JAWS • DECEMBER 2025 EVENT/TDM

[uruz]

TDM & EVENT: JAWS

Watch on YouTube

ᛗ

Show Me Those Pretty White Jaws

The dream has been coming in waves for those new to Sleep's touch, as a shoreline that never stays still. As a sky that never remembers to include its stars. Beneath it all, there is a voice. Her voice: silk-sweet, coaxing from just beyond the approaching wave that towers like a moving mountain. She tells you to come home. She promises it won't hurt, even if she never tells you what waits beneath. You see the shape just before the dream ends: a massive black tidal wave, yawning wide and black until it looks like a pair of jaws breaking upon you. You don't have time to resist.

You and your veteran Vessels will awaken in water.

There is no surface. No bottom. No sky. No sound but your own heartbeat and the echoes of water being slashed though, dull and endless in the still, frigid dark. You are suspended, weightless— Some may have difficulty to breathe without inhaling water the first few times, while those aligned with the waves will feel it come like second nature. Once you acclimate yourself, you'll notice that around you drift glowing filaments; thin, pulsing threads that coil like jellyfish tendrils, softly luminescent. They curl and twist through the water, and when you look closer, you realize: they show you things. Memories, maybe. Dreams, maybe. Each one unique to your gaze: a hand reaching for yours in the dark, a goodbye that never finished, a face you haven't seen in years. They are what you think love looks like. What you once needed it to be. And when you touch them, they wrap around you, gently, warmly . . . Hungrily— and begin to pull you down.

To ascend into the next level, you must let go. But not everything that binds you wants to be released. The filaments drifting through the water show you what you think love looks like— what you've built it into. They are gentle at first, beautiful even, but the longer you cling, the more they pull.

There are ways to escape them: You may bind your filament with another's and together speak aloud a shared truth: what you believe love really is. If your hearts align or at the very least come to an agreement, the threads dissolve into light and lift you upward. If your beliefs clash or contradict, the threads knot tighter, and something . . . May take interest in you.

Beneath you, something moves. Huge, silent and almost regal. It glides through the deep like a phantom, almost too large to be real. You feel its presence before you see its flash of pearl white and glowing red eyes, three on each side of its face: a shark.

The shark is here to choose its next meal. It smells grief, fear and seeks out trauma most of all. It is drawn to the most unspoken parts of you, the very parts you thought were buried, roused from the tightened ropes of what you crave in your heart. And when it chooses you, it does not bite immediately. It invites, with its jaws opening like a sanctuary and slow towards you.

Inside is I, whispers Sleep. Allow Me to have you whole, and you will be at peace. Show Me love.

Fight against her, or even with your current partner about what love is, and Sleep will open her maw, spilling tendrils from her throat and begin to stalk you. Best be prepared to fight the possessed Megalodon— She will laugh, amused as you do, like a great cat playing with its food. And if you were to be caught, well. You'll wake in the dream's next level with an undeniable prey drive, whether Token or Offering.

She will do anything to keep you here.

NOTES:

• There is no surface visible at first. Light only comes from the filaments. As characters resist, act, or ascend, a faint stained-glass shimmer begins to pulse upward, hinting at the dream's next layer.
• Sound is muffled— speech emerges as bubbles, but meaning travels regardless. Words feel heavy here. Some phrases may literally change the water (turn to light, birth dream-objects, or ripple with tension). You will do better using The Murmur as a means of communication. Luckily you have your mask on!
• The Shark always circles once it senses trouble within you. Sometimes close, sometimes far, but always felt. If characters listen closely, they can hear the echo of One's voice coming from inside it: pleading with a haunted, at times screaming melody.

TOKEN EFFECTS

• The dream bends subtly around Tokens, especially at the whims of an Aquamancer. Walls of pressure open before them, and filaments shift course as if expecting them. This can make their path easier, unless they start to doubt their purpose.
• Tokens perceive emotional resonance as currents in the water such as subtle flows of energy. These can guide them (or others) toward escape paths, or signal when the shark is near.
• When a Token speaks or acts with strong intent, the dream sometimes translates it into a symbolic structure: A word might become a floating glyph. A gesture might alter the filament's shape. A moment of clarity might reveal a hidden path. Other characters can interact with these dream-objects, but they're fragile, unstable, and prone to distortion by doubt.
• The deeper Tokens go, the more they feel themselves pulling apart and begin to experience dual awareness: one part dreaming, one part watching— some may even see flashes of within the shark's belly, and One's voice much louder. The deeper they go, the more detached they become, and the more they lack the ability to act at all.

OFFERING EFFECTS

• The shark is more fascinated by Offerings. It circles them often, sensing kinship— or potential. The more monstrous the Offering, the more the shark "pauses' near them, almost curious.
• Offerings feel "the pull" more clearly, particularly Merrows and other aquatic-based Offerings—they can sense where the surface might be, and where the shark intends to strike next. They may even see pulses in the water that others miss, similar to Spider Man's "spidey senses".
• An Offering may experience rapid body changes submerged. Fins may appear, bones may shift, teeth may lengthen without warning and so on. This makes their movement easier or harder, depending on how much of themselves they're holding back or how apt their monstrous forms are at swimming.
• Some Offerings may feel drawn to the shark— not in fear, but in understanding. They may see themselves in it, and vice versa— One's song in particular is hypnotic, and for split moments you may understand his pain through his words. This might make you more prone to being consumed, though, so hopefully your partner can help you out of it—?.

