I Walk in Dreams -- An Esoteric Journey Quest

After facing your first peril, you woke up feeling fundamentally and deeply wrong. After facing your second, you woke up feeling horrified as you processed everything that had happened and everything you had risked.

After facing your third, you wake up in agony.

It is so, so much worse than the headache you had after your first night on the Ascent. Your bones feel like they have lava instead of marrow, and icy knives dance over your skin, and your head is in a vise.

You can't make your way to the bathroom to sit in the shower like the other night. You can't get up at all. Instead you just curl up, hugging your knees to your chest, and shake.

---

Pain happens to you.

---

After an impossible-to-judge amount of time, the pain has abated enough that you have room in your consciousness for anything else. You haven't vomited, which you are glad for. You are dimly aware of warmth at the small of your back, and eventually your beleaguered neurons identify it as Hana, and that more than anything makes you feel better, and gives you the strength to breathe deeply and let yourself rest more. The world will still be there when the pain goes away.

---

The pain becomes more bearable, and the world is still there.

You manage to sit up, eventually. Cruelly, while this modern era has made it possible to order all sorts of things delivered to your front door, they won't take the important following step of delivering it to where you lie in bed, and so if you want a refreshing sweet drink for morale purposes you will have to shift yourself -- even if they were willing to, your door is locked, so there's no dodging the necessity of getting up and moving around. But eventually you manage to drag yourself to your trusty living-room armchair, which will serve as a staging area while you paw ham-fistedly at your phone through half-open eyes and hope that you pressed the right buttons in the right order to cause iced coffee and a sandwich to eventually appear outside your apartment door.

So. This is what it feels like to get the absolute shit kicked out of you in the dreaming-realm and then return to your body. Can't recommend. And you won that fight.

You manage to fall asleep in the chair, and only the sound of Hana scratching the front door stirs you. "Bad cat," you mumble, "you have a perfectly good scratching post." She gives you an affronted look for reminding her of such a perfectly obvious fact that has no possible bearing on the situation and stalks away, and then you realize that she was probably lured over there by hearing someone in the hall, and an ungainly minute or so later, you have breakfast.

That helps. With the dregs of your iced coffee, you wash down the maximum dose of both Tylenol and Advil, under the reasoning that even if the pain is wholly psychosomatic, the placebo effect of taking painkillers should help, right? Whether by one mode of action or another, about half an hour later you feel about sixty percent of the way toward being a person again, which is honestly pretty good given where you started.

Now that you have room for other sensations besides pain, you notice that the spiritual furnace is, as expected, burning more strongly within you. You don't notice any dramatic changes to your vision, though you think that maybe they're more intense around Hana specifically than they were before. A thought occurs to you: Inanna surely has experience with the Ascent, and she invited you to write to her. Maybe she can give you a better explanation than your books had to offer? You reach for your laptop -- then pause, remembering that you had intended to get a nice fountain pen to write a letter with -- then finish reaching for your laptop, because you don't know a damn thing about fountain pens besides the facts that they exist and are easier on the hand for longform writing than ballpoints, but one thing you know for certain is that the Internet will have opinions on everything you need to know.

---

The Internet has so many opinions.

You learn about papers that are better or worse for fountain pens, which you discover are not the same thing as dip pens. You learn about nib thickness and ink wetness. You learn about cartridges and how to make your own out of non-cartridge inks. You are utterly engrossed by a deep dive into a certain corner of community drama; seeking out gossip to gawk at might not be very spiritually enlightened of you, but you'll say this for it, you did not notice your various aches and pains while you were giving it rapt attention. Only after all that do you think to check if there's a store that sells all this stuff nearby, but as luck would have it, there's one about two miles away. Ubering that distance feels silly, but you're not going to walk it in your state and getting a Zipcar for one trip is even sillier, so after a nap and a shower you feel up to making the adventure. Once back with your haul, you do some practice doodles and such to get the hang of it before writing out a physical letter with fancy ink and paper and sealing the envelope with colored wax, which honestly does more to make you feel like a wizard than all the literal magic you've been practicing.

You're not about to resume your wise-dreaming while feeling this bad, so you spend the next few days resting and recuperating. Even when the pain is mostly gone, your energy levels are low, so following the same principles as when getting over the flu, you take it easy and sleep a lot. Hana offers professional criticism regarding this endeavor (headbutts, meowing) to which you respond with dignity (scritches, throwing a squeaky mouse across the room). You stay in touch with the people you've been talking to, of course, but keep things vague, just saying that you're under the weather but on the mend.

