Sales were actually existent for By Starlight - Before Dawn. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy in eBook or Paperback. If you bought it in paperback, you can get a free kindle version through matchbook. If you bought it on Smashwords but would like a paperback, I'll be running a promotion Thanksgiving weekend for 50% off. And while I make sure all my products are the best quality I can make them, I'm a fan of the printed word, so the paperback is the preferred version in terms of formatting and style. And it looks great on a shelf when you're not reading it!
My busy week has mostly been filled with me plugging away at Some Call Me... for NaNoWriMo. I'm at the close of Act 1 and 15,813/50,000 words in. I've also been annoying about my progress on social media already, so I'm less excited to be throwing up my hands in the air and celebrating the first week of my new novel being written.
I really should be more excited, because the story is turning out really fucking cool. Of course it's a mess currently, and being done for the word count at this point. But, there's definitely a diamond surrounded by a bunch of coal in there. I've been wanting to write something set on Mars ever since I read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles back in 11th grade English class when I was supposed to be following along in Huck Finn. And while I've read more than my fair share of cyberpunk and generic Science Fiction, I haven't really delved into Steampunk as a literary genre (really only read Bruce Sterling/William Gibson's The Difference Engine. If you have suggestions where to go from there, please share in the comments). Or westerns.
I've never read a western. Watched tons of sing-songy Gene Autry ride alongs, rough and tumble John Wayne and Henry Fonda fodder, and blood and whore drenched Spaghetti Westerns, but never read one. So translating the feel of the idealized Wild West on a planet that will kill the shit out of you if you step outside, all won by the power of your steam powered sidearms, it felt like a fun challenge. And it really has been. I've been having a blast writing it, with only one day of slogging through that dreaded but necessary exposition so far. I haven't been this stoked about writing something than I was when I first wrote To Slice The Sky.
But you didn't come here to see my rattle off things that I'm currently writing (unless you did. Did you? If so, sorry, your time in this world grows short. The collectors will be by shortly with pliers and hacksaws to make sure you never make that mistake again). You're here to read what I've already written and polished into a presentable state. We're almost at the end of By Starlight. Our players are gathered into place, and shit is about to get real as we slide into the action packed climax.
So here we are this Sunday. Part 7/8 of By Starlight.
Pick up a free eBook copy of my first book on Smashwords: Urban Legends of the Future containing the tie-in story Sucking Out Loud
Previously on, By Starlight: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4+5 | 6
seven
“Madre Leon?” Tressie’s voice reverbed back to her in the empty church hall. The prayer candles flickered at the meditation altar, but no Madre in lotus position before it.
“Well, looks like church is a bust. Better go,” Johnny fidgeted at Tressie’s side.
“Hush. You haven’t burst into flames,” Tressie took a deep breath to loose a huge, “Madre Leon? Anyone?” Peace officer sirens answered with the faint whoop of circling choppers.
Tressie pulled a protesting Johnny by the arm into the baptismal area. The wall was seamless. Tressie questioned everything she saw last night. She sprang to the place she could have sworn The Madre fiddled with. Tressie gripped at the flat wall for any sign she wasn’t crazy. Johnny looked everywhere but at Tressie having a breakdown, as she pounded on a changing room wall in an empty church.
Tressie punched the wall full force, bruising the knuckle beneath. A growl of frustration opened into a scream of impotent rage. Tressie collapsed to her knees, heaving in and out, letting the experience wash over her. Johnny placed a soothing hand on her shoulder that she didn’t have the energy to shrug off.
The flush of a toilet came from deeper within the the church. Madre Leon peeked her head around the corner with a, “What’s all that racket?”
Tressie got to her feet with a, “Thank the mother. Madre. The Succubus. We met it, in its new host. It came for me.”
“Tressie, right?” Madre Leon said, shuffling towards the bioscanner hidden in the wall. Johnny’s eyes widened at there actually being something there after all. “Who is the young man?” The Madre finished.
