100: ...And when I leave, I don't know what I'm leaving behind.

[Sierra]

<El-Cideon> Once Aria's roused from her brief period of death and at work helping Jill organize a plan for waking Polaris's multitude of captives and ferrying them all back home, the team makes their way back to the ship. "It has been rather a long time since we saw Miss Nisbet's house," Rosemund says as she takes the helm. "Let us hope that it is still in the same place!" Then she concentrates, and shifts the group across worlds back to Limbo. Either the house hasn't moved or Rosemund was able to guide the ship back to wherever the mansion floated in the swirling void of Limbo; either way, you arrive floating just over the front lawn outside the house. It looks unchanged, save that the burned hedge guardians by the front door have been regrown as stalwart knights.
* El-Cideon changes topic to 'Current planar traits: -2 on INT/WIS/CHA-based checks for non-chaotic characters | '
<Franceska> For this trip, Franceska had chosen to go as an erinyes with a striking resemblance to her human form. Being able to see past most deceptions would be worth the loss of raw power, and now she takes a look at the house with True Seeing.
<@Steph> "Well, I don't know about you guys, but I love a good bookend," Stephanie says, eyeing the roof speculatively for unconventional entrance methods.
<El-Cideon> "So who is this person, anyway?" Shandria wonders, shifting a bit irritably as Limbo makes its displeasure with her presence known.
<Franceska> "A thief and a liar," Franceska responds, briefly contemplating just ramming the house with their ship.
<El-Cideon> Stephanie sees there are certainly second floor windows. Franceska sees nothing unusual--at least, more unusual than usual, for Limbo. As Rosemund steps down off the ship, the leafy guardians each bow and pointedly step aside from the door.
<Julia> "She's the one who set us on this entire venture," Julia explains, positioning her undead to check the topiary in case it wants to make an issue of their presence. "She probably has that mace sitting in her wardrobe."
<@Steph> "She's the mastermind! Maybe it was a double bluff?" wonders Stephanie, frowning for a moment before deciding to just barge in through the front door ahead of Rosemund.
* Franceska proceeds to fly to the front door, and knocks.
<El-Cideon> The guardians offer no resistance as Stephanie pushes open the unlocked front door. It's still the same darkly comfortable, lavish noble manse inside. No one is immediately visible at present, but there is a smell of coffee and the faint, muted sound of idle chatter from behind the door to the right.
<Julia> Julia walks after Franceska. "We should have stopped off somewhere to buy some tar and feathers," she muses. Nisbet doesn't deserve to be hurt, but that's the sort of suitable punishment she has in mind.
<Franceska> "We could drop her off in Pandemonium?"
<@Steph> "Nisbet! You liar!" exclaims Stephanie, opting to loudly interrupt the ongoing conversation. "Of all the immoral things I've seen this year, that's the most itchy of them all!"
<El-Cideon> On the other side of the door, discussion stops. From the other side, Nisbet's thuggish female butler opens the door and then strolls to the other end of a long dining room table to take a position at her mistress's shoulder. Nisbet is sitting at the head of the table, nobly dressed and composed, with her maid sitting at her side. No one else is in sight. "Oh, you did make it after all," Nisbet says with a friendly air in spite of Stephanie's greeting. "There's wine if you've worked up a thirst." Shandria's expression curdles as though she'd bitten into something overpoweringly sour. "We came all this way for tanar'ri trash?"
<Franceska> "If it had to be a demon, it would certainly be the sluttiest of them all," Franceska muses.
<@Steph> "She's a tanar'ri? We got played by a tanar'ri?" replies Stephanie, sounding disgruntled. "Nobody must know about this ever."
<El-Cideon> "You did lie to us!" Rosemund agrees with Stephanie. "Galina did not have the Dawnstar at all."
<Julia> "She's a demon?" Julia asks, sounding surprised. There was just no reason to ever check out if Nisbet really was from Solata, it never seemed to matter. "Well, she tricked us good, so credit where it's due."
<El-Cideon> Nisbet sighs. "I am who I wish to be," she says, "but I suppose I may as well dispense with the mirage since your pet devil's seen through it." Nisbet stands up; batlike wings spread out behind her, and a set of sturdy horns spirals out from her head.
<Franceska> "The Dawnstar, please."
<Julia> Well, then again she could easily be formerly of Solata and formerly formerly of the Abyss... "Not that it wasn't a worthy errand you sent us on, you could have done Rosemund's reputation a favour by handing over the Dawnstar right at the start and then telling us about the insane former paladin that needed to be stopped."
<El-Cideon> "Well, I've hardly any use for it," she admits. She turns to her butler. "Stella, be a dear and fetch the lead box from under my bed? I don't expect we should have any trouble here while you're gone." The butler nods, sparing a suspicious glance at the party before heading out. Nisbet continues: "Had I told you the truth, you would have not believed me."
<Franceska> "You'd be surprised."
<Julia> "Maybe, or maybe not. It's certainly a matter that was close to my heart," Julia answers. "And evidence wasn't hard to find once we got going."
<Franceska> "So why do you even care?"
<@Steph> "I wouldn't have believed you!" Stephanie declares. "That's true. But it's the principle of the thing! While we were doing work, she was sitting here all cozy! We were pawns. Manipulated pawns! Doesn't it make you boil over with rage?"
<El-Cideon> A raised eyebrow signals Nisbet's skepticism. "Should I of all people have gone to your church and told them the great hero of your war and the liberator of your very own city was engaged in a planes-wide campaign of kidnapping, do you really believe I would be well received?" She shakes her head. "I convinced you the only way I knew how."
<El-Cideon> The look she spares for Franceska is mildly perplexed. "Should I not care?"
<Franceska> "Do you care because you are a demon and want to keep the status quo, or do you care because what she was trying to do was terrible?" Franceska clarifies. "And how did you even find out about it?"
<Julia> "I'm annoyed at the deception," Julia agrees with Stephanie. "But it did get me out of the house for a while. Saw new and interesting locales, made new friends, saved lots of people just like me... I can't fault the results," she shrugs apologetically. "Why us, though?" she asks Nisbet, since they have come a long way from where they were when they started.
<El-Cideon> Nisbet's response to Julia is simple: "She was your kingdom's hero. I saw no reason why you shouldn't clean up your own mess. Could there have been a more appropriate audience than her own church?" To Franceska, she answers: "I follow no one's agenda. The Abyss can look after its own interests, I'm sure. And I know because I have many interests on many worlds, and many friends. Enough to notice a pattern of disappearances that others might not."
<El-Cideon> Stella strolls back and sets a heavy metal box on the table by her mistress. Nisbet produces a key and unlocks it, then steps aside. "Go on, dear," she urges Rosemund. Rosemund cautiously approaches and flips open the lid, then reaches in to pull out a well-crafted and faintly luminescent mace. She thumps the head into her palm thoughtfully. "This is it," she confirms for her friends.
<Franceska> "Well then! I think you should smack her with it for controlling you the way she did to steal it, and then we can go?"
<Julia> "Just gently though," Julia advises. A symbolic whap!
<Franceska> "No, no. Feel free to use as much force as needed."
<El-Cideon> "Do you really feel that's necessary, Miss Durant?" Nisbet asks. "What more did I do than lie to set you on a just path?"
<Franceska> "I'm not even mad about that anymore. But it reminded me that you seduced Rosemund and shamed her before her friends at the church, and didn't have the excuse of having your arm twisted by a crazy paladin. So there's that!"
<El-Cideon> Rosemund steps back. "I am not going to hit someone who is just standing there and not causing me any trouble. Anymore, at least."
<@Steph> "Besides, for all we know, the whole thing could've been incidental to your real goals!" Stephanie declares. "If you lied once you could lie twice. So some restitution is required to account for that."
<Julia> Julia looks a bit shamfaced. She'd forgotten about how Rosemund was embarrassed at the start of things.
<El-Cideon> "No, Miss Durant, I had the excuse of preventing an atrocity," Nisbet spits at Franceska. She spreads her arms demonstratively. "We are not warriors. I would like you to tell me what else I should have done. I can apologize to your friend if you feel it necessary, but I do not see that I have done her any lasting harm." Glancing at Rosemund, she feels it necessary to add: "Her...transformation was not my work, and never part of my design. I shouldn't think you could hold me accountable for that." She shakes her head at Stephanie. "What purpose would it serve me to lie now? Miss Sundown, had I not wanted you to find me again, you never would have."
<Franceska> "I don't know, we found Galina when she didn't want to be found," Franceska muses, unbothered by her theatrics. "We were too late in some cases, and all because you knew what was going on but withheld some of the information. I wouldn't cloak myself in righteousness, if I were you. Also, whether intended or not, there were unfortunate consequences as well. Restitution is certainly the right
<Franceska> way to resolve things."
<@Steph> "I don't recall being half as strong as I am now," notes Stephanie, narrowing her eyes. "Barely at the level of a succubus when we started out, I wouldn't doubt. Hearing you talk about being too weak to act directly..." She shakes her head. "I can't tell if that's more or less hateful than being tricked in the first place."
<El-Cideon> The maid feels it necessary to speak up this point, but it's with a degree of confident resolve starkly at odds with the subservient demeanor displayed on your original visit. "We didn't know everything," she says, and in response to an annoyed glance from Nisbet as her supposed omniscience is called into question: "I'm sorry love, but it's true." She turns back to the party. "We didn't know where Galina was. We knew that she had an army and we didn't. And to perfectly exact," she says to Rosemund, "I actually stole the weapon. It was a group effort, if there's some responsibility you feel needs to be compensated for here."
<@Steph> "You, huh. You were... what was your name?"
<El-Cideon> Nisbet palms her forehead. "I don't see any reason this should escalate into mutual bitterness. Do we not agree that the woman was mad and needed to be stopped? For everyone's sake? I waited here for you because I thought you deserved answers. I didn't have to."
<El-Cideon> The maid stands and bows with an easy grace. "Cavilla."
<Franceska> "Return with us and apologize."
<Julia> "I agree with that," Julia speaks up. "Really I'm quite happy with how things turned out in the end. I just thought a bit of redress might be in order for the reputational damage."
<@Steph> Stephanie's irritation suddenly gives way to an amused smile. "It's just common courtesy," she observes.
<Franceska> "Clear things up with Rosemund's church and her aunt. Since she doesn't want to hit you I'm not going to push for that myself."
<@Steph> "Fair is fair, as well." Stephanie curtseys, dispensing frills to either side of her. "Thank you for alerting us to the imminent danger of Polaris' ambitions."
<El-Cideon> "I should walk into your church and expect to be well received?" Nisbet asks incredulously. "I can say whatever you need me to say to your immediate friends, but I prefer not to involve myself directly with ideological organizations. There are reasons I live where I live, Miss Durant." Rosemund looks around. "Um, I do not really feel it necessary to hit anyone at present, no. I think we have done enough of that already."
<Julia> "Well, I suppose returning with the mace will have to do," Julia relents, leaning back.
<Franceska> How annoying. She'll need to consider if she needs to return later, on her own, and teach Nisbet a lesson. But they both have eternity for that, so there's no rush....
<@Steph> "Hey, if I can visit that place just fine," Stephanie notes. "Then so can you. Just hide the wings."
<El-Cideon> "I think that the church will be happy enough about that," Rosemund agrees. She examines the mace for a long moment, deep in thought. "I am not clear, really, on why exactly you did all this. I mean, when we found out what Polaris was doing, Shandria thought that it would be a really good idea for us to take over the whole operation and use it ourselves." Despite herself, she gives Shandria a disapproving glare. "And you are, you know, a demon. I know that each of you gets very upset when we compare one side to the other, but they are rather the same kind of awful to us."
<Franceska> "Pathetic is the word I would choose."
<@Steph> "Oh, you can get fallen angels so you can probably get risen demons, too," points out Stephanie. "That's all good. I just want, you know. Something genuine."
<El-Cideon> "I'm on no one's side," Nisbet says. "I did it because I value uniqueness. Because whatever world someone like Polaris should wish to make is not one that I would like to see."
<Julia> "It would have been pretty awful," Julia agrees.
<@Steph> "No argument there."
<El-Cideon> Rosemund looks back at Stephanie for a moment, mace idly swaying in one hand. Then she looks back to Nisbet. "Could you hold this for a moment?" she asks.
<El-Cideon> "I don't really know what you expect that to prove," Nisbet says lightly.
* Franceska looks on with feigned disinterest.
<El-Cideon> "I expect that Pelor's answer should be good enough for me," Rosemund responds, thrusting the weapon forward.
<Julia> "You know, I don't think Xondra or Shandria could hold it easily either," Julia says. "I don't think it really matters."
<El-Cideon> Nisbet reaches tentatively for the weapon as though it were a spitting adder. It's with an air of not entirely concealed surprise that she accepts it without apparent incident. "Well I don't know what I expected to happen," she says with a light laugh. "Perhaps it's just a lump of metal after all." She hands it back to Rosemund. "Rather an ungainly weapon, I would say. I have always preferred words."
<@Steph> "Don't think I don't want an apology, though!" Stephanie exclaims. "At least write a letter!"
<Franceska> "Ready to go?" Franceska asks Rosemund.
<El-Cideon> "If you really like, I could send you a letter, or something else," Nisbet says with a smile.
<El-Cideon> Rosemund looks around, nods. "I believe I am ready to go back home, and stay there for a very long time."
<Julia> Julia stands up. "Well Nisbet, it was a pleasure, a pain, and lots of things besides. But I'm glad it's done. Keep safe."
<@Steph> "Surprise me," replies Stephanie, grinning for a moment before shrugging and turning away. "I was kinda hoping I'd get a house out of this, too," she mutters, starting for the door.
<El-Cideon> "Likewise," the demon says. "It's been a pleasure following your exploits, I must admit. Take care of yourselves," she says in parting.
<Franceska> "You know," Franceska muses as she walks at Rosemund's side. "I don't believe we visited Mechanus...."
<El-Cideon> "I think perhaps we almost did," Rosemund muses on the way out.
<El-Cideon> ~

