I Walk in Dreams -- An Esoteric Journey Quest

Name: Ash
Gender
Aspiration: I aspire to understand the nature of the dreaming-realm and share that understanding with others. (Wands)

Willpower: 3/20
Supernal Force: 0
Supernal Insight: 1
Supernal Experience: 2
Supernal Connection: 1
Triumphant Initiation: 3

Pneuma

• Swords:
• Wands: Ace (Aspiration), Two, Page, Knight, Queen
• Pentacles: Ace, Page
• Cups: Ace
• Trumps: 0 The Fool, II The High Priestess, III The Empress, IV The Emperor, V The Hierophant, IX The Hermit, XIX The Sun

Ascent Deck

• Swords: Six, Nine, Knight, King
• Wands: Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, King
• Pentacles: Two, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, Queen, King
• Cups: Two, Three, Seven, Eight, Nine, Queen, King
• Trumps: VII The Chariot, X Wheel of Fortune, XII The Hanged Man, XIII Death, XIV Temperance, XVI The Tower, XVII The Star, XVIII The Moon, XX Judgement, XXI The World

Lost

• Swords: Ace, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Page, Queen
• Wands: Five
• Pentacles: Three, Four, Six, Knight
• Cups: Four, Five, Six, Page, Knight
• Trumps: I The Magician, VIII Strength, XI Justice, XV The Devil

Unseen

• Swords: Ten
• Wands: Ten
• Pentacles: Ten
• Cups: Ten
• Trumps:

When you quit your job at McKinsey & Company and left that life behind, here is how you decided where you would live next: you took a list of the best art museums in the US, eliminated every city your job had sent you to, and then picked at random from what was left.

Cleveland's not bad so far, you guess.

---

Here's your dark secret: you liked your job. That's the thing; that's part of why it's been so hard for you to move on. Yeah, you were a sellout... but that was the point. You sold out deliberately, at the earliest opportunity you had, and you did so for the highest price you can get, because if you're going to do something you should do it properly.

(Why did you sell out? Well, there were a lot of reasons, but if you had to point to one, it would be the sentence "while you live under my roof, you'll follow my rules," which dogged your heels for the first eighteen years of your life. You may not have fuck-you money in the sense of never having to work again, but even at 28 you certainly have enough money to say fuck that.)

You knew that the consultant lifestyle would demand significant sacrifices, but you were ready, or thought you were. From the moment you stepped into the office as a fresh-faced college graduate, you were swept up in a whirlwind of intense work and constant travel. You know that a lot of eager twenty-two-year-old consultants get shunted into a lot of make-work, a lot of crap invented by their supervisors just to bill more, but you were lucky enough to be assigned meaningful work right from the start. Eighty-hour weeks became the norm as you poured all your energy into delivering exceptional results that made your clients happy with you and your boss even happier. You hopscotched across the country, spending more time in airports and hotel rooms than in your apartment. The work itself was exhilarating, and the grueling nature just meant you the extra challenge of keeping it up. You found yourself constantly pushing the boundaries of your own capabilities, testing your ability to absorb and analyze large amounts of unfamiliar information very quickly while working alongside people who would happily stab you in the back at the first sign of weakness so that they could look good by comparison. The high-stakes environment fueled your ambition, and you thrived under the pressure. You took pride in every dollar contributed to your clients' bottom lines and every billable hour McKinsey could charge for. It was a game, and you were racking up the high score. And the travel! After a while, you weren't just seeing the country, you were seeing the world. Which was your favorite city? London, Singapore, Milan, Zurich, Dubai, São Paulo, Seoul? It was hard to say. So much art to see, so much culture to experience, so much life, everywhere.