“Johnny Marko,” He responded. “So. There really is a secret supernatural vigilante group.”
“I wouldn’t consider the Holy Knights vigilantes,” Madre Leon said. The wall slid into itself. “Or that secret. We’ve been a church order since Pope Alexander VII. And we made our intentions public not even ten years ago.”
Johnny scoffed, “You mean right before the CoFS epidemic? That The Church blamed on vampires.”
“They did show proof. The vid’s on the net,” Tressie followed The Madre into the sanctum.
“Dodgy evidence at best. You know you can’t trust reality, let alone vids, these days,” Johnny said to an empty room. “Guys?... Oh for frag’s sake.”
Erika and Estevan were in the gym with three others Tressie didn’t recognize. They were running takedown drills as Erika oversaw the pairs, barking, “Again,” after each flip. The handful of Holy Knights continued with their drills as The Madre led Tressie and Johnny into The Codex room.
“So.” Madre Leon leaned on her cane “This Succubus hunted you just after making eye contact with your neighbor?”
“There’s a bit more to it now.” Tressie laid out her encounter on the neuronet and the actions their monster had wrought in The Raw. The Madre rubbed her arthritic hands as she listened. "....And now it hopped to a different body, which I may have killed."
“I agree you definitely made yourself a target, Ms. Unknown. But if what you said is accurate, every human is potentially in danger. According to The Codex the host body can be destroyed with no harm to the Succubus. We need a way to seal it behind the veil, between planes. That could be problematic.”
Johnny perked up, “That’s what Dr. Rattlesnake said.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that last night?” Tressie said.
“I did. You were someplace else.”
“So were you,” Tressie huffed.
“I’m sorry. Dr. Rattlesnake?” Madre Leon interjected.
“Not a real doc. Witch Doctor,” Johnny said.
“I didn’t know they taught in medical school.”
“Me neither. But the dude’s older than you, Madre. Guy says he’s from Haiti before the Western Ice Shelf fell. Scary as Oblivion.”
Madre Leon said, “We don’t need to consort with folk ritual--”
“--He actually showed me the veil. The other side was..." Johnny shuddered. "I needed to get reeeeeeal dadfragging high to forget about all the live action nightmares.”
“Johnny,” Tressie’s voice equal parts condemning and comforting.
“He said something about knowing how to do it, strengthening the void, but he didn’t have a care in doing it,” Johnny shrugged into another body-rattling shudder. Madre Leon rubbed her hands together again, making low sounds in her throat.
Erika poked her head in, “Drills complete, Madre. Scanner’s on full alert. One stiff confirmed at an apartment complex party Peace Officers busted up. Murder suspect on the loose. Sounds like our Succubus from last night.”
“It is your Succubus from last night and I'm the murder suspect.” Tressie hissed.
Erika was taken aback, then smoothed her features as Madre Leon cleared her throat.
“Erika, you’ve met Tressie. This young man is Johnny Marko. I want you to travel with Mr. Marko to meet Dr. Rattlesnake. I want you to impress upon the Doctor the importance of him returning here with you.”
Erika raised an eyebrow, “Dr. Rattlesnake? What, is he a G.I. Joe villain?”
“Nah. I think he’d be too competent for Cobra,” Johnny’s smirk collapsed under the weight of the room’s glare. “What? She sets it up and I can’t knock it down?”
“Both of you,” Madre Leon boomed, “the time for levity has passed. There is a Succubus loose on our plane of reality. The one person it knows is actively hindering its progress is in this room with us. Our only chance of stopping this threat may lie with this Doctor. Now please, go together and bring this Dr. Rattlesnake here.”
“You got a popemobile or something? I’ve only got a motorcycle built for two. Aaand there's a strong chance the pocs are scoping for it.”
Erika sighed with a roll of her eyes. Tressie was deeply irked by the action. Erika stomped off with a, “You coming or not?”
“We’ll be back. Don’t save the world without us,” Johnny gave a noncommittal wave goodbye.