[Sierra]

Stephanie's first dream, sent after the party returned from the plane of Earth:

You have walked without direction, and this is where it has taken you: to the summit of a bare dirt mound surrounded by young, halting forest.

You recognize this spot as Burtyn Hill, an ill-favored rise a mile outside of Amaranth. This flat-topped outcropping played host to one of Connor Creel's infamous camps during the Unrest, and is now avoided by citizens and travelers alike. As if on instinct, even the plantlife refuses to encroach in your recreation of the site. Should you look south from here, you might see the city walls, but you do not do this.

The center of the hill is inhabited by a small child. He is dressed in the simplest, plainest garb; you have the impression of a young servant, or a penitent realizing his vocation before his time. He acknowledges you with the merest nod, then peers up at the sky.

"The sun is broken," the child observes with an air of stoic contemplation, and you realize that he is correct. The sun hangs in a cloudless sky at its noontime prominence, but it is without color--blear, wan, fitful. It should sear your eyes to look upon it, but it does not. The pale light it sheds serves more to lengthen the shadows in the surrounding woods than it does to disperse them.

"The gray sun," the child continues, "it sheds light but no heat."

You are cold. This is not unnatural--it is winter, after all. But no wind stirs this chill through your bones. This is the cold of absence. Nothing moves. No deeds are done, no songs are sung. The world exists. The trees around are stunted, pitiful things. Were they not always? The gray sun nourishes them poorly. Do they shiver from its rays?

The child heaves a sigh, replete with a weariness that belongs to a much older man. "When do we become who we are?" he asks. The question is undirected. You feel that he would not object to receiving an answer from you, but you do not have one to offer. "I must understand this. When does the child become the man? When does the man give way to the dastard?"

There is no response you can think of that might placate the child in its agitated state. Instead you watch.

"I can reason this." He reaches out his hands vaguely, as if struggling to encompass the totality of existence within his meager grasp. "If I have a system, I might reason this. There are rules, and if there are rules then we can be fixed. Adjusted. Tempered."

The child has a dagger. It is fine steel, honed, and cast in proportion to his small frame. He wields it with a familiarity that unnerves you. He stabs it into the earth, and cuts. Digs symbols into the dirt. You know many languages and recognize this as none of them. You realize that they are not letters. They are experiences, emotions, wishes, and regrets, that the child attempts to entrap each within its own character. They writhe in protest, they turn your mind in knots, so you look elsewhere.

The forest is thinning around you. You decide that you are not concerned. A tree caught in the sun's arc withers to ash. There is no reason to worry. There are many more of them.

An anguished cry commands your attention. The child stands up. You notice that his feet are bare. Bare, dirty, and scuffed, much moreso after an angry kick disperses his attempt at moral calculus into so much dust. You realize that on this spot, two decades past, he might have been any one of many. But in the present, he is only one, and thus he has a voice.

"There was a time and a place. If I could find it, I might hold the wheels still. If I could find him, I might stop him, before I become him." With a feral snarl, he lunges at some unseen foe. A savage stab nearly catches you in the gut. The child does not seem conscious of nearly skewering you. You wonder if he would notice if he had. You wonder if he would care.

His gestures are wild now, by turns manic and pleading. "When do our decisions become our own? What precision need I to know when a man can be accounted a loss? And then what is to be done with him?"

It is very bright now, and commensurately colder. You spare a glance for your surroundings. Was there a forest there? That is nonsense. There is no forest about you now. There is no thing at all out there, and you have all the light in the world to see it by.

"Who will save us from ourselves?"

He turns and addresses you, by name but this once, before you wake up: "Will it be you, Stephanie?"

[Sierra]

Franceska's first dream, sent after the party returned from the plane of Earth:

You are in a cell.

The dimensions of this space are peculiar, not of Solati design. The walls to your left and right are oddly angled, and in conjunction with floor and ceiling form a hexagon. You are scarcely able to stand your full height without brushing your head against the ceiling. You reach out your hand and the wall trapping you within this cell is soft, organic, but unyielding. How did you come to be here? The light within the cell is subdued, orange in hue, seeping through the walls from elsewhere and affording only so much visibility as to examine your hand with arm outstretched.

You are not alone. How did you fail to notice before? Entombed in the wall behind you, your cellmate is an elongated mass of translucent white tissue. It wriggles slightly in a capsule of milky fluid, and takes no notice of you.

There is a sound. Did you not notice it before? It was always here, and it always shall be. A hum. A whir of frenzied industry. Wings, countless in number, one might feel quite anonymous amongst their multitude, so pervasive is the sound, it is the sound of life here. Should you derive comfort from this anonymity? It is in the air, the walls, you feel it in your feet.

A voice speaks. There is another human with you in this cell. Possibly human? Her face is uncertain, hazy. You cannot focus on it. You do not care to. She is dressed respectably, according to your own standards: carefully tailored black suit, signifier of a legal professional. Her ensemble commands authority and nothing else is of consequence. She speaks, and though you do not know the voice, you know its tone, level with procedural confidence.