ᛗ

Watching Me With Eyes Of A Predator

The surface you breach is not water— it's glass.

You strike it with the force of falling sky. It fractures beneath you in a bloom of painted light. For one weightless moment, the dream hesitates, sputters. Then the world shatters, and you fall with the cascade.

Water pours through the crack in the ceiling, carrying you down in ribbons of color and a shattering splash. Stained glass shards drift like petals through the now collapsing roof, and you eventually land not in sand, but upon a cathedral floor, slick with tide. Around you, the water spreads, pooling across the stone and swallowing the walls in a rising hush as it finds escape through the doors.

The cathedral is vast, impossibly so. Its architecture towers, crooked and immaculate, built more from longing than stone. No altar awaits you. No congregation. Only the sensation of having trespassed into something meant to be private. Veteran Vessels may recognize this cathedral as St. Patrick's— before it was drenched in One's blood sacrifice.

High above and surrounding you, the stained-glass mosaics churn with captured light. f you linger beneath one of the window's rays, your appearance may begin to change under the light. You appear as someone else sees you. Be it a hero. A monster. A disappointment. A god. A weakness. A temptation. Even a burden. That version of you clings to your dream-body like a second skin; uncomfortable, intimate, and undeniable. For some, it may be beautiful. For others, unbearable.

If you and another stand beneath the same window, you may each appear as the other secretly imagines. There is no control and no negotiation. Only truth twisted through the lens of want, resentment, fear, or love. And it doesn't go away until you leave the light.

Eventually, the cathedral doors open by dream's will. Beyond them lies a cloister garden: narrow paths, pale trees, and wild flowers that bloom in stillness. At the far end, behind the overgrowth and ruined arches, you see a hollow.

It is a corridor where the dream collapses inward, twisting, warped, half-swallowed in fog and dread. Its stones pulse faintly beneath a shallow film of water. Black tendrils reach from its depths like roots, veins, twitching toward sound, warmth, and movement. You see them dragging matter into the earth, and between them lie bones, contorted and fresh, half-consumed.

And farther still, a body that still breathes. Glimpsed only briefly, A masked man's form is stretched by the hollow's gravity, arms pinned behind the veil. He does not move, or speak. Or perhaps, he cannot. The hollow does not let him go and will not, should you make your attempts. If you step foot in the hollows that have consumed him, you too will be consumed. A three eyed Tod sits at the hollow's edge, a single bushy tail splitting into three, as its body plays with illusion like smoke put to dance over fire. It says, as its head floats up and its maw splits into a grin too cheshire to ignore: Wearing shoes, yet no feet in sight. You'll hear steps pound in the death of night. What is it that you need, to cross this narrow blight?

It disappears and only leaves you the riddle to chew on.

Nothing living can cross the hollow, you'll soon find. Nothing except . . . The Nightmares.

Just outside the garden's boundary, you'll find horses built from wind and shadow, flickering at the edge of your vision. Their bodies are black— not the color, but the absence, swallowing all light. Some of their craniums cound be seen, others have a jutting horn of bone from their foreheads. Where eyes should be, there are six: three stacked on each side of the skull, glowing dimly red like distant embers beneath ice. Their manes flow like torn fabric, like drifting vapor that trails behind them like the smoke from a snuffed candle. Their maws are too damn wide to be herbivorous, yet they seem to enjoy the act of grazing. They wait, unchained and wild in a herd.

This is the only way forward. Only they can pass through the hollow untouched. But how to ride one—? You may chase them. You may plead, command, kneel. You may offer them all your need and all your love, promises that you will provide if they become your steed. But they were not made to answer it. For every Vessel, there is one single Nightmare that will choose them, and thus you will choose each other. They have their own personalities, some more aggressive or shyer than others. The harder you reach, the faster they vanish or harshed they will attack if unready. Try to mount one through force, and you'll regret ever trying. Try to bind one, and it will break you.

But if you are patient, if you figure out its nature and how to please it— your Nightmare may come closer. One may circle you. It may bow its head. Their snort is warm and real against your palm. If successful, it will lower itself to its knees. If you've got the height, they will simply wait, patiently, for you to get on their backs (Or not; there are plenty of sassy mares out there).

If you accept, you might not be taken somewhere safe, but you will be taken somewhere true, away from here. And if you force your want upon them, if you cannot let go— you will be left with something else.

In the distance, across the flooded cathedral floor, you may see One again. Flashes, glimpses. Always chasing a mare he never reaches, or the opposite— the mare chases after him.

NOTES:

• If a character successfully forms a bond with their Nightmare, it will return with them in the form of a waking world steed, officially introduced in the next event. You're free to give it the personality you wish.
• If a character attempts to force a connection with a Nightmare at any point (tries to catch, mount, command, etc.), the mare will bite or kick, which Vessels will suffer as a persistent dream-mark that will carry into the waking world.

