I Walk in Dreams -- An Esoteric Journey Quest

You think about it. A lot. You knew, intellectually, that what you would find atop the Ascent would be strange and different, something other than what is found in the world. But this -- you're deeply conflicted. It does feel solipsistic, to say that the deepest and most profound emotional relationship in your life is going to be with yourself. It's a turning-inward at a time when so many of your energies are bent on turning outward.

At the same time, though... this isn't a clone. You are not Narcissus, falling in love with your reflection. Rowan was, ultimately, your conscious self, albeit one who had made different choices. This shadow-self is composed of the parts of you that you have hidden from yourself. Parts the world had convinced you that you'd lost, or shouldn't have, or never had in the first place. And it's been very, very hard, these last few weeks, to reach out and engage with others, to present yourself as someone-with-value-and-worthy-of-care, when you have the habit of looking at yourself and turning away in contempt and dismissal.

Well. No more of that. You will be yourself -- you will be all of yourself -- and you will do it without self-hatred. You won't let you.

So you close your eyes and reach into yourself, exploring the bounds of your own soul, and when you reach the boundary of the light at which you would reflexively turn back you instead step forward, into the unlit and forgotten corners, and clasp hands with what you find there. "I love you," you say to it, then draw it up and out, and then do that again, and again, and again, until you have found all the pieces of the other half of your heart and brought them tenderly into the world to be realized, and then you push them into the waking world with a tremendous effort of your power, the power that you have won through boldness and cleverness and trial. Through the course of your Ascent.

You open your eyes. The mountaintop looks the same as it did before and yet completely different, because you have changed. You walk around the boulder, admiring it, and the tree, and the dreaming-realm spread out before you. You sigh. You're going to miss this -- the journey, the climb, the uncertainty of what lies around the next turning of the path. But hunger is meant to be sated, and yearnings are meant to be fulfilled.

Besides. It's not like you're leaving this behind forever. You haven't plumbed every secret; you haven't decoded every mystery; you certainly haven't put any of that into a form that makes sense outside your own head. You have plenty left to do. But, now, you'll have someone to do it with -- and you don't even know what projects and goals and aspirations they might have for which you are the perfectly-suited complementary helpmeet.

You pause in your perambulations as a glint of light off something on the ground catches your eye. You bend down and pick it up.

It's the chain that held Aiglan's locket, which you left as an offering at the Shrine of Celestial Winds on the very first night of your Ascent, honoring the powers of divine passion, returned to you now at the last. You never met the dream-entity that you called forth with your oath and your prayer, and so you hadn't spent much time thinking about it. Has its power limned you, nonetheless? Has your commitment to the course of love been recognized, yet again? Even now, Ascendant though you are, questions multiply shamelessly, dancing outside the limits of your understanding.

You look up at the sky. "I'm going to figure you out, you know," you say conversationally, and then with a well-practiced mental twist you send yourself back spiraling back to your body.

---

You awaken in fuzzy pre-morning light. You've seen a lot of sunrises lately; no knock on them, but you hope that this will be the last you see in a while. Still, you swing yourself out of bed and pad over to the window to admire what rosy-fingered Dawn has done with the sky this morning. It's beautiful. Typical.

You notice, without much in the way of surprise, that the dream-colors that had accentuated your sight as of late are gone. A quick check determines that the spiritual furnace is gone too. That's consonant with what Inanna had written to you, that spiritual potential energy has been building up within you, waiting for... well, for what you just used it on, you suppose. And now that it's served its purpose, it's not burning inside you anymore. You allow yourself a moment to miss it, even though the colors will still be there, in the dreaming-realm.

Besides. There is something else inside you, where the fire used to be. A feeling; an intuition; a sense of direction. You're pretty sure you know what it is, but you're not going to do anything about it right this second because the sun has yet to properly rise and whatever the manifold faults of your upbringing, "lack of manners" was not one of them.

So, instead, you sit and watch the sun come up, and then you take a long shower, and then you have breakfast, and then because it's still far too early in the morning you spend some time playing with Hana before pulling out a brush and going to work on her, a procedure that she possibly loves and possibly hates. Strong feelings are definitely involved, in any event. You give her a treat and then look at the clock. The last time the hours passed this slowly, you were in economy seating on a transatlantic flight and the person in front of you had cranked their chair all the way back from minute one.