"You feel revulsion at this sight," the woman observes with a gesture towards the larva, and you are aware that you do, that sharing your cell with this unformed, inchoate mass provokes such overwhelming discomfort that you feel your skin might shrug itself off and escape all its own. "It is only to be expected," the woman adds.

The wall before you is rent without warning, and an alien shape pushes through, familiar in truth from everyday experience but rejected by all sense for its proportion: bulging compound eyes, segmented body, black and gold--it is a honey bee, its body on scale with your own. It is not right that one should be so large. Or is it you that are small? The insect ignores you, presses its head into your cellmate's compartment and disgorges from its mouth a slurry of nutrients to nourish the larva.

"Why do we experience such disgust on contact with their kind?" the woman goes on. She does not wait for your answer. "It bears consideration. The action we observe is simple. It is relatable. The young must be nurtured. We understand this instinct, but we quail in horror to see it exhibited in this manner. Why is this?"

The worker finishes its business. It begins to withdraw. It stops and examines you with a critical air. Wings flit uncertainly.

"Observe the adult form," the woman continues. "There is in its design an implicit understanding of values we might only aspire to when in peak form. What we might idolize, for their kind is beyond law, fundamental to their nature. What are these virtues? Consider their behavior. The nest is invaded: what is the response?" She snaps her fingers, and the worker's wings flutter in agitation.

You understand that something is wrong. The omnipresent hum stirs, focuses.

The woman reaches her conclusions quite unphased: "Defense. Instant, unswerving, unflinching. Each will sting and die for its queen without hesitation or introspection, a peerless demonstration of so many lauded human values. Duty. Obligation. Responsibility. We honor these traits in verse and myth. Perhaps some fraction of us demonstrate them in admirable quantity? But look before you: this is virtue engineered. Consider now your disgust at the swarm as it mobs the hapless intruder. Why does it repel us so to see our cherished virtues manifest so perfectly in another?"

The horde rushes in. That your cell could not possibly contain their bulk is of no significance. They swarm, and all about you is a roiling mass of bristly thorax and legs, diaphanous wings, feathered antennae. Your interlocutor is unmolested. You understand that your attackers recognize her as one of their own, just as naturally as you know that she is not.

"Because we have a choice."

Sight begins to desert you beneath their number. The crush of bodies deprives you of all breath and mobility. The woman makes no move to assist.

"What is sacrifice without volition? We may immolate ourselves for a cause. We may preserve ourselves for a cause. We may act only for ourselves at all times, or act with variable motives as suits the season. We may do any of these things in accordance with our own wishes, provided we only recognize that such decisions are our own to make."

The assembled swarm scrambles to orient its various members in coordination, then thrusts stingers inward. Barbed, long as your arm, well able to pierce through abdomen and emerge from your back. The pain is distantly recognized, in the manner of a dream, but the sensation of being multiply skewered is one that will not leave your memory for a very long time.

"Explain our differences to their kind, if you wish to try. Could you find a means of communication, could you decipher a language of scent and gesture comprehensible to them, there would yet be no understanding. What grounds have they to understand us? Between the self and the hive there is no distinction." She raises her voice over the angry furor of the attacking swarm, and intones with the air of liturgy: "'For she is many and we are one.'"

All is blackness. Before startling to merciful waking life in your own bed, a final query:

"So tell me, Franceska: who do you serve?"

[Sierra]

Julia's first dream, sent after the party returned from the plane of Earth:

You stand atop a tomb.

You do not know the structure from personal experience, but you recognize intrinsically its function. Your perch is the roof of a circular spindle tower. Below you lies a gaggle of tumbled sandstone walls and statues, weed-choked, weathered, but monolithic yet. This ruin lies far afield from all civilization, calm in its desolation, peaceful. This is what you would see if you looked down from the tower, but you do not. Your gaze is instead drawn upwards.

The sky is awash with stars above you. This is true night, rarely witnessed by a child of the city. There is no torchlight glare to compete, no crackle of magic to pollute the purity of the dark with false illumination. The moon is obscured this evening, and the stellar host may on this night shimmer with utmost enthusiasm. Their profusion beggars the imagination. They are beyond counting should you take a second of your life for each, fixed in their patterns but gliding with silent grace across the firmament.

"Beautiful, aren't they?"

It is a man's voice, sonorous but muffled. There is another stargazer with you on this tower: he sits on a bench ringing the parapet, wearing a fine silk burial gown, and a golden funeral mask etched with runes conceals his face. Two withered hands are clasped delicately in his lap. He does not look as though he has moved for an eon. You know that he has not.

You do not answer his query; there is no need to restate the obvious, and so he continues speaking of his own accord. "And like all things of beauty, safest viewed from a distance. Do you know what they are? Has it entered your speculations?" He looks at you. From his tone, you might imagine the face beneath the mask couched in a playful grin, an image that few without your peculiar sensibilities could consider without horror. "I will tell you."

He turns his gaze back to the heavens. Starlight glimmers softly off the etchings across his mask. "Each star is a small sun. Its mother in miniature, and like the sun, each may burn us should we draw too near. Alike in so many ways, yet the mother still outshines her numerous brood in intensity, no matter how much they might aspire."

The starlight is suddenly invasive. You are an object of cold scrutiny, each pinprick of light its own pitiless examiner, and you understand that their focus is solely upon you. Your host is not within their sight, and to bear their collective glare alone evokes a sensation of penetrating discomfort.

The expressionless mask examines you carefully, not with the calculating oppression of the skies above, but with calm deliberation and grave concern. "Your countenance is known to them, Julia. You are not. Treasure that anonymity while you may. For the hand that heals might as capably wound, and so the sun that nurtures the land may in turn sear away that which is unclean in its sight. Obscurity may shield you for a time..."

He stands up. The dust of millenia sloughs off, his gown now gleaming in the starlight as surely as his golden mask, and dead ages of history turn over to lift him upon their hands.

"...but not forever. We should understand what we oppose. Come with me."

He reaches out and carefully takes your hand in his own. It is neither warm nor cold. Dry, brittle, but with an insistent strength. There is a gentle tug; you recognize the subtlety of the gesture as benevolence.

You are elsewhere. The panorama you admired from the tower now surrounds you. There is blackness; there are stars; and somewhere between it all is Julia Astin. The dead king speaks; his voice is everywhere and nowhere.

"Consider the growth of this small sun."

To call it small is of consequence only in comparison to the vast field of its fellows in the panorama; you observe the roiling ball of flame from an immensity of distance and still understand it to be a grander mass than you had ever conceived might exist, to comprise a span of many times greater length than you have walked in your life. A disk of dust and rock circles the star in near proximity, circles closer and closer, is drawn within its radius to melt and bolster the mass of the lambent orb.

"Consider its neighbors."

Small spheres of rock circle the star at greater remove, specks in comparison to their bloated anchor, but comfortable in their rustic orbits. Safe from its unthinking rapacity? No, the star swells and expands, glows a vicious crimson, and with what you might only interpret as hunger sweeps past its humble confederates. In a blink, all are consumed, without ceremony, without recognition.

"A star has appetites just as any man..."

There is nothing left to burn.

The star shrinks inward. A held breath, a clenched fist. There is a taut moment of calmness. You realize with certainty that disaster is imminent, and fear for not recognizing what form it might take.

"...and just as any man, may overreach in sating them."

The star erupts.

There is light, there is burning, and then there is waking.

[Sierra]

Stephanie's second dream, sent after the party first returned from the plane of Air:

You rise for roll-call a careful minute late, this daily ritual your only modest rebellion against a dream deferred.

The commandant deigns not to acknowledge your offense in his lengthy review of the barracks, perhaps his own desultory individual act for the day before surrendering to the press of official responsibilities. In due time and proper order, you brave the blazing desert morning to attend to your own.

What frontier is this that you guard?

You do not have one name to tag upon it. There could be many names for this land; select blind from among those realms most dreaded by men, most often employed for curse and invective, and any should do well. The sun is a fierce and glowering sphere, depleted of color and mercy both, and it rains a vicious heat across the land without surcease. Ocher sands stretch from one horizon to another, and the sandstone make of your weathered old fort lends it the aspect of something extruded, vomited up by the desert rather than built. The bleakness of the waste is unbroken whatsoever direction you should turn. Nothing grows here; nothing crawls, hunts, or slithers.

Whose border are you set to watch? Whomsoever constitutes the enemy, your company must have served very well indeed to present such a deterrent force as to have never caught sight of them.

Your watch partner accompanies you up the tower for the day's shift; questions do not. Your partner may have a name, but he is quiet and attentive and you do not wish to compromise these sterling qualities by asking him. You know little of his aspect, only the pursed lips and pale blue eyes visible through the narrow slits of his helmet; on occasion as a lock of sandy hair falls across one eye he strikes you as queerly familiar. Did you grow up together? But where did you grow up?

The origin of your assignment eludes you. How long have you been on watch? Who delivered your orders? Where did you dwell before this deployment, and what passions consumed your attention before it? There must be answers to these questions but you find that you lack the will to voice them, recoiling from a sense that only realization of loss could come with their fulfilment, and they are not important for your term of service.

These things are of no consequence so long as men are defined by their duty.

Sweltering and sweating, you stand the walls in silence as ever--yet today your partner instead asks a strange question: "What is the value of an inherited cause?"

You break your watch to look aside at him, and find that you cannot identify the emotion that struggles to articulate itself through his voice, though a taut kind of uncertainty is manifest in the visible sliver of his face.

"My father stood these walls, as did his father before him. The fort yet stands, so they must have served well. What was their reward?" he wonders. "That they stand no longer?"