TOKEN EFFECTS

• Light clings unnaturally to Tokens in the cathedral, especially near the stained glass. It bends around their bodies like a false halo, casting them in divine or monstrous outlines depending on who watches.
• If a Token casts or channels any magic within the cathedral or near a Nightmare, the spell does not manifest, but instead, a cold mist escapes their mouth, and the Nightmare turns to look. The dream rejects force.
• When a Nightmare looks directly at a Token, their eyes eclipse, pupils vanishing into rings of shadow. In that moment, a fragmented vision floods the Token's mind . . . not from the Nightmare, but from another character nearby. It shows the Token how that character once dreamed of them, what they feared, needed, or hoped they would become.

OFFERING EFFECTS

• The stained glass causes a subtle change in scent and physical appearance turning into a more grotesque version of this— Offerings begin to smell or look like what others most want from them.
• Offerings may always know where the Nightmares are, even when hidden. But the more they try to act on this knowledge, the harder the Nightmares are to reach.
• An Offering's body will react before they realize it, flinching from lies, bristling in moments of emotional pressure, pulling away from contact, and so on. They may startle even at gentle contact, as if something inside them is as reactive as they are.

ᛗ

Where The Delicate Stops

As your Nightmare takes you through the misty hollow, you may begin to notice the empty city of Manhattan as veterans remember. There is no warning but the eerie silence that surrounds you like impossible weights. The cathedral once behind you folds inward— wrong, deep and full of pressure. It bursts through the hollow's path, through the city's street, and then— The dream ruptures.

Stone peels backward like paper. Glass liquefies mid-air. The sky above the city pulls itself inside out. Time bends sideways. And from the edges of the dream, something, someone, begins to hunt. Sleep's presence moves like the very shark she chose as a vision of her physical manifestation. She does not speak or rage. But you feel Her, rising like fever beneath the skin of Her world as the hairs at the back of your neck do. She does not want you this deep, and neither does One.

Somewhere within the collapse, you may see them— entwined, shifting, trembling. One's face is turned toward you, screaming something that doesn't reach your ears. Sleep's hands are tangled in his body. She pulls him back with a gentleness that breaks the sky, and he screams, reaching for you with his last breath before consumption. The dream convulses.

The Nightmares bolt with you still on them.

The city rises to meet you from the shadows, but it's not the city you know. Skyscrapers twist at unnatural angles. Streets flood, then dry, then flood again. Tendrils burst from subway grates and gutters, slashing upward like tongues. Streetlights spin like compass needles. Cars levitate, crash, freeze midair. You move through it all at breakneck speed, but the exit keeps shifting— a hole in the world that flickers just beyond reach where you see your body, fast asleep.

Somewhere in the chaos, a few Nightmares are caught. Sleep strikes like lightning— she coils like a viper and tightens like a vice. One touch from Her, and your Nightmare collapses mid-gallop, its body unraveling into smoke and light. No sound. No scream. Just absence. And you fall right off it like a ragdoll.

Others fall beneath impact, too— a wrong turn, a shattered wall, a burst of heat from One's grief. A broken leg. A crash. A wound too deep to ride through. If your steed is lost, you fall. And if no one reaches for you, you stay fallen. Others are near, and their Nightmares still run. All of you have a terrible dread in your bones— if you are caught or left behind, the consequences will be dire. You might not even wake up. So, call out. Cling. Climb. Share. Two Vessels on one mount. Anything to survive and flee as the dreamscape tightens its wrathful grip around you.

Sleep calls inside your spine. You can't make out what She says. One answers, the same blur of garbled words in your marrow. And then, just before the dream can take you, just before you reach an exit— you rise.

Your body lifts from the Nightmare as it paddles the air with desperation, it too rising. You're pulled upward, weightless, as if a thread inside your heart has been yanked by a furious god. You float, twist in the air. Your vision glows white.

We've got you.

And then you wake up— mid-air in the waking world.

Your body slams into your bed, floor, street, soil, wherever it was that you had slept. Reality greets you with terrible impact.

NOTES

• If a character does not find a mount in time, they may be caught in the dream collapse. They still wake— but they wake broken. These characters may wake up bruised, disoriented, or emotionally fragmented, and this can be explored in the next waking world event.

TOKEN EFFECTS

• Any Tether they feel becomes unstable—splintered. For brief moments, they feel it breaking and re-forming again and again, with slight differences each time.
• The more emotionally charged they are, the more the dream pulls toward them; tendrils snap faster, debris veers unnaturally close.
• Their body flickers with signs of their own magic—sigils, symbols, runes— burning just beneath the surface of their skin like constellations. These glow brighter as the dream collapses, as if trying to tear free.

OFFERING EFFECTS

• Where Offerings are grazed or injured, they bleed light, not red. It floats up like mist.
• They hear One's heartbeat, not theirs, and it speeds in panic. It affects their own pulse, the mare under them . . .
• The Nightmare no longer follows the Offering's will—it will respond to their fear instead.

