65. What Dreams May Come

65. What Dreams May Come

A dark forest, trees a black silhouette running under the stars, but it wasn’t the Cloakwood. Onyx pushed his palms outwards, parting boughs of pine needles, and strained in the starlight to discern the shapes of the clearing. Round, primitive huts or tents. A fortified camp secluded and guarded from the entire coast, somehow he knew this. Humans and hobgoblins moved about, all ill brigands and bandits, but he felt invisible, and stepped into the clearing.

Jade recognized the wood, Peldvale, and the crude, sloppy tenements of the bandit camp. She stepped from the trees, scimitar in hand, and smiled as the bandits turned their heads and charged. She lay the flat of her weapon across her left forearm, then let it sweep out over her head and around in from her right, felling a hobgoblin no more solid than sawdust, which was what he turned to. She following through the arc into a human, who blew away as ash. She casually, almost lazily looped her scimitar back and forth, scattering the bandits to the wind, and pushed out her left hand, watching the tents topple as she willed it.

Across the camp, Onyx watched the bandits en masse encircling about his sister and moving in to their doom, like water poured into a funnel and then broken upon rocks. He ran, wishing to help her all the same, but a footfall somehow missed the ground, caught up on a gust of wind. He would have fallen upon his back but he lifted, and soared up into the air, watching the trees fall away, the bandit camp stretch beneath him like a map of itself. He spread his arms like a bird, and looked up into a morning sun that beamed across the camp, not to be prayed to, no thought of his duties to those below, no, he was free - until the earth reasserted its hold and his stomach lurched. He felt no longer like a sparrow, now more like a catapult stone.

A whirlwind arc twice around herself, and Jade rendered ribbons of the last of the bandits. The main tent collapsing in on itself as if with a sentient awe of her, not only its frame broken, but also its will. She sheathed her weapon and looked up, and now saw her brother, falling. She ran and reached to catch up, but the ground itself betrayed her, opening up, and she fell through, scrambling with her hands and feet but lost in a cascade of soil and rock, an earthen waterfall. Her brother fell to through the rift without the ground striking ball, and their eyes locked for a moment as they fell end over end into void, as if plummeting to the very core of the world.

The rock around them illuminated, a cavern took shape, solid rock under their feet, no memory of the violent landing such a fall would have demanded. They shouted out and stumbled toward each other, but found an obstacle between them, and instead, came face to face with themselves. A two-faced stone likeness, standing with broad shoulders and hips, Onyx’s square brow and jaw in stone staring back at the paladin on one side of the head, Jade’s round face and pursed lips on the other, and the rest of themselves, chests and arms and legs, formed on both sides.

Such pride undeserved, great conquerer, swift predator, when your whole beign is borrowed. Credit where credit is due, where payment is demanded.

A dagger of bone flew from the darkness and struck the statue, cracking it along the line between the half that was Onyx and the half that was Jade. They cracked apart from one another, and the real Onyx and Jade both collapsed to their knees, clutching their hearts and staring woefully at one another, watching their statue separate and feeling as they themselves were each rent asunder.

You were made as you are, and you can also be divided and broken.

--

Her world was black, but the happily dissonant sing-song voices rang, “Jadey Jadey wakey wakey, keep your mind a’thinking too! A very merry, very merry, non-scary unnightmare to you!”

Jade opened her eyes and gripped the tablecloth, finding herself in a sun-speckled, pleasant autumnal forest at the long dinner table spread with coffee and cakes, joined by her reveling companions, Xzar in a green top-hot, and Montaron with brown rabbit ears as tall again as he was. They kept sloshing their coffee and singing, but before she could thank them, she saw Xan running by. He was dressed in a ruffled indigo suit, white rabbit ears sort of like Montaron’s. “Oh no!” he wheezed, running by without so much as a nod to the Zhents, “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important fate!” The enchanter produced a shining golden stopwatch from his jacket pocket, and whimpered.

“Mr. Xan!” Jade cried, hopping up from the table, and hiking up her white and blue sundress to dash after him. “Where are we, Xan, what fate?”