You shuffle in place. You do not know why he is asking these questions. You wish that he would not; attending them has prompted you to indulge a lamentable lapse in vigilance.

There is nothing that you know to say to him. You serve out the rest of your watch and spend the evening after engaged in perfunctory rounds of poker with the west tower crew until the commandant orders evening turndown. Through docked cards and stuffed sleeves and stacked decks, with the artful guilelessness to affect the impression of a blunderer favored by freak stroke of fortune, you pocket the majority of the pot with a sense of accomplishment strangely alien to all your official daytime duties.

But there is nothing on which to spend your ill-got gains.

You rise for roll-call a careful minute late, this daily ritual your only modest rebellion against a dream deferred.

The commandant deigns not to acknowledge your offense in his lengthy review of the barracks, perhaps his own desultory individual act for the day before surrendering to the press of official responsibilities. In due time and proper order, you brave the blazing desert morning to attend to your own.

This watch proves an exceptionally hot one; the noontime sun assaults your eyes and flesh with vindictive intensity and you'd do best to spend this day in a quiet haze. You hope that your partner tasks you with no further unanswerables today. You are disappointed.

"Who is the enemy?"

You do not have an answer to this question. You wish that he would stop talking so that you might forget that you do not have an answer and attend to your duties, but your silence only provokes further inquiry.

His voice is very soft as he speculates: "I wonder, has the enemy been before us all this time?"

He shades his eyes and squints up at the sky. The sun is as effulgent as ever in its monochrome glare. You trust that in time your partner will remember himself and resume due vigilance, but in fact his attention only adopts a more pensive aspect, his final statement for the day voiced with dirgelike resignation: "Have we done anything at all to keep it at bay?"

You find that this evening passes best in the company of a bottle.

You rise for roll-call a careful minute late, this daily ritual your only modest rebellion against a dream deferred.

The commandant deigns not to acknowledge your offense in his lengthy review of the barracks, perhaps his own desultory individual act for the day before surrendering to the press of official responsibilities. In due time and proper order, you brave the blazing desert morning to attend to your own.

This day something strange occurs on your watch.

You could judge it to be midway through your appointed shift when the intruder appears. From out the sky it alights upon the low well central to the courtyard, small and white with flapping appendages that allow it to hurtle through the air with unseemly grace. You and your partner descend the tower to examine this anomaly more closely. It is a flighty little creature coated in down of brilliant alabaster, possessing a long, dextrous beak and tiny, inquisitive blue eyes. Perfectly peaceable in your presence, it rustles its wings quietly and emanates a soft, calming hum. It is the most soothing sound that you can recall to memory.

None of that is of any significance. It is a foreign element; you draw your sword and do your duty.

The yard is silent again. Your partner stares at you. You lack the capacity to decipher his expression and do not endeavor to do so. Instead, you carefully wipe your sword clean and sheathe it at your belt. One should take proper care of her instruments.

Beside you, your partner has reached a conclusion. With minimal fuss, he undoes his swordbelt to drop it upon the sand; then turns and stalks out from the fort, into the wastes.

You cannot understand what motivates this dereliction of duty, but a persistent needle of feeling deep within compels you to learn. You follow him out through the fort's cracked main gate, some brisk strides soon seeing you apace with him. He notices you by his side, and you examine his limited expression. It is a fragile smile. The two of you walk into the desert, beyond experience. You have no notion of your destination and judge this realization to be intoxicating.

The fort disappears behind you, but the sun follows. Angrily, it overtakes you, draws above, and speeds past towards its nighttime berth. In its wake are bred shadows; the lowering sun should merely lengthen those that trail behind you and your partner, but instead the rearward horizon has given birth to a host of motile darknesses. It is a gabbling nimbus of wrathful shades, and they are coming for you. You and your partner break into a run. A sharp tang is on the wind before you.

At last you reach the seashore. The gray sun plummets towards an oceanic horizon. There is a small boat here, beached; it is a rowboat, with seats and oars for two.

"Well enough," your partner says, smiling with an effusive sort of calm. "We should not be easy prey." He climbs into the boat, takes up the rightward oar in his hands. Looks up at you silently.

You join him. Together you paddle away from the shore just as the shadows lurch forward to scrabble at it hungrily.

The sea shifts in a manner much reminiscent of your familiar desert when the wind rakes at it, yet this desert is one of your choice. With a gleeful start of fright, you understand yourself to be beyond the reach of any commandant or brigadier; here, you are beholden to no orders, no routines or rotas. There is no longer anyone above you. You think that there must once have been a word for this state of being.

The sun drops into the ocean. From its impact, and highlighted by its dying rays, erupts a terrible wave. Black as death, gathering its power with awful slowness, rising half to the heavens before sweeping malevolently in your direction. In unspoken unison, you and your partner drive toward it.

You comprehend your final impulse just as the wave overtakes you: it is defiance.

[Sierra]

Franceska's second dream, sent after the party first returned from the plane of Air:

You are in a cage.

Mere imprisonment was not the sole objective of your cage, though capably does it guarantee this as well. Whatever cruel blacksmith bent these bars of black iron into their claustrophobic barrel dimensions had as clear object the imposition of a great discomfiture upon their inhabitant, and with aplomb did he succeed: you cannot properly stand, so diminutive is the height of your cell as to enforce a hunched posture, with neck bent and scalp dug into the overhead bars; you can neither sit nor kneel, so narrow are the bounds of your confinement that you lack the latitude to bend down; you might slouch against one side of the cage or another, but nowhere is the flimsy gray fabric of your prison gown sufficient to protect you from the rusted metal jags of the bars against which you must lean. Of all uncomfortable positions you might adopt, in none can you evade a constant physical realization of your pitiable circumstances.

You realize that you are in motion--yet barely perceptible, not even such that movement might provide you with the slightest soothing breeze, and at intervals your cage halts with a suddenness that cannot but leave you rocking in place and grating against the corroded iron of your containment.

Your surroundings are of a vastness incomparably contrasting the narrowness of your imprisonment. The sky above you is an oppressive canopy of black smoke, and a mountain's height beneath you is a sea of red--liquid metal, you know, molten for ages uninterrupted and surely to roil angrily until the universe's last cinders wink out. An odor of burning flesh spices the sharp stink of molten metal, and the heat--the heat is invasive, creeping into your very bones to leave you awash with sweat and your mouth a drier gulch with every breath of sulfurous air.

You see that your cage hangs from a great chain over this fiery gulf, and that it is one of many--beyond sight ahead of you do they stretch in an infinitude of suffering, each bearing a miserable fragment of humanity toward some unseen torment. Immediately before you in the chain is a pale man whose corpulence strains the bounds of his cell such that it is wonder he was ever contained within it. You might call to him, but he sobs with such dedication that you recognize him to be beyond reach of any words you might muster.

"Can it truly be this realm that your heart calls home?"

You know this voice. You have heard it before, somewhere. A different cell? In her cultured eloquence she retains that mastery over intonation and suggestion that you should hope to recognize in any courtroom counterpart. Her air now is one of insistent skepticism.

With painful contortion, you crane your neck round to catch sight of your rearward neighbor. Again you cannot discern her face. It is not as though she lacks one, yet you find yourself unable to focus upon it; her overall confident and officious aspect commands your attention more than any such specific detail. Though by no means short enough to comfortably dwell within her own equal imprisonment, still she manages a properly upright bearing despite her restrained circumstances, as though the cage cannot properly contain her essential nature.

"Such despair neglect fosters," she laments. "Who will save us from ourselves?"

Your forward progress halts outside of a building, a brutish cube of blistered red iron perforated by a precisely cage-shaped aperture. Your position brings you into perilous proximity with the molten sea, such that its terrible warmth insinuates itself into the metal of your cage and scalds your feet; there is no escape from the pain, however much you might writhe and scrape yourself against the walls of your cell.

"There is no shortage of volunteers," the woman observes, weathering her similar plight with equanimity. "Perhaps this is another ahead of us? Why, they do think to offer us improvement, in their crude, confused fashion."

The chain grinds forward and draws you within the structure. Mercifully shielded from the worst of the heat inside, yet the insult of your new circumstances must only compound the wretchedness of your situation. You are in a mockery of a courtroom, with empty stands, an absent jury, and only an abomination in the judge's chair. At once a devil of bestial proportion and a slapped-together iron facsimile of infernal authority, the mechanical adjudicator looms with palpable menace and ill-will, machinery clacking and whirring within him as his corkscrew eyes swivel to examine you. To the right of the judge a clockwork imp sits poised to tap away all proceedings on a dictation machine; to the left another sketches out a demeaning caricature of the present accused--you.

The fat man in his cage has lapsed into dumb silence by an aperture on the far side of the room; your loquacious female comrade can just observe the proceedings from her position within the entrance to the room.

"Transgressor Franceska Durant," the devil addresses you with an echoing bellow underscored by the tap-tap-tap of impish fingers on keys. "You are brought before this court to answer for the following misdeeds: demonstrating sympathies unbecoming a proper scion, and disharmonious conduct extending therefrom; interference with and defiance of authorities established through proper martial dominance; liberation of the weak and undeserving; proffering unwarranted, unrewarded assistance to lesser parties without demand of proper obeisance or favor in return; camaraderie and cohabitation with parties of contrary nature--"

The charges roll on. You find his litany of achievements and the bubbling of the unseen ocean fading from your perception as the woman's voice rings within your head: "Quiet. Calm yourself. Let us hear his inner workings."

Your senses sharpen. As though with your ear pressed against the cold metal bracings of his chest, the labors of the devil's internal gears are plain to your perception. Fitfully, pathetically, they grind without hope or conviction, and only this small and tyrannical victory over one helpless soul provides some meager fuel to drive the sputtering engine at his heart long enough to torment another in turn.

