Porcelain Child/VanaNightmare

<onine> Panting. Ragged breathing. It echoes in the blackness, as if growing closer. It is the sharp intake of breath that you have come to associate with injury and pain. Soon it is almost all you can hear apart from the muffled yet deafening cacophany of rumbling around you.
<onine> You feel dirt under your hands and its texture is felt when your hands claw reflexively at it. You feel a warmth in your left shoulder. It grows warmer and warmer quickly and fast becomes too warm, then it sears and throbs with the rumbling in your ears. You can feel the earth tremble under you, then you are able to force your eyes to open.
Vana flicks her eyes around wildly, trying to find a point of reference.
<onine> Everything is blurry. Not the blur of fatique or intoxiacation - but a bluriness that is strange, everything is slow and leaves trails in your vision. You're lying on your back, the sky above you is a mix of black, purple, blue and stars - No moon. None.
<onine> The pain in your shoulder leaps into agony every time you move your left arm.
Vana finds nothing recognizable in this sky, whimpering quietly at the pain.
<onine> You manage to focus on a spot some distance to your right. Imbedded in the ground is the sword, a loyal blade of gold and red. You dont know why, but this is YOUR sword.
Vana reaches for it slowly with her good arm, trying to keep the other one still.
<onine> Too far. You dont *thinkyour legs are gone, you can feel them aching, but the shoulder seems to have slowed you, dulled your strength.
Vana awkwardly, painfully, shuffles into something of an upright position, inching her way towards the blade that, somehow, must provide her safety.
<onine> You manage to roll yourself over, but have to pause to catch your breath. Thunder sounds and there is a flash of lightning somewhere that illuminates the entire area, temporarily blinding you. You blink and look down, your cloved hands clawing at the rock and dirt under you.
<onine> Metal, you can taste the metalic tang of blood against your tongue, and more is below you, spilling freely from your shoulder and onto the earth, now annointed burgundy.
<onine> You find you can only crawl slowly with your right hand, the left is lame from the wound - probably a cleanly snapped collar bone at best, a few ribs and the shoulder blade at worst.
Vana closes her eyes and forces down tears, swallowing hard at the intense pain. She grits her teeth and claws at the dirt, pulling herself agonizingly closer to the weapon, and salvation.
<onine> You are so close to it, you could almost touch it you think when a dark shape moves between you and the glinting red blade. A foot steps in front of your vision, impacting in the earth with a boom. You realise that in the thunder you could hear the dull scraping sound that He made...
Vana looks up fearfully, her expression falling as her one chance at rescue is cut off.
<onine> The black shape towers over you, grotesquely oversized, limping strangely from the bizzare power that warped it into the twisted creature that you now fought - and lost.
<onine> Tattered volumous cloaks shift and ripple in the wind as it... no it was still He... moves, dragging the gargantuan blade behind him, the edge scraping along the ground from its pure weight.
Vana tries to push herself away with her functioning arm, making tiny whimpering noises of fear and pain at her pathetic progress.
<onine> Fins, spikes and other random growths pierce the cloaks he wears at wanton random, no pattern - such was the nature of the energy that he now commanded. One of his hands... no tallons picks up the red blade as one would pick up a particularly vile dead rodent and looks it over. It is little more than a dagger in his hand.
<onine> And like little more than a dagger he tosses the blade aside like so much garbage and turns to you, the bright golden brand on its forhead fills your vision, burning a bright circle onto your retinas that you see even when you blink.
Vana cries openly, now, realizing through the blinding pain that this is her end.
<onine> Even at its loping, lumbering gait, it is upon you before you can even escape, it reaches down with its massive free hand and grips the face breastplate easily along its edges, one of the claws digging into the wound in your shoulder, and lifts you into the air. You can see the entirity of creation from here past the white city you seem to be in the highest part of.
Vana lets out another pathetic cry, lying limp in his grasp.