But the relentless pace took its toll. You missed every wedding of every high school and college friend you were invited to. Such romantic relationships as you attempted to cultivate inevitably collapsed under the weight of your perpetual unavailability, and you found yourself growing increasingly isolated, the messages of "hey, let's hang out when you're in town!" becoming fewer and fewer by the year. The rare moments of downtime were tinged with exhaustion, leaving you unable to fully disconnect from the demands of your job. Things you had once enjoyed lost their luster, your mind always wandering back to work.

The straw that broke the camel's back, the thing that snapped you out of it, was on a trip to Paris. You realized with horror, after you'd been there for a week, that you had forgotten to schedule a trip to the Louvre. Not "couldn't fit it in with all the work you were doing," forgotten. It just... hadn't occurred to you, it literally had not crossed your mind at any point. That was the engine-spark on the train of thought, and once you'd started seeing what your job was doing to you, you couldn't stop seeing it. Everything that you'd tried to brush under the rug as inconsequential slammed you in the face: the friends who had once mattered to you, the interests you had used to have, the flashes of feelings when performing gender was particularly onerous, the way it seemed that everyone you met in your line of work was measuring everyone else for the knife. This life was... hollowing you out, and when you found yourself thinking "but if I stay for three more months, my next batch of RSUs will vest!" you knew you had to leave before it was too late.

---

So. How do you build a meaningful life? No, better question: how do you bootstrap yourself back to being able to experience meaning?

Time to answer that question, you have. Your nest egg is sizeable enough that you don't need to worry about the next job you'll have for a while. The heart of University Circle, walking distance from the museums and the concert hall, might be expensive by the standards of the Midwest, but it's frankly laughable by the standards of the city (and at some point you'll stop reflexively thinking of New York as "the city"). But you're just so damn out of practice! You tried to meet people and go on dates, but it turns out that when you aren't interacting with other business and finance people you're a terrible conversationalist. The only culture you're really familiar with at this point is high, and if you don't know what you're doing (you don't), it's really easy to come off as incredibly pretentious and condescending (you do). And without a job to spend eighty hours a week at... you're lonely. You're really lonely. You can distract yourself with amusements, you're not bored, but it all feels so empty, at the same time that you're trying to fill yourself up again.

In online spaces where you went to talk to people in a lower-stakes environment, you made Ash your pseudonym as a bit of a joke: the thing that's left after a fire has burned through its fuel. It... felt painfully right distressingly quickly, and now that's how you think of yourself, whatever name might show up on your driver's license.

But if you hadn't been so fucking bad at everything you tried, you might not have wandered into the antiques store in Coventry, and you might not have bought a bunch of old occult books on the whim that maybe esoterica would be a fun thing to talk about at parties (witchy stuff was in among people your age, right?), and you might not have read The Created Light by Zev ben Avram.

---

We are born screaming into mortality, into a realm ruled by a tyrant sun, which doesn't care what we think at all. Reality is lit by a cruel and distant star, and so everything is only what it is, and nothing means anything. Those with the knowing of it flee into the dream. The dream is lit by the souls of men, and so everything is a symbol, and there is beauty.

The standard thing to say about a book that changed your life is that you couldn't put it down. That's not the case. You put The Created Light down a lot. You'd read it for a bit, entranced by its discussion of a mystical world where you could seek out wisdom from the personifications of abstract concepts, then it would get frustratingly dense and overly elliptical or there would be an extended diatribe taking sides in some philosophical argument you had never heard of or the author would bald-facedly assert some absolute fucking nonsense and you would sigh and put it down.

But you kept thinking about it, even when you weren't reading it. Like you had with work; like you still do with work. And so you'd stomp back over to where you'd set it down, pick it up again, and read more. You'd puzzle your way through the dense ellipses. You'd piece together the philosophical argument from context. You'd sigh and ignore the absolute fucking nonsense.

Until the night where you decided to give the absolute fucking nonsense a try and you opened your eyes in the dreaming-realm and you knew that nothing would, could, should be the same, ever again.

