here! Or how about here!?” With every repeat of “here,” he flipped one of the swords out of the sand. The swords spun once, ignited with a harsh purple light, and fell back to their original spot.

By the time he was done, half the swords glowed a neon violet. The eelfolk broke out of the sand uncomfortably close to me, and he grabbed my shirt and leaned in with a breath that smelled like alcohol and cheap cigars. In a stage whisper, he said, “The biggest skeeze of all, though, is right… here.” With a tail I hadn’t realized he had, he grabbed a sword and jammed it directly into the top of the hill, right where I knew the princess’ castle must be.

With that, the dream ended, and I woke up disoriented and bewildered on the bus.

Had another extremely long and intricate dream, most of the details of which slipped away from me before I could grasp them. Names in particular vanished immediately, but here’s what I pieced together from the fragments I was able to keep:

The dream was mostly in third person, occasionally slipping into a first-person-like perspective for dramatic effect. I was quite young—an age wasn’t specified, but the whole dream was painted in a style very similar to Made In Abyss, including the proportions of me and the other characters.

The dream began with me and a group of about four or five of my closest friends all staring down the Labyrinth, a tunnel with a mine-like entrance on the surface that led deep underground. No one knew exactly how far into the earth it plunged, but we were determined to become the first to find out. All of us were equipped for a long-term expedition and had experience that filled us with confidence. This wasn’t our first cave. 

It was going to be the most dangerous one we’d tackled by far, though, and as we looked on, a timid-looking girl with red hair expressed her doubts. The cave had to be forbidden for a reason. Maybe we should find a different one. But our leader—a blonde-haired and blue-eyed, headstrong, and endlessly confident kid, and my best friend—assured us that we could handle it. We’d spent our whole lives training for this day, and even though the adults told us we needed to wait before doing a full expedition, we were ready. 

That quieted the doubts, and we all took one last look at the sky, and then filled our lungs with a last deep breath of surface air and stepped into the cave. For the first part, it looked no different from an ordinary cave. We rappelled down small drops, crossed portions of uneven terrain, and the biggest challenge was occasionally having to hop over cracks that reached down into darkness. Thankfully, we never had to crawl, and this part of the Labyrinth had been explored enough before that the walls had wooden supports and the drops had ropes already fixed for us to use. 

After a while, we came to a room-like cave with a trapdoor and a warning sign. Turn back!, it proclaimed. Anyone that wanders past this point will be considered dead! 

Red tentatively spoke up again. Maybe we should stop here. No one will come to rescue us if we pass this point. I silently considered what she said, but my curiosity at what this cave held and my respect for Leader outweighed the concern. 

The rest of us looked at each other and then scoffed at the old sign to cover up the budding unease inside ud. We were experienced cave divers, someone blustered, and nothing had been a real challenge so far. Clearly this cave’s reputation had just gotten out of hand. Maybe someone had gotten stuck once and everyone was just too afraid to go in after that.

Leader stepped forward and put an end to the chatter. We keep going, he decreed. He squatted and pulled up the trap door, and from beneath it, an unearthly blue glow shone up through the hole. It took me a moment to recognize the source. Glowing crystals were embedded in the walls, giving an uneven outline to the path ahead. We lowered ourselves through the hole and got ready to go deeper.

As we walked, things started to get... weird. It started with one of us, a porkier kid with overalls, mentioning that there was a pit ahead and stopping. At first, I thought he was just messing with us. The path went on as before into the darkness beyond the lamplight. We kept walking, but Porky stopped and yelled at us, “you’re going to fall!”

“Fall into what?” asked the person in front, a brown-haired dauntless kid, with a laugh. He continued to walk down the tunnel, arms nonchalantly behind his head, and then his laugh suddenly became a sharp yelp quickly followed by a *thump*. I looked at where he had been a moment earlier, and now there was a yawning pit where there had been flat ground. We rushed to the edge and saw Dauntless sitting on the ground about ten feet below holding his leg, surrounded by sharp crystal spikes that he had somehow landed perfectly between. 