The elf put his pocketwatch away, only giving her one glance over his sagging shoulder as he hurried on over the bed of fallen leaves. “Can’t debate you make your fate, but you’ll be doomed if you’re too late!

Just before Jade caught up, Xan reached a small rock outcropping not unlike the back entrance to the Nashkel mines, and hopped in. Jade leapt off her uncomfortable high heels and after him, but he was nowhere to be found, nor was anything else, rather she was now falling once more through an utter void.

All went from black to blinding light, and she squinted before the sun, finding herself having landed on her butt upon a beach. Looming over her was Branwen, wearing a civilian carpenter’s overalls, and Kagain, with his snowy white beard but now a horrid overbite and a pair of tusks growing out where his incisors would have been, curving down over his beard and chest.

“The time has come, lass,” Kagain wheezed, “A quest for much doth hinge. For gold as well as iron, for answers and revenge.”

Branwen helped Jade to her feet, adding, “Who has a price upon your head, and how to make them cringe.”

“Callooh! Callay! I must say!” Kagain took her other hand, “We will prevail, even though it’s so much marching overland.”

The dwarf led them up onto a grassy dune and spread out a picnic. From the basket served copious bread and oysters and mushrooms to them each. “To keep your head,” then Branwen said, “Is chiefly what you need. Both to keep it on your shoulders, dear, and guard at what takes seed. Overjoyed was I that you a sterling patron have uptook, disciple of my own Tempus, the Red Knight is his rook.”

Kagain rejoined, “But now with gals of Umberlee it seems we must get wet, I’m no water walrus but my beard may get salted yet!”

“O Kagain, Branwen,” Jade smiled, “I feel a great thing has begun. Shall we get back on the road now and reach the Gate tonight?’ But answer there came none, for she’d taken a bite of mushroom, and shrunken from their sight.

The grass and flowers all rushed up to surround her like another forest, and she groaned in frustration, “I shall never get anywhere at this speed!” but began a disciplined march through the garden become a jungle. She wove through blades of grass like entire ferns and dashed through a flower patch like an orchard, and came before a ‘gigantic’ red and gold mushroom. Perched atop it, was Edwin, or more properly his torso, head and arms attached to the body of a caterpillar. The Thayvian smoked black lotus from a houka, and every puffing exhale conjured a shape with the smoke. “Who are you?” he asked quizzically. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jade!”

“O…” Edwin stroked his beard, and took a two drags of his houka, the first exhale puff coalescing into a grinning skull, the second into a chessknight. He snapped off a corner of the mushroom his bloated lower half coiled up, and droned, “One half, makes you darker, one half makes you a thrall. And the other half, makes you a woman, a human, with no tendency at all.” He bit into the mushroom, and threw his red robe over himself, with hardened into a cocoon. Edwina burst forth, with pink robe and wings, and flew away, calling, “Who are you?”

“I’m Jade,” she cried out, and bit into the mushroom, “When she’s ten feet tall!”

--

Onyx was lost in another forest, the unpleasantly familiar Cloakwood now, but comforted to find his friends with him, and they seemed to know what they were doing, at least. Peeking over a mound of dirt, they spied two dirty-faced, crusty-haired Shadow druids in their tatters of hide and leather, standing with their dire wolf companions and speaking.

Garrick whispered to him, "Minscbacca and I will take care of this. You stay here." He looked at Imoen, whose hair was braided up in ram's horns. "You too, princess." He drew a hand crossbow, and the unusually hairy ranger strung his bow. They circled around through the bushes, but just as the bard crept up behind one of the druids, he snapped a twig and earned their attention.

"Go for help, go!" The first druid shouted, and socked Garrick while the other hopped on his dire wolf and it sped off. Minscbacca fired an arrow after them, though, striking the dire wolf through the neck and sending it hurtling with the druid into a tree. Garrick had dropped his hand crossbow after being punched, and was fistfighting the first druid.

