Val shares her take on the Dreaming, contrasting with Slug's (LOG)

[nick_garou]

OOC Note: Val shared her experience with Nick via Mindspeech. I just threw a log of the earlier event up because I'm being a lazy sack of crap.

It's not the easiest thing for those who aren't terribly comfortable in the umbra to lie down and fall asleep in it, even if it is in the safest spot in the city for them to do so. Val's the first to manage, but gradually, each Garou drops off. How much time passes is anyone's guess, but when they next open their eyes, they're lying in a field of tall brown and yellow grasses. Rolling hills covered in the same brown and gold stretch in all directions, broken only by a wide, slow moving river so clear and clean that you can see straight to the bottom.

 

Awakening in the Dream, Memory spreads her wings and takes to the skies, as she takes a quick look around.

 

As his eyes flicker open and closed a few times, Benny grumbles and growls for a moment before rolling over and pushing himself up to his feet. His eyes flicker around at the scenery before moving around to look for those he came through with.

 

Slug is already in Glabro, and given that it's his preferred form, he's likely to stay there. He 'wakes' with a snort and a cough, and rises up to his feet quickly and gracefully, hurrying to take in his surroundings. "Huh," he grunts, his voice all rumbly and rough. "Reminds me of that field in The Sound of Music."

 

Indeed, while the mountains are missing, the scenery is not entirely unlike Slug's movie reference. Apart from the river, all that any of them see, Memory included, are gentle hills and vast meadows that stretch to the horizon, impossibly vast. Bird song and insect noises are in the air, but there's no sign of the actual sources of these sounds. The sky seems almost larger than the ground here, blue with only scattered clouds, and a bright sun hanging in the east.

 

Memory circles lower, then flares her wings as she comes in for a landing on Slug's shoulder. "Well, we should probably start by following the river. You have any means of trying to find the nearest Magpie?"

 

Benny grunts in agreement with Slug and then says with a slight smirk, "Yeah... all of this fresh air makes me want a cigarette." He considers Val's question for a moment before he says, "I don't. Haven't made it that far yet."

 

Slug takes a second to kneel in the grass, falling to one knee. He reaches out with a single finger and writes 'SPRINGHEEL WAS HERE' in the dirt, along with a crude fox face. He's just finishing up when Val joins him. "It's good to be out of the city once in a while. Feel new things. Draw new breath." He stands up, and claps his hands together. "I've got an idea," he says to Val. And then he closes his eyes, and concentrates.

 

There's a second or two of pause, and then Slug's body fades away. It's replaced by a man-sized silver-dollar, as perfect and polished as the day it was minted. The coin catches the sunlight and flashes brilliantly, turning, slowly, as if being dangled on an invisible string.

 

There's a shiver in the air that's felt rather than seen. The ground beneath them ripples like water, and suddenly something large, something impossibly massive, rises up...no, not from under the ground, but the ground itself. It resembles nothing so much as a gargantuan serpent slowly lifting its head, with rocks and grass instead of scales and skin. Up and up goes the head, revealing more and more of the seemingly endless hills as mere parts of its body. The Garou are jostled, but the monster is so large that they're in no danger of falling off even as one of its coils rises up beneath them as well. Everything as far as they can see is in motion, a part of this bizarre creature. Its mouth opens, or at least some approximation of a mouth, made of dark, damp earth and flowing water that spills between stone teeth to continually fill the river, and the noise it makes is the roar of rushing rapids.

 

"Holy shit!" Memory exclaims, as she takes to the air. "It's the serpent from my vision. In my vision, it was doing battle with a black one."

 

Benny widens his eyes as the ground ripples beneath them, seconding Memory's exclamation with an "Oh shit!" Shifting to his Glabro shape he crouches, digging his hands into the grass that they had stood on. "Well if this thing's going to battle then it looks like we're going with it." Looking toward the head of the serpent he calls out, *Hey! Where are we going?*

 

"I think it's a river," says Slug-coin. He falls to the ground and grabs a few handfuls of grass to keep himself anchored, and then he hesitates. He thinks with his face in the dirt, and then the image-shell around his body changes again. This time, he becomes an image of his own head, but bigger, and facing toward the serpent.

