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I Walk in Dreams -- An Esoteric Journey Quest

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The Third Night -- Part Three
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    • [*] Move on, saying only a few words in passing, or nothing at all: Gain this card as an Aura.
    [*][ASCENT] Keep exploring.

    Tally

    You dither for what seems like a long time, though in truth it must only be a few seconds. There is a fellow occultist before you, struggling to accomplish something dangerous, possibly for bad reasons and possibly for good reasons. Should you trust that he's got this? Should you help him succeed? Should you banish the spirit whose only use is to do harm? Do you have the right to interfere? If you help him bind it and he hurts someone with it, or if you banish it and someone hurts him because he doesn't have it, that's partially on you. But inaction is not morally privileged: do you have the right not to interfere? If he fails at binding it and gets hurt when you could have definitely averted that outcome, that's also partially on you.

    And he's young, that's another thing which adds a wrinkle to it. You have never forgotten how unhappy you felt when you were young and powerless, and how much better you felt once you started having resources you could call your own, ways you could fight back against those who would do you harm. Living in scarcity and fear hollows you out; safety is a basic need. But you don't know that's what he wants it for: you could just be projecting. And just because you were a scared child does not mean that any responsible adult would have let you play with knives: feeling safer is not the same as being safer.

    You stand there. You watch. You think. And, in the end, you elect to do nothing. This young man, and what he does or does not do with the Sicarius he does or does not bind, will not be part of your story. You go back, and find another corridor, and walk on.

    You wish you knew whether to wish him well.


    FIVE OF WANDS

    After navigating a maze of corridors, you ascend a staircase into a guard-house and depart through the rear gates of the stronghold, following the path up the hill. However, your hopes of a nice clean ascent are dashed, as instead of leading to another hill to climb, or a way up the larger mountains, it leads straight down the other side of the hill and veers into yet another cave. Wonderful. You know that progress along the Ascent is not literally tied to how high you appear to get during the climb before -- it scarcely could be, given that location is inconsistent and you don't appear one night where you left off the previous -- but it still feels bad to be directed down when you want to go up.

    Your bad feeling intensifies when, after a few minutes of walking, you enter an enormous cavern lit by thousands upon thousands of candles floating atop the massive pool of water that dominates the space. Near the banks of the lake is a shrine, the altar of which stands proudly, illuminated by the sacred radiance of the chamber, unmixed with the light of the sky.

    The Shrine of the Word Unveiled. A place of veneration for the blessed powers who know certain hidden words, which contain within them the highest truths of the supernal. Some dreamers have names for some of those powers: Thoth, Odin, St. Jerome. 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 Insight or Aura of the suit of Wands: Add this card to your Pneuma. Search the Unseen for any one of the following cards -- II The High Priestess, V The Hierophant, IX The Hermit -- and shuffle it into the Ascent Deck. You cannot pay the costs associated with this option!

    You know it as soon as you look upon it, without needing to find the gilt letters etched into the wood. You sigh heavily. Your previous night, in the cartographers' hall, you had specifically sought to avoid this place, once you deciphered that it lay in your path. You didn't possess a suitable offering with which to honor the powers of divine understanding, nothing that demonstrated your commitment to the course of wisdom. You had hoped to find one, but you haven't, and fate, or the hidden machinations of whatever wills are at work in the dreaming-realm, or sheer bad luck, has conspired to put the Shrine in your path again, and so you must continue on your journey, leaving it behind.

    You take a moment, first, to bow your head and contemplate it anyway. You do want to understand. It's why you started climbing in the first place. And some Socratic part of you thinks that your awareness of your own ignorance is the sort of offering worthy of being made in this place, even if it isn't adequate temptation with which to draw a greater power of the dream closer to you.

    Then, without a backwards look, you move on.


    SIX OF CUPS

    When you finally emerge from the tunnel through the mountain, you're at sea level, white-capped breakers crashing in. You sigh and start walking along the shoreline, keeping an eye out for the first mountain or hill or even ridgeline that looks at all climbable. Even if this place is weird and works by weird rules and maybe there can be seas high up above the lowlands, it still feels wrong.

    As a result of your focus on matters on the land, it takes a while before you notice the mermaids.

    In fairness, even if you had been watching the sea more avidly, they're not easy to spot. From a distance, their fins and tails above the surface just look like sharks or dolphins. They're singing, of course, but it's hard to hear over the sound of the waves unless you know what to listen for, and even then it's muffled and distorted. But a momentary climb atop a sand dune gives you a better view out to the horizon, and you notice a peculiar color to the water, and then a number of things click in your mind in rapid succession. Once you've recognized the Silver Sea, it does not take much more work to recognize its most famous denizens for what they are.

    The sirens of the Silver Sea offer knowledge of the future. And they have knowledge of the future. They can prophesy truly, if they want, if they like you enough. It is within their power to grant wisdom rather than death. That's how they get you. But you could make an efficacious appeal to them for mercy and knowledge, you think. You could bargain with them, if you spent the time and energy to do so.

    You hear the mermaids singing, each to each. You wonder if they will sing to you.

    [] Take a breath, and move on: Gain this card as an Aura.
    [] Spend 1 Willpower and one Supernal resource or Aura of any suit: Add this card to your Pneuma. Look at the top two cards of the Ascent Deck; you may put either or both of them on the top or bottom of the deck in the order of your choice.
    -[] Write-in what Aura or Supernal resource to expend

    [][ASCENT] Keep exploring.
    [][ASCENT] Wake up, ending the Night.


