Dream Time - SuperJer Forum

aaronjer
*****'n Admin

2005 Mar 21 • 4940
1,227 ₧

Just woke up from one heck of a dream at 1:00 PM PST today. This is what I managed to write down before forgetting all the details. I usually don't get 3 hours to remember and write! I was lucky today! Not nearly as good as the last one, though. I don't remember any of the dialogue except one line...

--------------------------------------------------------

I title this dream: The Witch of Faraxia. Because she was the only person with a name.

The Witch of Faraxia is a very old (like hundreds of years old) woman from a long destroyed city called Faraxia. Everyone just thinks her name is 'Faraxia' because of the fact that they've never heard of the city Faraxia. She is supposedly very good at summoning spirits and gods into a physical form. She wore a brown hooded robe, sported stringy grey hair, and you couldn't ever see her eyes due to the hood.

The very first thing that happens in this dream is that she tries to summon me into a physical form. I was the the sorcerer king of ancient Faraxia, long dead from the time of the terrible catastrophe that left the entire city permanently frozen in ice. As we all know, sorcerer kings are ALWAYS evil, so her summoning of me was probably a bad idea. She was unable to summon me into a physical form. She could only grant me an ethereal body that could have little effect on the world. I didn't get a good look at myself in this form, but I could see that my hands were transparent and skeletal. I can only assume I was very much like the popular image of a 'phantasm'. I looked for a mirror, but the dark hole of a room she summoned me into didn't have much in the way of decorations. Other than the magical symbols drawn on the floor, of course.

Apparently everyone who died in Faraxia is nearly impossible to summon because a god is specifically keeping them all from leaving the afterlife. In most cases Faraxia's people would be unsummonable, but I was 'pushing from the other side' so to speak, and could at least come back as a ghostie. I had been a last resort for the Witch, she really didn't want to risk summoning me. But she wanted to bring her daughter back from the dead before she herself died of old age and she couldn't break the god's curse on her own. I told her that I would help her out of spite for the god that was keeping me from coming back into the living world. This actually quite true. What I didn't tell her was that I was going to possess during the ceremony to resurrect her daughter. She'd be unable to defend herself if she wanted her daughter back, so she'd be an easy target and a very powerful physical medium for me.

Everything went entirely according to my plan. I possessed the Witch of Faraxia just as her daughter regained physical (and naked, woohoo!) form. This meant that her daughter would never even know I had been summoned, so wouldn't suspect that I wasn't who I looked like. I then had to put up with being unfortunately old, female, and blood-related to this girl. At least this body had the magic mojo equivalent of Super Gandalf. I had to use the majority of my own power keeping the Witch possessed and keeping myself from being torn back into the afterlife by the god who I'm sure was starting to get very disturbed by my prolonged presence in the living world. The Witch's daughter didn't have to worry about the god trying to kick her back to the afterlife again, because the curse keeping her dead was only a side-effect of the curse that was supposed to keep ME dead. The witch's daughter looked like Brigitte Bardot (from the 60's) with black hair. The Witch apparently had kept her daughters personal belongings for the past couple hundred years, because there was an outfit that fit her perfectly laid out on the floor. It was an ornate, silver suit of lorica segmentata with metal greaves and bracers, leather leggings, a long sleeved black tunic and cape and a silver ring that I can only assume was magical in some way. It was heavy armor and unfortunately left much to the imagination. I recognized what she was wearing as the armor of a soldier of Faraxia, probably an officer. Completely breaking with the Roman style of her armor, she carried an English longbow and a hand-axe.

I told the Witch's daughter that I had summoned her so that she could go with me to Faraxia and ask the god to free the city from the freezing curse. She apparently didn't know much about the sorcerer king or why the city had been frozen, so she obliged without resistance. I got the feeling that the Witch didn't know her daughter very well, because she didn't trouble me with many personal conversations that I'd have to improvise with. The Witch's daughter seemed obedient, but somewhat distant and even slightly fearful. Apparently the girl expected her mother to be cold and business-like, so I didn't have to fake much of anything. I thought the fact that I didn't know her name was going to be a huge boulder in the road, but calling her 'you' or just telling her to do things without addressing her didn't upset her.

We traveled to Faraxia on a very uneventful boat, we climbed a few hills and crossed a river or two and even blazed a trail through a forest. It was all terribly boring. I'd just as soon use my magic to instantly transport us to Faraxia, but that's a power that the Witch shouldn't have and it might raise questions. We arrived at the outskirts of the curse hanging over Faraxia. It got cold and fast. There had been moisture in the air so everything was covered in a thin sheet of ice, but it didn't snow here. It was far too cold. I could use a simple sort of spell to keep the both of us from freezing to death (which would've taken less than an hour) and keep us mostly comfortable. Ahead of us was a building that was not covered in magical ice, and so must have been constructed after the freeze. It was a small wooden cabin with a stone chimney, only a couple hundred square feet. The billowing black some could only mean it was inhabited. I had no idea what this could mean. There was no reason why someone would want to try to live here.