I realized with a chill that somehow, Porky had been the only one of us to be able to see the pit. Down here, we couldn’t trust our senses anymore. We all grappled with that realization for a second, but Leader didn’t let us dwell on it. He called down to Dauntless to check if he was okay, and the grunted responses made us all breathe a sigh of relief.

We scrambled to get a rope out and down to him. He was still clutching his ankle in pain—he must have landed on it—but he was able to grab hold of the rope. He held on tight as we hauled him back up, and then collapsed on the floor of the tunnel. The rest of us talked among ourselves, trying to decide how we should proceed when we couldn’t be sure if what we were seeing was real. 

We decided we would have to move in a line, calling out what we saw as we walked. The person in front would have to tap in front of them with a rod to make sure that the ground was solid, while the rest of us felt along the walls. As we discussed this, Dauntless got to his feet and gingerly tested his stride. After a few hobbling steps, he was able to walk a little more normally, so we formed up again. Despite the injury, Dauntless volunteered to take point, and we began walking with our new system.

It was slow at first as we tried to figure out how best to relay information, but after a while, we fell into a rhythm. Soon, we’d left behind the glowing crystals and complete darkness closed in beyond the lamplight once again. It seemed to press in all around, and the air was still and musty. There were no supports down here, though the cave was still relatively rectangular and flat like a mine. It felt like we were the first people to walk there in a very long time. The only chatter was our cadence of observations. More than once, one of us noted something off, and everyone else paused and looked harder until they were able to see it too so we could navigate around the obstacle.

After treading through darkness for a while, we came to a fork. Both sides were identical, so Leader picked one at random and led us left. The cave sloped downwards deeper, and soon all of us were huffing from the exersion of the descent. Porky stopped and fell to his butt on the ground, trying to catch his breath. The rest of us stopped too, and with a rising panic I realized I couldn’t catch my breath either. The air was too thin. We were slowly suffocating. 

Leader barked at us all to stay calm, even as he was heaving for breaths. He told us we needed to start climbing back up the way we had come. Porky and Dauntless were too tired and breathless to move much, but in the back of the party, Red drew on some reserves of strength and came to the rescue. She climbed up until she found a stalagmite to tie a rope around, and then threw the other end down for us all to heave ourselves up with. 

Slowly, we worked our way backwards step by step, pausing frequently to rest. The further up we made it, the easier it became to breathe, but it was still a battle for every foot of ascent. After an eternity, we finally made it back to the fork room, but after looking around, we realized something was wrong.

All of us glanced at each other uncertainly and described what we saw. All of us were seeing the same thing. There were more than just three exits to the room now, and none of them looked like the one we’d originally come from. I walked around the room, tapping the walls and wandering a few feet into each tunnel, and found that there were no illusions here. I returned to the group and shook my head.

Porky began to panic, yelling that we were trapped and would never escape. Red curled up into a ball and shook silently. Dauntless just sat there, rubbing the leg he’d landed on earlier. I felt my resolve harden, and told them that we weren’t going to just give up and wait to die. We knew this place would be dangerous; that’s why we were going to be the first to explore it and come back alive. If the walls had shifted, that just meant we had to explore the new paths. I set down my pack and pulled out some granola bars and began handing them out. Porky and Red looked up at me and the panic slowly lifted from their faces, and the spirited, determined look returned to Dauntless’ eyes.

All this time, Leader had been looking around the other tunnels. I heard a call from behind me, and turned to see him beckoning us. We gathered ourselves and formed up once again. This tunnel sloped gently down, unlike the sharp descent of the last one. Our party marched further into the depths, Dauntless leading the way with his tapping rod, the rest of us calling out to relay what we saw.

After a short time, Dauntless stopped and held out a hand. The rest of us blinked, and the tunnel ahead turned into a dead end. A pit lay in front of us, dropping down a dozen feet, and at the bottom, a pair of statues holding leveled spears glared sightlessly at the wall. Red moved up to the front and the cave was filled with clanking as she hammered a piton into the rock. When she finished, she rustled in her pack for a rope and tied it off, and Dauntless stepped up to be the first one down. 