 

The river that was visible has vanished under the earth-coils of the unspeakably giant monster, visible only as it pours from its mouth and occasionally when one coil rises high enough to offer a fleeting view. No longer are the waters calm; they thrash in all directions, with great waves of water slamming harmlessly into the body of the beast. It responds neither to Benny nor Slug, but it doesn't actually seem to be moving anywhere. No, rather, everywhere that they can see is already a part of it. Cracks in its grass hide reveal crumbling dirt and red magma blood, none of it, fortunately, near enough to the Garou or Corax to cause harm, but they can still feel the heat. Coils rise far above their heads and far below where they're standing, constantly in motion as the serpent's head rises up and up, now large and high enough to obscure a great deal of the still-blue sky. The shadow it casts moves on its own then, and rather than a shadow, a great black oily /thing/, serpentine as well, bursts up from between the coils of the first monster. It's eyeless, featureless apart from its gaping mouth, which strikes cobra-swift at the neck of the first snake. More magma blood spills from where the two monsters meet.

Memory eyes the magma, as it flows from the serpents neck. "Perhaps."

 

Benny growls as the Serpent ignores them and then yells out again as the shadow serpent begins to attack the one they ride upon. He lifts his eyes to Memory and calls out, "This vision! What happened?"

 

"Oooh," Slug says, fading back into his original form. "I get it, I think. I think it's like," he points at the non-shadowy serpent. "This is Earth, physical, 'The World Serpent!'. It's fighting it's other half, the ooze, the 'Nothing!'. It's light night'n day!" He glances from left to right, painfully aware of how unpleasant it would be to fall into the lava.

 

Violent does not begin to describe the struggle that ensues. The black, oily serpent maintains its grip on the other serpent's neck, while the first serpent thrashes every which way imaginable. The Garou aren't safe from this; almost before the words are out of Slug's mouth, both he and Benny are flung to what they thought was the ground, and then in the opposite direction. There's a brief, terrifying sensation of flying, and then they smack into yet another one of the first serpent's massive coils, though this one, like all the others, is in ferocious motion. The black serpent makes no noise, and in the struggle Memory can see the two intertwining into an unimaginable knot, somehow separate but always entangled, and slowly, slowly the first serpent's struggles seem to weaken. High arched coils still and become tall, snow capped mountains, low coils become valleys full of wildflowers, streams, and lakes. Trees sprout along its surface as the struggles become less.

 

The Garou find themselves at the top of one of these snowy peaks, able to look out over the ensuing chaos in relative safety. The black serpent either releases the first monster, or it tears free--it's hard to tell which--and slowly, slowly that impossibly gigantic head lowers back down. It becomes mountains of its own, with water still flowing from where the mouth once was...and Memory, with her familiarity of the sight from above, is the first to be able to recognize those peaks as the Blue Mountains. Where Slug and Benny have ended up bears the shape of the Cascades, and between them lie the valleys of Eastern Washington, and the low, broad, flowing blue of the Columbia.

 

"You two okay?" Memory asks, swooping close too the Garou, after the snakes turn into mountains.

 

Benny growls as he is tossed and then bounces around. He pushes himself to his feet and glances around at the terrain that seems oddly familiar to him. "So what's the deal? The serpent is the earth and the ooze is what? Part of the earth too?"

Slug does that scrambling-flailing thing with his limbs as he flies through the air, and when he hits 'ground', he latches onto it like a cat that's been thrown at some curtains. Cracked ribs and bones stitch themselves back together again, and he sits up, head in hands, surveying the scene. "Fine," he grunts at Val, and then he turns to look at Benny. "It's 'Nothing'. Night, and Day. Black, and White. It's... Something that Is, and Isn't. The black snake is... What isn't."

 

The massive black serpent sways slightly from side to side. Bereft of its foe, it slowly turns, slithering over the settling snake-ground and finally coiling amid a cluster of mountains, an offshoot of the Blue Mountains near the bend in the Columbia. It vanishes there, crawling into an opening that closes behind.

 

From behind the three, in a spot where she should have been easily visible, comes an old woman's voice, "Watch now." The owner of the voice is there, an old woman with black hair going white at the temples, wearing some sort of traditional native dress. She points toward the Blue Mountains. "Watch."

 

Memory quorks softly in surprise, then lands next to the woman and shifts up into the form of her birth. "We will watch and we will try to understand, sister Magpie," she tells the old woman.

