Return to Earth (Open)

This is getting ridiculous, Shadow thought to herself, forcefully reining in her demonic side. She sat down, her legs crossed in the lotus position. This had to still be the Dreamscape. There was no way any of this could be real. The change of scenery, the thing she had been chasing. She closed her eyes, laying her hands on her knees, beginning to murmur under her breath.
"Bandia, mi guidh air sibh gu riug thoir mi lùths," She repeated to herself, over and over again.

"Shadow," the dark voice whispered all around her. It was reminiscent of someone... Pale skin and dark eyes. "Shadow, where are you? Do you know where you are? Shadow!? You know where you are! Where are you, Shadow?" The sound echoed all throughout and down the hallways endlessly. "Too confusing for the little girl," another voice countered. The masked thing was creeping up behind her now, "You can't save her that way." A pair of humongous rusted scissors ground against each other as they sliced down. "The little doll is just broken, and she needs help to get fixed again. But spinning her in circles while she's blindfolded, that won't fix her..." Again the scissors could be heard snapping closed. "I know how to fix a broken doll," the voice became slightly strained, "Look, I'll show you!"

Shadow squeezed her eyes shut again ,trying to concentrate. The voice, focus on the voice. But where was she? All the demoness could guess was that she was still in the Dreamscape. However, the irritating voice of the thing that seemed to be bent on trying to make her lose her mind in some sort of ridiculous game also spoke. She found a tiny spark of strength inside of her and used it.

Shadow got to her feet, calmly, her demonic side safely tucked back under control and her mind cleared by short bout of meditation. She faced the masked creature. Her violet eyes were disinterested, bored even.
« I am not a little girl, nor a doll. You are merely a figment of imagination trying to toy with my mind. » She spoke in firm tones, as if addressing a naughty child.
« Diaes! » She yelled out to the empty corridors. « Could you possible get me out of here? »

The thing didn't seem to like that at all. It's eyes flared with a fiery will. The massive pair of scissors extended before it, the beast lunged. But as it moved, the world seemed to slow and become almost liquid. There was a strange under-lighting to everything, as if sunlight was being cast through water upon the walls all about. The feeling of being buffeted about could be noted, like currents tugging this way and that in a nondescript body of water. And then, a pale hand reached out, thin and almost translucent, it stretched out, attempting to grasp a hold of Shadow. "Take my hand," it was his voice, distorted and amplified strangely, but nonetheless, Diaes, "Quickly, before you sink again!"

Shadow didn't need any more coaxing. She grabbed the hand.
"Thought you'd never ask," She said, smiling slightly.

((Sorry, can't think of what to post))

The world became a murky surge, rushing against her, pulling her back, pulling her down, but the hand which held her was strong, fiercely strong and it wasn't letting go. It was like being pulled against an incredibly strong current, and as the world washed away and the atmosphere did indeed become more and more watery, the masked thing was there again, simply standing it seemed and watching her as she was yanked away, always level with her despite never moving to keep up. "Well played," it spoke almost like a normal human being might, "I dearly hope that we may dance again soon... Shadow." As it began to drop out of view, it reached up and pulled the mask away from its face. The cloak came with it. It revealed not a monstrous, abundantly limbed beast, but instead a man. A light gray suite and pale, graying hair marked an equally pale man, sad and haggard. Eyes filled with emotion turned to watch the demoness leave, gazing up as she was hauled away, forlorn.

"Shadow, hold on!" Diaes' cry resounded all around as a torrent of debris and the flow of the water tried to push her back down again, tried to dislodge her from his grasp. Another hand grabbed a hold upon her wrist and pulled that much harder. And just as suddenly as a dream starts, she was falling upwards.

Diaes was yanking her out of the churning waters of the freezing cold lake. "Shadow, Shadow can you hear me!?" He shouted as he began to drag her back, something seemed to be fighting him, but he surmounted the challenge, managing to pull her away and onto the shore, dragging her as best he could. He seemed exhausted. "Shadow, are you alright? God, tell me I wasn't too late!" he was pushing her hair aside so that he might check her vitals.