On the third day, though, Idra finally writes back. Bad night dreaming, she writes. Want to talk about it? you write back.

---

"I couldn't fight it," she says, over the video call. What you can see of her living space is basically what you'd expected: Spartan in its functionality, with the main touches of personality being the shelves of occult volumes in the background. "It was... it wasn't dinosaur big, or skyscraper big. It was city big, mountain big. You can't fight that. But I couldn't figure out what else to do, so I ran." She sighs. "After I woke up... I needed to rethink some stuff. I'm still rethinking some stuff. I don't know how to describe it. It wasn't just a scary monster, it was... the scary monster. And I ran from it."

You're not sure what to say, but she's brooding, so you clear your throat. "It sounds like you took an L, and I won't minimize how much that sucks and can rattle you. I get it. But I'm really glad you took the L and didn't get squashed or eaten or whatever."

Idra makes a huffing noise. "Thanks." She shakes her head. "I can't believe you were worried this punk drive-by shooter had gotten me. I mean, I appreciate the concern, but you'd think that after I kicked your ass-"

"Excuse me, I tapped out rather than risk either of us getting hurt-"

"-after I kicked your ass, you'd have more faith in my abilities," she finishes, undaunted. "I'd have his guts for garters, no sweat." She gives you a look. "I still might have to."

You shake your head. "I know. And I don't even think it would have been wrong to finish the job. It's just..." you search for words. "The sense I got, from stuff he said, is that the Ascent didn't go well for him. Maybe he failed and he's bitter, maybe he just didn't like what he found up there, it doesn't matter. He started tearing people down. Fine. That's ample reason to strip him of his power, as much as possible, so he can't hurt anyone else. But I don't think he's all that much more dangerous as a quarter of a sorcerer than he is as zero of a sorcerer, and... I wanted to leave a door open for him. Like, look at the conversation we're having now, having a gripe session after the Ascent proved nastier than expected."

"Are you saying that if I'd taken more of an L but didn't have your email I might have gone psycho and started mugging initiates who barely know their ass from the Ascent?" Idra says. Her words are jocular, but there's some real heat there.

You throw up your hands in frustration. "No! Definitely not, I wasn't saying anything about you. If it's about anyone, it's about me. Not that I'd start hurting people, but I'd do something foolish and self-destructive. Until quite recently, I spent a long time totally unmoored from real human relationships, and it's bad for you. So... maybe now he'll lean into that, and get better."

"Or maybe he'll find people who will enable him in his spite."

You sigh. "Maybe."

---

The talk with Idra eventually wraps up. She's planning to continue her Ascent, once she's certain she's got a handle on things. You wish her the best of fortune.

As for you, on the fifth day you wake up without pain, and going to the gym goes completely fine, and you are eager to get back into things yourself. But the United States Postal Service has a surprise for you, and you sit down and read it. Inanna's calligraphy is effortlessly beautiful, which only ruffles your competitive spirit insofar as it gives you an example of what to shoot for. And she does have interesting things to say about the growing spiritual furnace.

"What you perceive is common among those who have attained the higher reaches of the Ascent. As we rise towards heaven, we face tribulations along the way. Those tribulations challenge us to the utmost, and each one you conquer brings your soul into greater and greater harmony with the divine mysteries, allowing like to call to like. The 'spiritual furnace' is simply the accumulated potential energy of your spirit, growing mightier and burning hotter as it draws nearer and nearer to glory. As you've discovered, that energy can be called upon in various ways. The dream entities you met have techniques for doing so. Those of us who did not attain the highest heights, like me and presumably this Neria of whom you write, find other outlets for that energy, paths of mystical achievement that do not rely on the supernal powers atop the mountains.

But you, my young friend, are still climbing. No one fortunate enough to behold the face of God returns unchanged. Make no mistake: if you continue along your path, then eventually you will be called upon to make of yourself not just a furnace, but that which is tempered within it."

Night after night, you climb higher; night after night, you approach the greater powers of the dream. You may or may not be ready for them, but they draw closer, regardless...
Cards added to the Ascent Deck: V The Hierophant, XVII The Star

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