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The dreamscape was clearer than any dreamscape Aix was used to, right down to the smell of old stone and an underground too deep and cut off to harbour anything but extremophiles.. The scrape of chains, a sense of… fear? No, not fear, they weren’t sure enough to call it something so definite. Distress, of some kind, and they felt afraid because of their own baggage. They quietly tucked their own emotions away for later, and focussed.
‘Are you in need of help?’ they called into the darkness, toward the centre of the cavern they were at the edge of, their voice giving shape to the dark.
A pause in what they realised was a low humming. It was the kind of pitch and drone that they were used to hearing all the time from the civilised world—fans, motors, things that ground slowly down on their nerves and that they didn’t notice until the silence.
‘Hi!’ they sang out, hearing it echo on the stones, ‘Hello, do you need help? Are you in pain?’ They hoped that, this being a dreamscape, a lack of shared language wouldn’t be a barrier.
Just like the dreamscape let them stand on their feet again, without the pain clock starting to tick. Aix knelt carefully on the stone, feeling forward so they wouldn’t accidentally step into darkness and fall. ‘I’m a witch, I’ll try and help! Are you in pain? Is this a real place?’
Finally, a response; the fleeting thought they’d had about their own pain seemed to have been it, because Aix got a strong sense of the same—whatever agony this being was in, they had been in it for a long time, but it still remembered the injury. They were reaching out to Aix’s own memory of what had caused their own feet to be permanently damaged.
Release me.
‘Ah, okay, so you’re trapped here. Where is this place? Where are you?’ Aix had a feeling it was far away, the kind of bedrock required to support a cave like this was nowhere near where they lived, as far as they knew—Aix lived way too near a fault line for that. They tried to impress that they needed to see a plant, an animal, or some kind of words, a building….
Aix suddenly wasn’t in their body. Whatever was acting as the point of view moved fast and was very small, and moved through darkness that had a bioluminescent quality to the extremely faint light, heading for something shining and silver on the ground, before stopping, focussing on it. Happily, the words were in English.
Contri,
Patrick R.
[numbers]
B Neg
Protestant
Huh, so that’s what’s on a dog tag… they thought to themself. ‘If this is a dog tag, this person isn’t from here. Can you find me something from outside the cave?’
The view went right to the edge, but not much further. Blinding light, suddenly and the distinctive smells and xerothermic air of a desert. There was an animal, though—a large, very distinctive bird currently engaged in swallowing a fragment of bone whole.
‘Oh that’s good! Don’t scare him, don’t chase! Let me just get a look at him…’
A lammergeier.
He was feasting on a human skeleton that had been picked clean. Thankfully, Aix couldn’t see the hands or skull, so there was no visceral horror.
Lammergeiers had a very narrow range, and if it was in a desert, in a mountain range, that narrowed it further.
‘I can work with that, thank you.’ Aix had not an earthly idea how they were going to get across the world, but they were going to try.
Nobody should live in a cage.
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