“Johnny, wait.” Tressie grabbed Johnny by the wrist, “Be safe. I love you,” Tressie kissed Johnny hard.
“I’ll bring him back in one piece.” Erika said from the doorway, “C’mon kid. Let’s get your doctor.” Erika yanked Johnny out of the room.
Tressie bit her lower lip. Madre Leon put a hand on her shoulder, “They’ll be okay.”
“I don’t doubt that for now,” Tressie turned to look at The Madre, “But really, none of us are okay, are we?”
“No, not really child. But we will be, It’s what we do.”
“How are we going to do what we need to? We have a body jumping killing machine that we can’t stop or track. It could be long gone from Das Komplex at this time. How are we even going to get it back to it's own plane of reality to trap it?”
“What about the neuronet? From what you’ve said, it seems to be compelled to return there.”
“In the middle of a flesh buffet? It seems more likely everyone at the party would be dead by now.”
“Which wasn’t a part of the police scanner message.”
“I may be able to track it on the net, but my palmtop is smashed. I can’t jack into The Raw without something to synch up to for more processing power.”
Madre Leon turned to the server banks of the Codex, “Estevan. Can you come in here, please?” Moments later, Estevan’s serious round face poked into The Codex room. “Ah, Estevan, you remember Tressie? She will need your assistance accessing The Raw neuronet through The Codex.”
“Oh, is that all?” Estevan nodded at Tressie, “Welcome aboard. Let’s get you jacked in.”
***
Gribelle was dragged back to the HPD precinct to an office marked for the Blake Donaldson everyone kept calling her shell. They left her alone to perform an autopsy upon the remains of Gribelle’s previous host. Her current one was experiencing a sensation Gribelle could not ignore or control. Worse than the hunger pangs, Gribelle’s borrowed body moved sluggishly and felt a stinging ache in the ocular area. Her mouth kept involuntarily opening wide with an audible utterance that wasn’t like any word she’d heard come from a human subject in The Dreaming.
The shell’s extremities grew leaden, further grinding down Gribelle’s will. “Just got to get off these legs,” she mumbled aloud, falling into an office chair.
Blake Donaldson dreamt.
***
Tressie and Estevan were rubbing away nethaze when Johnny and Erika dragged in a gray, dreadlocked man that reeked of patchouli, barbequed fish, and body odor.
“What be here? You take me to a house of God and there be no god in them walls. Man alive, but spirit a dead thing.” Dr. Rattlesnake sniffed the air, then tasted it with a waggling purple tongue. “How can you mend souls and shawls with no tools?” He shook his hair.
“Ladies and germs, I present, Dr. Rattlesnake,” Johnny said with a mocking grin.
“I can’t say this is the most conventional means of achieving goals, but these are not conventional times,” Madre Leon said. She failed to hide her unease with the doctor.
“So this guy’s going to mend the veil?” Estevan snorted, “didn’t know it needed mending.”
Dr. Rattlesnake laughed with his head tilted back. “No chile 'live know ‘bout the veil. They feel it. You boys know it from your fancy holy ones saying it there, but you don't feel.
“Papa Legba is tired and thin as a Loa be. Keep letting things sneak past him between worlds. I feel it in my bones. You can too if you let it.”
“This is how he actually talks,” Johnny said.
“How else you expect me to talk, boy?”
“Well, net’s a no go,” Tressie interrupted, turning the room’s attention onto her. Her ears felt hot, “Trail’s cold on the Succubus. The party was cleaned up with no incident. City coroner's already left with the stiff.”
“Oh blood and thunder. All this talk ‘bout the night winds. It be enough to gray an ole’ man’s head. And mine be gray ‘nuff,” Dr. Rattlesnake stroked his beard. “Ole’ woman’s head in the same boat.”
Madre Leon’s face looked like she’d been sucking lemons, “Then I strongly suggest we get to work restoring the veil. That is why we had Erika and young Marko retrieve you, Doctor.”
“No can do.”
A collective, “WHAT?!” from everyone who wasn’t a Haitian Vodou priest.