    Decks and Resources: Character Sheet
    Night-specific information: 4/max 6 Explorations, Swords Aura, Wands Aura
    • Technically I should have stopped and called for a vote after the Five of Wands for whether you wanted to keep exploring, but I elected not to because the previous update's vote had been pretty decisive in favor of continuing and nothing has really changed: you didn't spend any resources, you just gained an Aura which if anything makes continuing more appealing. So in the interest of having better pacing, I fiated; if you really wish I hadn't done so, please let me know so I can adjust my future behavior.
    • Just like last time, if there's consensus in favor of the "scry 2" option, I'll close the vote earlier than I normally would, look at the next two cards, and start a new vote to resolve the effect, in the interest of keeping things moving. That new vote will also have the keep going/wake up vote so you can make an informed choice about it, per @Wiadi's excellent suggestion last time.
     
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    • The Third Night -- Part Four
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    • [*] Spend 1 Willpower and one Supernal resource or Aura of any suit: Add this card to your Pneuma. Look at the top two cards of the Ascent Deck; you may put either or both of them on the top or bottom of the deck in the order of your choice.
    -[*] Swords Aura
    [*] Empress on the top of the deck, Three of Wands on the bottom.

    [*][ASCENT] Keep exploring.

    Tally and tally

    While you take some time to think about it, ultimately, your curiosity gets the best of you -- perhaps unsurprisingly, given that your curiosity is a large part of what motivates your time in this realm to begin with. There are some things you're interested in seeing, and there are some things you're interested in avoiding, and the sirens can help you, if you appeal to them properly, which you think you can.

    You switch from looking for paths higher up the land to your right to looking for paths further out on the sea to your left. After a bit more walking, you espy a rocky shoal that looks promising. You walk out as far as it goes, then take off your shoes and walk a bit father. The water is calf-deep, but the waves reach your thighs. It's uncomfortable, but better to be uncomfortable than to be rude. You cup your hands around your mouth and call out: "Sirens of the Silver Sea! I, an aspirant on my Ascent, seek your wisdom!"

    Out in the deeper water, the forms you see pause briefly, then as one turn and begin to swim towards you. Your hindbrain registers a severe objection to seeing multiple large fins headed your way and suggests you run the hell away; you thank it for its contribution but inform it that you'll be sticking with the original plan. You don't have long to feel dread, though, because the sirens swim swiftly and soon they are there, right in front of you, upper bodies breaking above the surface of the water. There are four of them, each of them uniquely and impossibly beautiful, like four masterful statues in marble or bronze or basalt. You do your best not to stare; showing weakness here would be unwise.

    "And why should we sing truth-songs to you, little dreamer?" one asks. "Why should we not return to our sport, and let you fumble along the Ascent guided only by the nothing-song that haunts your steps?"

    "And even if we sing for you," another continues, "why should we not simply sing you a luring-song?" She doesn't state what would happen after that; she doesn't need to.

    You swallow, your mouth very dry, and answer. You're no Frank, but you do your best to match their diction. "Fair sirens, my ambitions are great. Though only a wise-dreamer for a few months, I embarked upon my Ascent in the hopes of unraveling the truths underlying the dreaming-realm. All my life I have sought to gain and keep control over my own fate, and knowledge is the best way I know of to accomplish that. So I come to you, for foreknowledge of what lies in my path if I continue as I have been, so that my will might more truly guide my steps." You pause, thinking about how to phrase this next. "Recently, I encountered another dreamer. He was doing something dangerous, for good or for ill reasons I knew not. So I did not act, because without knowledge I couldn't discern whether his will was worth help or hindrance, and so let him be, according to his own will."

    "Prettily spoken," a mermaid says. Her tail twitches idly in the water, reminding you uncomfortably of Hana's.

    "Entertaining, if nothing else," muses the last. "A knowledge-seeker, and one who reaches high. Tell us, dreamer, what is it you hope for, from our prophecies?"

    You'll take the openings you can get. "I am hoping to seek out greater entities of the dream, for I have never met one and I am curious." You figure being straightforwardly honest is probably a good policy, here. "And I hope to avoid distractions of the sort that would take active effort to drive away, for I do not wish to spend the effort."

    "Oh. Is that all?"

    "What a humble aspirant we have found today."

    "Bold, too, to seek out the Great Ones."

    "We shall oblige you, fair-speaker." Her smile is unsettlingly toothy. "May you gain much joy of it." Before you have the chance to feel properly apprehensive about that, the sirens tip their heads back and began to sing in unison, and you are transported-

    The song is lovely, lovely beyond your imagination, and grows lovelier by the moment, and it is only the fact that you don't feel more of your body enter the water that lets you dimly recognize that this isn't a luring-song, though surely it could be if they wanted-

    And through some combination of words and music and magic you feel like you can actually     see what it is they prophesy: there is a great dense wood, the song shows you, not far from here, and a path that leads up to it, and within that wood dwells Mother Ancient, who is their mother and your mother and everyone's mother-

    (And something inside you hears that and trembles, but you have sought to meet with a greater dreaming-entity and here one is...)

    And of what shall come from meeting with Mother Ancient they will not sing, but after a descant the song turns merry and bright, telling you of a clearing in which lurks an Amanuensis, who will find you a dreamer of interest and seek to follow you and not be easily stymied from doing so, but it is the simplest thing in the world to choose a different path and avoid it-

    And then the song is over, leaving you gasping and disorientedly falling backwards, landing on your hands and rear in the shallow water. You eye the mermaids in the water around you from your new vantage point, but they seem disinclined to rush in and devour you, so after a moment to collect yourself you rise to your feet with all the dignity you can muster, and then bow deeply. "Thank you for your aid."

    They make no response but to laugh, their voices harmonizing like a set of fine knives, and then swim away.

    You take a deep breath, turning towards the shore, and begin the slow process of wading back.


    III THE EMPRESS

    This is the forest primeval.

