The bonfire flashes Daniel creates paint images of shadow and shadow across the dream. Hazy images rise with each, as if reflected in a window. The boulders and trees take on more defined shapes. The roses twist and wither. The soil starts to clear from the concrete. Then with his last flash, the dreamscape fractures. It doesn't break, but it splits into multiple concurrent dimensions, like a prism splitting a beam of light into multiple colors. Straight ahead is the first dimension, an urban landscape rising out of the plateau. Mountains shrink and contort into a skyline full of buildings, highway overpasses, and sparse trees. Parked cars take shape and streetlights shine. Wind blows loose paper through the air, and anonymous supernumeraries roam the sidewalks with brisk, purposeful strides. Is that a street sign? Yes... that's a Sacramento street sign! Turn to a different facet of the dream and find a room... no, an empty box car. Rolling along the tracks, an unimportant landscape passing by on either side. Signs that someone has been living in here; a threadbare blanket, a bottle, a few scattered possessions. From the walls echo whimpered words, in a sing-songy tune, "Oh-h I'm bound to go / Where there ain't no snow / Where the rain don't fall... the wind don't b-blow..." The voice sobs. Another fragment of dream shows nothing but darkness and madness, pale creatures lurking under a sunless sky, striking, feeding, whispering the sweetest of horrors. Yet another shows an indiscernible, shadowy figure working in the light of an old, battered lantern. Before it, on a piece of cardboard, rest an assortment of shiny, bright gum wrappers, woven around the candy. More could be learned here, perhaps. From each of these.
What were once roses with long, thorned stems that Ava summoned up to assail the Sandman are now arms of concrete studded with sharp rebar and broken glass from discarded beer bottles. It wraps and cuts and tears all the same. The Sandman squirms, those little-girl feet kicking hardened concrete away even as they draw further blood. Meat. Flesh. Yet then, as the dream is shorn of the plateau, of the carefully laid trap she had designed, she shows surprise. And anger. Something begins to move under her flesh, bubbling and boiling until it erupts from her skin. Vermin. Vermin everywhere. Rats. Roaches. Spiders. Locusts. They surge from her split body in a great wave, shattering Ava's concrete tendrils. For the Scrivener it is like being caught in a snowstorm, but instead of snow there are tiny foul bodies everywhere. Snakes and bats and crows and flies. The storm of creatures emits a horrible shriek, failing to injure Ava as it flows around her, but expanding until it can engulf all three of the Changelings. "GET! AWAY! FROM THAT!" The dream shrieks at Daniel, shredding his mind with the force of the objection just before the hideous storm descends upon him. Things bite and claw and sting everywhere, burned up by his fire initially by enduring as it gutters out. "STAY OUT OF THERE, DANIEL!" She vomits his name, as if reminding him that he gave it to her, as if it summons some power over him. And perhaps it does. "YOU CAN NEVER GO THERE, DON'T EVER GO THERE AGAIN!"
Each of the Lost finds themselves separated from each other by the storm of vermin. Yet Lynn finds herself untouched. Engulfed, and yet no harm comes to her as the insects and reptiles and small, filthy mammals swarm around her. Until, that is, the little girl in the yellow dress appears at her side. "Is this important to you?" She asks Lynn, smiling that sweetest, poisonous smile, asking in that adorable, cutting voice. In one hand, she holds a small coffin, fixed to a chain leading into Lynn's heart. She gives the chain a tug, and for Lynn it feels like a heart attack and a heart break. Like her physical heart is being pulled from her chest, and her emotional heart suffering the tragedy of loss all over again. Sharp and immediate. The little girl giggles at the result of her experiment. Meanwhile her creature, the incubus, slinks away from the darkling, whimpering at it's burns until a sharp blow from the storm of it's master straightens it's back. It melts through the storm, nothing for a moment, until it emerges from Ava's shadow. It's many, spindly arms reach for her, but it hisses and recoils, unable to touch. The light glaring off her shimmering armor repels it.
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