The building sheltered a dozen sorceresses in training and their teacher. They were on a pilgrimage to visit their patron god. The same deceitful god who froze my city and killed me! I can't remember what happened, but I'm positive the god had tricked me in some way and that it was the cause of my downfall. They were protected from the fatal temperature by their allegiance or some rituals or something. I didn't know or care very much. I told them we were the last living Faraxians and wished to apologize to their god for what the sorcerer king had done and pledge our allegiance to him. They didn't question my motives.

We traveled into the city, you could barely tell that the city was medieval in style due to them much thicker sheets of ice that covered it. We made our way to the palace in the center of the city. The drawbridge to the palace was completely missing, but the moat was frozen over so you could just walk across. Inside it looked like a barely symmetrical white cavern due to all the ice hanging down. Straight ahead my old throne lay under at least a foot of ice, and a seat made out of ice sat atop it. The sorceresses busied themselves with their ritual to summon their god. This actually worked out quite well for me, because I didn't have to waste any energy summoning him myself. They all merely wished to gaze upon him and receive his blessing.

The god had apparently noticed us interlopers, and would not appear before us unless we proved the strength of our will to see him. From the ice rose a frozen cat-like beast. I sent the Witch's daughter to fight it. I stayed back and imbued her with the strength and speed required to defeat such a creature. This was also a power the Witch shouldn't have, but I was SO close and there weren't any other options. For what seemed like a much longer period of time than it really was, the Witch's daughter fought the monstrosity. The ring I assumed had magical properties could be used like a shield, hold up you hand as if you were holding a shield and it would deflect blows. Her bow was quite useless at this short range, so she fought with axe and 'shield'. The battle continued until the Witch's daughter was unable to continue fighting. The thing didn't kill her, it just pinned her down. The god, fortunately, was impressed with her will to keep fighting and deemed us worthy. The creature atop her shattered into tiny shards and was no more. The god finally appeared, an ethereal cat-like humanoid sitting in the throne of ice. This was very good for me, he was ethereal and was therefore something I could fight without needing to possess the Witch. I burst forth from the Witch in a cloud of dark smoke and floated before my nemesis in phantasmal form. He just looked at me, he clearly recognized who I was, but was apparently waiting for me to make a move.

I menaced, "Shouldn't you be busy murdering your allies and destroying cities? Get outta my seat!"

At this point he stood, and the Dawn of Sorrow version of 'Dance of Illusions' started playing. An amazingly appropriate piece in name and sound for what was happening. I could see my reflection in the ice now. I was a transparent skeleton as I had thought. I was wearing armor similar to the Witch's daughter's, but it was more ornate and much lighter. The armor itself was silver with burgundy highlights. I had a long, burgundy coat on over my armor, not dissimilar to a trench coat but more flared. I had a thin robe under my armor instead of a tunic, it was tied with a belt and obscured my feet entirely. I levitated everywhere I went, so it's not like I had to worry about tripping. When I closed my right fist a sword shimmered into existence. It was transparent as I was and bright white. It was a 19th century saber like what cavalry would carry. The god remained unarmored, but lifted a somewhat crudely formed broadsword of ice out of the ground. As we circled each other for a moment, hovering in the air, thousands of phantasmal being like me appeared in the hall around us. These were the cursed people of Faraxia and the god was apparently too busy focusing his power against me to keep them from coming to watch the fight.

Our actual fight only lasted about a minute and a half. We quickly maneuvered around each other, fading in and out of sight and would clash swords, strike and parry quicker than humanly possible and then back away from each other. We did this three times until he ran me straight through the chest as I attempted to recover from a poorly executed parry. I dropped my sword, used my right hand to grab onto his sword to keep him from pulling away, and turned to face the very confused sorceresses who were watching us fight. I reached out with my left hand and magically sucked the life out of them. They fell to the floor as bones and dust. I glowed very brightly for a moment and crushed the god's sword in my hand. Before he could back away I grabbed his shoulders and similarly sucked the life out of him. He turned very pale and hung in the air barely able to lift his head enough to look at me. Without a word from either of us I rematerialized my sword in my hand and cut him vertically in two. He shattered and disappeared.

The ice faded away and the cursed spirits of the dead went with it. I used the life I sucked from the god to reform my living body and happily strolled over to my throne. The Witch hadn't died from my possession, and had managed to stand at this point. Her daughter had sat up and was obviously totally confused about what had just happened. The Witch looked angry as if she intended to do something about me, but I told her that she and her daughter were both still alive and that they had better not even complain. She told me that I would doom the entire world with my war against the gods, but I thought otherwise. It's true I had a penchant for angering the gods, but now that I had killed one it was unlikely that the others would risk themselves in an attempt to chastise me. This is where I woke up and started furiously writing.

≡

2008 Jul 21 at 23:10 PDT — Ed. 2008 Jul 21 at 23:12 PDT