---

It's been a few months, since that first fateful night. You've mostly accepted that this is not just lucid dreaming writ large, but something realer. Something magical. Just like the book said, at first you needed to go through a lot of ceremonial rigamarole to get there at all -- anointing yourself, burning incense, inscribing mystical formulae around your bed -- but it became easier with time. Weirdly so; it feels more like remembering something than like learning it. You've wandered around a place that drips significance from every branch. You have spoken to denizens of that place, some of which were creatures out of fantasy and some of which looked human until you noticed the uncanny tell about their eyes, or their skin, or the shape of their hands. You've worked magic, gradually learning how to invoke the symbols of the dreaming realm to do things impossible in mundane reality. You've spoken to other humans, who were also there in their dreams, and who had all had different experiences getting there than you had. What did that mean? How did the dream-world work? What was this place?

One thing they all agreed on, though, was the same as what was written in the book: don't try to climb out of the lowlands. Every novice dreamer appeared there, and that's where they should stay. Until they were ready; until they knew what they were doing; until the wanting of what lay further up and further in grew too great. Once you set your feet to the Ascent, you can't really stop casually, not without establishing your nature as "being someone who stops," and that means never being able to come back and reach the top later.

(This made immediate sense to you: it was a lot like how work had been, where saying "not right now" to an assignment you were offered was a death-knell for your career. "Not open to new challenges" on a performance review meant never being trusted with anything important ever again.)

(You are not prepared, and you understand that you are not prepared. You do not know what awaits you along the way. You certainly do not understand what you will find at the end. But it will all be worth it, if you succeed. For your purposes. For any purposes. It has to be.)

At least it's simple, sort of. Here, in the lowlands, there are no perils, and it is possible to explore safely and grow stronger in the ways of this place. The dangers all lie above you, but so too are the greater opportunities. So which is better? To spend more time in the lower reaches, or to climb faster? The balance of opinion, such as you've been able to perceive, lies with the former, but you're not so sure.

There are so many things you want to know, and you're not about to learn them down here.

---

It's time to establish your first strategy! Normally, you'd also be able to vote to change your Aspiration, but since you just established your Aspiration that vote option isn't available yet. A strategy is a plan vote (make sure to name it starting with Plan so that it will tally correctly) that consists of two parts: how long you want to dream (which could consist of a simple number of Explorations from 1 to 6, or something more complex such as "until we've spent N willpower"), and how aggressively you want to engage with the dreaming-realm (since you don't know much about what you'll find, right now the only option is "engage with everything straightforward"). See the Mechanics post for more details.

[] Plan Example
-[] Explore N times
-[] Engage with everything straightforward

I'm going to bed right after I post this, so I will be unavailable to answer questions, but if I wake up and things have gone wrong or people are confused or there are really important misunderstandings to clarify I will do what I can to help up to and including restarting the voting. We're all figuring this out together: you as voters, me as QM, and, of course, Ash themself.

After months spent visiting this place in your dreams, after weeks spent thinking about the Ascent specifically, you set out. Tonight, instead of walking along the lowlands you have grown to know, you turn your feet in the direction of the great summits in the distance, and begin to walk with purpose. You know it is that purpose, far more than any specific direction, that this place respects and understands: here, intentions are, in fact, magic, or at least a necessary component thereof.

As it so often does, while you walk your mind wanders to the question that has obsessed you ever since you first came here: what is this place? Why is it like this? What does this mean, about the way reality is truly arranged? You've read lots of books that mention the dreaming-realm by now, though none have captured you quite the way The Created Light did, and they all have their own opinions about this place in general and the Ascent in specific. The link between it and the Tarot is often discussed, the fourfold symmetry of the stations of the Ascent and the way that the greater powers seem to correspond to Trumps, though nobody can agree upon the details and most of them admit that much of this is hearsay and conjecture. The writers invariably have never climbed far themselves or, in some cases, have not yet attempted to Ascend at all. The only author among them who claimed to have completed the Ascent himself was a clear and obvious liar who contradicted himself repeatedly.

