Dreams have always been messages from the deepest places. They are our obdurate messengers, epithet of the world witnessed yet unseen.. They are both the spells of vaunted orison and summoners of cloying doom.
A strange dream you find yourself in.. To some it may even constitute a haunting..Your first breath cavorts across frigid but clean deep-forest air. Yet no matter how much you struggle your lungs and throat cannot cull enough of it from the dark forest to sound voice.Here the forest's branches are stunted and tottered. The brittle firs and pines are not the phalanges as they aspire to be, for they are too meager to shield one from the biting chill that whistles against your skin.Even the shadows cascading down from the trees are warping, and seem to take on silhouettes of both monsters and men. They creep along every corner of the space, filling it with banalities, refuse and information in various degrees. Little black denizens that soundlessly call out..Your hazy eyes suddenly bear the vision of man, the shepherd of shadows emerging amongst his flock to cajole it with hidden graces. This figure is a presence that calls distances into question.. For he appears to lurk so nigh yet so very distant.. The more your eyes reach for him the farther he appears..Yet still, you are able to take small measure of him, vision cutting through enough shadows at least to spy the man's eyes, right of carmine and left an opalescent, glowing with preternatural illumination. They are all at once plaintive, imperious and knowing. One might suspect those chalcedony spheres to be Menphina and Dalamud, having fallen into a tempered colic where they descended from the heavens.Above his aquiline nose those sharp twins fall upon you. They are both the origin and the corbels of his studying. From then on, if you later met again, the man would always seem arresting of you and the world, affixed with the very same dedicatory and ineluctable stare.It was clear that presence augured either something profane or premonitory. A summon to some vertiginous trial that brooked no abjuring... After a moment he breathed only a single note, "Come," and then turned towards the forest, dissipating into the stygian woods. There is an uncertainty in tracking the shadow of him. Yet you do manage, without any evidence to know that you follow true.Your feet tread over the light and impacted snow, and whatever clads your feet echos your journey, an odd staccato peeling against the confines of the trees and brush..Crunch.. crunch... crunch.... crunchHere, the lushness and fullness of the Shroud's green cedes to the white and grey nothing of the Coerthan expanse. Here, traveling north, many come to feel as though you've come across the threshold of world's womb only to ascend on white sheets of snow into her somber tomb.The man turns and continues the small peregrination until the two of you come to a clearing: a circle of birch trees, barren of their leaves. Two stumps, a yalm apart, sit bathing in what little moonlight slivered between the rolling clouds that sat above, obfuscating of the stars.The Keeper sits upon one of these stumps, legs tucking underneath him and then sits as tall and poised as a ragged beggar might to mock kings. Here and now the man postures over his meager and unreal fiefdom, upon his throne of nothing; you are to be his only subject... From this perch he studies you once more.The moment is alluvial, somehow rich but granular like sifting gold from sand neath the blistering sun that was his ineluctable gaze. It is only then that you realize the gift of your voice has been returned to you..It is clear that he awaits you.... that he has always awaited for you.. if only to hear what you may speak of that you never had the opportunity to.Whether you decide to sit on the tree-stump across.. or simply aside within the clearing.. his voice eventually cuts the quiet."Tell me... What do you seek?" tumbles past his canines, through his lips into the clement air.And how might then you answer?