We were at war or, rather, the enemy was. The peaceful kingdom didn't stand a chance, especially not when dark magic was at play. I suppose you need a little background; you see, we lived in a world that was pretty much a standard fantasy book setting. You've got your one really powerful kingdom that had recently gone on hard times, there's an evil force that had been gathering support from the surrounding lesser kingdoms and was prepping to take the former down, and one cannot forget that, of course, magic was a real thing.
Magic. Not to be confused with illusions...or tricks, which are what whores do for money.
As real as magic may have been it was also a pretty rare to be good at it; everyone could do simple magic like lifting small items, basically a lazy person's dream, but there were some who were quite powerful and helped each other learn more as a group; in classic dream style I was naturally part of that group. Surprisingly (because my dreams never allow this sort of thing), I quickly went through the ranks and became the most talented and powerful with magic; I experimented with magic quite often and even found a way to be able to fly in a controlled hover sort of way. I wasn't a magic miser so I, of course, shared the things that I learned on my own and we turned into a sort of flying, magical team for good which would eventually come in handy when the great and evil sorcerer Magnar decided he wanted to take over absolutely everything.
Not to be confused with Magmar, no matter how similar.
And so Magnar created a massive following of evil henchmen and even created his own primitive, magical powered robots. He did all of this in secret and so came completely out of nowhere; it was a huge, horrible surprise for the kingdom. The peaceful qualities of the kingdom really did nothing for them in this situation and the war was more like a hostile takeover than anything else. The kingdom's army wasn't remotely formidable and the king would rather surrender than lose thousands of lives. But Magnar really reveled in killing people so the kingdom lived in terror while some brave few fought back with little to no success. Then one day a huge shadow was cast across the capital of our kingdom; above was a giant chunk of land just floating in the air. Upon further inspection by our magical group of do-gooders, what lay on top of the chunk of land was a huge city topped with a castle that Magnar had somehow built for himself.
Like this but on a much bigger scale. Where's Link when you need him?
We decided that this was as good a time as any to launch a massive attack. We split up into smaller groups and went off in different directions to wreak havoc on the general evil population; I, however, went to take on Magnar. I flew to the castle and battled my way throughout it, but Magnar was nowhere to be found. I took a sword from one of the expired minions and used a spell that would track strong sources of magic; as it turned out Magnar was in the back courtyard. He was looking through a book that I recognized, anyone could have by its appearance, as a book of dark magic. The book was dark red and had symbols carved all over it that glowed an acidic green. Instead of doing the typical thing and talking at him, I opted to just hurl a spell at him while his nose was in the book. He caught on fire for a second but then appeared to absorb it as he stood up and threw the book to the ground. Then the magic battle ensued.
I wanted to use Gandalf and Saruman, but let's be honest, their fight didn't have the visual panache
that Dumbledore and Voldemort provide.
I wasn't familiar with Magnar's spells and could really only defend myself with my own magic since he seemed to be just absorbing my spells. I quickly decided that going on my own was a mistake; fatigue was taking over and I just didn't know what do to until I remembered that I had a sword and we were getting quite close to each other in order to use spells that weren't ranged. So, I stabbed him; everything was over and Magnar and I didn't even have to say a word to each other. I magically communicated with the rest of the group the incredible victory that we had just won and they informed me that everything was under control in the rest of the floating city.
Then the city started shaking, like in any classic video game, the the evil city was falling to pieces as soon as the evil guy in charge was dead; not really a big deal if everyone steered clear of buildings. But then the whole ground started rocking violently as well and I hovered above it to avoid wobbling. Horrified, I sensed the magic that held up the piece of land suddenly let go. The ground fell away beneath me; the entire chunk of land and city and screaming people plummeted downward. Right on top of the city I was saving below. My horror slowed everything down; I held my hands out in a useless gesture and saw the no longer floating city tumble over and over downward until it smashed into the capital, completely engulfing it in rock and dirt. My city was gone, mostly everyone had to be dead, and it was my fault.
My brain does not give me a break; and that's when I woke up.
Apologies to any readers out there on the extended delay of a new post. I was out of a state for a while and then had a parental visit and all that made me a busier person than usual. Anyways. As you may have noticed my brain doesn't provide me with many happy endings, but a friend suggested I write up one where I win for once. So, without further ado I present my one and only lucid dream, because typically when my dream self demands I wake up my brain says "Screw you".
I was in an odd Old West style alternate reality where we still had some present day, real-world technology. One of the bigger differences was that the trees were all dead and it was perpetually twilight.
This is pretty much exactly what you should be imagining; you'd think I had played this game before I had this dream.