ᛗ

OOC NOTES

➤ Welcome to Somnia's third TDM, which doubles as the month's gamewide event!
➤ This TDM is considered game canon. You are free to have your character remember as many details as possible when they wake up.
➤ Only new characters are free to experiment with the Vessel options, Token or Offering to your liking; this is a dreamscape, so multiple/different situations for you to really test which option you like most is possible. Current characters must remain as their chosen Vessel type unless you requested a switch, which can be done on the Taken page.
➤ All TDMs take place within a dreamscape, meaning characters can interact with the setting without needing to apply. Come have fun with us!
➤ Veteran players, I ask to please refrain from making post-event threads for the time being! We have some important information to take into account in next month's event when characters are slated to "wake up". At the very least, please wait for the information to be offered on the next plotting post. Thank you everyone for your patience!
➤ Please comment on the TDM's INVITE TL if you are a new player interested in joining the game, but don't yet have an invite. Current players or the mod may reach out to extend an invite. Once you've got one, please don't forget to comment on the Invite page so you may properly link it in your reserve and app.
➤ Questions? Please direct them to the designated questions comment linked below!

network ᛗ logs ᛗ ooc ᛗ memes ᛗ navigation

code

code

Comments

yun ruhong | original character (dnd) | current player

[hongtian]

[ nested prompts to follow! ooc plotting here. feel free to wildcard me or contact me at aerolith or jinlian @ discord. ]

ᛗ Show Me Those Pretty White Jaws

[hongtian]

[ For the second time in as many months, Ruhong is drowning in blackness and cannot breathe.

Small blessings, though, come in the instant knowledge that unlike her near-loss-of-self to Sleep’s blood moon the month before, this time Ruhong has at least maintained her own mind. She knows this from the anger that surges within her at the sound of Sleep’s silky-smooth voice, the way it wraps over her skin and coaxes her further into the darkness. Anger is familiar, comfortable—anger is safe, and it pushes and pulses through her meridians until she breathes it with every heartbeat.

With each breath so too does light begin to flicker. Ever the faithful paladin Ruhong reaches for them instinctually—and the irony is, perhaps, that this is her first mistake.

The thing is that Ruhong cannot grasp them. The first tendril curls around her wrist, and there, flashing through her mind’s eye as it slips through her fingers: a woman, appearing to be in her late forties or early fifties, her dark silvery hair piled in intricate patterns on top of her head and adorned with jewels that only enhanced the sharp, glittering gold of her eyes. Ruhong remembers the ink on her grandmother’s fingertips as Ruijin turns the pages of her history books, the smell of parchment and sandalwood lingering in the air of her office among the scattered brushes and inkpots, the steel in her voice as she corrects Ruhong and her siblings on the training grounds. Then—her back, turned, as Ruhong struggles to lift and swing the steel in her hands, never turning back around. Ruhong’s brother, not even nine, departing the open gates of the secluded compound where they were born; adults with faces Ruhong cannot even recognize but who must perhaps be her parents, leaving again, as they always do, never staying; and finally Ruhong herself, in a body barely older than her first brother’s was, bowing to her twin as she herself now departs through the wide open gates knowing she will never see them again as they begin to burn.

Ruhong thrashes, air escaping through her lungs in a stream of panicked bubbles as the second tendril grabs at her now. She doesn’t notice the way the shark glides closer, because she is now kissing the forehead of a blonde-haired girl who is weeping in fear. ”Look after him,” she begs, and Ruhong responds, I promise, and suddenly an arrow punctures through the girl’s right eye, and as her blood spatters through the memory Ruhong sees backs turned and promises broken.

Then the third and final, as the shark approaches its meal hungrily. For a brief moment the thrashing calms, and Ruhong feels something else instead: excitement. Thrill. Vulnerability, the sense of hands and lips across her exposed skin, crossing every threshold she could ever set but letting her take the lead on when to step. Those touches cause shivers down her spine, like something forbidden—she should want to pull away, something, suddenly, screams at her to pull away, but before she can the same blaze, the same spatters of blood, the same loss— ]

I understand! [ Her voice rings through the Murmur, ripples screaming through the water. ] To love is to lose! And I won’t—do it—any more!

[ And the shark opens its massive maw. ]

(cw: eye body horror) lmk if this works, it got a bit long orz

[guidingbookworm]

[Sirius's body changed as he sank deeper into the water. The right eye he sacrificed to Sleep in the waking world eroded into glowing silver sand that shimmered like the stars. The erosion ate away the right side of his face. Crystals that shined with a light blue glow formed along the gaping hole, revealing a storm of swirling silver sand inside.

He was drawn to the shark. It felt like he understood its pain. He couldn't swim so he simply allowed himself so sink down to it. He could almost see the creature when a familiar voice tore through his soul. Ruhong? He reluctantly pulled away from the shark's pain as he frantically looked for her. Once he found her his body glimmered as he wrapped his star magic around himself and clumsily blinked to her side. He tried to grab her and run but the tendrils resisted his magic.

Fragments of his own memories resonated with hers as he frantically tore at the tendrils. The memory of Sirius when he was a young boy, his glowing silver eyes replaced with his natural blue eyes. He interrupted his father who was reading him a story, asking why he chose to name him during a missing year when he would be cursed. His soul ached as he remembered his father's gentle smile as he pat his head and explained that he loved both Sirius and his people equally and that he knew his son would be strong enough to carry the misfortune of the dead in order to let them rest in peace.

He tried not to think about how his father's smile become cold when he sacrificed the very people he loved, along his son. His view of love had been shaken irrevocably that day, but there were other moments that faintly lingered in his soul. A black haired boy with purple glowing eyes staying by his side during one of his panic attacks, a boy with short blonde hair except for a small braid on the left side and light blue glowing eyes that looked like a piece of the wind was trapped inside them proudly revealing a beautiful hand carved chess set to celebrate them all finally becoming friends, a girl with red hair in a ponytail teaching him how to play guitar. He could easily get lost in these memories but he had to save Ruhong before he lost her too.