Shadow hung on to Diaes' hand as if it were her only lifeline, and indeed it was. As she broke the surface of the lake, she immediately started to cough. She knelt on the bank, coughing the last of the water from her lungs.
"I think I'm ok, Diaes," She said, gently puching the man away. She shivered slightly, pulling her wet cloak further around her shoulders. She glanced up at the vampire. "What happened?"

"Thank God!" he fell back and breathed in deeply for several moments, "Shadow, in that lake." he nodded towards the water. "You were going through a dimensional shift, yes? But you didn't come out like you should have. You were dragged back down. I tried to see why, but when I attempted to find you, you were dreaming, Shadow. How could you possibly fall into a dream in a dimensional shift?" He seemed perplexed, but earnest. It was self evident in his eyes that the answer did not belong to him. "Shadow, this is important. If I hadn't been here just now... If you tried that again and fell into such a deep dream. I don't know if even I would have been able to escape unaided from the level to which you had sunk." His eyes narrowed, not with feeling but with intensity of curiosity. "Shadow, where were you?" he whispered hoarsely.

Shadow put her head in her hands, trying to remember, and put what she had seen and experienced into words. Taking a deep breath, she started to explain slowly:
"It started with coming out of the lake. You were there, with some sort of prophecy. I can't remember the words though. We travelled to the Library of Alexandria. You told me to rest. While I was asleep, you took me to some sort of... Dreamscape. The Realm of the Sleeping..." She took another deep breath, searching her memory for the details taht seemed to be slipping away. Running a hand through her soaking wet hair, she looked up at Diaes with confused eyes.

Diaes' eyes narrowed even further. "Can you remember anything else at all? I know asking you to recall a dream is like requesting that you restrain a wave with your hands and then inform me of its composition, but if there is a single significant piece of what you learned, something said, an individual seen, even an object out of place, it could mean more than you would have thought at the time," he seemed rather intent, searching her gaze, perhaps probing farther than that. Though he did not move he might have been prying through her very thoughts, creeping in the passages of her mind. Yet, the look on his face, though cold, was one of trust, and of course, no invasive tendrils of thought were present to feel, so it seemed he was honestly keeping himself to himself and limiting the interview to verbal questions and answers. That alone was an amazing sign of the respect that he must feel towards her, or possibly he knew that such an infraction of courtesy would cause her to clam up altogether. Of course, he had not asked her about the prophecy further and he had not reacted in the least to anything else she had said, as though they really were not known to him at all. The question was then, where had that dream Diaes, the one who had very much seemed to be real, come from?

Shadow closed her eyes tiredly, trying to remember, putting her head in her hands.
"There was a thing, a creature with too many arms and legs, like a spider. There was another creature, who seemed to be made of thread, with a mask." She took a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. "And there was a book, a book of demons that I have only ever seen in my dimension of birth." She looked up at Diaes. "I'm really sorry, I can't remember much more than that..."

Diaes sat back, his gaze retreated into the realm of thought. Were the gears of the mind a visible element, one might see a whole clock tower of them grinding against the problem which had presented itself to their normal functions. Slowly, he closed hi eyes, breathing abnormally. Rubbing his temples he shook his head. "I don't know, when I dived in to see if everything was alright. I could feel something, something trying to pry its way into my mind," he looked up at her, "Shadow, do you remember anything prior to your departure that might have caused this? Something that might have come with you? Or perhaps something that your dream might have been trying to tell you? Even just a vague idea could help."

Shadow shook her head slowly.
"Nothing I can think of, apart from emotional disturbance, but that had bever before affected my ability to dimension shift." She said. The demoness looked up at the vampire, her violet eyes trying to hide some emtional happening that had resurfaced in her mind.

He looked away, his eyes averted from her own, deliberately avoiding them. Leaving the emotions that play across her face in the private care of their owner. Nodding slowly, the pale man allowed his lips to part to allow a breath to pass through into the chill air. His red tongue ran smoothly over those viciously pointed incisors. "I must have left some kind of impression upon you when I ventured into your mind, but... You can really recall nothing at all of what I said to you?" he only spoke after giving her a moment alone with her thoughts, her memories, be what they may.

"I recall talk of a prophecy, something about freeing an angel or a demon, and talking about teh Realm of the Sleeping." Shadow murmured, trying to think. But the details were slipping away like droplets of water escaping from a hand that tried to hold them. "You said there was a woman, a friend of yours that had directed you to me, to when and where I would appear. It was then that we took off to the library."