And also there were magical beings running around, like griffins and grim reaper types. My dream landed me in media res; a war was raging in this land of supernatural cowboys and automatic hand guns. I was a soldier in one of the armies and none of us footmen actually knew what we were all fighting about, which probably meant my brain couldn't come up with something creative that night. All we knew was that we must take this town that had been quickly abandoned at each troop's approach and that our lives were at stake. Most of us didn't want to be involved in this and were actually conscripted in the most browbeaten sense of the word.
We each wore combat boots and Kevlar underneath our dusters and only the higher-ups wore cowboy hats. We sported clunky looking guns that were very reminiscent of the RCP 90 and as far as I could tell, weapon-wise, that's all we got.
If only our ammo was as inexhaustible; things probably would have gone better.
I obviously play too many video games.
We marched toward the town bathed in purplish light in silence, we were not a troop with great morale, and could you fault us? We each had an ankle bracelet that would inject us with an incapacitating poison if we were a certain distance away from our commander; to be fair it was a pretty wide circle but that fact still didn't instill us with confidence and loyalty. well, maybe the lying through our teeth kind.
Luckily I was not in the front lines; I was nearer to the back, fairly close to our line of griffins which are few and far between because they are incredibly difficult to train. As we walked through the extremely wide main street of the town we began to see lights moving very quickly around the borders of the town, akin to waving a flashlight very fast. They became faster and faster until it silently solidified with a flash of light into an almost transparent wall. As a group we faltered, everyone knew what that meant. We all started talking immediately and in classic mob fashion some people in the front took a few steps back causing every last person to be pushed backward and become panicked. The enemy had spell casters and we didn't have a lot of options. We couldn't be sure what the wall would do but it was safe to assume it would be impenetrable and too high to somehow get over. And even if we did get over the wall our commander would have to as well or we would just collapse out in the barren land of twilight; it would be like shooting paralyzed fish in a barrel, but easier because they wouldn't have to deal with that pesky water part.
Suddenly our enemies began to materialize out of the mist on the opposite end of the main road. Small balls of red light came at us and we all shifted out of the way, but the light ignored us completely and went straight at the griffins. The light didn't seem to do anything but disappear into their skulls; that's when each griffin turned around as fast as a whip and snatched their riders, all of those in charge, by the necks with their sharp beaks and rip them to shreds before going to town on the rest of us. Well, that was it. We had guns, but so did they, and they had spell casters. But we hadn't quite lost it completely yet. Not until we saw those grim reaper beings I mentioned earlier.
Never had I been able to say, "I know exactly how you feel" to Bastian before now,
even though his fears were stuffed wolves and responsibility.
They weren't "Death" so much as harbingers of death. As far an most people knew nothing could harm them and they loved killing slowly with their scythes. So as soon as we spotted those black-robed killing machines float out towards us everyone ran everywhere else with no goal in mind except to survive. Guns were being fired all over the place and constantly and those bullets would have helped a lot if everyone wasn't so panicked and use up their ammo so fast. But there was nothing for it. At this point I knew I was going to die, but that didn't mean I had any closure at all. The primal part of me was sure I could get away if I just kept running in circles.
Exactly like this.
Finally I opted to go inside one of the houses and it turned out to be completely empty. But I didn't even have time to hide in a closet before a grim reaper floated in and spotted me. Screaming, I ran through a hall and out a door that opened to an outside porch which I fell off of, since I didn't know it was a porch. As I looked back I saw the grinning reaper heading down the hall at top hover speed. I cried out in frustration. "This isn't real!" I yelled.
Then, with everything continuing exactly as things had been going, I quietly repeated, "This isn't real."
My new confidence level.
I decided I should have the most powerful magic at my disposal and a beam of red light shot out of me and knocked the grim reaper over. A flash of blue and he exploded into dust. I laughed with disbelief and got to my feet, brushing myself off. Then I thought to myself that I should be able to fly too, which turned out to be a little trickier and less cool because I wasn't sure how I wanted to make myself fly. Since only part of my brain was aware about the dreaming I guess it wasn't working at a great capacity so what I got was a mix of Angel and Rogue from X-Men, but lacking any and all grace. I didn't give myself the wings for some reason, but in order to actually start flying I had to flap my arms like a lunatic and jump in the air correctly. There were a few false starts but when I got it I didn't have to flap anymore.
Obviously this woman is just falling with style, but you get the idea.
I got rid of the magic wall and destroyed the spell casters, grim reapers, and insane griffins, then left everyone alone to figure it out for themselves while I flew toward a twilight mountain range. They were dream people, after all, they didn't need me.