The second tendril that wrapped around him fed on his fear. His eye burned brighter as the memories showed the same boy with the braid in his hair with a heartbreaking smile as a metal door closed in front of him. The boy's voice sounded muffled as he pounded on the door. "Don't blame yourself Sirius. This is my choice. Take care of each other, okay?" The memory mixed with the electronic sound of a girl's voice on the phone. "I'm sorry Sirius but this is the only way I can protect everyone."

The memory of the kiss he shared with Skylar in the rain right after hearing her last message was too cruel. He was glad the water hid his tears but his anguish still rippled through the Murmur.]

Maybe you're right, love is losing...but its also a precious gift they left behind and I never want to forget that no matter how painful it is!

i absolutely love long tags feel free to go nuts!

[hongtian]

[ It would be a relief, usually, to feel the presence of another, to have their memories seep into her mind to drive out the pain of remembering her own. The problem here is that with each memory comes feeling, that heavy weight on Ruhong's chest that continues to sink her further and faster with every second. She cries out: her own anguish tangling itself with Sirius' as she thrashes through the water in her search for him. ]

I am tired of pain.

[ There. She sees him, fighting through the thick tangle of glowing filaments just as she is, and Ruhong stretches out her arm to reach for Sirius. One wraps around her forearm as she strains towards him, and for a moment her vision flashes: he is a blond-haired, grey-eyed (green-eyed?) half-elf, his one good arm extended back as his voice in her memory chokes out: "Ruhong... I..."

He dissolves, and he is Sirius again. ]

They would be alive if not for me—I am the only one who should die for this!

[faa]

Ruhong! No!

[ Freddie's wings do not move through the water easily as he calls out—with his voice, not answering back through the Murmur, not even thinking to. The resistance of the thick cold salt water pushing back against the added limb makes his shoulder and the new muscles attached to it burn with effort as he whips one wing forward to put it between her and the megalodon's glistening white teeth, however temporary. The pain follows a moment later, a harsh sting and a tearing as feathers are separated from the underlying skin and a plume of bright red blood stains the water around it maroon. But it buys seconds, it physically barricades his friend from its encroaching jaws, it gives her a moment to hopefully snap out of it and take the psychic hand he holds out through the tether in the hopes of catching hers before she slips down too far to be reached. ]

This is what it wants. Sleep's trying to take you. I saw Toki a few minutes ago. It almost got him. We have to talk about—just start talking. Tell me what love is. Make it wait to hear you out.

ᛗ Watching Me With Eyes Of A Predator

[hongtian]

i. cathedral

[ Soaking wet, among broken glass that drifts on a tide of nothingness, Ruhong stands in the light.

It's where she prefers to be, and where she might have stood were it not for the place that she has fallen. The last time—and only other time—she set foot in this cathedral it had been a scene of bloody sacrifice, wrapped in Sleep's heavy influence and near driving her to madness. She might have already swept her way to the open doors, perhaps, had she not caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the myriad window glass that surrounds her, and for a moment her body begins to change with the image: ruby scales rippling across her skin, her mouth stretching one side of her face to a broken and open crushing reptilian jaw, claws beginning to burst from her hands as she almost doubles over, feral, hungry.

Then a blink—and Ruhong is back to normal, stepping out of the light and away from her own reflection. ]

I do not like this place. [ Her voice is clipped. ] There are only foul deeds here.

[ But perhaps, as she steps, she sees your reflection too. ]

ii. nightmares

[ In the center of the garden, Ruhong seems to have given up trying to entice the horses to come to her—if indeed she ever really tried. Instead she can be found sitting cross-legged on the grass, her legs crossed, surrounded by pink petals that occasionally a blackened nightmare will approach to mouth curiously before eating or simply turning away with a swish of the tail. She does not seem impatient, though, and she does not open an eye even as she seems to sense her sudden company and speak: ]

I wouldn't push too hard with them if I were you. But if you see the biggest mare in the garden, I'd ask you'd at least let me try to greet it first before you do, and I'll owe you a favor.

i

[whomthebelltolls]

[In truth, Maria is mostly just glad to be out of the ocean; her heart still pounds with the memory of it, and her hands still shake. The 'out of the frying pan and into the fire' feeling continues apace, and from her previous experience in dreams, she's unsurprised.

She's only shakily regained her feet and started to calm her breathing when the flashes of light begin to... change the people around her. Grotesque appendages and other nightmarish details that come and go as the lights shine, as though spotlighting the true nature of whoever stands beneath them.

It's a distraction, at the least. Something to fixate her attention on that isn't the storm of memories and voices in her head from her previous experiences (and she's sorry to her tethers, she's trying to keep them out of it... but a bit may seep through.)

This one is a little different; she hasn't really seen too many dragons in a place like this, though she's vaguely aware of rumors there had been at least one.

Ruhong speaks when Maria wasn't even intending to, but then she feels obligated to answer.] Mm. Foul deeds and poor memories. [Is she going to Get Into It about what happened to her last month? No.] I'm sure it is simply some trick, meant to make us doubt our own senses.