    If you did not know what lay within it, you would on no accounts have stepped into it. It is ancient, trackless, and eerily quiet. Even the faint traces of the Tragoudion go silent, and all you can hear is your own breathing and the blood pounding in your ears when you exert yourself. But there does not seem to be any actual danger in it, so you do your best to recollect the images the sirens' song put into your mind and find your way.

    And then, suddenly, the trees open up before you, and you are in a clearing, and you behold her, and she speaks to you, for of course she knew you were coming (how could she not be mindful of her children?).

    "Oh, poor thing. My poor thing. Do you remember what it is to be little?"

    Mother Ancient is huge and primordial: something like a woman, and something like an ape, and something like a kind of animal for which you have no name. She is all long-furred swells of softness. Her vast arms could enfold you like a baby. You can see, from how her enormous hands rest cupped on the soil, that she yearns to do just that, but she stays seated where she is.

    She smells of honeysuckle and dew. All around her seat, the creepers grow thick and wild.

    "In the beginning, it is all so simple. Desire always takes the same shape. You want to be warm. You want a belly full of sweet milk. You want someone infinitely strong, and infinitely gentle, to hold you and rock you to sleep. What else could you want? What else could there be?

    "But the world is cruel, and sometimes warmth or milk or mother isn't there. So you grow, to meet the lack. You develop plans and powers. You learn to explore. And in the learning, and the exploring -- you hook your mind onto strange things. You find new desires.

    "It's all vanity. It's all just a way to cope with being cold and hungry and scared and alone. People try so hard, they spend their lives in such strivings, and what difference does it make in the end, which satisfaction-game you decided to play, and whether you won or lost?

    "You haven't been a baby in a long time. There is so little I can do for you now, my poor thing. But if you want: I can hold you close, and rock you, and you can let it all drift away for a bit. For a little while, everything will be all right. And in the morning, everything you carried with you will still be there."

    There is a large part of you that wants very very much to say yes to this. There is a large part of you that wants to run screaming and crying from this place. You suppress the latter impulse ruthlessly: no matter how badly this strikes at your heart, outright offending one of the mighty spirits of the dream is deeply unwise. But you need not let her mother you. You need not let anyone.

    How do you choose to interact with Mother Ancient?

    [] Spend 1 Willpower, talking to Mother Ancient about comfort and memory without letting her hold you: Add this card to your Pneuma.
    [] Spend 1 Willpower, letting Mother Ancient rock you to sleep: Add this card to your Pneuma. Immediately end the Night without discarding your Auras; they will return to play as Auras at the start of the next Night.

    [][ASCENT] Keep exploring.
    [][ASCENT] Wake up, ending the Night.


    Decks and Resources: Character Sheet
    Night-specific information: 5/max 6 Explorations, Wands Aura
    • Congratulations on meeting your first Major Arcanum, that was pretty fast.
    • Obviously the Ascent vote is only relevant if you pick the first option on the Empress itself; if you pick to be rocked to sleep, the Night ends regardless of the outcome of the Ascent vote.
    • You see now another part of why I don't put Auras into Lost until they're actually used up.
    • One day I swear I will learn how to shut the fuck up but until that distant day you get a thousand words about how sirens are beautiful and terrifying.
     
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    • The Third Night's End; The Third Day
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    • [*] Spend 1 Willpower, letting Mother Ancient rock you to sleep: Add this card to your Pneuma. Immediately end the Night without discarding your Auras; they will return to play as Auras at the start of the next Night.

    Tally

    You take one step forward, then another. Mother Ancient does not stir; she remains seated where you found her. Bit by bit, you walk towards her, until you're in arm's reach.

    (Your arms, not hers. You were within her reach a while before that. But she did not assert it.)

    You reach out a hand and rest it on her knee, looking up at her. She is warm and yielding, and her fur is incredibly soft. It's hard to judge size while she's sitting -- her proportions are not quite human -- but you'd estimate her standing height at between fifteen and twenty feet tall. Probably closer to twenty than fifteen. You've never seen a giraffe up close, but you think she could look one in the eye, were she standing; but, of course, they are all slender awkward construction, whereas Mother Ancient's immensity never had to be evolved, or hold any respect for the square-cube law. She simply is, and has been for a very long time.

    You break the silence. "I have... difficulty with this."

    "I know," she says. Her voice is no louder than before, but up close its power is tremendous, and with your hand on her knee you can feel the vibrations.

    "My mother," you say, "is an incredibly controlling woman, to whom appearances are everything, who fills her life with lies, and whose children are accessories for her own aggrandizement and weapons to be wielded at... whoever, really. Sometimes my father, sometimes each other." You had meant to keep your voice even. You were not successful.

    "I know," she says. "But there were times, when you were very small, when none of those wounds had yet been dealt, and all you knew of her was the supreme source of comfort, and she held you close for as long as you needed, and then for as long as she needed beyond that."

    Your head snaps up to look her in the face as you spit out, "Like any of that can possibly justify or make up for fucking years of-"

    "No, no, no," she interrupts. Her voice is lower now. Gentler. Soothing. Despite everything, you find yourself soothed, and quiet down. "You misunderstand me, child. I am not trying to tell you what your mother is. I am trying to tell you what I am."

    You consider that. But- "I am not a child."

    "Part of you is," she says, and you cannot really argue the point. "There is no shame, in letting that part have what it wants. There are no witnesses in my forest, who might perceive as weakness the desire to be comforted. I do not permit them. I want as few barriers between me and my children's sincere desires as possible."

    Well. When she puts it like that. Hesitantly, you close the last gap between the two of you, and place your other hand on her knee. With a small effort you hoist yourself up, until you are resting on her thigh, and then pause, unsure of how to proceed. Mother Ancient solves your dilemma: now those great hands move, scooping you up with practiced grace and drawing you close to rest against her body, cradled in her enormous arms. It is the coziest and most comfortable you can ever recall being.