He remained unmoving, still as death... His appearance was calm and thoughtful. "Shadow, when I pulled you out of the water, even when I pulled you out of the dream, you did not question me. You did not ask how I came to be here, only accepted it. Now, I would not think it strange that you were so unresponsive had you and I known each other better. It would not be completely alien for a friend to meet you upon your arrival. Of course, there is the rationalization that I sometimes may appear to be exactly where I aught to be exactly when I aught to be there," he paused to look at her once more, "It seems that you have counted my appearance here as a natural function of fate, perhaps the visit of a friend. My presence at this place at this moment in time is neither. I am indeed following the word of another which led me hear to what may very well have been saving you." He began to lever himself off of the ground. Once he was standing, he looked out of the now placid waters of the lake. "But you see, Shadow, unlike that dream vision of me, I have no idea why. I have no prophecy to give you, and this title, Realm of the Sleeping, means nothing to me," as he spoke his expression closed into thought. After a moment, he cast a glance down at her, soaking wet. "Are you cold?" he asked, a strange transition from deep thought into a simple concern.

Shadow listened to Diaes with her teeth gritted. He had taunted her throughout the time she had spent in the Dreamscape, and now here was seemingly another version of him saying that it couldn't have been true. The frustration suddenly mounted, turning into anger as she stood up, glaring at the vampire.
"I'm fine," She snapped, wringing her hair out, her eyes narrowed into cat-like slits. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with me." She tied her hair back with a strip of leather, shoving locks that refused to be tied behind her slightly pointed ears.

"I can see that," a small smile lit on his face for just a moment. Without further word, he simply began to step away.

Shadow glanced back at the lake. She had dimension shifted into he lake. That was not the most unusual thing to have happend. But to have fallen asleep in trying to make it into this dimension. That was strange. And more than that, the time she had spent down there, within all normal limits, she should have drowned. There had to be something down in the depths of that lake.

The demoness made a decision. She ran back towards the lake, diving into its depths. Her waterlogged cloak dragged her down towards the bottom, aiding her in her quest to find whatever had been there.

A splash created by the displacement rose into the chill air. The sound that her body generated as it hit the water resounded through the otherwise silent surroundings. Diaes looked back over his shoulder, eyes narrowing and head cocking to the side. Such a curious creature, that Shadow. He turned, and sat down, watching the water, gazing into its depths, past the murk and the dank blackness. His legs crossed and arms resting, he waited, a shadow cast upon the world.

The water was frigid, and the immediate transition into it would have been difficult to handle. It was almost too cold, maddeningly cold. Of course, why wouldn't it be cold on a mountain path completely covered in ice. Lying, soaked in the middle of the snow wouldn't have helped either. "Clever that..." the voice came from somewhere behind her, "The only question is, now that you've gotten yourself back in, can you get back out?" The voice was reminiscent of something, a close memory perhaps, but there was no one there to whom it could belong. Why should that be odd, though? They must have just run off, in fact, in that direction, there appeared to be a little village nestled into the space of a large cleared swath, built around a frozen lake.

Shadow groaned inwardly, wondering what had possessed her to jump back into the lake she had fought to get out of. Then she remembered. Finding out about that stupid prophecy and how she had managed to teleport into what seemed to be a pocket dimension in the lake. The thought would have boggled her mind, apart from the fact that most demons had a pocket dimension inside their heads.

She got to her feet, pulling her still wet cloak around her shoulders in an attempt to find ome warmth in the frigid air, looking around. Wit hthe village in her sights, she set off at a determined pace. She thought about the voice she had heard upon arriving in the frozen land.

Growing weary of trudging through the snow, the demoness quickly morphed into her normal wolf form. A soaking wet wolf, but at least she had a fur coat and it would be easier to travel on four paws rather than two legs. So she bounded her way through the snow drifts until she reached the village. There, she paused, sniffing the air, looking for any scent that may trigger a memory.