Onyx and Imoen jumped out of hiding, only to see two more druids nearby mounting dire wolves and dash away. Garrick flipped the druid over hi shoulder and Minscbacca fell on him elbow-first. Onyx and Imoen whistled, and were answered by Lance and Amalthea bursting out of the trees, whom they mounted and gave chase to the two fleeing druids. The trees raced by and they frantically tugged with their thighs to weave their mounts safely around, pushing dangerously fast to catch up with they prey. Lance gained in his galloping until Onyx was alongisde one of the druids, and leapt from the back of his horse onto the dire wolf, grabbed the druid around the neck and flung him into a passing tree with a crunch that made the paladin wince. He jumped back Lance, just in time for he and Imoen to pass two more druids, already sitting astride dire wolves and giving chase at once. "Keep on that one!" Onyx yelled, and reared back, squeezing his thights. Lance halted, Imoen and Amalthea zoomed ahead out of sight, and the two druids flew past him on either side. Lance broke into a fresh gallop, and Onyx shrugged, pulled his bow off his, and shot one of the new druids off his wolf, which itself careened into a tree trunk with a splat. The other druid sped up.

Far ahead, Imoen gritted her teeth as the first druid continued to weave and keep ahead of her. "Up, up and away!" she shouted, and Amalthea leapt over a fallen tree, not touching the ground upon the other side. The unicorn flew up over the trees and plunged back through the canopy again, falling upon the druid with a lance of her alicorn. The druid threw a bola which wrapped around Amalthea's legs, and she and Imoen went careening onto a long skid over the grass. The druid looked over his shoulder, laughing, and faced forward again just in time to splash himself and his wolf over a tree trunk.

Elsewhere, Lance gained on the dire wolf as he had the one before, and the druid responded by jerking his mount sideways until it slammed into the horse. Lance and the wolf started snapping their teeth at one another, with dangerously little heed for the trees as they ran. One came up in front of them, and the druid kept pushing, but Onyx jerked Lance away but fell from his mount and landed hard on the ground. The druid circled his dire wolf around and came back in Onyx at a charge. He drew the blue-glowing holy avenger, waited until the beast was upon him, then lunged aside and cut off its head, sending the druid flying through the air and crunching against a tree.

Onyx limped toward Lance, but the ground opened up yet again, and he fell into a dark dome, spiderwebs strung across the floor, and he looked up to see the bloated, fleshy form of Centeol. "Oh ho ho ho!" she laughed, and the spiderwebs under Onyx's feet tore apart under his weight. He fell again into a danker, darker, and fouler pit, where one of the wyverns reared up, shrieked, and dove at him with its maw open wide. He turned and fled into a small tunnel, the wyvern's serpentine head and neck slithering behind him. Onyx ran under a portcullis at the end of the tunnel, but one more gate beyond barred him. The wyvern's head shot out, and clamped around his leg. He screamed, and threw out his hand toward the portcullis chain. An acid arrow streaked out, dissolved a chain link in a matter of moments, and the portcullis fell, spearing through the skull of the beast.

Onyx fell backwards with a weary groan, only to find himself falling yet again, down a long shaft until he landed upon the floor of Davaeorn's lair. At the far wall, a stained glass window resembled a gigantic Cyric emblem, the center occluded by a chair that turned around to reveal the wizard, looking dead but not inanimate, his face shrunken and lich-like but his eyes bright with cruelty. Davaeorn rose, and Onyx charged with the same blinding speed he had in the mine, but halfway across the floor was rocked off his feet by the wizard's blast of lightning. He went sailing back and landing painfully against the far wall, and rose, only to be hit with a second lightning bolt.

"Now, Onyx Coastwalker," Davaeorn hissed, "You shall experience the true power of the dark essence!" His face became more skeletal still, and hard as stone. “Give in to the anger, give in to the hate, and your journey shall be complete!”

The paladin lay groaning and smoking, and Davaeorn drew back his hands for a third lightning bolt, but suddenly flew off his feet, lightning streaking into the air. Onyx rolled over and looked, to see Yeslick, face white and bloated like a drowned dwarf, lifting Davaeorn up and bellowing. The dwarf tossed he wizard into the mine shaft, then slumped over, wheezing. Onyx crawled over, but he only shouted, "Go...it's not too late for you, or your sister. Go..."

Onyx rose and yelled out, limping to the elevator before all was flooded away by a river of blood.