    Everything from the night crashes in on you at once -- the visions in the Vaults of Innocence, the boy trying to bind a terrible power, the disappointment of the Shrine, the terror of facing down the sirens, the vulnerability of meeting Mother Ancient -- and you are terribly, terribly exhausted. You can't keep your eyes open, nor can you resist snuggling in closer to her, the way you have snuggled into so many luxurious hotel beds after draining days. You feel more than hear her saying, "Shhh. That's right. Rest. I've got you."

    HERE ENDS
    YOUR THIRD NIGHT    ​


    You wake up slowly, comfortably, like walking up a gently-sloping grassy hill until you finally reach the top and feel the sunshine on your skin and the wind in your hair. You feel great. It is the best night's sleep you can remember ever having in your life.

    And, to top it all off, Hana is lying on your stomach, purring. You reach down to pet her, moving slowly and carefully to not startle her, as behooves a large being trying to be kind to a smaller one. Your fingers make contact with her fur, and then your palm does, and you stroke her gently. "Hey there," you say quietly. "How are you doing?"

    In response, she pushes her head against your hand, basically petting herself on you. OK, well, apparently you are a buffoon who can't be trusted with the all-important task of giving her pets and so she has to handle everything herself, but this is fine. You let yourself be a petting implement while your mind wanders, chewing over the events of the night. You went on an expedition and found yourself proven delightfully wrong. You passed up the opportunity to meet another occultist because you did not want to interfere in his path. You have met your first greater dreaming-entity, and all she wanted was to cuddle you.

    OK, no, that's not fair. It's easy to cast Mother Ancient in dismissive terms. But she loomed. Not just physically, but spiritually. The other beings you met were all entities out of stories or myths or bestiaries: the sorts of things that you'd pack in, dozens to the volume, to catalog and discuss and record as things of interest. Mother Ancient felt like something out of the depths of your own soul: you can't imagine an occult text dispassionately listing her next to others of her kind. She deserves a book of her own, or books.

    Are all of the Great Ones, as the sirens called them, like that? If so, you can see why it is that the grimoires you've read touch extremely lightly on them. They're... weighty. You don't feel like you'd be able to talk about Mother Ancient in any but the crudest terms without being uncomfortably self-revealing.

    Your musing on the nature of the dreaming-realm is interrupted by Hana suddenly pressing down harder on your stomach and then leaping off. Enough petting for now, it seemed. Judging by the direction she was headed and the sounds that ensue, time for breakfast.

    "You said it, girl," you mutter, climbing out of bed and padding kitchenwards.


    You don't head out into the city today. You consider doing so, but your mind keeps wandering back to the dreamwalk of the night prior, which is unusually vivid in your memory. Even the Shrine, which you had expected to fade away with the other paths not taken, burns clear and bright in your mind's eye, lit by a hundred hundred candles. Rather than return entirely from your journey, you feel as if one of your feet is still in the dreaming-realm, like if you just closed your eyes you might step there easily.

    You know, or at least strongly suspect, that this is an effect of the Ancient Mother. You suppose you're grateful that the memories have not disappeared like mundane dreams; there is power in the dream, even when you don't claim it and make it yours. But nonetheless... you're not entirely confident that the effect will not pop like a soap bubble when confronted with too much reality. So you'll stay inside today, and read, and play with your cat, and maybe find some light entertainment online, and then dream again tonight before whatever she's done loses its power.

    So you do that. It's an advantage of not having to answer to anyone, be it domestic partner or workplace boss, that you can just stay in all day if it suits you to do so. One day you'll have to get another job (assuming you're still living in the world then, you can't help but think), but for now you are still wholly your own master.

    Well. Not wholly. There is, after all, a cat.

    In between fending off attempts from her to hunt your toes (it was cute once, and then the claws and teeth came out and nope), you keep up with your correspondence. Nothing new from Idra, but Jagoda has responded to your guestbook message of the other day. She updated her website and wants to make sure you see it: there's some new art, including a piece that is incredibly obviously of the two of you under the cloud of butterflies, and a poem about meeting a wise mage who showed her the Gates of Horn and Ivory, through which true dreams and false dreams pass.

    Her mom liked them a lot, she mentions. You have complicated feelings about that.

    The day seems simultaneously to crawl by like a caterpillar and to disappear in great swathes of lost time. Finally/suddenly, it is time to sleep again.

    You have met your first greater power of the dream. You know it won't be your last. You wonder what marks the next one will leave on your soul.

    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: The Eight of Swords, the Eight of Wands, the Eight of Pentacles, the Eight of Cups, II The High Priestess, XV The Devil, XIX The Sun

    [] No change to Aspiration
    [] Write-in a new Aspiration, which must begin with "I aspire to" and include the Aspiration's suit in parentheses


    Happy one month to the quest. In one month we have done twenty updates, for a schedule of approximately two days in three. That's honestly way better than I was expecting going into this, and I hope folks like the pace.

    Let's see how far you go in another month.
     
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    • The Fourth Night -- Part One
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    • [*] No change to Aspiration

    Tally

    You open your eyes in a world where the colors are finally right and the landscapes reassuringly normal. Or, wait, no, that's not it, that was the waking world, and the dreaming-realm is the strange one. Right? You stagger a bit, disoriented by how disoriented you aren't. It's like the previous night's dreamwalk never really ended: like your day spent awake was the ephemeral dream. Certainly you can feel the untapped power of the Shrine of the Word Unveiled thrumming within you, as though you had just been there and chosen to walk away.