"Then how the frag did you show me the tear last night? Do you think I’m going to, like, unsee all that freaky skull heads in top hats skag?” Johnny was ready to tear out his collapsed spiky hair.
“Dat be no thing, Johnny.”
“What’s no thing? The future night terrors?”
“Don’t be a fool. One can see tears everywhere. That’s not the hard part. We gotta send a body through wit’ no body.”
“What does that mean?” Erika said. She had no patience for the man since she met him.
“I get the vibe that this girl here know what I mean.” Dr. Rattlesnake looked Tressie in the eye. “She got the look of an astral traveller.”
Tressie stammered, “I’ve never made any astral travels.”
“You trust your Universal church boys? They got you prayin’ to the east an’ doin’ your nightly meditations. You ain’t never seen nothing behind them eyes?”
“You talk about crazy visuals all the time, Tress,” Johnny coaxed her.
“That doesn’t mean anything. I’m not astral travelling or leaving my body. It’s just mental imagery.”
“Mental imagery you conjured?” Madre Leon pressed. Tressie remained silent. “No, not you yourself. Your consciousness.” Madre Leon rubbed her knuckles, “Do you meditate with a mantra? Transcendental path?”
“Yeeeeah? It was how I was taught,” Tressie said.
“Then you’re ready for this.” Dr. Rattlesnake grinned from ear to ear, “Good thing I brought me reagents. Where can one set up in this house of still voices? We need space. Lotsa.”
***
They resynched Tressie’s graybox to the Codex servers and ran bioscan displays on the church’s holovision projector. Tressie was told by everyone who saw her to, “Relax a bit.” Each one put her more on edge.
Dr. Rattlesnake stood in a tattered denim suit marked in yellowed-white patterns. Dreads and neck charms hung over the open neckline.
After an hour of debating if using prayer candles in a Vodou ritual was blasphemous, it was decided the ritual itself was a necessary evil by church standards.
Tressie had a poultice of stinky herbs smeared on her face and neck. It tingled like vapo-rub and smelled like wet fur and allspice. Each person lit the evenly spaced candles in synch. No one had spoken since Tressie was prepped. Even Johnny kept his tongue behind his teeth, though his guileless face told all his snappy teenage one liners for him.
All candles lit, Dr. Rattlesnake sat crosslegged before Tressie in her lotus position. Her biosigns ticked off like a stock counter in holographic suspension next to her. The bad doctor put his head back and began a rhythmic, throaty, chant. Johnny’s eyes widened to dinner plates as he shuffled like a caged animal. Erika grabbed his wrist and gave it a squeeze. Tressie felt a pang of jealousy before losing herself in the pulse of Dr. Rattlesnake’s drone.
His chant rose in intensity, punctuating every round with a strong, “Ooom-BAH.” The doctor kept it up, cyclically breathing with the accelerating pace. When it seemed he could go no faster, Dr. Rattlesnake cut off with a final “OOOM-BAH-BAH-HA” and clapped his hands. The only sound was The Codex’s server fans. Dr. Rattlesnake shook his bone charm in time with an under the breath Creole chant no one could make out. He accented every fourth beat with a slap on the chest.
More nothing. No one dared a sound. Then, a sickly green light shimmered around the group. Reality rippled and wavered, then peeled away to reveal an alternate reality sitting firmly behind fourth-dimensional rips in the curtains of dead space.
Tressie peered into the tears of what was once nothing. She watched a shifting mix of scenery for any form of a reference point. Through a patchwork of cityscapes, room interiors, and other bits of scenery stretched across an endless desert beneath a blood red sun in a midnight sky, Tressie caught the glint of silver leaves. She held onto that image in her mind’s eye. The image of a Universe sized tree, standing on the edge of the infinite desert, made of silver bark and leaves. Each leaf a silver work, finely veined and crafted, flexible and living. The silver tree engulfed and encapsulated Tressie as she sat beneath its boughs. She stroked its smoothly textured bark at the roots that dug into fresh black soil.