It feels mad, audacious, positively hubristic to set out on your own Ascent so early in your career as an occultist, to try to claim the grandest prize, when many who were more learned and more prepared failed, or didn't feel themselves ready despite all their knowledge and experience. But at the same time, something about it rings truly to you. In your previous life (and it feels right, to call it that), the people who insisted on getting all their ducks in a row before tackling a task were never the ones who earned the top spots. Ducks multiply of their own volition. At some point, enough must be enough; you have to kick things off, knowing that parts of your plan are vagaries at best, trusting that you'll be able to figure it out by the time it becomes necessary. Victory doesn't always go to the boldest, but it never goes to the meek.

Or, at least, that's what worked for you. You've become alarmingly sympathetic to the notion of subjective truths, these last few months.

---

THREE OF SWORDS

After you've walked awhile, you start wondering about why you haven't encountered anything. Shouldn't there have been something by now? Some site of significance, some strange creature, some fellow aspirant to serve as friend or rival? The Ascent is different for everyone, but it's never uneventful. Did you... break it somehow? Has the dreaming realm cast you down already? Did you manage to fail before you even began? You look around, to either side and behind you, but see nothing but the gentle pastoral landscape that fills much of the lowlands, so easily confused for mundane reality save that the colors are just a little too saturated and the horizon is just a little too close.

Then a passing shadow prompts you to look up, and you realize that your inaugural encounter has been here all along.

The avian silhouette high above you is unmistakable, with the wide wings and splayed "fingers" of primary flight feathers that typifies soaring birds. Squinting up into the sourceless light that suffuses the sky of the dreaming-realm, you can't make out distinguishing features, but here and now, there's only one thing that it can be, according to the bestiaries you've read. That's an omen vulture. They are not as overtly strange and magical as other creatures of this realm -- they don't speak or possess dramatic powers -- but their diets set them apart from anything in the waking world. They feed on the wreckage of significance. They devour the spoiling gobbets of important events, and great triumphs, that have come and gone. They feast in the wake of heroes.

To have one following you, making its broad lazy circles in the air, is... a marker of something. Certainly it will attract attention.

[] Spend one of any Supernal resource: Gain this card as an Aura. You cannot pay the costs associated with this option!
[*] Spend one Willpower: Add this card to your Pneuma.

You feel a confused mélange of feelings, looking up at it. Does it scent your past life on you? Does it scent future failure? What dashed significance does it hope to consume? Or has it identified you as one who will leave its preferred carrion behind wherever you go? You know which possibility you prefer, but... you're not a destroyer, you don't think, that's not what you want to be. Your eyes narrow, and you consider driving it off, but you possess no obvious means of stopping a high-flying bird from following you, and you know from your reading that they are not easily dissuaded.

"Fine," you say, speaking for your benefit rather than from any real belief that the vulture will hear your words or take them into account. "Follow me, if you want. We'll find out together where your meals come from, I suppose." And with that you set your face again to the path in front of you, and press on.

---

FIVE OF SWORDS

Some time later, staring out at the rows and rows of marker-stones that cover the land before you all the way to the uncanny horizon, you suspect you may have found one of the omen vulture's intended meals.

There is a path, paved and maintained. You follow it.

As you walk, you see that every grave in this impossibly large cemetery has a weapon or tool laid on it, and you can tell that it belongs to the one over whom it lies: here a knightly sword, there a felling-axe, beyond them both a set of scalpels. The words on the stones are eroded and illegible, and the bodies in the ground are rotten and decayed, but the metal is imperishable and pristine.

The path takes you to a small shrine in what you know is the graveyard's center. Gleaming letters proclaim it the Shrine of Steel Undying. It is a place of veneration for the blessed powers who remake reality to suit their own ends and who assist humans in doing likewise. Some dreamers have names for some of those powers: Hephaestos, Ikenga, St. Dunstan. Perhaps there is truth in one of those names, or more. Perhaps they are all just myths covering over the mysteries of the dream.