    You had felt part of this while you were awake, and now that you're back in the dreaming-realm, you feel the other half of the Ancient Mother's blessing. You fell asleep in her arms, and now you have woken up.

    Not that you're in her arms anymore, or anywhere you recognize, but you're used to that by now. You're in a rockier, more rugged region of foothills, abutting one of the great peaks that had been so distant for so long. Your breath catches as you stare up at it, drinking in the sight of the winding paths, the mysterious structures, the clouds obscuring everything past a certain height. You're getting closer. You've seen a great deal of what the lower areas of the dreaming-realm have to offer; last night, you finally met one of the greater powers and felt the mark she left on you. You're actually doing this.

    (You wonder, briefly, what is it that makes you special. Not everyone seeks out the Ascent. Not everyone who seeks it out gets this far. You're not done yet, not even close -- you still haven't even touched the deeper mysteries -- but still, you have done much and confronted a lot and are still climbing. Not everyone gets struck down by perils: some simply give up. Why you, and not them?)

    Well. You aren't going to get answers to those questions, or to any other, by staying here. The key to the mysteries is further up and further in. (You hope.) You look around, figure out a likely-seeming route that takes you in approximately the right direction, and get going.


    EIGHT OF SWORDS

    You're not lost. You're not. You are exploring.

    After picking your way carefully across the scree and around various boulders, you found yourself led to a... palace, or manor, or something, at the foot of a slope. You have been lost inside exploring it for some time. The hallways twist back and forth in ways that should intersect with themselves or each other but don't, the rooms have windows and balconies that look out onto vistas that are not where you were, and you've climbed enough staircases to be, by your rough estimate, about twice as high as the roof. The Escherian nightmare aesthetic was neat at first, but it's honestly grown a little boring by this point, especially given how completely deserted the place is. If you have no ability to make a mental map, you're forced to simply open doors and see what happens.

    Granted, the actual contents of the rooms has been very neat. There have been all sorts of strange objects and treasures within them: orreries of strange and beautiful metals, clockwork automata, musical instruments that play themselves when you draw near... it's a shame they were all too large to be moved, or else affixed to the floor or furniture, or else you would have quickly made yourself a stash of amazing objects like Frank's. Every room is different, so while the process of... exploring... is tedious, the results have at least been engaging. At the moment, you're working your way down a long hallway; you're opening all the doors on one side, then the door at the end, then you'll open all the doors on the other side and work your way back.

    However, your algorithm is interrupted by the door at the end of the hallway. It leads you to a peculiar chamber, wrought from white stone. At first glance, it's hardly worth the effort: there's barely anything in it, apart from a silver mirror hanging on the far wall.

    Still, you walk in and look around. As you do, you catch sight of your reflection in the glass, then swing back to look more closely when you realize something: it isn't a true reflection. That isn't you. Not the you that you know. It doesn't quite move in sync with you, and -- little details are wrong. But it's a you that you can imagine being you. A you that might have been, had circumstances been different.

    It's profoundly fascinating: it would be very hard to pull yourself away. But you can look intently into the mirror, and perhaps learn something about paths not taken.

    [] Spend one of any Supernal resource or Lose two cards from your Pneuma: Gain this card as an Aura.
    -[] Write-in what Supernal resource you will spend or what cards you will Lose
    [] Spend one Willpower: Add this card to your Pneuma. Gain one Supernal Experience. Search the Ascent Deck and the Unseen for XI Justice and put it on top of the Ascent Deck. You must immediately Explore again; you may not end the Night.

    [][ASCENT] Keep exploring.
    [][ASCENT] Wake up, ending the Night.


    Decks and Resources: Character Sheet
    Night-specific information: 1/max 6 Explorations, Wands Aura

    As with Mother Ancient, the card's effect trumps the [ASCENT] vote; if the second option is chosen, the results of the [ASCENT] vote will be ignored.
     
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    • The Fourth Night -- Part Two
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    • [*] Spend one Willpower: Add this card to your Pneuma. Gain one Supernal Experience. Search the Ascent Deck and the Unseen for XI Justice and put it on top of the Ascent Deck. You must immediately Explore again; you may not end the Night.

    Tally

    You gaze into your reflection. Your reflection gazes also into you.


    XI JUSTICE

    Then it leans forward, gripping the sides of the frame, and as you recoil in surprise it steps out of the mirror.

    It is -- they are -- distinct from the real you in many ways. The clothes are different. The expression is different. The little mannerisms are different -- some of them, at least. This is a character from a different story, a version of you with a different history.

    You realize, after a moment, what part of that difference is from the face you see in the bathroom mirror every day. They look happier.

    "You could have been me," says your reflection. "I could have been real. I could have scaled the Ascent and chased my most glorious dreams. Instead I am less than nothing. A trick of the light, an image in glass."

    You cut them off, because you see where this is going. "Let me guess. You're the ambitions I cast off? The version of me that stuck around in consulting and kept kicking ass and taking names, and now seeks new worlds to conquer?"

    They throw back their head and laugh. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? To be confronted by an incarnation of the parts of yourself you already decided to forsake? Then you could ignore me with a clear conscience and move on, feeling righteous. No, Ash. I'm the version of you that quit sooner."

    Your heart freezes in your chest.

    They keep talking, each word a hammerblow. "I'm the version of you that saw what this was costing and prioritized appropriately. I'm the version that stood up with Zach when he and Nikki got married after graduation, and stood up with Christine when she got married, and has a weekly game night with Justin and some local friends we made, because I'm the one who actually cared. I'm a godparent, too, because they don't just want me in their lives, they want me in their kids' lives. Like, yeah, I probably don't have as much money or free time as you do, I have a much lower-powered career path now, but I think we both know who is richer."