The smell of trees filled Tressie’s nostrils. The sound of throaty chanting was gone. Tressie locked eyes with herself across the impossible. What she knew of herself sat in lotus position, ringed by mostly strangers. Around her ankle, beneath the tree, was a silver cord tethered to nothing. It trailed through the black soil that looked like pitch against Tressie’s mahogany skin. Her astral tether, from what Dr. Rattlesnake and Madre Leon attested. Tressie was in The Dreaming.
***
She was home. Boring, always fluid, never static, home. The coroner, Blake Donaldson, pleaded with Gribelle for his life. Gribelle obliged by completely ignoring the dreamer’s existence, thought better of it, and then drained the human’s life force in full.
Gribelle stretched out and felt no barriers holding her back. No mock up bodies or borrowed meat husks. The freedom of The Dreaming was hers to explore once more. Yet, the feed of Gribelle’s last host lacked the satisfaction of all her meals within the Base Plane of Reality. It left a cold pit, beyond the usual pangs of hunger, in a place she never knew she had.
She didn't like this new sensation. She hated it. It made her jump up and down in a tantrum. She wanted to go back to the other world. Where human life was waiting to feed the constant desire inside. Just waiting to be culled like kine. She had to get back to the other plane to hunt for food like her ancestors must have, instead of waiting around in the desert for a dreamer to pop by her encampment. If only she could taste the musky headiness of unfiltered human sexuality once more.
With a flutter of black leathered wings, The Dreaming enveloped Gribelle in its midnight and spat her out within the bowels of Yggdrasil’s sylvan trunk in the great meeting hall. A clutch of Incubi and Succubi lazed about the pathways, sitting in silence, staring at one another without noticing anyone was there.
Gribelle knew each by name; Klamith, Esparidon, Ruby, Castigan, Hobbler, Belltone. She had known each of them since they were fledglings. One of the first batch to be born in The Dreaming after the sealing aeons ago. Each of them sprawled, lotus-eater complacent, in the formless prison of freedom that is The Dreaming.
They laid limp within the trunk of the world tree, the only constant in the unfixed void at the edge, or center, of the desert. Hundreds of thousands of Gribelle’s cousins continued on in comfortable survival. A lifestyle of sampling dreamers like grapes in a bunch, untouched in their safe haven of unconscious manifestation. Where the storied great hunter spirit that ran through the Lilim’s veins went to was anyone’s guess. No longer were the dreamers a sport. They were a service. Now that Gribelle had fed unfiltered by unconscious thought and attacked the raw sexual desire of the mind, nothing compared to the rush of feeding on a being of sweat and pheromones in the flesh.
Gribelle’s emotions flipped in rapid flashes with each look of her languid fellows. Ideas of nobility and nostalgia mingled into a screaming passion Gribelle had not felt within the span of her memory. Her people fled to this plane and had only looked back once, which ended in failure.
Alas, that was the foolish dream of Morrigan’s half-breed. The Incubi and Succubi wrote off the Cambion’s ambition as human sentimentality with Morrigan’s bias for her bastard spawn.
But Gribelle was of no such ties. She had been to the dreamer’s plane with her own consciousness. She had supped at its table and drank deep from its cup, down to the bitter dregs. Gribelle wished for all to fill their glasses with their rightful nectar.
“Hile cousins,” Gribelle called to the clutch in present company. They continued a silent loaf, not registering the presence of anybeing, least of all themselves. Gribelle hiled the group louder to similar effect. Her voice died in the open space of Yggdrasil.
Gribelle plunged her fingers into the floor. She lifted a silver mesh, the interconnected thread weave of fates, from the fabric of unreality.
“Cousins of the Night Winds. Denizens of The Dreaming. One of you speaks with urgency. Your presence is required in the meeting hall. Be here now. It is to your benefit.”
Belltone unfolded her wings from around her torso, stretching them to their full membranous span, “What is the meaning of this, cousin Gribelle? Why do you call the flock when a clutch will not heed?”