Finally, you hit a time you judge civilized enough for your errand and head out the door. You follow your new sense: it takes you the better part of two miles, but it's a pleasant morning and the walk is good for burning off nervous energy. You climb up a house's exterior staircase to a second-floor door, clearly the entrance to a separate apartment, and knock. You hear footsteps from inside, and then the door opens.

"Hey," you say.

---

You introduce your partner to your friends, of course -- virtually, at first, and then in person. Now, after your Ascent, you feel a lot more comfortable making plans beyond a limited horizon, and traveling to visit is a task long overdue in some cases. It's good to see people; it's good to mend those relationships that need mending and solidify those new friendships that you'd like on firmer ground. People give you a hard time, of course, for not mentioning you were seeing someone, but then that fades quickly, because the two of you, well, fit. The dynamic is as natural as breathing; your friends claim that it quickly seems strange to them to imagine a time when you weren't always together.

You find a new equilibrium-of-being. You find a management position at a nonprofit: the pay is less, of course, but they have use for your skills. Project management is project management and balance sheets are balance sheets, and finding ways to ever-more-efficiently convert dollars raised into dollars for your beneficiaries is a task that both challenges your ingenuity and satisfies your soul. There are a few others like you in the ranks, people who took the same sort of path you did from the private sector. It makes you glad, to not be special in this respect. Your partner, perhaps unsurprisingly, is an artist, and becomes great friends with Jagoda. They plan a collaborative project, which you look forward to with great interest.

The two of you practice magic together. The dreaming-realm does not give up its mysteries easily. But you can range over all of it, now; you are Ascendant, a rare distinction, and the dreaming-realm knows its own. Occasionally, dreamers on their own Ascents run into you, just as you once did. The two of you do your best to teach them things, to prepare them for what lies ahead; sometimes, they teach you something. Being on the other end of that is strange, but you accept it with as much grace as others showed you. The humility is good practice for the textbook you're writing together.

There are challenges, of course. Life hasn't stopped being arbitrary and frustrating and difficult just because it's been born anew by magic. But your other half, your heart's wholeness, guides you and comforts you and inspires you, and you do likewise like the matched set you are. Together, you understand so much. Together, you are so brave and wise and strong. You don't feel like a broken thing with missing pieces, because -- you're not, anymore.

You are a couple in the world, living lives like anyone's lives. You eat. You sleep. You stare at screens. You have friends, old and new. You go to work, and museums, and whatever.

But, at night, as you sleep, you blaze with glory.

---

And that was I Walk In Dreams.

Special thanks are in order. First and foremost must be to Warren Tusk, the writer of the solo journaling game off of which this quest is based and a dear friend of mine, for making this game and giving me permission to do this at all. Secondly to my wife, who has been this quest's #1 fan since its inception and who has provided support in the form of beta-reading, deck-management, and "driving while I write an update in the passenger seat" on top of that moral support. And, of course, to you all: everyone who voted, reacted, or simply read the quest. This quest may have stayed pretty little throughout its lifespan, but that made your support all the more precious.

Now, for the shameless plugs. As mentioned, this game draws on the mechanics and text of a solo journaling game: essentially a one-player RPG, where a rulebook gives you instructions about what to do and prompts about what to write in response to the mechanical events that take place. The similarity to the quest format is what gave me the idea to do this in the first place. You can get a copy and play it for $5, if you want to explore it yourself; this quest only saw about half the endings and Trumps, and there are several Minor Arcana you never met at all, so even though you'll be going in with the advantage of structural knowledge, there's still plenty to discover, and of course a non-Ash character may certainly approach the same cards wildly differently. If you think solo journaling sounds awesome but don't want to just run back the same game again, I will strongly recommend the work of @mirror_lock, my best friend, whose work as a game designer is the chief reason why my friend group got into them in the first place. Her game Galatea, in particular, is one I think will resonate with a lot of people here (though it is, alas, less suited for the quest format).

I am happy to field questions people have, though I am going to avoid publicly answering "what does card X do," to avoid spoiling people reading the thread who might want to play the game themselves without more information. And if I ever kick off a new project on SV (such as resurrecting Hellgate Hotel, or writing something else entirely) I will post a link in this thread. But, by and large, this is it, I guess, so: goodbye, and I wish you well, and I'll see you around SV even if I don't in here anymore.

And, once again, thank you very much for the gift of your time and attention. I hope to have treated them with the respect they deserve.