    "Listen, mirror-Ash," you begin feebly.

    They shake their head. "Not Ash. I figured that out sooner, too, with the support of our friends. And seriously, Ash? Did just naming yourself 'Burnout' feel too on-the-nose? I'm Rowan."

    "And you are... this." Rowan looks you up and down, and the contempt is like a knife-wound. "This is what you have made yourself. This is what you have done with the gift of existence."

    "I think we should exchange places. I think I'd make much more of reality."

    They step forward, maybe to attack you, maybe to embrace you, and you're not sure that there's a real difference...

    This is a great trial of the Ascent.
    A terror of the dreaming-realm threatens to destroy you.    ​

    Claim Victory

    [] Stand, fight, and win. Prove that your own history has made you stronger than this might-have-been.
    -[] Write-in spent resources totaling four Swords Power, plus one additional Swords Power for each Triumphant Initiation you have

    [] Believe, truly believe, in the inescapable reality of your consciousness and your perceptions. How could a might-have-been really matter?
    -[] Write-in spent resources totaling four Pentacles Power, plus one additional Pentacles Power for each Triumphant Initiation you have

    The following section has been added to the Mechanics threadmark, but is being reproduced here for ease of reference:
    Power
    Certain cards will require you to spend a certain amount of Power in order to achieve certain favorable outcomes. Power is always associated with a specific suit. Each of the following actions gains you one Power:
    • Losing a card of that suit, or a trump, from your Pneuma
    • Losing an Aura of that suit, or a trump Aura
    • Spending one Supernal associated with that suit
    Accept Defeat

    [] You escape, but are scarred. You cannot remain as you were. Lose the Ace associated with your Aspiration. Immediately write a new Aspiration, associated with a different Ace still in your Pneuma.
    -[] Write-in a new Aspiration, which must begin "I aspire to" and be associated with Swords, Pentacles, or Cups

    [] End the quest in Tormented Finale: The Other Side of the Mirror.

    If you won:
    • Gain one Triumphant Initiation.
    • If you have at least two Triumphant Initiations, search the Unseen for any one of the following cards -- VI The Lovers, X Wheel of Fortune, XX Judgement -- and shuffle it into the Ascent Deck.
    Win or lose:
    • Lose this card.
    • Immediately end the Night.

    Decks and Resources: Character Sheet
    Night-specific information: 2/max 6 Explorations, Wands Aura
    • We've been talking a big game about perils all quest long. Meet your first.
    • You currently have zero Triumphant Initiations, so the cost of victory here is four Power.
    • I look forward to seeing what the analytical posters can deduce about the overall game structure as a result of tonight.
    • Important point: Losing a card from your Pneuma in order to gain Power for a challenge should not be understood as blowing up that card. If you, for example, spend your Knight of Pentacles to win here, you will not lose Frank as a friend or forget about him or anything like that. Rather, Losing cards here should be understood as tapping into the experience you had with that particular card, the lessons it taught you or the power it bears, to overcome the challenge.
     
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    • The Fourth Night's End
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    • [*] Believe, truly believe, in the inescapable reality of your consciousness and your perceptions. How could a might-have-been really matter?
    -[*] 1 Supernal Experience, Three, Six and Knight of Pentacles

    Tally

    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.

    HERE ENDS
    YOUR FOURTH NIGHT    ​

    • 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.
     
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    • The Fourth Day -- Part One
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    • 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."
     
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    • The Fourth Day's End
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    • [*] Reach out to lost friends from the past
    [*] Reach out to people from your dreams

    (Secondary priority)
    [*] Start working out

    Tally

    You stare for a moment at the sky, then back at your living room. Now that you're really looking for it, and the light is brighter, the same effect is present: it's not just a product of the sun. You pinch yourself, then when that does nothing you slap yourself as hard as you can make yourself do so.

    Maybe it's because facing the peril kicked you out of the dream rather than you leaving it normally? You force yourself to sit down and assume a meditative position, then when your mind is some sort of first approximation of ordered you perform the exercise of "tugging" on your connection to your physical body, the same way you always end your dreamwalks so you can wake up. You've had enough practice at this that you don't need the meditative position or the incantations or the visualizations, you can just do it reflexively, but just for the sake of verification you go through all the steps like a raw beginner. Twice. Then, when you're certain you're awake and not still in the dream, and that your soul is as seated in its body as it's ever going to be, you let your eyes drift open placidly and, with contemplative serenity suffusing every corner of your being, gaze out the window in calm acceptance of whatever the universe has to show you.

    The colors are still there. Mother of fuck-

    Okay. Okay. Spiritual tranquility. You aren't still in the dream, you aren't incompletely returned to the physical world... you probably aren't hallucinating, though you did wake up under kind of a lot of stress and haven't had enough sleep and come to think of it you haven't actually eaten food yet, so you're probably not at your best physically and pulling yourself together a bit would be wise. What are other hypotheses?

    You frown as a thought occurs to you. There was that line in the book about impurity, and your suspicion about what it is that perils do. Is this part of what that writer meant by purity? Come to think of it, your old buddy Zev ben Avram talked about "seeing with the eyes that look beyond the world" -- you thought it was a metaphor, but maybe it was more literal than that? This is the problem with occultists, everything that seems straightforward is a metaphor and everything important has to be wrapped in several layers of symbolic ellipsid so that only sufficiently wise people get it.

    Right. You're not going to worry about it now. If it goes away after you take better care of yourself, great. If it doesn't, then you'll tentatively chalk it up as part and parcel with the... you're going to need a name for it other than "not-heartburn." The spiritual furnace? Overdramatic, but good enough for now.

    You climb to your feet and head to the kitchen. Breakfast before other things.