Gribelle steeled her gaze on Belltone. She shrank from its harshness, defensively wrapping her wings about herself once more. Gribelle said nothing further as Succubi and Incubi popped into presence among the walls of Yggdrasil’s meeting hall.
***
“...Be here now. It is for your own benefit.” Reverbed up through Tressie’s feet to her skull. The sound originated from the silver tether to nothing around her ankle. "What a stroke of luck," Tressie ran her fingers over the towering silver tree, feeling a steady throb that reminded Tressie of breathing.
All around her, dreamscapes cropped up like fully rendered blocks of data in The Raw. Rumblings and distant voices echoed through Tressie’s mind and body without understanding. How was a mystery, but she could perceive a massive migration to the meeting hall mentioned in the original message. A groundswell of presences came from within the mighty tree’s insides. Tressie knew her target was in there, calling out to whatever other horrors resided in this house of nightmares. What she would do with the Succubus when she found it would have to wait for when the time came. The first task was finding an entrance.
To the left and right, the curvature of the tree remained to be defined. The textured bark turned into a solid wall at the vanishing points. Tressie backed up to get a better view of the situation, only panning out on the scale of a dimension engulfing arbor, surrounded by emptying and filling wastelands. The feeling of inhabited space grew with Tressie’s frustrated impotence. She was stuck in a dream world with no way in, out, around or back to anything but people’s dreams and a Succubus filled tree right out of Nordic Myth.
The red midnight sun dappled and glimmered off the leaves above, painting a bloody smear above Tressie’s head, shining in a point ahead of her path. From a bloody slit in the bark, the tree pulled aside to reveal a pathway of living pulp and shadows. Once Tressie stopped caring if she believed her eyes, she walked the path ahead of her into Yggdrasil’s bowels.
***
“So that’s it? We just stare at a big hole in reality and a shiny tree until something happens?” Johnny paced in front of Tressie, her face troubled and breathing shallow. Since she went deep, the training room was quiet as the grave. Even the police scanner had been silent since a code blue called in at the morgue of all places.
Not one of the strangers, and Dr. Rattlesnake, replied. Johnny’s ears grew hot. He clenched his fists, aching to punch something. His tense stomach churned. “Do you guys, like, not know or some skag? Or am I getting the silent treatment because I’m non-essential personnel to you chuckers?”
Dr. Rattlesnake pulled Johnny aside, away from Madre Leon and her ineffectual supernatural death squad. He hushed Johnny until they were sequestered in The Codex server.
“What the frag is the--”
“--Keep quiet boy,” Dr. Rattlesnake shook Johnny by the upper arm for emphasis. “Look now. They ain’t be admitting it, but all them soldier boys out there don’t know nothing ‘bout this. An I let you in on the secret. No one in the whole world knows what to do next. This type of thing ain’t happening every day. Or if it is, no one jawin' ‘bout it.”
“Is everything okay in here?” Erika poked her head into The Codex room.
Johnny started,” No, it’s--”
“--It’s fine now. Go back to your boss lady and tell her we not touching her fancy box,” Dr. Rattlesnake finished.
Erika regarded the cagey old man with a repressed sneer. Johnny and Dr. Rattlesnake waited in silence until Erika let them be.
“Look dude. I just... Tressie needs to be alright.”
“I ain’t gonna lie to you here,” Dr. Rattlesnake gave Johnny a fatherly hand on the shoulder. “You trust your woman?”
“More than I trust anyone else here. No offense.”
“Then my words mean not a thing. Trust her. She be as well as she can be. She’s a dreamer.”
With that, Dr. Rattlesnake turned to leave. Erika popped into the entrance again, “The tear. Something’s happening.”
***
More and more of Gribelle’s kin lined the pathways and lounging areas of Yggdrasil’s meeting hall. Titters of dissent and curiosity made a dull roar of white noise. Gribelle stood, head held high, on an empty floor. The light emanating from every surface became a spotlight on her station. When the assembled had hit their fever pitch, Gribelle held a hand out and began.