[But she won't let Ruhong be alone, so she sticks her arm into the light, and it's a horrific, long-furred beast's arm that shows up, all gnarled knuckles and filthy claws, offset by an almost glowing white fur.] Or... something else. It's not the first time I've seen that Beast. It's what apparently happens often to me in these dreams.

[hongtian]

[ Ruhong has never been very good at compartmentalizing. For all her years spent training, meditating, cultivating power through the strict, ascetic practices of her people, she has felt (rather ironically) her calmest when wrapped in her own anger. In the ocean, Sleep had thrown the memories of heavy loss at her until they had dragged her down; here in the cathedral, it would be nigh impossible not to think of the bloody scene of One's sacrifice that Ruhong had not succeeded in reversing through the power of her faith alone. Anger, therefore, is the safe emotion. Moving forward is easiest when there's someone to blame.

Of course, it's easiest too when that someone isn't herself; but Ruhong has plenty of blame to spare. Seeing herself as a creature beholden to the urges of its own greed and hunger is as fact as it is metaphor, so the sight of her own reflection isn't necessarily an abhorrent one. It is a reminder, though, and one she'd prefer not to contemplate fully.

And yet. As she has come to learn is often the case in these dreams, she has not been left alone to choose whether to contemplate it or not. Ruhong turns, prepared to comment on Sleep's reserve of tricks, but her words die on lips as she instead startles in surprise.

White hair. Pale Eyes. For a moment Ruhong does doubt her senses, blinks again to clear her vision, but is quickly reassured this is no reflection. There their similarities end—though her new companion does not hesitate to reveal what bestial limbs the light would expose of her, too. ]

The same beast always, is it? [ Ruhong reaches back, unable to help her own fascination, as the claws on the tip of her scaled hand hover above that shining white fur. ] Only in these dreams have you seen it? Or is it something you have known even longer?

[whomthebelltolls]

[That's an interesting question, isn't it? Maria finds herself momentarily quiet, observing her own hand. The easy answer is that it is the dreams that reveal this of Maria. The more complicated answer is that beast-possessed degenerates and other horrible epithets as such had been levied against both Hunters and, even before her death, her "Vileblood" relatives.

The more complicated answer isn't one she's so willing to speak of, though, so she turns her hand over a bit, laying her wrist supine.] It's a new development, as of these dreams. Or, rather, it is a new development as of the first time I have been in these dreams. [After all, it's something inside of her, new and feral and yet old and familiar that keeps salivating for blood and violence and hunting the woods beneath the moonlight. She feels it stretch under her skin, sometimes, when the moon is full and the night is dark, as though it wants to burst out of the seams. So far, she's only ever denied it the opportunity, even at her worst. And because she has to ask:] Do you know yours?

[hongtian]

Yes. I do.

[ There is neither hesitation nor shame in Ruhong's answer: simply fact. She pulls her own hand out of the light once more but continues to watch Maria's. ]

Just like you said, the physical embodiment of the beast is a new feature of these dreams as well. But it makes sense: it was a dream once. Now it lives within me, as much myself as I am it, ever wanting and angry and hungry.

[ The last word is spoken in almost a growl, a deeper voice than should be possible from Ruhong's throat, but she does not appear alarmed. She does not take her eyes off Maria as she speaks—circles, without drawing closer, to study her from a different angle. ]

And yet I would be empty without it.

[whomthebelltolls]

[And finally, Maria's hand drops to her side. The light clings like a somewhat-iridescent second skin.] You sound like you've accepted it as some kind of inevitability.

[Couldn't be Maria. Her life is far too much avoiding and denial to be so cavalier about her truer, darker, more dangerous nature. She eyes Ruhong as the other woman walks around, but she doesn't move. She's being appraised, and while she doesn't particularly care for the feeling of it, there's no reason to shrink or challenge at the moment.]

It should be something to shuck, like an old skin, with wisdom and enlightenment. Rise above the beast, not lower yourself to it.

[Easier said than done, she knows, but that was the whole point of all they did, and it feels strange to want to say it aloud here, like the little bit of light is forcing more than a visual truth to the surface.]

Beasts are merely prey for Hunters.

ii.

[untilldeath]

Is that what they are called? Mares?

[Frowning, Till stares at the creatures in the field. He thinks they look like Wagyein, like most the creepy creatures in Manhattan. This is a dream, though, and he isn't familiar with all of the Earth animals.]

[hongtian]

Well, I don't believe they've the equipment to be stallions or geldings...

[ Now she does open her eyes, glancing briefly at Till before squinting at a nightmare standing a few paces away from him. ]

But then, I've not gotten close enough to all of them to check. Calling them nightmares just feels a bit—on the nose.

[untilldeath]

I don't know what those are, either.

[Stallions? Geldings...? He knows what a 'Nightmare' is. Is the word based off of these animals?]

I'm not familiar with a lot of Earth animals.

[hongtian]

You make it sound like you're from some other plane of existence than the mortal realms. You've never seen horses?

Not that these are exactly horses, either. Just... close enough.

ii.

[schietto]

...

[ Dante had not meant to interrupt the woman out of sheer respect and belief someone in meditation or prayer should be allowed to do so without interruption no matter where they choose to do it.

He hasn't really stopped to speak with anyone, really, an exceptionally quiet observer as he continues to make laps around the garden which he started some time ago. So honestly.. Ruhong might have already sensed him silently passing by once or more before now, but it's only when she speaks that she'll sense him actually stop.