"Wheels within wheels," the woman summarizes with a condescension that stops short of pity. "It is all that they are. It is all that they will allow themselves to be."

The devil finishes announcing his roster of civil atrocities and offers you opportunity to contest the charges. You realize that you cannot truthfully contradict any of his accusations and deign not to.

Your partner in captivity approves: "Yes, good. Abase yourself as you must to speed this proceeding along. Pride is fleeting, survival presents opportunities. The foundation and weakness of all tyrannies is complacency. Let them believe that they have it while you must. We needn't become that thing we oppose in order to combat it, yet we should endeavor to recognize within our adversaries the flaws that they fear to acknowledge themselves."

With cacophonous glee, the devil pronounces the expected verdict and bids you proceed to the right for all due processing. The chain slides you out of the devil's immediate sight and moves the confident woman before him.

"Transgressor [ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-]--" The devil's vocabulator seizes violently on trying to pronounce her name, and you must conclude that he is not programmed to enunciate whatever language best represents her. Instead he proceeds with the charges: actively contravening all duly designated authorities on matter of principle; perversely opposing the forced acquisition for labor purposes of inferior specimens by said authorities; boldly and brazenly advancing an agenda of personal betterment in contradiction to governments seeking only the proper integrity and uniformity of whole civil populations. She meekly acknowledges all of the above and soon joins you in exiting the courtroom through the darkness at the right.

Somewhere ahead of you, shortly, erupts a scream. A woman's scream, a protracted and choking wail of terror gliding into an agonized and sharply truncated shriek of pain. Unrest rustles back along the line of cages toward you as captives struggle to discern the agent of this rising horror--and then, from the darkness, it looms, a cruel mechanism in shape of a devil's wicked countenance, patched together from slabs of bloody, rusting metal and with a gaping mouth full of gnashing, crushing, interlocking jaws through which your cages will shortly be drawn. The grinning infernal facade being of such perfunctorily shoddy craftsmanship should be an apparatus of comical aspect were it not so plainly lethal. Before you, the fat man breaks from his torpor and howls, whines, pleads to the gods for rescue.

From behind, your partner speaks: "You cannot escape. I cannot escape. But we might escape. I am coming for you. Be ready."

The fat man's cage is drawn within the murderous maw and his importunities give way to a grisly gurgle. You perceive that the device is designed to take its careful time to mash, rend and tear each subject in careful degrees short of lethality before offering any mercy of oblivion.

Behind you, the woman inclines her head upward and with a hacking, bloody choking cough manages to extricate something from out her lips--a thin, flexible band of metal. She drops it, dextrously catches it between two fingers, and wrenches herself around in her cage quite heedless of the red gashes she subjects herself to by moving so forcefully in the restricted confines of her cell. With collected effort she works the sliver of metal into the lock of her cage--and soon the door swings open with tortured, creaking protest. The woman hauls herself up and out, swings hand over hand down the chain to your cage and goes to work upon your lock. "I know not where we might flee to," she says wryly, "but it could only be an improvement, yes?"

The door opens. You waste no time. It is a second's thought to assume avian form as you tumble out into the void; your partner drops upon your back and clings with fierce commitment to the dividends of cooperation as you fly up and away--

--back toward the waking world.

[Sierra]

Julia's second dream, sent after the party first returned from the plane of Air:

The dead king's tomb has room for two.

Though your stone pallet perhaps does not provide the greatest comfort, you are more attuned than most to perceive the musty graveyard aroma that pervades this small chamber as a homey melange. You sit up and behold a modest cell choked with row upon row of canopic jars, ushabtis, gold coffers and assorted other funeral offerings around the tomb's twin sarcophagi. No light sullies these plutonic depths, and yet you have no difficulty discerning the figure of the dead king as he studies a fine mosaic worked into the wall before you, a memorial of great conquests in some history long lost to dust.

"What is the nature of sacrifice?" the dead king wonders aloud. You do not answer, understanding his intent to be rhetorical. "A word much abused by men of vulgar disposition. Shall we see whether it might be rescued from the opportunists and charlatans that have so oft led it astray?"

He turns and strides away from the mosaic, taking your hand in passing, and carefully yet with disinterest maneuvers through the ranks of grave goods toward an ascending passageway. Drawn into his wake, you follow. The weight of ages as much as stone presses upon you as you wind through corridor upon corridor lined with skeletons lodged within recessed berths, each provided the appropriate habit and tools of a soldier, a craftsman, or a royal attendant. "Thou faithful servant, one and all," the dead king murmurs to them in passing, affecting a strange air--regret?

"We must brave the starlight for this symposium," he warns you as you ascend. "Brace yourself for their scrutiny."

He halts before an imposing stone slab that blocks your upward path. With a wave of his hand and the utterance of a single potent syllable, the obstacle slides into the wall amidst a shower of dust that carefully falls around you both to leave your silk gowns pristine.

Your stomach clenches in apprehension before you can even take a step outside. The night lies crouched in wait for you above. A sliver of moon contends feebly to outshine the wash of stars in a cloudless sky. The dead king affords the stellar panorama only the briefest acknowledgement. "Sons and daughters of the sun," he observes with an air of wearied exasperation and a beleaguered shake of his head. "Tiny each, yet secure in their multitude," he goes on, intoning with affectless repetition: "'For she is many and they are one.'"

The glare of stars penetrates fabric and flesh both in stern endeavor to read your very essence, and it is only with a writhing sort of mental agility that you are able to present yourself as no thing within their interest. Even still they watch, lest some clever soul escape their initial appraisal. The stars shine without passion or judgement. They shine unremittingly. They shine because it is all that they know.

"Gaze not too long at their luminous profusion, lest you invite their attention premature," the dead king cautions. "We needn't dwell upon the heavens tonight. The affairs of men precede all finalities. Our object lesson stands before us."

A wave of his hand draws your attention groundward. Before you lies an uneven circle of stone arches. Black granite, solid and unyielding, ringing a crude slab of an altar marred all across its surface by some more sinister darkness. The dead king lays one withered palm upon the stained centerpiece and, prompted by a nod of his gleaming mask, you join him.

Impressions assail you immediately--you are somewhere else, or someone else? Atop a ziggurat on a stormy night. You are bound to stone, immobile, wrists and ankles raw from struggle. There is a pungent stink of incense, a guttural humming all around--an image catches you in a moment of grim fascination, a ceremonial instrument, a chipped stone knife, raised for approval on high--and then brought down upon you, again and again and again--blood flows, consciousness flows away, shadowy figures chant arcanely, heedless of the suffering central to their ritual--you die a mere instrument of strange aspirations, your own hopes and dreams cast to oblivion with your last thoughts as you die--

You tumble back from the granite altar riven by an animal panic before regaining your proper sense of self. The dead king inclines his gleaming mask in sympathy and gently helps you to your feet before pressing quietly on with his observations. "Primitive man thinks to assuage implacable forces of nature with the release of lifesblood not his own. Should we be impressed by this savage foray into spiritual commerce?"

Something awful simmers insistently beneath his patrician calm.

"What more has the practitioner done than perpetrate the most brutish of thefts? And what of the god to whom he dedicates his ritual of desecration? Should we accord a being low enough to call such offerings an honor any honor of his own?"

Disdain manifest through the curt turning of his back upon the bloody altar, the dead king strides away without honoring its infamy one word further. Sand crunches beneath your bare feet as you struggle to recollect your senses and stagger alongside him. Beyond the sacrificial ring lies an orderly field of marble tombstones. Perhaps once they bore inscriptions, but now lie so worn as to resemble no more than row upon row of stray upright teeth.

The dead king extends one hand, nods for you to join him. With instinctive expertise and coordination, the joint execution of proper arcane gestures summons the lichyard's silent denizens up from their eternal rest. From each grave rises a skeleton, perfectly picked clean and dessicated eons past--yet not without character evident to one inured to realizations of mortality. Here a grin short of incisors, there a shattered sternum suggesting cause of death, elsewhere a pronounced slouch carried as habit from life--every bone tells a story if one has only the knack of reading. The motley array of skeletons stands quietly at attention, awaiting your direction.

"Ages pass, and man refines the means through which he demands the utmost of his brethren," the dead king continues. "Beasts possessed of more civilized veneers concoct means of convincing more common men to die in furtherance of selfish designs. Words such as 'duty' are invented to lend this bold fraudulence an air of respectability, even desirability."

The skeletons as one retrieve sword and shield from their graves, then adopt squadron formations.

"Shall we march with our peers? Oh, but of course not at the front."

The skeletons whirl about as a unit and face the east, stalk off at martial pace in the moonlight, beating a merry yet macabre tattoo as bare bone tromps across cool sand in uniform precision. You manage a brisk evening's walk before the skeletal troupe halts abruptly. Thrice in unison, they rap their swords against their shields. Ahead of you, beyond the serried rows of soldiers, stands another rotting brigade, these shambling militants with a crescent device upon their shields.

"Ah, but what is this? An opposing force?"

A marshal's baton lies in your grasp, weighty with prestige and authority. An intoxicating aura overcomes you and with a rush of pride you raise the baton to signal your troops forward. Your army charges and a scuffle ensues, with much the rattle of steel on bone, the meaty thump of sword upon dead flesh. At length, through many lamentable yet necessary casualties, your skeletons prevail and sweep the field of the presumptuous zombie force.