 

Benny raises both brows in surprise at the woman's sudden surprise arrival and then turns in the indicated direction, looking for whatever detail it is that he is intended to see.

 

Slug stiffens at the appearance of someone new, but he doesn't look like he's about to come out swinging. The Garou simply nods, perhaps a bit cautiously, and waits with open eyes and ears.

 

The land-snake-monster is calm, but not entirely inactive. As the three watch, the ground far below occasionally ripples and changes. Creeks form and dry up. Forests grow and burn down. A mountain--though fortunately, not their mountain--erupts, belching smoke and ash into the sky, where it falls like rain over everything they can see. This too fades before their eyes, ash forming new soil and growing new forests and fields full of wildflowers. But at the spot where the old woman points, they see something different form, with features unfamiliar and yet knowable, near the base of the Blue Mountains. A Caern, with its landmarks forming a spiritual wheel. Likewise in the place where the black serpent crawled, a valley forms between sharp sided granite cliffs, cut by a roaring waterfall of pure water, and this too, though none of them have ever laid eyes on it, they know to be a Caern.

 

Val watches, hands sliding into her hoodie's pockets.

 

Benny widens his eyes in awe at the lands transforming around them. He glances sideways to the woman and opens his mouth as if to speak, but then quickly jerks his eyes back so as not to miss anything.

 

Slug worries the corner of his upper lip and continues to watch. He barely even blinks as he watches, his attention so focused.

The ground ripples again around the Blue Mountains, and in the path of the ripples the spiritual wheel of the Caern breaks, reverses itself into features familiar to Slug, as it's the Caern he first knew. And again, as they watch, another shiver from the ground-serpent causes the wheel to vanish entirely, rocks to rise and fall, and then a great tree in the center sprouts, so that the Caern is now recognizable to all three of them.

 

Changes happen elsewhere as well. More mountains erupt, quiet, and then rebuild themselves. Rivers change course. The Caern in the valley where the black serpent crawled crumbles and warps, tainted but still powerful. And then, abruptly, that Caern collapses inward with a great, deafening sound, and they can see the power leave it, see it grow cold and dead, neither a font of energy for Gaia or for the Wyrm. And once this happens, the old woman's hand drops back to her side, no longer pointing.

 

"And what of you?" Val asks, turning her head to face Magpie. "We have seen your shadows. What can we do to help you?"

 

Benny turns to face the woman as well and then adds, *And what is there that we can do to stop... this. The blackness?*

 

Slug shifts down to Homid when Val speaks, whereupon his dedicated items come back to him. Bowl in one hand, bottle of vodka in the other, Slug sets the bowl on the grass and pours out a generous portion of alcohol. Then he leans forward and pushes the bowl across the grass in silent offering, and leans back, sitting up straight.

 

The old woman smiles, but it's a sad smile, one that speaks to regret and sadness. "I'm a dream," she replies. "And I'm afraid that you are mistaken. Those are not my shadows. Not, at least, in the way that you think they are." She looks over Slug's offering and then turns her head toward Benny. "Tell me what you have seen."

 

Benny frowns in thought at this for a few moments, turning his eyes back to regard the caern below. Turning his eyes back to the old woman the Cliath begins, "Well, at first I believed that the snake we were on in the beginning must be the Earth, like one of the Native American creation stories, but then I wasn't sure what the shadow snake would represent. Maybe evil or decay, in the way that it tried to kill the first snake. Or maybe the two simply represented life and death." He quiets for a beat before he glances back to the Caern that had lost it's power and was not a beacon for Gaia or the Wyrm. "I am not sure how that thought fits in with the evolution of the Caerns and the changing of the lands. The mountains blew up just to reform, our Caern changed many times, but still presses forward in a new shape, but the other has been snuffed out."

 

Slug glances over toward his fellow Gnawer, and takes a pull of vodka himself. Why not have a little drink with his dream? He listens and nods a little bit, nursing his bottle.

 

"Change is the way of your home," the old woman says, with a nod in the direction of it. "Always new faces, be it spirits, Garou, the land itself. What you saw is not the whole earth, but it is a part of it. Old. Older than me." She chuckles to herself. "Perhaps you could call it Change, but it is too old for names to stick. As for the other..." A shadow seems to pass across her face. "That was not the work of the forces you witnessed. That place has also known change. Beauty to corruption, then a spark of hope. Potential. The Last Days, oh yes. They destroyed it. You destroyed it. Your people."