    After breakfast, you return your thoughts to the question of what, exactly, you intend to do with yourself. Yes, you expect that your progress on the Ascent will change you and/or your priorities, but you've got to do something with your days if you're going to keep existing within the world at all. And you're not above taking advice from a magically-manifested fragment of yourself: you're really fucking lonely, and as much as Hana has been a joy and a comfort in the less than a week you've had her, the presence of an animal, no matter how small and fuzzy and good, is not actually a replacement for the society of your fellow humans.

    From now on, you resolve, you're going to more assertively try to get contact information for anyone you meet in the dreaming-realm. You got it for Idra and Jagoda, but not for Aiglan or Frank (though, you suppose, the locket-half could probably be used as a focus for a communication spell when you're in the dream itself). At twenty-eight, it's a lot harder than it was at five to bald-facedly say "hey do you want to be friends" -- but you can try to do more with the contact information you have, try to forge more of a connection than just the casual contact of information-sharing and generic positivity you have going on.

    You sit down and you hammer out some messages to Idra and Jagoda. They are roughly similar -- more discussion of your Ascent, of course, in general terms, going into more detail about the Ascent itself to Idra and more detail into the vistas and places and beings you encountered to Jagoda, but also including more about your life, as gracefully as you can. You describe yourself as "between jobs and living off savings," which seems better than trying to go into that whole painful saga, and talk about moving to Cleveland for the city conveniences and attractions you were accustomed to while being more affordable than the coastal metropolises, which is true albeit incomplete. You mention a little bit how you got started in wise-dreaming, but segue from that into the adoption of Hana. You include a picture of her sprawled out on her side on the carpet, quietly vibing in the midst of a scattered number of her toys. That's how to make friends as an adult, right? You edit a bit and then hit Send before you can talk yourself out of it.

    ...great, now it's time for confronting the actual painful saga. You decide to procrastinate on that: you can't actually fill your days with writing emails, and sending them and then staring at your phone for your notifications to go off is just going to drive you crazier than you already possibly are, so you're going to figure out a fitness program and get started on that first, with what remains of the morning into the afternoon, and write the letters in the evening. It's not cowardice, you tell yourself, it's really the responsible thing to do when you think about it.

    So you dump a few hours into looking up gyms near you (there's a Planet Fitness in walking distance, which seems fine -- sadly your apartment building doesn't have one), reading reviews to see if any non-cis people had reported harassment (didn't seem like it, but you still intend to change and shower at home anyway, at first at least), and looking up beginner guides to put together some sort of workout routine plan. A lot depends on what is actually available at the gym, so you decide to get changed and head over there, sign up, look around, and get started: you'll take it easy, since you're still coming off only a few hours' sleep, but hey, no time like the present for avoiding things you don't want to do.

    Finally, you're home, and you can't delay any more. You've been to the gym, you've signed up, you've worked out, you've showered, you've logged your workout in a little tracking spreadsheet, you've set up pivot tables for the little tracking spreadsheet because you might not be in the business of giving presentations anymore but good dataviz is not something you just set aside, you've eaten dinner... there's nothing else you can persuade yourself you need to do. It's time.

    One at a time. You don't need to reach out to everyone at once. Take it slow. You can handle that, right?

    You write a letter to Zach and Nikki. It is a clumsy, sprawling thing, full of rambling self-recrimination and too much detail about your emotional landscape and way-too-elaborately-constructed references to the good times you had in college, see, we're totally great friends, see? and stories about the things you've been up to that swing wildly between projecting an image of having your shit together and making it clear how desperately lonely you are. You stare at it, then delete it, then think better of deleting it and save it in a notes file so you can strip-mine it for spare parts. Slowly, carefully, you put together a second draft: something much shorter, where you ruthlessly quash your every attempt to hide what the letter is actually about: I'm sorry I treated you like afterthoughts. It was wrong of me. I've changed how I'm approaching life. You're important to me, and I'd like to talk more, if that's OK. Not in those words, but near enough.

    It's still not as good as it could be. You send it anyway. Perfect is the enemy of done.

    Then you turn off notifications on your phone, binge-watch a web series until your physical exertion and lack of sleep catch up with you, and cast yourself into the dreaming-realm once more.

    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: The Queen and King of Swords, the Queen and King of Wands, the Queen and King of Pentacles, the Queen and King of Cups, XVI The Tower

    [] No change to Aspiration
    [] Write-in a new Aspiration, which must begin with "I aspire to" and include the Aspiration's suit in parentheses


    The top two were an obvious place to stop but, like, it doesn't take that long to write emails, so what else can Ash do with their Day? Luckily, the third-place vote had an answer.
     
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    • The Fifth Night -- Part One
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    • [*] No change to Aspiration

    Tally

    This time, when you open your eyes in the dreaming-realm, you have difficulty believing them. You're not in the lowlands anymore, of course, but neither are you in the foothills you have become used to. No, you're on one of the great mountains of the dream. On its lower reaches, to be sure, below the cloud level, where the way is still relatively gentle going, but... you're there. You're climbing towards the summit directly, not just wandering around in a vaguely mountainwards direction.

    There's no guarantee that what you seek will be at the top of this mountain, of course, insofar as "this mountain" is at all a meaningful concept in a realm where geography is more of an art than a science. But you're closer. Bit by bit, you're getting closer.

    On the subject of getting closer, the world around you looks the same as it did when you were last in the dreaming-realm, or at least you aren't noticing any differences. Now that you have the opportunity to pay attention for the sake of contrast, you'd definitely say that the vibrancy of the colors you've been seeing in the waking-world is not as intense as the true palette of dreams. But it definitely feels like your perception of the waking-world is altering to become more in line with the one you have in the dream.