One by one, we dropped down in front of the statues. They stayed motionless, and uneasily, we slunk between them. First Dauntless, then Leader, then Red, then me, and finally Porky. We breathed a sigh of relief and turned to keep going. Then, an explosive metallic *kashunk* and a sudden wave of something wet slammed into me from behind and nearly knocked me to the ground. 

I looked back and found myself staring at what had just seconds ago been Porky. In the wildly swinging beam of my lamp, it looked like something straight out of a horror movie. His head had been cleanly severed, and the body still stood there as though it was waiting for something. A line of blood split his clothes right down the middle, the saturated fabric peeling slightly but still held up by the overalls. All of us stared in shock, unable to process what had just happened for a moment. Then, Red shrieked and fell backwards, and the rest of us scrambled away a few steps and fell back in horror.

The body stayed upright. Then, a leg lifted, and it took a step forward. Then another. It stopped in front of us, the same distance away as it had been before. We cowered, waiting for it to attack, but it just stood there like a statue. 

Leader slowly got to his feet, his eyes never leaving the motionless figure, and gently gestured at us to stand up with him. All of us moved backwards one step at a time, and for each step we took backwards, the body took exactly one forwards. It seemed to be following us, just as Porky had been a minute ago. 

In a hoarse voice, I called out, “Porky? Is that... you?” 

No response. 

I tried again. “Porky? Can you hear me?”

Still nothing. 

We tried to back away again, but the body just kept following us. Leader was still shaking, but in as steady a tone as he could manage, he said, “It doesn’t look like it wants to hurt us. That might... still be him. We should see if we can help him.” 

While keeping one eye on the body, we looked for Porky’s head, but it was like it had vanished into thin air. Eventually, we were forced to abandon the search and just keep walking, the headless corpse trailing behind us. Maybe we would find some way to help him further down the tunnel, we told ourselves, but really I think everyone just wanted to get out of there in case whatever happened to Porky happened to one of us. 

As the second-closest to the back, I had to help guide Porky’s body over the uneven parts, and it was exactly as unnerving as it sounds. But even so, I felt a responsibility to take care of the body, just in case. It was still a part of my friend.

Shortly afterwards, the four of us and Porky’s body reached a much more open room and saw the first wooden structure we’d seen since passing through the trap door. It was what looked like a very old-fashioned platform lift. At the other end of the room was another tunnel that seemed to slope upwards. 

We circled and debated what to do. There was a lever at the top that clearly had to be pulled to activate the lift, and it seemed to drop down below the floor. If we were to take the lift, someone would have to stay behind to operate the lever. Though the thought of being left alone there filled me with dread, I volunteered to do it. 

The others piled onto the lift and said that they would be back within an hour to report, regardless of what they saw. Tamping down the dread I felt, I wished them luck and pulled the lever. With a clanking of chains, the lift ground into motion and began to descend. I kept my eyes on them until they were lost to the darkness, and then watched the chain spook out until it finally halted with one last rattle. There was a pair of shakes on the chain, followed a few seconds later by an echoey yell of “we reached the bottom.” I returned an affirmative, and then shuffled backwards to sit against the wall and keep an eye on the two entrances. 

Time passed. I ate and watched the entryways and tried not to think about something suddenly chopping off my head. I also tried not to think about my friends never coming back. It was taking them an awfully long time to return.

After what was certainly much more than an hour, I walked over to the pit and yelled down it. No response. I considered going down myself, but I had no idea if I would be able to get back on my own without someone to man the lever. All I could do was wait, and wait, and wait. 

No one ever came back.

Eventually, I suppose, I must have gotten low on food and lamp oil and decided to see where the other tunnel led. If it led to the surface, maybe I could fetch a rescue party. So I called down the pit, just in case anyone was listening, to tell them where I was going. Then, I gathered my things and left. 

