Dreams

The exiled matriarch of the warmonger people, stripped of her power and of her eyesight, could do little now except keep moving and drift into her waking dreams. Where she was going she now had only the vaguest concept, for vision was her kinds’ primary sense, but so long as she kept moving and pulsing her flippers she would eventually get somewhere. Maybe if she went far enough out to sea, she would be put to death by the Pelagans and so end her journey with at least some dignity. Until then, she tried to dream of beautiful places and better times gone by… but instead her dreams kept guiding her back to thoughts of different choices that could have led to different outcomes in the most recent war and in times long before. She dreamt of people long gone, of a mate who died a whole generation’s length ago… a sister vying for the throne who was willing to die in combat against her for a chance at her power. She remembered a daughter, marked with the forbidden color and so left abandoned to predators shortly after birth by rule of her then-ruling mother, the previous leader, and the hundreds of others’ children killed in her own jaws, and thousands more at her call by her followers. So very many lives were lost to her… and now, left drifting along the tides with nobody in the perpetual night… she wondered if it was really all so worth it.

Days passed, then weeks, and the pain in her newest ruined eye dulled from a constant hot knife to a dull and tired ache. Hunger pains however grew strong until they burned her insides with every movement and her stomach began to digest itself. But without her vision or the support from her clan she had no hope of acquiring food and so she strove to fall deeper into her mind and to distance herself from her physical form. Yet the visions grew increasingly dark and frightening, and the weaker her body grew the less control she had over them. She dreamed of herself in the places of those she had killed, feeling herself struggling vainly against much bigger teeth. Without her eyes to open and let her escape her inner realm and find focus in the outer world, her inner mind became a nightmare world to which there was no relief.

Lost and disoriented, the fallen leader eventually found herself turned around and tangled in dense surface vegetation. Far from the open sea, she had circled back toward the shallow coasts. By the time she was conscious of where she was, she couldn’t remember from which way she had come and was soon lost in the ever-thicker tangle. In the open water she could move freely even without her sight to guide her and carried herself with the imposing presence of an apex predator. No creature dared threaten her there. Now so out of her element, she carried the aura of a lost, weak animal and she felt the scavengers coming in around her and nipping her heels. She turned and kicked and whatever small monster sought to catch her was driven away. She couldn’t tell if the outside world was daylight or dark in her own eternal nightmare. Couldn’t see the slow, creeping thing which had picked up on her distress and begun moving close to investigate. If she had known of it she could have still moved away fast enough to outrun it, but as such an evil thing didn’t live in the open seas she had known for her life, she could not have known when to run even if she still had her sight.

Moving ever more slowly and weakly through the seaweed, the disgraced warmonger was so deep in her mental nightmare that she didn’t at first wake to realize it had come for her in the outer world as well. But now she found herself thrust awake by a metallic clicking growing louder by the minute and the scent of decay. Soon the cacophony was deafening to her, a chorus of grating shrieks and rumbles, and yet she was unable to move away. She was now at her limit. Starved for so long, her body was giving up on her. She was too weak to move as a hellish creature from a real-life nightmare world began to reach out and touch her… a billion tiny feelers all over her skin… and even as it began to feed. She tried to scream when it reached her face, but her airway was already clogged… she felt inside her now a million little things biting, cutting, slicing her apart into so many minute pieces and building their own life from the dwindling essence of the once powerful warmonger matriarch.

Eaten alive by the sea shoggoth, there could be no worse death in the ocean. Silently screaming until her weakened, disfigured, and oxygen-starved body at last mercifully failed her, the matriarch had a final dream. The pain was gone now, at last, and for just a moment she could see her people in the distance. She saw them with her eyes, the clear sight of the outer world, not the amorphous shapes of the inner one. Plump, carefree children were playing in clear waters under the sun. The detail was so crisp… she had forgotten how beautiful the world once was. She sought to reach them… to see her kind again… to right wrongs…She could do better this time. But the harder she tried to reach them, the further she was swept away by a current she was powerless to fight. She plunged into cold and dark waters, spinning and disoriented, until her sight was lost once more and she found herself alone in a still and silent world. Then, for just a moment, she felt someone nearby. Something around her, coming from every side at once. She felt it was watching her… that it already knew her, and that it knew more than she could ever have in her lifetime or many more. She wanted to speak, to ask it so many questions, but it was already too late.

The matriarch was gone, but her final dream of a better world for her people would go on.