<onine> Around, you can see five other bodies in varying garb of gold and white. They're not dead... you dont think.
<onine> His strength is tremendous, and your flailing means about as much as a mouse gripped by the tail by a man would. He walks you to the edge of the area the battle took place in and holds you above the black abyss bellow you.
<onine> "I never expected..." his voice sounds like that of many men talking in unison. "...you to be so much trouble dragonwhelp. For a simple footsoldier you fight almost as us..."
<onine> He squeezes his grip on the front of your breastplate and you can hear the jade straning before there is a popping crack as the stress becomes too much for the armour, it buckles and cracks like tin. You're "fine" as he only gripped the front of the breastplate, but the pulling of the straps is almost unbearable.
<onine> "...almost."
Vana bites her lip hard enough to draw blood, before the muffled moan erupts into a terrified scream.
<onine> He laughs. "All this is mine now, as it was meant to be, I have powers that nigh even the gods can stop. It is beyond them. I will crush and create and crush and create this world as I see fit, as it amuses me. It will be... spectacular. A shame yes, that you will not live to see it?"
<onine> He barks a sharp laugh then with a casual flick of the wrist sends you sailing back and down, over the edge and into the blackness. You hear another man scream as you fall, but it rapidly fades into just your own. Your movements are sluggish even as you fall, and soon your screams become more real
<onine> More focused.
<onine> You open your eyes again suddenly, and feel an almost reassuring pressure beneath you. Your bunk at the barracks. The blanket and sheets wrapped around you constrict your sweat soaked body uncomfortably, and your eyes are blurred and stinging with salty tears.
Vana curls up on herself tightly, the phantom pain in her shoulder fading along with the dream.
<onine> You are alone in the room. Almost all of the other recruits are out, either celebrating or on training assignments. Your 'special' status has gotten you off some of the outings recently so that the swordmaster could 'polish you off' as he said.
<onine> Those celebrating were of course looking forward to the promotion ceremony from simple recruits/cadets into fully fledged soldiers and posted to units.
<onine> That was happening tomorrow.
Vana rubs her raw throat after a long while of lying still, and slowly peels the blankets away, letting the cold air reassure her of her reality.
<onine> Its real alright. But the dream felt real too.
<onine> When you blink you think you can almost see the mark still on your retinas, but that could just be the paranoid manifestation of a fearful and confused mind.
Vana reaches beneath the bunk for the spare blanket she has gotten into the habit of keeping, carefully standing and wrapping it around herself as she makes her way to the baths, managing not to fall from jittery nerves. She tries not to think on the dream.
<onine> You are unwounded however, shooting down the theory of you having a secret Anathema hunting job like in some childrens stories. You may be young, but you are well versed on the Anathema.
<Vana> This is truth, but yet another things she tries to avoid thinking about, forcing her mind into blankness as she slips into a bath.
<onine> That bath does make you feel a small bit more relaxed about it. This one was far more clear than any of the other terrifying nightmares you have had. Those ones you seemed to wake up scared from but could remember nothing. This was far, far worse. You can still remember almost everything that had happened.
Vana rubs her shoulder clean, gently warming the skin so the marks her nails left slowly fade.
<onine> In dreams and reality there seem to be constants. Fear and pain.
<onine> Your bath is interrupted a little earlier than you'd want by others coming to the bathhouse. Rowdy others.
Vana looks up over the edge of her tub cautiously.
<onine> Just a few fellow recruits, probably with an ale/sake or two in them. They glance over, but pay little more attention to you. They seem more engrosed with their gossiping conversation which is as insipid as it is pointless. Their loud voices echoe annoyingly around, piercing whatever peace you had like a broadsword through a bubble.
Vana can no longer relax, so pulls a towel about her and slips out of the bath.
<onine> You perform the legendary feat of getting out of the bath, and head outside. Where to now?
<Vana> Back to barracks! To get dressed.

Comments

Holy crap, worst nightmare ever. --UncleChu