If death had a memory to it, that might have been triggered, for it was rampant. There wasn't any blood, not even a bit, but their were corpses, some off them mutilated, others looked freshly dead, although how they had died didn't make too much sense to look at them. Perhaps it had been the cold or starvation, but no apparent marks lay upon a single one of the myriad bodies. So then, how could those mutilated ones be mutilated? Twisted backwards and forwards upon themselves in ways that the human anatomy simply did not accommodate. But they weren't just humans. There were dogs and horses and strange beasts of unknown origins. A crunching sound could be heard in the snow though, a little ways off. The sharp ears of a wolf could have had a bearing in no time at all.

The sound was coming off from behind some houses, down the next alleyway. It was a pair of no more than two feet, one hitting the heavy snow covering after the other. "Not the most pleasant scene to walk back into, eh?" the voice was behind her again, although the sound of footsteps was in the next street in front of her. Even had she whipped around in that very moment, she wouldn't have seen a thing behind her, though, for there was nothing to see which she had not already seen. Nothing, except perhaps a single eye, looking out from a dark room through a murky window. But it blinked and vanished all at once. The sound of footsteps was drawing away from her, becoming softer quickly.

Shadow jumped round at the sound of the voice. She was on edge, that much was obvious. The fact that there was death all around her and yet there was no obvious cause... it was enough to shake most people. All she could think of was that some idiot human had somehow created a new disease or perhaps a weapon that could cause this sort of damage. She shook herself, trying to rid herself of as much of the excess water on her coat before it froze into icy spikes. She decided against morphing back into her humanoid self. It was easier to stay as a wolf. Her hearing was sharper, and her sense of smell would never let her down.

The black-furred wolf padded her way through the snow towards the place she was sure she had heard footsteps. It was possible in this deserted village that someone's voice could carry and echo, meaning that the person who had spoken hadn't nessecarily been behind her at the time. If there was someone there, she wanted to talk to them. She found the tracks and snufffled around them, trying to pick up a scent.

There, where the footprints ended, stood a woman, staring off down the road, unmoving. Unmoving, that is, except for her shaking hands, although, somehow, one would be brought to doubt that it was the cold which caused her to shake like a rag doll. "What are you doing here!? Why did you come back!? Why!?" her screams echoed. Slowly, she turned, her hands held out, feeling. In a moment, it became clear why. Blind eyes stared out from sunken sockets. "Why won't you just run!?" Her rotation came to a close, and instead she made as if to run at Shadow. She made it perhaps three frantic steps before she tripped and fell in the snow, a cry escaping her on the way down, but after she hit with a dull thump in the wet cushion, she did not move at all.
"You came back?" an irritatingly familiar and yet completely alien voice emanated from behind her, "Just to watch this world die? Or did you intend to lose yourself here?" In the alley behind her, a man had appeared, as if from thin air. He looked to be in the prime of life, although his features were viciously sharp and frighteningly cold. White hair was spiked back along his head, as if blown that way by the winter wind, in fact that could be how you might describe all of him. He looked as though some freezing gale had whipped his whole form into that of a living icicle. "The Weaver left, if that's what you've come for. You're friend chased him away," the man displayed less than no emotion. he might have been bored, or mildly irritated, or just curious, but his palate didn't really express very much at all, "And this net is all torn to pieces." He looked around him casually, past her, at the still woman in the streets. "The whole place will probably fall apart in a little while, without anyone to hold it up. So I hope you left yourself a way out, unless you plan on staying here for a while. Because the rift is sealing shut," he scratched at the bridge of his nose, "Unless you came to play... That could be fun."

Shadow just looked confused at the woman, at first taking a few catious steps towards her. But as the seemingly maddened woman made a dash at her, the wolf leapt out of the way with a yelp, deeply unsettled by the behaviour. As the demoness heard another voice, she pricked up her ears, turning her head to see the frozen looking man.

Shadow tried to morph back as gracefully as she could, turning on her heel to face the man fully, her cloak billowing slightly as she made the turn. Her hands rested inside the sleeves of the other arm, monk like if not for the knowledge that one hand was resting against the hilt of the dagger, ready to unsheath it should she find she needed it. For the moment, it was merely a hidden reassurance.
"I'm not here to play. I want to know what was going on the last time I was here. I need to understand it, how whoever it is that created that place knew who and where I knew."