“Incubi. Succubi. Cousins of The Dreaming. The fairest of Lilith’s children. Wanderers of the world mind. Lend me your attention as I come before you for your betterment and the betterment of us all.
“We were once a proud race. Are still a proud race. But now, with pride unfounded. I have been on a journey, my kin. A journey to planes beyond this one we have called home for millennia. A journey to the plane that spawned us and our kind. The plane that we have relied upon for sustenance since fledgelings. A land where all would be provided, if only we could reach it.
“I stand before the greater sum of our numbers to say we left that very world for a world of shadow and ash. The ease of which food comes to us has dulled us to the thrill of the hunt.” Grumbles through the masses. “Grumble and groan all you will, dancers of the night winds. But I know for certain, the dreamers we sip from like an overfilled goblet, never daring to take too much since another will be by all too soon, are but a fragment of what could be.
“The everlong quest of relief from hunger, the fear of discomfort, has made us soft. Suckeling from the opium tit, with no predators to harm us but ourselves, has made us soft. Weak. What pride can any of us feel taking sleeping prey in the only place they are truly defenseless?”
“Who cares about pride? Burn your pride and nobility,” Came a lone voice Gribelle knew well. High in the environs sat that rake, Lozario. A smattering of agreement with the opposition murmured through the crowd.
“Your own pride will make you care. Cousin Gribelle speaks true. Our kind were Lilith’s most cunning children. Only we remember the days of our mother. While we were never her favorites, it was us who slipped away, like a flock of fleeing prodigals.” More voices sided with the new Succubus voice.
“It is not your floor to be grandstanding, cousin Desdemona.” Lozario fired back.
“And it is not yours either, Lozario you spiteful curr,” Gribelle spat towards the rafters. “The floor belongs to whoever called The Family together. That was this one before you. This plea I bring forward is addressed to us all. Let us retake the plane that spawned us. Meat has never tasted sweeter than that of a live dreamer.
“The heady perfume of sex permeates the very air you breathe. We moved to this plane for convenience and engineered it into a prison of our very spirit. This plane of consciousness is not meant to house our bodies.”
“What of the Cambion’s gambit? That foolish gamble stranded a number of our own inside stranger shells. Why force us through the tattered shreds of the veil for another half formed grasp at glory?” Lozario rallied, gaining back support. "Why have none of them attempted to come back and tell us of the wonders of this place?"
“Your propensity for interruption notwithstanding, possession was a necessary evil. As for the actions of our cousins, I cannot say. But the tattered veil that Morrigan and her half-breed left in their wake is a blessing. It could be our way out of The Dreaming. To take back a world full of wonders for ourselves. If The Dreaming is an unfulfilling opium haze of sloth, the Base Plane is a place of risk and reward, agony and ecstasy. That which refines the being through tribulation makes the reward all the more fulfilling.
“I was like you but a short duration ago. I was content with combing the desert with only casual interest in the dreamers that littered its spaces. Now that I have drunk from the source, the false flavor of this place is sour acid in the mouth. Time and complacency has erased our memories of how a noble race such as ours should live.”
“Nobility is leisure,” Lozario fired a parting shot.
“For the meat, perhaps,” Desdemona fired back. Grumbles of agreement rose to drown the hisses of dissent.
Gribelle raised her hands and boomed her voice, “Humans cannot enter this realm in their form, but their world? If you follow me we can invade, we can pervade. We. Will. Prevail.” The crowd grew in fervor for Gribelle’s monologue.
“Our minds found a way through to this realm in body and spirit. Our minds shall find a way to bring them back,” Gribelle outstretched her arms to the cheering masses. The kin were a hard crowd to stoke, but once the fire in their hearts were lit, nothing could outburn its passion.
“You better rethink that...” A new, yet familiar, voice squeaked.
The entire meeting hall of Yggdrasil fell silent. There, on the edge of the polished silver floor space, stood the interloper.
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