I don’t remember the journey back to the surface, but it must have been much quicker and easier than the journey down. But when I reached the top, everyone thought it was a miracle I had come back at all. They refused to send a rescue party or allow me back into the cave. The main entrance was blocked up, to prevent anyone else from doing what we had, and the adults told me to forget about the cave and just try to move on. Anyone I had gone in with was almost certainly dead already.

Time passed. I pretended to work diligently on other tasks and to have given up cave diving. I had a normal life—a job, a decent participation in town politics, an income. I built up some money. Then, once I had enough, I got myself some equipment for a solo expedition and left in the night. I used the alternate exit, which I’d never told anyone about, and entered the Labyrinth once again, determined to find my friends or die trying.

I got to the lift with no problem. Once there, I set up a system of pulleys with a rope so that I could feed it down the pit and pull from the bottom to flip the lever. That way, I wouldn’t get trapped. I set the lift to descend, hopped on, and rode it into the black depths that had haunted me ever since I’d abandoned my friends to it all that time ago.

I didn’t know what I expected to find at the bottom, but I was suprised to find an ordinary-looking cave just like the one above. There was no gore-splattered walls, no rotting bodies at the bottom. Just another rectangular stone hallway leading deeper. 

I took a deep breath and prepared to set out. Knowing the nature of this place, I tied a thread to a post on the lift and let the spool sit on my pack so that it could unwind as I walked and lead me back. With that set up, I began to walk down the hall.

Within a short time, I encountered what my friends must have when they were here. A pair of shiny titanium doors blocked the path, completely at odds with the wooden lift and dusty cave. I stepped up to them and pushed, and they swung open easily.

Inside was a brightly lit lab. Large, empty glass cylinders sat around the room like they should have something growing inside them. A chair with restraints occupied one side of the room, and above it, a helmet of some kind hung from a tube in the ceiling. At the far end of the lab was a set of screens, and standing before them was familiar person.

It was Leader. He had grown up, it seemed, and his blonde hair stuck up in crazed spikes. His electric blue eyes were behind a pair of circular glasses. He hadn’t worn glasses before. Leader turned as I entered, and his face twisted in disbelief. A brief flash of joy flickered across his face, quickly chased away by a deep frown. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

I stood there at a loss for words. After all this time, that was how he greeted me? In the first place, how was he still here and alive? And where were the others? 

Leader strode over to me and laid his hands on my shoulders. He looked just as collected and in-control as he always had. He tried to push me back, but I stood fast and finally found my tongue. 

“You... you’re alive.”

“Yes. I am.”

“What about...”

“They aren’t here.”

“Did they... die?”

“Die? No, not... no. They aren’t dead.” 

Something in his reply gave me pause. “What do you mean? What happened to them?”

His face hardened. “You need to leave. You need to forget you ever saw me.”

I pushed back. “No, you can’t just... tell me to forget! I thought you guys were dead! I thought I’d... left you to die.” 

“You didn’t... leave anyone to die.” An emotion beyond words pulled Leader’s eyebrows together and pursed his lips. “Trust me. It is better if you just leave now.”

I broke his grip on my shoulders and pushed past him into the lab. It wasn’t until then that I really took in what I was looking at. The large glass tubes. The chair. The screens showing what looked like live video feeds of the town above. One of them showed the interior of a house. MY house. 

“You’ve been down here... watching? The whole time?”

Leader said nothing. He just stood by the door and stared at me.

The cold grasp of realization started to crawl up my spine, and I pushed it down. “The others. Where are the others? Porky and Red and Dauntless?”

Leader pushed his glasses up his nose until they caught the light and turned his eyes into bright, opaque circles. “They aren’t here. They aren’t in the Labyrinth. They never were.”

No. That couldn’t mean what I thought it did. He couldn’t be saying...

“It wasn’t easy, you know. Memories are difficult to get right. Too much detail, and they don’t match up with the present. Too little, and they aren’t believable. You were my greatest success. My best friend, truly. Remember all the time we spent together?”

A crooked grin flashed under those blinding circles. In that moment, the creature in front of me wasn’t Leader. It couldn’t even be called human. It was something alien, something *other*. 