There's no actual response to be heard from him initially until a very loud and inhuman snort is heard close up. When he does speak, he's overall calm and respectful, but there's a thin yet measurable amount of restraint being performed by him that she will be able to identify through the sound of his voice alone.

If/when she does open her eyes, she'll be graced with the sight of a man around her age in an expensively tailored trench coat and scarf, his arms stiffly by his sides and jaw ever so slightly clenches while he tries to remain looking calm and unbothered... while a nightmare stands behind him, having mad an absolute mess of his hair to snatch up his fedora that it's now chewing on. A part of his light hair is clearly saliva licked (or whatever nightmares have that would be equivalent enough for the effect) to one side goofily. ]

...Yes, of course. While we're on the subject, would you be amenable to also greeting this one, as well, in lieu of a favor?

[ he has no idea how big this nightmare is or isn't compared to the others; he's been making extremely dedicated efforts to ignore all the creatures in general and is avoiding making eye contact with them after he first saw them. Apparently, though, at some point at least one of them decided that his behavior makes him somehow worth following around. Or it just likes the look of his hat and the hat keeps moving with him. He hasn't really bothered to stop and ask the mare for confirmation, and he doesn't have intentions on trying to change that anytime soon.

Normally, he is very gentle with and loves animal; but this beast following him is not an animal he's ever seen in his life— except maybe it looks a little like one of the demonic horses he's seen in some paintings of the four horsemen of the apocalypse or some such (which just makes him want to mingle with the nightmares even less, god have mercy on his mortal soul—)

The truth is that Dante is downright terrified of the Nightmares even though he shows absolutely no trace of that emotion in his current expression or his body language.

(Why are people wanting to mingle with these things, and why won't this one go hang out with one of those many people? What kind of cruel and unusual punishment for his sins is this?)

please help. ]

[hongtian]

[ She has, indeed, been aware of the presence of at least one other human-sized figure in this garden through the lightness of his footsteps as he's passed by, the sounds of the nightmares circling and snuffing the air as he has made his way around. Ruhong has rarely excelled in the actual act of meditating, especially without her spiritual connection to her core and the flow of energy through her meridians, but she has at least managed to perfect the discipline of trying. So it is that it's only when this presence speaks that Ruhong finally gives up on her attempt and opens her eyes.

And—she can't help it. For all Ruhong tries to purse her lips to keep her laughter from spreading across her face, she doesn't succeed. ]

I've the sense it's already decided it likes you better than it does me.

[ Still, she takes pity on him. Ruhong drops her hands from their carefully placed positions to resting them instead on her knees, which she uncrosses and rises smoothly to her feet. ]

A rather convincing affirmation they are not unlike their mortal cousins. They're very good at sensing nervousness. That in itself may be reason enough that it's decided to eat your hat.

[schietto]

...I do wish it had less expensive taste.

[ well, despite her laughing, he doesn't take offense to it. In fact, her it makes it all just a little bit easier, if he's honest. Maybe because that is a reaction he's very used to.

He still hasn't moved, but he posture seems to ease a bit more even if he still isn't willing to look at the mare and the state of his hat. It being suggested that it's just like a normal horse does make him feel a bit better, though, since it certainly is spooky to someone who's never seen anything in his world that would be supernatural and even particularly unusual in its appearance or constitution. ]

I can't help but notice it's not exactly ... solid looking. [ looking being the key word, he supposes, since it's very much solid as he did try and walk right through in initially at some point and get bounces to the ground. That also made the creature even more determined to follow him around, he thinks, as he might have had to pick his pace up a bit afterwards to maintain even the illusion it might just be following him rather than trying to walk on top of him. ]

Is this some kind of ...magic? Or is it a divine being of some kind?

[hongtian]

That is an excellent question.

[ She takes a few slow steps forward, careful not to spook the nightmare that continues to chew the man's hat almost lazily as it snuffs its merry way across his person. It mostly ignores her, but she knows a horse's sideye—sideyes?—when she sees one, and she'd rather not test her theory of how similar it is to a normal horse. She'll continue approaching with all the patience and slowness of someone who has met opinionated horses before. ]

Magic, almost certainly. Divinity...

[ Ruhong trails off partway through her sentence as a thought strikes her. Could she sense it, where they are in this dreamscape? She hasn't tried to use her divine sense, mostly out of habit of being unable to access it in Manhattan. Without finishing her sentence, she reaches carefully towards the ball of golden power in her body's core—pushes past the thinned-out walls around it that she can pass through only in this dreamscape and draws it, almost tentatively, into her lungs with her next breath—and then casts out her net of magical detection as wide as she can.

Sixty feet is more than enough. Ruhong almost stumbles at the familiarity of the energy that she feels, that part-divine and part-fiendish but all-powerful energy she had felt when she had tried to cast into One's mask in the cathedral. Red eyes wide, she stares in disbelief now at the nightmare. ]

...It... is. It is divine, though it is fiendish in appearance. And... familiar.

ii

[vixenish]

[ ah.

what a lovely, familiar face this is. ]

I do like being owed favors, [ she murmurs, smiling close lipped as she, too, takes a seat on the grass. a Nightmare is already with her; it nuzzles at her hair, and she reaches back to stroke its face and neck idly. ]

Hello, Ruhong.