 

Benny frowns as he looks back toward the fallen Caern. Bringing his eyes back to the woman he questions, "So are you saying that we brought about the blackness that destroyed Last Days? That sucked away it's power and left it empty?"

 

"The way of their home, yea," Val says with a faint, slightly sad smile. "The wolves fought? Woke the Nothing in their struggles?"

 

"I wonder if it's a crack to be sealed, a physical thing... Or something else," Slug murmurs. "And what will happen to what's already been unleashed if we close the wound. I also wonder if it's possible to save Magpie. To leave a spirit bound and twisting in the wind isn't something I would want."

 

"No," the old woman says quietly. "What you're referring to did not destroy the Last Days. It may have done so, but it was not the one to do it. The people of the Last Days destroyed their Caern themselves. They did not understand the nature of what was beneath them, and did not know how to fight it. They destroyed the Caern, rather than let it be taken again."

 

"Do you know how we can fight the Nothing?" Val asks, as she looks sidelong at Magpie's Dream. "And I agree with you, Slug."

Benny widens his eyes at this latest bit of knowledge and then asks the woman, "And how do we fight it? How can we fix it?" He glances sideways at Val as she asks the same question and offers her a wry smirk and says, "Jinx."

 

"I think I do," Slug says, wetting his lips with a flick of the tongue. "We can't fight Nothing with destruction. It would be like trying to fight fire with gasoline." Slug looks up and around them, over the vast space, and the rolling landscape. "We don't destroy. We create. Creation is it's enemy, like light in the darkness. Maybe..." Slug gnaws his bottom lip with his canines, his one working eye studying the ground. "Maybe we create something. This area's got volcanos, right? Maybe we can bring some magma to the surface. Not an eruption, just the magma. Make it rain down the mountainside. It will seal the old wound. Change it. Bring in new life, and sew new seeds to be grown."

 

"You are closer to the truth than you know," the old woman tells Slug. She turns partly away; she looks almost wispy from the side, as if she weren't entirely corporeal. "You must understand that I am only a dream. I don't have all of the answers you want. I am not old enough or whole enough for that. But you do not fix this thing. It is not broken. It is what it has always been, and what it has always been is what you have partly seen. But it is very important," she looks back at the three of them, "very important that you remember that you saw two serpents."

 

"Perhaps," Val says, turning her attention to Slug. "The Nothing has awakened. Perhaps we need to awaken the mountain as well."

Benny shakes his head and says, "If we can't fix it, then maybe you could tell us what the other part of it is? The part we haven't seen yet."

 

"Maybe. Maybe awaken the mountain when we seek to spill it's blood," Slug murmurs. He takes another pull of vodka, then looks down at the ground. "But I still don't know if or how we can break Magpie out of the prison, or if we even should. Maybe she'll be freed when we close the wound, or buried."

 

"No," the old woman tells Benny. "No one can know that part and stay sane and themselves." Her attention shifts to Val and Slug, and her lips tighten noticeably. "You have it backwards, I'm afraid. Firstly, it is not a mountain. The mountains are a part of it; connected by ancient loyalties. Secondly, it is already waking. That is why the blackness stirs. It is as you saw just now. Their purposes are intertwined. Always the first serpent first. Always the second in response. And finally..." She quiets, trailing off for several long moments before continuing. "Your concern for Magpie is misplaced. You have larger dangers to worry about."

 

Benny frowns in thought for a few moments before he says, "I would suppose our greatest concern would be how to make sure it is the first serpent that wins the struggle, rather than the second."

 

The old woman states, simply, "You would be wrong."

 

"Ouroboros, the endless cycle," Val says, musing mostly to herself.

 

Slug flashes her a wry smile, and stands, bottle in hand. "Sometimes it's the struggle that's important," Slug says, taking another big drink. "A lesson Garou know well."

 

"Do not make the mistake of believing one is your ally, because the other is dangerous," the old woman warns. "Neither will do you well awake. I will give you the last advice I can: find the one who woke the first serpent. He has betrayed you, though it was not intentional. And do not believe all that you see. There are no magpies." With this last word, she vanishes. The mountain vanishes. All three jolt awake, lying in the Harbor Park Glade.