And neither could I. I wasn’t a born human. I was... designed. False. A simulacrum in the shape of a person, stuffed full of memories that didn’t exist. I wasn’t real, and I never had been.

I broke.

I woke up.

Had not one but two dreams in the same night about knowing the exact date of my death and just trying to live my life the happiest and most satisfied I could until then so that I could meet it peacefully, but my death came bloody and dissatisfying anyway.

In the first, I was a caveman (specifically the one from the animated series Primal) living with my cavewife and spending our days idling in a nice comfortable cavehome on the outskirts of a village. On the day I was to die, a group of marauders attacked the village, and before I knew they were there they’d already killed many people. I tried to fight them off, and I went down feral with bloody teeth and nails instead of passing peacefully in my wife’s arms like I’d wanted.

In the second, I was in a sandbox world that operated a bit like 3d Terraria. I was part of a swarm of others with the ability to break/place pieces of the environment. I had grand plans and directed the others in large building projects, and we spent a very long time gradually building a staircase to the heavens. We built it out of a black stone with rainbow highlights around the edges, and I put great care into making sure the structure looked good every step of the way. All along the staircase, we put aesthetic buildings and rest points to vary the scenery so the staircase wasn’t just one long trek upwards.

As my death edged closer, we neared the top of the world, but I got word that there was a group of police/detectives hunting me down. None of us, the builders, were meant to be here, and they were following the trail of my projects so they could stop me, the leader. I urged the builders to work as fast as we could, but eventually we were forced to give up on aesthetics. We switched to building a long, flat ramp up to the top of the world instead of the nice, graceful staircase we had planned so that we could make it before my clock ran out or the police found us.

When we finally reached the top of the world, it was beautiful. As we crossed some invisible line, suddenly the sky lit up with distant galaxies and colourful nebulae and countless stars filling the black backdrop. There was a small existing temple already floating there, little more than a simple Oriental-style room. We started work on our ultimate project, what we’d been building up to the top of the world for: Exo Circuit, a mariokart-Rainbow-Road-esque race track in the sky. Before we were even halfway done, though, I could see the police climbing the staircase to us from above. My death time ticked closer and closer, and we were out of time. Without seeing my work completed, I woke up.

Had a dream about being robocop. At first, I was just a guy. I broke into my former school to get onto the roof just for kicks. It started to rain, and then this titanium octahedron drone with floodlights along its edges swooped out of the darkness and opened fire. I ducked behind an AC unit, and the dream shifted to third person. I watched in slow motion as the drone darted forward, skidding across the top of the AC unit. My hands came up to hold the metal frame away from me, and the drone's turret focused on my right shoulder. I watched every individual bullet leave a warped wake in the air behind it as it travelled from the turret to my shoulder, pierced through the rain-slicked skin like a fork through frosting, tore up the metal and plastic and fluid tubes underneath, and I watched my arm go spinning off into the darkness. I fell, and once I was knocked down, the top two sides of the octahedron slid open to reveal the upper torso and head of a man who said to me, “I have orders not to do this to people. But you aren’t a person. You’re a machine, a thing, a piece of plastic.” With every word it pressed the sharp bottom edge of its hull deeper into my legs and crushed them to mangled pieces, and once they were a shattered mess, I blacked out. I awoke limbless, unable to move anything or even swivel my head, hanging in front of someone in an interrogation room. I thought to myself, “Huh, this feels kinda bad. I don’t really want to be here anymore” and then woke up

I was a member of a group of holy knights protecting a kingdom, named the Angellic Host. At first, we had been a lowly band of warriors known as the Hawks, but through providence and hard work we rose from our common origins to this exhalted place. The other members of the Angels had faces vaguely recalled from everywhere in my life—classmates from the physics department, members of the fencing club, friends from unrelated circles—and we all specialized in different talents. Many of them were much more varied than just wielding the sword, which is part of what made us such a formidable force both in battle and while handling other duties such as guarding and investigating.

