I Walk in Dreams -- An Esoteric Journey Quest

As Rowan approaches, you retreat. Their steps are calm and measured. Confident. Like the ending to this is a foregone conclusion, and there isn't any point rushing. Like this is inevitable: a prewritten conclusion to the story.

Your back brushes the stone wall. Nowhere left to withdraw to. But your mind seizes upon that comparison, fixating on it. There's an answer there, you can feel it, and--

The relentless strains of the Tragoudion enter your hearing. Faintly, but there. Your previous train of thought is usurped, as is the nature of the living song. But instead of a distraction, it's an answer.

You straighten up. "No," you say.

Rowan raises their eyebrows. "'No'? That's it? That's the best you've got?"

You raise your voice as you grow more certain. "No," you say. "None of what you said is true. You aren't real."

"Not yet I'm not," they shoot back, "but once I'm in the waking world, our life will be rescued from the disaster you made of it, and-"

You interrupt. "You don't get it. You're not real. We didn't go to those weddings. We don't have weekly game nights. We aren't-" your voice breaks a little, "-we aren't a godparent. None of those things happened, because I made other choices."

They roll their eyes. "Seriously? We've been over this. I'm the version of you that-"

"You're the version of me that I made up!" you yell at them. You take a heated step forward as you do, and they flinch back. Just a little. But it's enough of an opening. "Like, no, you're clearly not just a dream entity, you're tied to me, you're born of me, but there's no reality in which I did those things. If there were, if it were actually real, you wouldn't need to try to take my place. No, Rowan. The truth about me is that I made those choices, and probably they were bad ones but they're the ones I chose to make. And the truth about you... is that I wish I hadn't." You take a deep breath, one which shakes a little. "I have regrets. So, so many regrets. I wish I'd made time for my friends, that I'd quit sooner, that I'd figured my shit out sooner. But there's no guarantee that if I had, I'd be happy. The thing about regrets... is that they're not possibilities, they're fantasies. And when you're fantasizing, you get to play God and decide that things go arbitrarily well."

"So what?" they spit, face furious. "Even if I'm just something the dreaming-realm made out of you five minutes ago, you just said yourself that you fucked up your life and wish you had done otherwise. I'm the you that you made up to fix all your mistakes. The better one."

"Rowan," you say quietly. "You know how I know you aren't real?" You shake your head. "You talked about Ascending. But if I had the kind of life you describe, that level of fulfillment... I would never have had to seek my fulfillment in my dreams."

They freeze for a moment. Just a moment. And then they hurl a fireball at you.

Looks like the talking is over. You have an instant of pure animal terror, and then you think to yourself, with a surprisingly calm voice in your head, Rowan comes from the other side of a mirror. So you don't bother running, or defending yourself. You just stand there and let the fireball hit you. A furious cold wind whips your hair and clothing around, but you are unharmed. You start walking toward Rowan, and now they're the one backing up. They speak an incantation and make a gesture, and daggers of lightning form above their shoulders and whip toward you in a constant stream, but you are walking to the rhythm of the Tragoudion's music and without breaking stride each and every one misses you.

Now their back is to the wall, against the empty frame out of which they had stepped, and their response is to kick off it and throw themself at you. Their movements flow like water as they throw a punch directly at you, with perfect form and unmatched speed.

You remember that you are real, and you do not give ground.

Their fist makes contact with your face, and you close your eyes by reflex.

There is a horrible crashing noise.

When you open your eyes, you are unmoved. But jagged cracks run up Rowan's arm, starting at their knuckles and continuing all the way to their shoulder. As you watch, bits fall to the floor, bloodlessly, with the sound of tinkling glass, and the crack digs a little deeper.

Rowan's eyes are very wide, and their shoulders rise and fall in frantic time with their breathing. They stare at themself, then stare at you, and lift their chin defiantly. "Fine. You win. You're the real one. Finish shattering me, and then you can move on like nothing ever happened."

You put as much gentleness as you can into your voice. "I never said that."

Rowan blinks. "Uh. What?"

"Unreal isn't the same as unimportant," you say. "Stories. Poems. Fantasies, even. You didn't live my real life, but you were born of my real regrets. You're part of me. I'm not going to..." you search for words, "I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter. That would just guarantee that I wind up here again." That last bit wasn't the most coherent you've ever been, but you think Rowan will understand. They're you, after all.

Rowan takes that in. The crack spreads further up their body as they breathe. When they speak, their voice sounds... desperate. Imploring. You recognize the voice well: it's the one you hear in your head when you beg the universe to have been different. "You promise?"

"I promise." You hold out your hand: the hand matching their broken one.

After a moment, they take it, and squeeze tight, and the squeeze propagates the cracks through their whole body, and after a second they exhale and then fall apart, in a gentle rain of mirror-shards. The largest shard left is the one in your palm: you open your hand, looking it over for a moment, and then without quite understanding what you're doing (but knowing that you must) you grasp it like a blade and press it against your own chest. It does not cut you; it passes through your flesh and bone like sunlight through glass, coming to rest in your heart.

You feel it inside of you, and it burns like an ember, setting your blood vessels all aflame, carrying fiery radiance to every corner of your body with every contraction and expansion, making of your soul a bonfire that blazes without being consumed but just flares brighter and brighter, until finally it's too much to bear, and you wake up.

---

• Enbies will LITERALLY confront their incarnate mirror-self in the dreaming-realm instead of going to therapy.
• Apologies for how long this took to get out; as I've said a few times, my normal posting pace is in part to try to maintain momentum. Once I slip a little, due to real life or other commitments getting in the way, I slip a lot.
• I could have combined the next Day into this, but for narrative pacing I thought it better to end one update there and begin the next Day in the next update.
• I have noticed that some of you seem to be reading my notes and I am working on identifying the security flaw in my system that has permitted this.