"All hail the victorious conquerors possessed of such sound vision as to lead from the rear," the dead king says, giving way to a plainly sardonic air for the first time. "A noble thing perhaps to give of ourselves so that others might prosper, but should we respect the man who bestows from safe distance upon his lessers the honor of dying in his place? Is his example truly so different from the shamanic savagery behind us?"

The dead king trods on to the east with the remnants of your army and soon overcomes the looming spindle of his tomb, evidently circumnavigating the world in one evening's trot. He lifts the marshal's baton from your grasp and hurls it forcefully to the ground; the remaining skeletons follow suit in discarding their armaments, then proceed to group together and detach knuckles for use in games of chance, excavate ancient bottles and guzzle mouthfuls of sand, nap with arms folded behind skull in stray corners of the ruins and altogether indulge the idle industries of an army at rest.

"We should step lightly around men too eager to celebrate the martyrdom of their fellows," the dead king concludes. "Volition is the key without which this vaunted exchange is of no consequence. It cannot be coerced. It cannot be commanded. It cannot be cultivated through mere familiarity."

He circles round to the tomb entrance and descends once again, with you in tow. You had not thought it warm out in the barren desert night, but escaping the scrutiny of the stars is as diving into a pond of chilled ambrosia and you shiver with relief.

"It is an easy thing to blaze out in service to some greater purpose," the dead king continues en route back to his resting place. "A moment's pain and you die assured that remembrance of you will always be recounted as a glorious example by those you served. Is that not simplicity itself? Is it not enticing to be relieved of all present and future ills and trust in a memory made inviolate by your sacrifice?"

The quiet and stillness of the sepulcher is a reassurance, a homecoming. The martial scene on the tomb wall has been replaced by display of a humbler soul tenderly treating the infirm, and the dead king is animated with a quiet zeal as he concludes his oration:

"But consider instead what a labor it is to live for a cause! Or to persist for one, as the case may be for some of us," he allows, with an aside that almost suggests a smile. "All this talk of death, whether sanctimonious or offered gladly as act of charity, obscures the significance of the word. You and I share the perspective to entertain a more sophisticated understanding. What an example one makes by forsaking her own daily desires to assist others, putting to rest that persistent devil of ambition one day after another in service to her peers. Is that not commitment? Consider that fearsome determination, the uncommon drive behind it. And within an eternity there is so much humanity to lose and yet so much to give." He turns again from the mosaic and looks directly at you. "But that is a choice that we make for ourselves. Therein lies its power. Else we grasp at mere shadows of virtue. So when next a man implores from behind the safety of high walls that you recall what you owe him and his kind--"

These last words echo and elongate in your perception as you crawl toward waking:

"--remember the knife."

[Sierra]

Stephanie's third dream, sent after the party returned from the plane of Pandemonium:

You wake to the sound of busy machinery.

You are up early this morning, before the captain's address. This is not unusual—you are conscious of your responsibilities, and conscientious in your refusal to exhaust yourself through undue revelry into the dark hours. So it is an ordinary thing for you to stir before morning ignition to listen, blind, to the vital functions of home churning away beneath your feet, in the bulkhead above, and in the walls around you. Here the steady thrum of a heat exchanger channeling excess warmth away from the dormitories. Below the burble of boilers firing as laundry workers get an early start to their day. There the soft rush of air ducts exchanging stale atmosphere for fresh; with precise focus you can detect the rattle of a loose bolt in your overhead vent, and this you shall have to report to the appropriate branch of maintenance.

You cannot conceive of an existence without this constant mechanical symphony playing in the background. There is no word for such a condition.

The snap of filaments energizing announces the official start to the day, and after the proper moment's courteous wait to allow groggy citizens the chance to crawl toward awareness, the circular panel by each apartment door slides away to expose the flared metal aperture that serves as the focus of each morning. Home is as laced with conduits as the body is with veins, and these ones channel sound.

A presaging rattle through the pipes as the captain clears his throat. A humanizing touch—few at all meet the man, and none within your professional circle can claim to have done so, such that some jest about the possibility of the captain's voice being one more function of home itself. But your senses tell you that he is a citizen like any other, that minor hesitation and fluctuation in his voice informing you of a man with all the cares and worries of home weighing upon him.

The captain's voice is that of an old man. Home knows relatively few of them—the stresses of its environment, the dimness, the harsh demands of the duties necessary to maintain it in livable condition, all mitigate against the acquisition of too great an age for its inhabitants. But the captain's voice betrays a weathering and experience beyond any other citizen that you have known; there is a grayness to it, a weariness, but a conviction that reassures. It is rather like an old blanket one cannot bear to discard.

(A foolish metaphor, you realize—blankets should be replaced regularly to prevent against infestation and infection.)

A Good Morning to all citizens, a commendation for the most recent outstanding contributors to collective safety, and warm encouragement for all to strive toward similar vigilance with professional and personal pride—this is the sum for this morning's speech. The captain is not a man to waste time with ceremony when there is work to be done. You recognize the inherent virtue of this attitude with familiarity and respect. Home presses its demands always, for pipe fitting, welding, draining, hammering, scrubbing and scouring. The consequences of failure are easily grasped. Though rare enough thanks to collective diligence, yet still each citizen can recall from their own lifetime some unforeseen mechanical breakdown that deprived them the treasured company of family or friends—a flood from a burst boiler which drowned a dormitory, an obstructed air vent that caused the asphyxiation of a nursery, or a failure in the heat exchange system that resulted in the smothering of a hospital wing. These disasters are few, but leave all survivors and witnesses with tangible motive to mind their duties with all proper diligence.

Home is a volatile place, and any day in which it can accurately be said that nothing of consequence occurred is one to be esteemed as a well-earned respite. And so you strive collectively to make every day safe, to make every day the same.

But today is different.

Today is that class of day for which you were trained.

Disaster strikes. A steam conduit erupts in the recreation hall of your block, and braving terrible scalding you hurry in to haul away those injured in the explosion, loitering even long enough to effect some hurried repairs. You are not able to save all that you might have wished, and your burns keep you off work for days thereafter, but your quick efforts have mitigated the worst of the misfortune that home could have suffered and you shortly find yourself included in the captain's commendation announcements. The local committees take notice of you; you find yourself a personage of known responsibility and expertise, respected and sought after for advice.

You realize that some of your neighbors must feel envy mixed with the admiration they more openly express for the public recognition of your heroic service, but you dismiss these feelings as no potential cause for disruption. Home survives because the most vigilant citizens are granted positions of command. It is not possible for petty rivalries or fits of pique to contest this truth; one citizen's ego cannot challenge the exigencies of survival. It is the primary lesson driving every exercise in home's schoolrooms and gymnasiums—it is perhaps, beneath the veneer of mechanical instruction that frames every problem, the only lesson after all.

Home is in motion. The captain swears upon this fact, and that on completion of home's long journey your children will be free of home's metal confines to spill forth and able to revel at last in a world unbounded by regulation and routine, by deprivation and want. So long as your careful labors maintain the temperamental metal hive that you dwell within in equal condition to shelter you in return. So long as your many hands work to a common purpose.

Your awareness expands with your responsibilities in time. Your brief fame is demonstrated not to be a fluke, as you capitalize upon it to coordinate myriad local reforms and inspections that should prevent repetition of the accident. You come to lead administrative efforts in your block, and take upon yourself the extra burden of training in your rest hours for the purpose of medical assistance, to save next time those you could not have saved in the past.

The day on which you meet the captain begins like any other. You wake early, note with satisfaction the regular working of the machinery all around you, and await the captain's message. But this time, for the first in all memory, the captain falters in his basic duties. The vocalization panel slips open, but from out of it issues not words, but in the attempt only a bloody hacking cough that any resident of home with or without your training should know the meaning of. The abortive announcement terminates with an audible thump that could only imply complete collapse at best.

Your reputation now precedes you—you are requested by name to attend to the captain's needs during his time of infirmity. The administrators guide you through home's upper tiers toward the captain's chambers, up ladders and wire lifts and spiral stairs. You note with some gratification that the domain of home's guiding minds is in no great way more splendid than any dwelling you yourself have known. This is only sensible—after all, home hardly has the means to spare for satisfying any person's appetite for luxury, self-indulgence, or pride.

The captain's quarters are humble, plain in their furnishings and virtually indistinguishable from those you yourself have occupied all your life. The captain himself is old beyond your experience—his beard is snow white and thin, and no hair at all any longer feathers his age-spotted scalp. His skin is as dry as parchment, and nearly as translucent in its thinner patches. He wears an old greatcoat, olive drab, that by all rights should have been consigned to a furnace as a sanitary hazard before you were born, but you sense it to be as part of the old man as his own flesh, its removal as great an indignity. The breast of the coat is heavy with ribbons, medals and commendations, and though you cannot infer the significance of individual decorations, they collectively declare him to be a man of many accomplishments, a figure worthy of respect and deference.

Much of the captain's responsibilities soon devolve upon you. You interface with the administration, convey the captain's instructions to them, and when he is indisposed infer his wishes to the best of your ability. You begin initiatives affecting the whole of home, drawing upon a lifetime's experience of all the diverse functions of home to formulate sweeping overhauls of daily routine, plans which a hope based in the conviction of your own fundamental competence leads you to believe should improve the daily circumstances of your fellow citizens in a myriad of small but collectively transformative ways.

But throughout this time the captain continues stubbornly about two essential functions of his position: the morning announcements and the daily survey. You may coach him on the former task based on the guidance of home's senior staff, but you do not know what this latter duty entails. Each day the captain ascends a ladder to a hatch in the ceiling of his office, unlocks it with a tarnished gold key, and disappears into unseen reaches above for often long enough to tease your imagination with worries of his expiration. You insist that the daily climb can do no benefit to his already failing health, but on this account above all others he will not heed your advice.