[*] Take a breath, and move on: Gain this card as an Aura.
[] Spend one Willpower and one Supernal Force or Aura of the suit of Swords: Add this card to your Pneuma. Search the Unseen for any one of the following cards -- IV The Emperor, VIII Strength, XII The Hanged Man -- and shuffle it into the Ascent Deck. You cannot pay the costs associated with this option!

There is an offering-bowl, and you know that powerful dreaming-entities look kindly upon gift made in places such as these. But, even if you wished to honor the powers of divine craft with your piety, you can think of no appropriate token you possess, nothing that demonstrates your commitment to the course of strength. Anything you have would ring hollow in your own heart before it rang in the offering-bowl, and an unworthy sacrifice is worse than no sacrifice. So instead you bow your head, silently acknowledging both those who have made this place their eternal home and those for whom this place is held sacred, and then move on, following the path that leads out, continuing on your way up.

---

PAGE OF WANDS

You continue walking for some timeless time after leaving the lichyard in the distance behind you before you spot something else on your way. Like the Shrine of Steel Undying, it appears to be a chapel of some kind. You wander in.

This one, unlike the last, appears to be dedicated to no great powers in particular. It has a space for contemplation and veneration of whatever or whomever the visitor might feel compelled to contemplate or venerate, and it is otherwise filled with books. Your own books mentioned these library-chapels dotting the dreamscape, and you reach out to the shelves with interest, curious to see what might be recorded here.

"Hey! Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

You spin on your heel reflexively, eyes widening as you take in the first other person you've seen since beginning your Ascent. She's short, young -- twenty, at the most -- and looking at you like she sees no reason why either of those facts could possibly matter when confronting someone aggressively.

You relax, straightening up and putting on a friendly face. She was here first, after all. "I'm Ash," you say. "An aspirant on my Ascent. I saw this place and decided to stop by, seeing what I might find. I guess what I found was you." No change to her severe expression. Well, it wasn't your best material. You hope. "How about you?"

She eases up the barest fraction. "Idra," she says. "An aspirant on my Ascent. I came here to see what I could learn." You see, beyond her, a table spread with books and notes. She catches you looking and smiles proudly. "I figured out a way to copy notes over, back and forth between this world and the waking. Learn magic twice as fast. The pinnacle of the dream is waiting, and there's no time to waste."

...she's smart, she's self-taught, she's arrogant, and she's decided to beeline straight to the top despite the fact that she can't possibly have been studying the hidden arts for very long. God in Heaven, is this how you look to other people? Between this and the omen vulture, you're pretty sure the dream is actively messing with you, and you make a mental note to be concerned about that later.

How are you going to interact with her?

[] Move on, saying only a few words in passing, or nothing at all: Gain this card as an Aura.
[] Spend one Willpower, teaching her a secret of light and air, one that cannot be found in these books: Add this card to your Pneuma. Gain one Supernal Insight.
[] Spend one Supernal Force or Aura of the suit of Swords, challenging her to a friendly (?) wizards' duel: Add this card to your Pneuma. Gain one Supernal Force.

---

Current status: 3/max 6 Explorations, 1/max 3 Willpower spent, one Aura of Swords

• The omen vulture as your very first card and the Page of Wands as your third. This Tarot deck is fucking sassy.
• You will note that the third option for dealing with the Page does not cost a Willpower. If it weren't for your Aura of Swords, I would have just continued with the night, under the principle of engaging with everything straightforward to engage with, but now there's a choice about what resource to spend and what Supernal to gain, making it no longer straightforward.
• Because I know how Sufficient Velocity thinks, don't fret that you've forever lost the three Trumps from the Shrine. There are other ways to get them, you have to actively try to lock yourself out of possibilities in this quest. You missed out on a bonus rather than failing to take an intended path.