The crown of our host, though, the reason we could really shine, was our leader: the Archangel. She was a strong-willed woman, strict but kind, a perfect knight in shining armor astride a white horse. She had long blonde hair braided down her back, flowing from under a simple but graceful helm with little ornamentation. Her face had sharp and beautiful features with piercing blue eyes. A red cape swirled around her elegant silver armour. On her left middle finger she wore a ring that symbolized her position, wide silver with a large ruby set into it. The other symbol of her authority she wore was her sword: a beautiful saber with a basket hilt composed of what looked like mythril chain so dense as to be solid and rigid. Both the hilt and sheathe where white with gold highlights.

At the start of the dream, the land was in turmoil. It was early winter, just after Christmas but before the turn of the new year, and extremely cold. The Angels lived in the royal castle, and the stone walls did little to keep out the cold. A war approached us, a tide of darkness, something not of the world of men. All of us knew it was our duty, as the Angellic Host, to protect the people from it. Every day we went out into the city, stopping crimes, keeping order, and distributing supplies from the castle to support the people. Despite our efforts, though, every day things just seemed to get worse. A malaise was descending over the city making everyone more desperate and hopeless, including us.

On the night before the start of the new year, a calamity befell us. Our leader, the one holding the ring and sword of the Archangel, had vanished in the night. All her equipment remained—it was like she had been spirited away while we slept. Without her, we were thrown into disarray, and in the midst of it, the enemy appeared over the horizon. An enourmous army marched towards our gates, the forces of Hell come to destroy us. We had had our morale beaten down for months and on the eve of battle, lost the foundation of our Host, and now this black army approached. In this situation, it would be all to easy for us to die scattered and with little resistance.

Sensing what would become of us if no one took action, I took up the ring and sword. Although I knew I could not match the charisma and tactical genius of our Archangel, what the Host needed was someone to lead them. Even without her, we were still nothing less than the strongest fighting force in the land, and I took it up as my duty to the Archangel to lead them in her stead.

The Angellic Host formed up outside the castle with the regular army and prepared for the battle to end all battles. It was still dark, but the light of the moon provided enough light to see the surrounding land by. The tide of enemies that flowed over the horizon seemed endless, and as they got closer, a shadowy mist approached with them. Within the mist, scattered fires bobbed, and around them strange and inhuman figures writhed, barely organized enough to call an army. The regular soldiers quailed in the face of them, and the Host rode through the ranks rallying our forces and calling for them not to back down, for there was nowhere to flee to. We fought here, and we either won or died.

A moment of calm descended as the incoming tide became a stream, then a trickle, and finally we could behold the whole enemy army. It was difficult to comprehend their size. The mist concealed them, but they must have been thousands, maybe tens of thousands strong. The sole hope we had was that they had no order or formation to speak of. In that, at least, we were superior.

A cold wind blew across the fields surrounding the city. The sky was just beginning to grey with the approach of dawn. Our defenses were as prepared as they could be, and now we waited on edge, the rows of spears quivering as their wielders shook with the cold and fear that laid thick over the battlefield. Then, with a resounding roar, the enemy charged, and the battle begun.

It hardly felt like a true battle. There was no grand contest of strategy and wits. Axes and spears rose and fell in a cacophany of metallic clangs. Our army butchered monster after monster, but for each one that fell, another immediately surged forward to take its place. Though we killed hundreds, they continued to press in. Step by step, we were forced back towards the gates.

Among the countless smaller demons, there were some giants that no ordinary spear could pierce the hide of, and they brought carnage in their wake. Centipedes the size of seige weapons with mandibles as sharp as blades, elephantine beasts that trampled soldiers like grass, each of these monsters carved dents into our army where they appeared. It was these giants that we, the Angellic Host, rode out to meet.

We were the elite, with weapons well-suited to the task of slaying these creatures. Each one fought differently and required a different approach, but the Host was full of versatile fighters. Time after time, we brought down these huge foes, and each one raised a cheer from the surrounding army. Though we were losing ground, we were costing our enemy dearly for every foot of soil.