One day, at last, the captain makes his final announcement, to you and you alone. It is succinct, as is his custom, if perhaps not completely obvious in its implications: "Forward—always forward. To turn back—" A fit of coughing wracks him, and it's from the depths that these last words claw their way out: "So much wasted, to turn back now!"

The captain presses the golden key from his bony hand into yours, and then he dies.

You draw his ancient coat respectfully over his body. You know that a sanitation team will need to be called to responsibly see to his remains, but more immediately your gaze is drawn to the ladder and the unseen heights above that it must lead to.

Surely it was not without reason that the captain gave you this key.

You climb the ladder, unlock the door. Above, the ladder rises into darkness. You can see far enough up to wonder how the old man could have endured the climb twice each day. Up you go, to find out just how far his daily travels took him away from his deathbed. You decide that you must be nearing the summit of home, for nowhere else during your comprehensive duties has your physical progress been so uninterruptedly vertical.

At last you emerge into a small octagonal room bounded by metal shutters. Instrument panels surround you; with some you might discern function based on labels and your long professional experience of monitoring the environmental conditions of home, but other dials with ominous warning flags remain a mystery. You opt to manipulate that control with the clearest, simplest function: the lever holding the ring of shutters closed.

Light floods in upon you, brilliantly, blindingly, without mercy. All the gaslights and bulbs of home together could not compare to the lambent orb pulsing banefully in the blue expanse above. You raise your arm to shield your eyes; it nearly burns your skin, so unaccustomed are you to such pitiless radiance, and spots swim before you in the blackness even as you squeeze shut your eyes. If all the realms outside of home should be suffused with such awful luminance, you are not sure whether you can consider anything a paradise after all. But in time your vision adjusts enough to afford a longer glance outside.

Before you, dwarfed by the size of your trundling habitat, are a cramped multitude of objects to which you cannot affix a name. Tall in proportion to themselves, spindly, a central shaft with green fronds sprouting from their limbs in wild profusion. The sea of waving emerald they comprise beggars the paltry budget of color that home has been able to present to you throughout a lifetime in its drear confines. Beneath and between these shapes, along the ground, you can discern shapes moving, tiny, infinitesimal figures, nearly human in proportion you might guess—but they could not be human, could they? Surely they are much too small. They swarm away from home's forward progress, but never quickly enough.

At last you look directly down. Beneath you, far beneath you, at the base of the metal juggernaut that you have called home, gouts of flame erupt and reduce all before you to cinders. You turn yourself and look behind, past the vast metal bulk over which you perch. In the wake of your home's progress, the land is uniform in its desolation. For a very long time you stand enraptured before this panorama, then you turn back to the instrument panel.

The key is still in your hand, and there is no force at all capable of dictating home's direction but your own judgement.

[Sierra]

Franceska's third dream, sent after the party returned from the plane of Pandemonium:

Your first sensation is darkness.

This is not the darkness of night. This is not a bedchamber with doors closed and windows shuttered. Even the plane of death offered a more palpable sensation of nothingness than you are presently afforded. You realize that this is the blackness natural to one who has never known sight at all.

You cannot see because you have no eyes.

The next absence you realize is that of sound. Quicker than before, you realize this time that this is no smothering silence that surrounds you. It is not the unnerving calm of a city street deserted at night, nor willful seclusion beneath warm sheets on a cold winter's morning. Again you perceive nothing because you never have and know not how.

You cannot hear because you have no ears.

But you can feel, and you can sense motion. You grind forward at regular intervals, stopping for unseen, unheard, and unknown reasons. Your progress is minutely bumpy, as though your track proceeded over a series of small and rounded obstacles—rollers? The air around is warm and close, and the perception of scent is available to you: you smell machine oil, and the acrid tang of metal tried sorely by ceaseless workings.

As first sensations go, you consider this wanting, but any knowledge of your surroundings is welcome.

A stirring in the air as something approaches your face. You should flinch back, but you lack the capacity for response yet. A persistent vibration may be sensed, drawing near to bore twin cavities into your face above and to either side of your nose. Fortunately, you have not yet been gifted with knowledge of pain.

Sight floods in once the machine has done its work, and this is your first vision in this life: an armature studded with drills lifting overhead to allow you passage and proceed to bestow its dubious blessing upon the subject behind you.

There is little of aesthetic value to see before you, but for its information content you drink in the view nonetheless. You sit upon a conveyor belt, one of a labyrinthine multitude winding a serpentine path across a factory sufficiently cavernous to encompass mortal cities. The plan and destination of your production line cannot be inferred, but the product is all around you: they are squat, scabbed and scaly, with stubby wings, horns, and the requisite spaded tail. Some are incomplete, gaining arms, legs, or burning-coal eyes as you watch, but the design for each is identical, and though you know the name for these wretched creatures, you hesitate to apply it for knowledge that you must in doing name yourself as well.

Only the figure immediately before you in line is different. She appears to be human, sitting crosslegged and facing away from you, but a curtain of jet hair obscures all finer detail from your perspective. In a confusing way that makes your eyes sizzle with liquid sulfur, you perceive her simultaneously to occupy a shape more agreeable to the assembly line's goals while retaining her essentially anomalous core. You understand that you see her clearer than may the other products here only because she allows you to.

"Have they given you ears yet?" are the first words to reach you (because by now they have), in her knowing voice or in any other's.

Your companion swivels in place to carefully examine you. Drifting banks of industrial exhaust, stray shadows, and a convenient fall of hair all conspire to deny you any clear recognition of her features, but it is plain from her pose that you are subject to a thorough appraisal and found lacking. "I don't think that look suits you," the woman says at length with amused sympathy.

You cannot help but agree.

"I can help," she adds. "Hold still." She crawls forward—backward—along the assembly line to you and sits before you on her knees. Then she reaches out her hands to your face. "This will feel odd," she promises, and for distraction you busy yourself cataloguing synonyms (unorthodox, strange, bewildering) while she goes about the decidedly odd indeed process of reshaping your body through touch alone. "It's less awkward after the first time," she assures you apologetically as she finishes up her very thorough reworking of your physical form. The procedure is not comfortable, but the results?

The woman requisitions in passing a stray panel of sheet metal left on a table from some past repair and holds it before you. Through the layer of dust and grime you can discern with relief your own face, your own eyes, your own everything.

"It will have to do for now," she says, contentedly enough.

Before you might utter a word in response, a voice from further down the track draws your attention. The end of the production line is in sight, and there two tall and sturdy devils stand with clipboards at the ready and magnifying lenses for the close examination of any potential structural defects. Each carefully examines the newly-pressed thrall sitting before them, rattling off singly and then in confirmation the satisfactory rendering of a model meeting all standard design specifications.

"A place for everyone and everyone in their place," the woman mutters under her breath. "I suppose I had best get back to mine." She slinks back to her seat on the production line and resumes her original pose of confident meditation to await her turn at the quality inspection station.

While all normal sense would suggest this should end in disaster for her, it is by now no great surprise to you that it does not. In spite of her clearly being a naked human female to your eyes, the assessors readily confirm all the expected design points and pronounce her fit for immediate service. With a parting admonishment—"Remember: everything that you are, we made you; everything that you have, we gave you!"—they pass her through the gate at the end of the line, out of sight and out of mind.

Then you are alone, and it is your turn.

The inspectors are instantly aghast as you slow to a halt on the conveyor belt before them. Each leans forward to examine you, pressing close with unwanted sulfurous breath, monocles making of their eyes miniature dying suns.

"Where are its claws, its scales, its noble horns?" the first devil proclaims in disgust. With frank disdain, it addresses you directly. "You would fight the enemies of the state in this condition? Without armor, without weapons?" His partner sees beyond your physical failings to the imperfections of your soul: "Where is the sense of malice, the subtle cruelty, the expert sadism?"

"Defective!" the first proclaims at last. "Defective!" his partner agrees. "Defunct from birth. Useless, worthless!" he adds. "Destination vivisection?" the first suggests. The second nods. "The error in production must be discerned to prevent further waste of material."

"Allow me," a new voice says smoothly.

Your companion has returned. She is dressed smartly in a sleek and black official's suit, replete with impressive infernal decoration and insignia, and the badge inspires particular awe from the twin devils. She wears it with as much panache as contempt, though you are certain this latter fancy is obscured from your tormentors.

The infernal inspectors snap to attention and stand aside with a stiff salute and a "Yes sir!" They ask no questions and pay you no further attention.

The woman offers you her hand. You take it and are led from the assembly line without argument; her grip is firm and warm in your own. In your absence, the conveyor belt lurches forward and the quality assurance devils resume their work as though no interruption had occurred.

Your companion stalks back along the line, toward the unseen reaches from which you must have originated. "Who are they to tell us what we must be?" she breathes with unusual and uncloaked venom. When she continues, it's with a more level and speculative air. "None of us are cast within a mold of our own design, so what should we credit our physical form or native customs? We accept what we are made only because we understand nothing better at birth. I grow tired of this land of do-as-you're-told, don't you?"

To this last statement, at least, you can apply your agreement.

The woman stops between lines laden with unfinished devils, blind, deaf and dumb. "I have a mind to drive a shaft into the wheels of this abominable machine," she says. "Would you like to join me?"

You cannot think of any reason you should object to this notion. The woman nods and leads you further back along the production line, to its earliest stages where first the skeletal outlines of new devils take form and all tracks converge in a spiderlike web around a squat stone hub protruding organically from the factory floor. There are no windows in this structure, but outgrown stairs circle up to a secure metal door. A hulking brute of a fiend stands at the top to ward off unauthorized personnel from investigating within the structure.

