[There was an entire RP which I might sort through and post which essentially led up to Mariana being drugged to sleep. I figured I'd post what she dreamed here. This is part of a developing RP that somebody (I'm not telliiiiing) is running. A specific thread should be up soon.]
She knew she was dreaming. A dream that was a memory, and vivid as life itself, but still a dream. She knew because she'd dreamed it already, many times before, and because the phantasmal ghosts of nightmares were no strangers to her sleeping world. Sadly, just as many dreams before this one, the artificiality of her circumstances only served to make them more frightening. More surreal. Here, stuck in her own mind, she relived every excruciating detail of her most recent death, compounded with horrific visions that not even her own personal reality could contend with.
Blood was everywhere. Blood on her paw and feet, which were splayed out in every which direction. Her severed arm landed somewhere with a decidedly wet smack against the pavement, and she was vaguely aware of the sounds of fighting below her. The bleak gray wall was above her head, and the little juncture between stony gate and cobblestones was being steadily infected with the vibrant red color.
Blood. Her blood. She could feel it pouring eagerly out of the gaping hole in the side of her torso, out of those cruelly severed arteries and veins. There was pain, of course, an unbelievable pain, but it was dulled by the rapid loss of her life's blood. She could feel it seeping from her with every pulse of her heart, and she willed the beating to slow, despite her rising terror. It didn't of course. The traitorous organ just kept pumping, and she just kept dying, only here it was much slower than she actually remembered the act had been. The blood was traveling its way up the wall now, defying the meager forces of gravity, highlighting craggy cracks and fissures within the old city masonry. It was forming a gory, macabre image, letting it float above her head where she could see it plainly even as her other senses faded into the cold embrace of death. An eye, an eye wide open and weeping scarlet. It stared at her, through her, and if there had been a face present with lips to twist in a mournful way, Mariana was certain that they would have done just that. Or perhaps they would have been opened in a cry of rage. Certainly anger was present in the air around her, thick and tangible, and the strangest notion washed over her that if she were only to stick out her tongue, she would taste the bitterness of it.
The eye blinked, and the tear snaked closer towards her, bubbling and foaming as it was extricated from its place on the wall. She could not move, and she became aware of pinpricks of pain in her arm and legs, as though someone had nailed them down in multiple places to hold her immobile. The pain was what terrified her; dreams were not supposed to make one hurt. But these ones did. They made her burn all over; her body was filled with a steady, roasting fire, and some innate sense told her there was something unnatural about that fact. She should be concerned about it.
But what she was concerned about now was that giant trickle of blood. It filled her vision. It hovered just over the edge of an awkwardly jutting bit of stone, and Mariana wanted to thrash her neck back and forth. She could see her own reflection in the iridescent surface, she was aware of the fear in her wide and desperate eyes. It was waiting, mocking her pain. She could do nothing about it, and like a vengeful entity it was taking a moment's pause to revel in her sheer and debilitating apprehension. Then, after it had had its fill, it jumped merrily from its perch and splashed into her eyes.
If her limbs had ached before, it had been nothing compared to the sensation that followed. Someone must have heated sharpened daggers and then driven them aggressively into her skull. The pressure and the heat might have made the rational part of her mind wonder why her head wasn't entirely shattered, but the agony shredded any notion of logical thought. She heard herself scream. The sound was almost alien in its quality. It was dragged out of her soul on the point of a metal hook.
She felt herself falling, totally blind, into a pit of blackness. The weightlessness made her stomach flop around and around, and the urge to vomit was strong. She had nearly lost the battle when she landed, the bones in her body jarring upon impact. She'd broken bones before, and knew that her spine should have snapped with the force of the falling, but it did not. Instead the pain reverberated up and down her vertebrae and crested over her head, a splitting sensation that made the darkness shine with unbearable light. Another scream ripped out of her throat, and she covered her face with her paw, curling into a fetal position on the ground and waiting for it all to end. Surely it would. She could not survive long after losing that much blood, and even the depths of the Realm were preferable to this.
Sadly, she was again denied the solace of death.
The light that was filtering through the gaps in her fingers was subsiding, and the tell-tale crackle of fire filled the empty space. She removed her paw from her face, and a gasp flew out past her lips. Scuttling frantically backwards on her haunches, she tried to climb to her feet, but the muscles gave out under the strain and she found herself unable to get more than a few paces away from the tree that stood burning before her. The flames licked angrily at the air, illuminating the ravaged pieces of rubble that lay entwined amidst the its roots. Some of the pieces reflected the furious orange color, so it seemed that the ground too had caught aflame. Mariana began to drag herself backwards again on instinct, and one of the shards pierced up into her palm, sending a shock to her system. She had to dig out the broken bit of glass with her teeth and spit it to the side.
It glinted a brilliant purple before it was utterly lost in the darkness.
By force of will alone she scrambled to her feet. She clutched at her armless shoulder, wavering, trying to get some sense of her bearings. The world around her gave a disorienting whirl, and the tree, with its broken bits of statuary, vanished into the distance like a forgotten memory.
She was left in nothing but darkness, and the assumption that she was alone in that darkness was a blessed and short lived delusion. A new sort of hissing crept into the silence around her, followed by a strange scuffling sound, like feet being continually dragged upon the floor and never lifted, or a body being drug to its grave. Her ears rotated as she shifted on her feet, and she squinted, but her vision could not pierce the darkness. She tried to summon a spark to see by, but the magic that she usually felt hovering in the air and ready for use was not there. Her paw grappled at her side for one of her sabers, but they too were gone, leaving her even without the comfort of cold steel against her fingers.
The hissing was growing louder. It was cacophonous now, it was deafening. She pressed her paw to one ear. It hardly helped, since she had nothing to shelter the other from the noise. Just when she was about to consider slitting her throat with her own claws, movement caught her eye. The slightest of glints, faint light refracting off of a smooth surface. She caught it again, and again. The darkness itself was moving, shifting and undulating around her. Something brushed by her arm, something cold and lifeless, and she shrieked despite herself, backing away stumblingly. She fell into more coldness, was embraced by it falsely. A crushing sensation wrapped around her limbs, and she felt lifted, the breath pressed forcibly from her lungs. With no more are available to allow for screaming, she could only sit in trembling foreboding, her neck craned upwards.
Underneath the gibberish of the continual hissing there was a word:
North. North. Nooorrrrttthhhhh...
Two large pinpricks of red light burst into existence. It took a moment for her to realize she was staring at eyes, the pupils slitted in narrow, vertical lines. It took her another to realize that she was staring at the head of an enormous snake, its forked tongue flicking eagerly from its mouth as it tasted the air and anticipated how palatable this morsel might be. Its grip tightened, and Mariana felt herself snapping. The finer bones went first, then the stronger, her fingers to her femurs. Still she could not scream, as she stared up into the cold, ruddy red eyes. The thing lowered its head closer to her, and words filled her mind, blocking out all other thought.
Look to the North. I am coming.
The words made dread consume her, even though she did not fully understand. There was not time to contemplate it however, as the snake's jaw came unhinged, widening to expose its hideous maw and gleaming, venom-impregnated fangs. It posed over her meaningfully, sizing her up, deciding which angle would be best to attack from.
With a small twitch and a single gulp, it swallowed her whole.