You wake up in darkness, snapping upright with a strangled cry, heart thundering against your ribs. You scrabble for your phone from where it rests charging under your pillow. A little past three in the morning.

From her spot on top of a laundry hamper, Hana lets out a disgruntled mrrp. That helps ground you, but you still feel wrong, in the wake of that dreamwalk. Your breathing is rapid and ragged. You are drenched with sweat. Your skin feels too small.

You throw away any hope of getting back to sleep and climb out of bed. After a "shower" which consists mostly of sitting on the floor and letting the spray beat down on you, you toss your pajamas into the hamper (in your absence, Hana has quit the lid and formed a ball in the center of the rumpled bedclothes), throw on a robe, and head out of your bedroom to make yourself a mug of tea and sit in your armchair. You grab your lap desk and some books: you know that your references are going to be sparse on details, you would find explaining what happened and what exactly it was that you did extremely difficult, but there's got to be something.

You click on a lamp: it's still fully dark outside but for the reflected glow of streetlights, a few lights on in the university dorms that you can just barely see if you crane your head the right way, and the weak light of the moon. The passage of time is marked by the rattle of Hana's automatic feeder, dispensing a new supply of dry food every four hours. After a deniable amount of time has passed from the noise, she saunters in and heads to the bowl, which by happy chance just so happens to have food in it now, then takes up station on the couch across the room, and all the while you search through the texts for whatever scraps of insight you can find.

As the sky starts to lighten, you sigh. Hard information on the perils of the Ascent is hard to come by. Oh, there's plenty of mention of them: "those Trials that wrack the Soul," "tests of the would-be initiate's connexion to the elements of natural life," "Heavenly Tribulations that befall those who attempt to surpass the constraints of their mortal fate," and so on. But there's basically nothing about what they're for. The best you've got is a line from one of the wholly anonymous books in your pile: "Anyone who seeks to summit the Ascent must face perils that threaten their very spirit, for the Ascent's greater mysteries reject the impure: if there are other paths up the mountain, I know them not." You'd read that before, but you'd interpreted the "must" as descriptive -- reading it again, though, it sounds like they might be saying it proscriptively. Not that the greater mysteries would react like an immune system against impure aspirants and so facing the perils was inevitable, but that the perils themselves were part of purifying the spirit and a requirement to grasp those mysteries.

You rest your hand on your chest over your heart, feeling it beat. The mundane systoles and diastoles had returned to their normal rhythm, but there was something different. You could feel it: it was a shame "heartburn" already meant something else, because that was the word that suggested itself despite the experience being almost entirely unlike normal heartburn. There's energy there, coiled like a serpent, not doing anything that you can feel, just... there, now, when it wasn't before. You venture a guess that you would look entirely normal to mundane diagnostic equipment. The question, then, is whether this is something wholly new to your existence, or something that was there before but only just became able to perceive? You suspect that it's a bit of both.

You set your books aside for the meantime and let yourself sink into the plush fabric, eyes closed and head back. The prospect of facing a day of your normal doings seems simultaneously exhausting and threadbare: both too much and not enough. Your confrontation with Rowan cast into light a truth you'd been trying to leave in a dark corner: you're not actually happy, doing what you're doing, which is to say "nothing in particular." There's only so much you can wring out of idleness: the moments in life you've felt most engaged have all been when you've sunk yourself in something, whether that be school or your work or preparing for the Ascent. But at the same time, it feels insane trying to make big decisions about your life right now, when you're in the middle of an extremely literal spiritual journey and have just passed your first major milestone. You have no idea what sorts of things you're in for now, either along the Ascent or on top of it, but you would be surprised if they didn't reshape you and your priorities in some way. You'd feel like a right idiot, not to mention an asshole, if you started, you don't know, volunteering with schoolchildren only to attain transcendence in a few weeks and realize you needed to be doing something else entirely.

But you can't keep doing nothing. You decide to chew on some possibilities: not committing yourself to anything, just exploring different things to do with your days.

[] Look for a new job
Work to live, not live to work, but surely you can find something that feels worth doing.
[] Start working out
Mens sana in corpore sano. Also, you've been in two magical brawls so far and both of them have involved punching.
[] Pick up a hobby (Optional: write-in what)
Do something fun, possibly meet people, enjoy climbing the skill curve of something new.
[] Reach out to people from your dreams
So far you've corresponded idly with Idra and Jagoda -- maybe you could do more, and strive for connecting with any new people you meet?
[] Reach out to lost friends from the past
It won't be like you've imagined, you're sure of it. And it won't be like it was. But maybe it can be something.
[] Reach out to family
No.
[] Dive deeper into occult studies
You've already got a goal for the short-term and don't need another. Don't half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing. There's more study you could be doing, to prepare for your nights.
[] Write-in

After musing about that for a bit, you open your eyes. It's significantly lighter, now. Well, there's a sunrise and a sunset every day, and they're absolutely free, so there's no point missing this one when you're in a position to actually see it. You get to your feet, body complaining a bit after the stiffness of sitting down for hours, and pad over to the window, to watch the daybreak.

What you see stops you in your tracks.

The dawn is painting the sky in the too-saturated colors of the dreaming-realm.

---

This vote is not mechanical and isn't a "the winner wins and the losers cry"-type vote: rather, it's a more formal temperature-taking. Ash's wheel-spinning has reached a point where it's no longer really tolerable: what do they seek to fill their Days with for the time being? Depending on what the distribution of the vote looks like, I will write accordingly: "one option is head and shoulders above the rest" will get a different sort of followup than "there are a few things all supported approximately equally."