The sky lightened, the sun approached, but their numbers were too great. Thousands of demons fell, but thousands more stepped over them to keep up the fight. Though our army fought valliantly, we were running out of stamina and ground to retreat to. As commander of the Angellic Host, I was torn between standing and fighting as we had been, and making the call to retreat to the castle.

Then, atop a hill to the east, a horn sounded clearly across the battlefield. Day broke, and a wave of cavalry surged over the hill and cleaved into the enemy. Our army, seeing the tide of battle turn, fought with renewed vigor. Inch by inch, we reclaimed ground, and the newly arrived army carved gouges into their rear. Their numbers dwindled, and finally there were few enough that the remaining demons scattered and fled. We watched them go, battered and bloody, but victorious.

Then, the leader of the cavalry that had saved us appeared. It was the Archangel, heavily injured, but alive. I, along with the other core members of the Host, broke into a run and threw our arms around her. Later, we could find out what had happened, but for now we were just glad that we’d lived to see each other again.

We returned to the castle in a victorious procession, and in every window, the people cheered and waved flags. The bright blue sky itself seemed to congratulate us. When we finally reached the castle, the matters of tending to the wounded and managing equipment fell to others, and the core members of the Host were finally alone with the Archangel.

I removed the ring and sword, and offered them to her. She thanked me and took the ring, placing it once again upon her finger. Then, she curled my hands over the sword, and told me to keep it. I could scarcely believe my ears. This sword was the very symbol of the leader of the Angellic Host. But from the proud look in her sky-blue eyes, I could tell I had earned it and the respect it commanded. Pride welling up in my own heart, I buckled it on, and through a smile I couldn’t contain, I swore to live up to the honour.

I looked away across the city, shining in the rising sun, and with that the dream dissolved and I woke up.

Had a dream about pulling a heist on the palace of the gods. I didn't have time in the morning to let it soak in, so I forgot a lot of it, but I pieced together most of the plot from what I did recall. I was part of a small group of rebels that served a god who had been unjustly punished and cast out from their place among the pantheon. The gods were generally jovial and spoke in common language, much like in the game Hades, but they acted like spoiled highschoolers in possession of the power to obliterate anything that mildly annoyed them. The god we served had been eternally sentenced to exile, their power slowly eroding away as their memory among mortals and the respect their domain once commanded was forgotten.

We, the faithful, were making an attempt to help restore our god by sneaking into the palace of the pantheon and obtaining an artifact kept in the room where they met as a council to decide important things. The palace was a very open design, clearly Greek-inspired, with lots of white columns and airflow, green vines in hanging planters and water flowing from small aqueducts and fountains into the floor. Attempting to sneak into such a place was a laughably bad idea--even if it weren't so open, even minor gods could see everything around them at all times, so no one could even approach the palace without being seen.

That’s where the Labyrinth came in. It was essentially an extradimensional space with entry points all over the world, and the gods could not see inside it. Much though the gods claimed to have tried, not all the entryways in the palace had been closed. After all, secret passages are useful even to gods (especially ones as prone to drama as these), and no sane mortal would ever chance getting trapped in the Labyrinth. Our plan was to use the Labyrinth to get into the discussion room of the palace, steal the artifact, and vanish back into it before we were caught.

The Labyrinth was extremely confusing inside, intentionally designed so. For one thing, the rooms often did not look like they were inside anything; they appeared to be a whole world. For another, it was non-Euclidean and constantly made sure you knew it. Many rooms seemingly had no exit, unless you did the right thing or thought the right way about it. For example, in some rooms, there was only an exit if you fully convinced yourself there was one. With multiple people travelling in a group, it got even harder, because it wouldn't appear unless everyone simultaneously was able to convince themselves there was an exit. When passing from one room to another, one could end up in a place that looked completely different.

I only remember two "rooms", and one of them was where we, the faithful, lived. It was a small hilltop with a dilapidated cabin on top and endless sky above, and plains in every direction. It would look at home anywhere in the midwest United States, except that the physics there made no sense. A dirt road led up to the cabin with a dusty red pickup truck parked at the top, even though the road was far too steep for any vehicle to climb. It was practically vertical in places.

