Scene: The World's Dream
The World's Dream is the colloquial term for the occurrence of a shared dream by almost all the populace of the world on {INSERT DATE HERE}. The slumbering world eater, Hadar, who was beginning to break free of the ritual imprisonment imposed on him by Bahamut, made this psychic connection with the people of Ulterra in order to sow panic and discord. The dream marks a shift in tone in the campaign, to one of desperation and disaster, before the (hopeful) triumph of the heroes. Every character in the story past this point is aware, whether they like or not, that something terrible is coming. The contents of the dream carried out as follows:
Your eyes come open in an unfamiliar place. You feel bodies press up against you, and as you come to your senses you realize that you are standing up, surrounded by people. You are pressed on all sides by an endless crowd, a mass of people so large that it fills your vision entirely. You are all standing here, shoulder to shoulder, in what feels to be a few inches of water, though it is too dark for your eyes to confirm what your feet feel. An endless night sky stretches out above you, splashed with gleaming, glorious stars, breathtaking in their beauty. The starlight allows you to see some of the faces around you, though they are all unfamiliar to you. Faces stare back at you in the darkness, the twinkling galaxies above reflected in their terrified eyes. Some of them seem to be speaking, some even screaming, though their voices sound far away and muffled. Others are simple standing there, eyes closed, not yet awakened to the strange place. More of the open with each passing moment.
There is in instinctive desire in you to move your feet, to free yourself from this place, somehow wide open yet crowded. As you have this thought, you begin to feel a pushing from all sides, as people begin to move, or try to. Try as you might, you cannot seem to move out of your small allotted space. You can move your feet, but they seem to slide back into place, and your arms feel heavy as they push the boundaries into the space of others. The crowd ripples, muffled voices and struggled movement, and a claustrophobic panic begins to rise in your throat and stomach, an all consuming need to GET. AWAY.
People's gazes begin to shift suddenly, all in one direction. Those who are panicking the most don't notice for a while, while the perceptive ones among the crowd simply stare. There is a mountain, one that was previously not easily distinguishable from the black expanse of space. It wheels around you in a wide arc, but what you are focusing on is the strange and horrible creature standing at the edge of the great cliff-face. Its body shape is vague. The main mass is bunched into the form of a vaguely humanoid, vaguely bestial creature standing on three legs, with one foreleg lifted, tentatively, ending in a fingered hand. It has three long tails billowing out from behind it. What you want to call its head is a mass of slick, undulating black cords, wrapping around a void of a face, simply recessing into its body with no facial features at all. The cords, like tentacles, hang off of its body all around it, waving slowly behind the creature in an unseen and unfelt wind. The reason you can see this body in the darkness is because of these tentacles. Lines of light run up and around the creature, coiling around the outside-most layer of its skin, and glowing a sickly crimson, casting strange shadows along its body and along the ground around it.
You can't tear your eyes away from this monster on the mountain. You can hear the muffled sounds of the people around you reacting. Goosebumps run up your arms and back. All that goes quiet when the creature begins to speak. The voice echoes over itself, and the sound seems to emerge from within your own mind, rather than from atop the cliffside. It is a deafening whisper, and its words beat down all other thoughts.
Live what lives you can.
Scrounge for every scrap of meaning.
We are coming.
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