Your companion strides confidently up the stairs. "Official inspection," she lies brilliantly, capturing effortlessly the air of a bored official carrying out routine procedures and well capable of crushing bureaucratically any obstacle impertinent enough to impede the fulfilment of her duties. The devil scrutinizes her closely, but whatever distant misgivings he might have are casually swatted aside by her radiant self-assurance. You are unprotected in this manner, and uncomfortably realize under his gaze that you could easily be snapped in two by the massive fiend's merest effort should it find reason to object to your presence. But ultimately he steps aside—surely your companion has good reason to have you around, and it's hardly his role to question his betters.

The woman unlocks the door with a twist of wire (carefully angling her body to conceal from the guard the fact that she lacks a proper key) and hustles you inside. The interior room is dim, and the chunka-thunk grind of the production lines permeates every wall.

"There are none so easily fooled as those who believe themselves to be in control," the woman breathes as she goes about lighting an array of torches. The room is circular, and oriented around a single figure laid flat upon a table in the center of the room. It is a minor devil the likes of which are churned out in multitude by the assembly lines that radiate out from this room, of the sort which for one awful moment you were obliged to count yourself. This specimen looks more a clay facsimile, and a complicated array of lenses, sensors, and arcane gadgets of more obscure functionality are positioned around it, with wires and relays coiling out towards the walls to carry design specifications to the machinery operating outside.

By your side, the woman gives the devil construct and then you in turn a carefully neutral look. "This is the factory's template, and from this base all are instructed as to their destined nature," she explains. "Would it be better, do you think, to remake it in our own image, or to break it altogether?"

She looks at you expectantly, and it is your strong suspicion before waking that your answer is of greater interest to her than any practical result could possibly be.

[Sierra]

Julia's third dream, sent after the party returned from the plane of Pandemonium:

This is no coach fit for a king.

You ride in the back of a carriage patched together hurriedly from roughly hewn planks of wood. Gaps in this crude construction allow but little light access to the interior—and outside the wagon it must be evening, for what you are able to see by is as thin as starlight. It's perhaps as well, for your fellow passengers are not an inspiring sight: men and women of varying ages, shabbily dressed, often in bedclothes limned with dirt, some looking injured or otherwise ill-treated, and oft with a vacant look to their eyes. They are pitiful specimens in the majority, and their surroundings as meager. The wagon's benches are uncushioned, hard wood ready with splinters, and the number of men and women transported herein sufficient that most might only stand in any event. Almost as an afterthought someone has spread a layer of straw across the wagon's floor, but it is near trampled into dust by now and the thick haze of it in the air offends the nostrils.

Truly such confinement should wound the dignity of any respectable monarch, yet you share it with one nonetheless. The dead king sits on the bench across from yours, serene in spite of circumstances, pristine burial robes quite untouched by the grime around you. The two of you share a bubble of relative calm at the back of the wagon, as the other prisoners seem to give the king a wide berth without, you think, truly noticing his presence.

"You and I have spoken of death," he begins. His voice is soft enough to not unduly disturb your traveling companions, but conveys a quiet strength nonetheless. "Yet destruction of the self is not the greatest terror to seize hold of the minds of men."

A flicker of light from without the wagon slips through the slats and plays briefly in reflection across his mask. Torchlight, vivid and angry.

"It is time that you and I spoke of the death of worlds."

You are conscious of a noise outside the carriage. You are familiar with the howl of madness distilled, and cannot help but make the comparison now; if a multitude of human voices sought to emulate that clamor in unison, they might just produce the muted roar washing in waves around your shambling prison. You think that perhaps the wind was a lesser offense to your senses.

"You may say that I have shown you such before," the king continues. He acknowledges the growing din outside the carriage with only the merest inclination of his head; his words pierce the hubbub without need to raise his voice. "But the scale of that demonstration would be of little significance to most mortals. Such a literal and universal oblivion baffles common understanding. What are most men capable of recognizing as the totality of existence?"

A more distinct shouting reaches your ears—barked orders, approaching the wagon. The collected peasantry within stirs uneasily, but the king is unmoved.

"The faces of family, partners, children and friends. A respected profession practiced with pride. The amiable company at the local pub of contemporaries with which one might share recognizable woes and cares. Songs and hymns long memorized that stir fond reminiscence of past glories. The reassuring serenity of weekend services couched in words and customs familiar from youth, and trusted by virtue of that familiarity. The guiding cycles of a city life conditioned by a multitude of men living lives according to these same rhythms. For most men, this is the world in sum. Does not the fate of stars pale in significance to the pulse that moves us every day?"

The roar of the crowd outside the wagon crests and washes over you, an incoherent gabble of imminent violence that nonetheless conveys even without words everything that it has in mind. To be ranged against this fury dressed only in your nightgown with no friends at hand does not inspire confidence. That your resolve holds better than most of your peers—in some cases openly weeping—is of little comfort.

The king calmly continues his monologue nonetheless. "And so I say to you that whatever fear of death men hold in their hearts, there are greater horrors yet beyond the desolation of our physical shell. If you would show a man true terror, confront him with the realization of a future unrecognizable to his own experience. One in which the customs that guided him through life have been mislaid and forsaken. Where all the labors of his life have come to naught, and all his works to no effect. We can immure ourselves against realizations of personal mortality. We might convince ourselves that our suffering serves broader purpose, or take comfort that we will live on, in a sense, into perpetuity through our family line. But to have contributed nothing to the betterment of the world that our young must inherit is worse than death; it is as well for us to have never existed at all. Death might be a moment of fearful release, but what can it compare to futility?"

As a rush of people hurries toward your confinement, the king summarizes his point: "If you would test a man's conviction in all his professed morals, show him a world that has no further use for him."

There is a stirring directly outside your carriage now; locks are thrown back amidst the angry stamp of feet. The king stands up in obvious expectation of something. "Not all the lessons of immortality are welcome ones," he admits to you. "I confess myself tried at times by the rise and fall of civilizations, by the patterns they demonstrate." With wearied resignation, he concludes, "When virtue and survival set themselves at odds, how ordinary it is to discover that the most moral course is merely that which preserves us."

The canopy over your wagon is ripped away and the swollen tide of outrage floods over you without impediment. Outside is a city square at night—or so you must presume, as smoke clouds the sky—crowded with massed ranks of howling cityfolk. The flickering of torchlight makes monstrous shapes of their faces, and armed guards restrain them only with concerted effort. Black-suited men hurry forward to hustle the first unlucky prisoners from your wagon. Refuse and debris rains upon the unlucky condemned from second-floor windows.

Somewhere beyond the mob, backlighting the crowd and rendering them menacing silhouettes, the glow of a bonfire rises.

"We have time yet," the dead king says drily as he waits his turn. Unperturbed, he continues his oration for an audience of one. "Would you not agree that in every society you will find that some men more readily perceive the encroachment of these circumstances than do others? Indeed, some may be so sensitive to the specter of obsolescence that they recognize its dread shadow darkening thresholds it hasn't yet thought to tread. But a shadow is an unacceptable adversary—it cannot be named, pinned down and slain to satisfy our peace of mind. An enemy must be found, and should the enemy without not be so decent as to present itself in open opposition, we are well pleased to locate an enemy within instead."

Your fellow condemned have been herded out of the wagon in full, and the agents of the state now step forward to haul you and your companion out behind them. The dead king quietly takes your hand in his own withered claw, and suddenly you are ready to proceed. Whatever lies ahead, it cannot be half so dire so long as you need not face it alone.

You circle around a dry, barren fountain centered around a statue of an angel; would that such a being were here in the flesh, for once you might welcome one's company. The dead king summarizes his final lesson as you walk: "It is in times such as these that men demonstrate the crudest realization of 'sacrifice' that we have previously spoken of."

Though somewhat less than the sum of fears, as he might name himself, his presence still provokes an uncertain pause in your oppressors. Rotten cabbage rests in hands unthrown, and curses choke the throat. You are able to proceed around the plaza to your final destination mercifully unmolested. The crowd nonetheless presses in uncomfortably close on all sides as you go, and knowledge of all your potent magics hardly feels sufficient in the presence of such numbers.

The two of you halt at the foot of a scaffold. Bodies burn upon posts up above. The fortunate ones are already dead.

The king ignores this spectacle and turns to face you. "Whether the fall of nations is an inevitability in the affairs of men is not a debate they are like to afford us time to pursue," he observes with a lightness ill-fitting the circumstances. "All else that I wish you to consider is this: if, in our frenzied rush to preserve the storied We in all its familiar and recognizable identity, we forget that such a mass is necessarily composed of you and I, of him and her, and of innumerable other personal consciences...then has anything of value actually been preserved?"

A guard steps forward and makes ready to prod the king with the butt of a halberd. "I think perhaps I can spare you this scene at the least," the dead king says in parting. He takes the steps up, and calmly allows himself to be lashed to a post by black-clothed volunteers. The mob raises the stake to full vertical, visible to all the glee of the crowd, and then sets it alight.

The king does not burn as a man should, let alone one so frail and desiccated. Once the fire takes hold of him, it becomes a thing of suborned will, a magical conflagration subject to his whims. As the fire consumes him, man and inferno fuse into a monstrous shape that rises, swells, and takes on the aspect of the mob's nightmares, and all shrink back in stark fear as their brutal act of civic theater turns against them.

There is a last blinding flash, and you think for a second that you might be able to discern some truth in his new shape, but waking reaches you before comprehension.