[hongtian]

[ A voice she recognizes; an energy, familiar as the voice, bound with hers. Ruhong does not need to open her eyes to know who this eyes, but in her surprise she does so anyway.

There they sit, facing each other in the grass; and though Ruhong does not relax her cross-legged position nor the meditative placement of her hands, her expression relaxes in its place. ]

Well. I was wondering when I might see you again. Have you come to greet me only in dreams?

i.

[overearth]

[ Kai's eyes, black as pitch, track the refracted overlay of woman and monster in the shards of glass that surround them. There is much he doesn't understand about this place, but strangely the sight of her reminds him of a witch—a comforting familiarity in her transformation, although Kai understands intellectually that it should probably be frightening. The circumstances of his life have given him a healthy respect for women who can turn into terrifying creatures, is all. ]

I'm beginning to think that the foul deeds aren't only here, [ Kai says, thinking of the fathomless swallowing sea.

His own reflection, when he glances up at it, is similarly monstrous. His true form, the form he would take in the Underearth, had the connection not been severed all those years ago. Demonic and terrifying, but like his companion, oddly comforting to see. It is the truth of who Kai is, after all, for all that it cuts him to be reminded of how far he now is from his family below.

Well, most of them he could care less about, but he can admit he misses Grandmother. ]

Are you new to this world as well?

[hongtian]

[ It's for the best, perhaps, that Ruhong is focused on reflections before she is on the physical bodies of anyone else here in the cathedral beside her. There is of course an irony to the notion the demonic sight that appears beside it does not feel out of place in this once-holy and soon-to-be-desecrated space; but despite her dedication to a faith that preaches goodness and light, Ruhong has—in her own self-struggles—always been somewhat drawn towards monstrosity beneath.

So she studies him in the mirror before she turns, not minding that her back is left open and exposed in the study she gives those reflective shards. Had Ruhong turned immediately to see his pitch-black eyes her response would not have been quite so calm. She has seen eyes like this before: empty, lacking light, the mark of one inspired by the Darkness that Dreams. Fortunately, she does not see him thus quite yet, and in having first seen a reflection of her own soul—in understanding her own monstrosity and, therefore, not startling at the sight of another's—the sight of him sparks interest rather than terror.

Ruhong does not turn.

Still—she is still a paladin, and one rife with pride. Here in the dreamscape she can do what she cannot in the waking world and grasp the golden power in her core, her divine sense rippling through the air and settling across his shoulders as she seeks to understand his nature. ]

Six months, [ she says by way of response. In the glass before them, her red eyes are trained still on his reflection, and from there they do not move. ] Six months since I dreamed my first ever dream.

You are correct in your assessment of the proliferation of foul deeds outside of here, though. This place just holds... particular distaste for me as of late. How do you find your welcome thus far?

[ There is a wry humor in her question. ]

[overearth]

[ In dreams, Kai can be many things at once. He's vaguely aware of her power tripping like fingertips across his shoulders, the same way he's always been aware of another using their magic against him, but he feels no threat in it and doesn't respond. This body was not always his, but his soul has settled into the empty space left behind by its original owner and expanded to fill the space; he is a deep, yawning chasm of agony within, a power-sink of pain with nowhere to direct it. Such is the lot of a demon wearing the skin of an expositor.

Six months sounds like an age and also like no time at all. Kai exhales quietly, a wry expression tugging at the corners of his mouth as he lifts his own gaze to meet her eyes in the glass. ]

I've met worse welcomes, but not by much. [ At least he's not in diamond chains here. At least he's still within his body, even if his power is strangely deadened. ] Is this the usual state of things?

[ All the water, he means, and the destruction, and the monsters. The gaping maw of the creature that had stalked them in the deeps. Inspiring for a man learning to swim for the first time, but not something Kai feels thrilled to encounter again. ]

[hongtian]

[ A pulse of energy, and then it withdraws, only six seconds from wave to shore and back again. His is a strange sort of energy. It is what she would call fiendish, unmistakably, and something else besides; but despite the roiling pain that causes Ruhong almost to hiss before her power fades, he is not the vessel of empty nightmares that would have caused her to draw upon a much more aggressive power without another word. Until Sleep is defeated, she will not scorn the potential of allies unless given reason to do so.

As her divine sense fades and the sense of endless agony with it, Ruhong stills her twitching fingers and reminds herself that the worlds beyond this realm are not the same as hers. If he has power of any kind, demonic or otherwise, she would know of it—and perhaps it could be put to use. To fight the darkness, by any means necessary.

Not that she won’t be careful. Not that she won’t watch him, as paranoid as she ever is, ready to strike at a moment’s notice. ]

This feels rather tame, all things considered.

[ She matches his expression in the glass, and once more Ruhong shimmers in the reflection. She becomes that ruby-scaled beast again, reptilian jaw stretched wide in a smile that could only be described as sinister. Then she is human once more, shaking her white hair back from her shoulders as her body remembers which one it ought to be. ]

Terrifying monsters, disembodied voices, bloody skies and urges deep within your soul—that, however, is all very typical. She is rather demanding when it comes to worship and angry when she does not receive it.

Does it unnerve you?

[ Of course it would. Of course it should. She asks it anyway. ]