I started the dream relaxing on the hilltop watching and waiting for the sun to set so we could begin the mission. The perspective of the sunset was highly unusual and extremely confusing. Though I was at a lower elevation than the cabin, looking up at it, I saw my shadow projected onto the wall above me, and my friends and I goofed around and took pictures as if the shadow were part of the group until the sun fully set and night descended.

The other room I remember was right outside the entrance that led into the palace. It looked like a gas station or convenience store, a small and cramped building that couldn't have been more than 20ft on a side with a clerk's desk and two aisles of merchandise like candy bars or batteries or novelty pocket knives. If you walked around the aisle in a circle, though, you would end up in a different aisle, and it was impossible to go back to one you had been in before. There was a seemingly endless amount of possible shelves, almost all of them completely ordinary, but occasionally weird things would be mixed among the snacks and knick knacks. The clerk was always one aisle away, occasionally audibly flipping the pages of a magazine, but you could never get to them. If you didn't keep eyes on each other, it was very easy to lose your group and become trapped alone there, because someone would go around the corner and be completely gone. The only way to leave was to focus on visualizing turning into the next aisle and there being a door in the wall, and you needed to have a perfect mental image of the door you wanted. If you and the person or people you were with visualized different doors, it wouldn't appear, and to get the destination you wanted, you had to visualize the correct door for that destination.

Everything went smoothly on the way there; we all knew the plan and were able to make it through, but things started to go wrong once we made it into the palace. The entrance wasn't in the room we thought it would be, so we had to go much further and through more populated areas than we expected. We split up so that we could travel in smaller, more covert groups in disguise rather than just sneaking through like we initially planned. As I was nearing the discussion room, I heard a commotion starting behind me, and realized that someone had been found out and I had to just run for it. Along the way, a young, androgynous servant found me out, but rather than alert the guards, they told me they sympathized with our cause and wanted to come with me. I told them they couldn't, but they reminded me that I had no choice but to let them because I didn't know my way around the palace and would get caught. I had to concede that, so I let them direct me to the discussion room.

There were guards inside, but they were not flesh and blood people. They were made of a green material that looked a bit like rusted copper, but darker. They didn't want to hurt me and seemed sympathetic too, but they had a job they had to do. I apologized to them for what I had to do, and then pulled out a strange weapon that was like a short and thick metal whip that moved in an unusual, sluggish manner through the air, like its vertical motion was slowed down but not its horizontal motion. When I swung it at the guards, it distorted them as it passed through like it was warping them in photoshop. I knew that eventually, they would return to normal without being harmed, but for now it would disable them so I could get past. I snatched the artifact and ran past the disabled guards.

My guide led me through the palace in a circuitous route back to where I said the entry point to the Labyrinth was. As we got close, though, some guards spotted us. I tried to yell at the young guide not to follow me, but they dove into the Labyrinth anyways, and I had no choice but to follow. I knew the guards would never dare follow us there; it was nearly impossible to chase someone through the Labyrinth due to its non-Euclidean, psychedelic nature, and they could very well end up trapped in its halls forever.

Once we were in, though, I had a different crisis on my hands, one that was much more dread-inducing than the adrenaline rush of being chased by guards and angry gods. We were now trapped in that convenience store room, and my guide had no idea how to navigate the Labyrinth like I did. I would have been able to leave on my own just fine, but in this room, all members of a group had to be able to visualize the door out or it would not appear. I swore at the youth, telling them they should have stayed behind because dealing with the guards would have been a better fate than this. They didn't understand, so I acidically explained the properties of the room we were in. They didn't believe my words, so I pointed to the contents of the aisle we were in, and then steered them to the next aisle and back around to where the first should have been, where the contents of the aisle were completely different. Horror started to dawn on their face as they realized the predicament they were in.

I tried to explain to them how to exit this room, and to their credit, they took everything else I said at face value without questioning it. However, as I tried to explain the door we were looking for, I realized just how different it was explaining how something looks in words versus actually seeing it in person. As I grappled with this, the dread building, my alarm went off, and I woke up.