    (Which, of course, suggests the uncomfortable question: is this a change wherein you see things that are not there because you expect to see them, or is this a change wherein you have begun seeing things that were there all along but which you have been heretofore unable to perceive?)

    Questions, questions. Ever the questions. You wish the books you had read as a beginner had had more to say, to give you a better idea of what you were getting into. For that matter, you wish the books you were consulting these days had more to say, because you're stumbling your way through tribulations and changes without a real guide to the Ascent. You play with the notion of writing one yourself when you reach the top; while the idea is extremely intriguing, not least because you are not sure how to translate some of the insights you have had into mere words that will make sense outside your own head, you set it aside for now. You're still driven to understand this place for its own sake: as a child you loved understanding the whys and wherefores of things, and that's no less true as you approach thirty.

    So you set your face toward the mountain-top, and you start hiking.


    XIX THE SUN

    An insight into the nature of the dreaming-realm: hiking up mountains is actually really hard.

    You stop to rest a few times. The slope is relatively gentle, but that just means "a constant walkable incline" instead of "sheer faces of rock you will have to find some way up or else go around." It's hell on your calves, and the wind gusts up every now and then and makes the whole affair rather frightening. You've never been particularly scared of heights, but you think you could be convinced. You eye the rock shelf above you with grim determination: it looks like a fairly broad flat place where you can stop for a longer rest and get your bearings, if you can just make it the few dozen feet there without your legs giving out.

    After a heroic effort that has you resolving to amend your nascent workout routine to include a StairMaster, you reach the shelf and collapse, letting out a relieved sigh. You screw your eyes shut to savor the feeling of relief in your leg muscles, and as such it takes you a little while to hear the scraping and shuffling against rocks, associate that with purposeful movement, and realize you are not alone.

    When you open your eyes, you can see that at the far end of the rock shelf is what looks like... a little kid playing by themself? Did an actual child get into the dreaming-realm somehow? There's a campfire near them: maybe they came with an adult who is off doing something and built them a fire in the meantime? But up here? What?

    You stagger to your bitterly-complaining feet and start walking over to the kid. As you get closer, you call out. "Hey there! Is everything all right?" The child looks up, then looks at you, and that's when you realize your mistake.

    In your defense, he's such an archetypal looking child. You could easily imagine that this kid was the protagonist of a children's book: a perfect little tousle-haired boy. Maybe that should have been a clue: no actual kids look that much like the Idea Of Kid. But, no, you didn't put it together until you got close enough to see his face. His eyes are luminous orbs of molten gold: no sclera, iris, or pupil, just the sheen of metal. Nevertheless, you can somehow tell where he's looking, and specifically when his gaze settles on you.

    The weight of his regard is like a yoke on your shoulders, and it's all you can do to not physically stagger. He is regal, and dignified, and perfectly self-possessed, not despite his childishness but somehow because of it. Then he smiles, and the sheer joy is like the physical impact of a blast front, and you do stagger this time. It seems impossible, when he smiles, that anything really bad could ever happen to him, or that anything might possibly wish him harm. You understand, beholding him, that you must be in the presence of the entity the books referred to only as the Golden Prince.

    (Standing before him, you feel leaden and ashamed about how small and sad you are. You feel as though, if you were better, you would be like him.)

    But he does not turn away from you, or look upon you with pity. He is very earnest and solemn as he speaks.

    "Will you go on an adventure with me? I could go by myself, of course, but -- it's always better to adventure with a friend. Especially a new friend. And so many dreamers like you don't have time for adventures. They're so busy with their important dreaming-work, their Ascent. I suppose the Ascent must be frightfully important indeed. I can't blame them. But I think it's a little bit sad.

    "We could go in any direction you like. There's always something to find, whichever way you go."

    How do you respond?

    [] Spend 1 Willpower, taking a little time here with the Golden Prince before moving on: Add this card to your Pneuma.
    [] Spend 1 Willpower, going on a small adventure with the Golden Prince: Gain the winner of the [ADVENTURE] vote. Add this card to your Pneuma.

    [][ADVENTURE] Supernal Force
    [][ADVENTURE] Supernal Insight
    [][ADVENTURE] Supernal Experience
    [][ADVENTURE] Supernal Connection

    [][ASCENT] Keep exploring.
    [][ASCENT] Wake up, ending the Night.


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    • The Fifth Night -- Part Two
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    • [*] Spend 1 Willpower, going on a small adventure with the Golden Prince: Gain the winner of the [ADVENTURE] vote. Add this card to your Pneuma.
    [*][ADVENTURE] Supernal Insight
    [*][ASCENT] Keep exploring

    Tally

    You don't hesitate for a second. "Sure," you say. "I'd love to go on an adventure with you. The dreaming-realm is beautiful and fascinating, and I'm always happy to see more of it."

    The Golden Prince's face lights up, looking for all the world like an actual little boy who has been cruelly cooped up all day and has just been told that an outing to the park lies in his future. "Hurrah!" he says. Not hooray; hurrah. "Well, if you want to see more of it, shall we go flying? There's no view like the view from above."

    Uh. What? "That sounds good," you say cautiously. "However, I should mention that I can't fly."

    His face falls, and like knives piercing your heart you feel the shame of being the person to deprive the Golden Prince of his joy. "You can't? Have you tried?"

    You shake your head. "When I first started wise-dreaming and learned the basics of air magic, I gave it a shot. They say to practice by a lake, so that when you crash you just get wet instead of hurt. It's good advice." Everyone tries, you've been assured. It doesn't work. Oh, there are stories of great prodigies who soar through the air like dragonflies. But those would be people who reached the very pinnacle of human aerokinesis, and none of the dreamers you met in the lowlands had ever actually seen it for themselves, just heard stories or read about it in books. Which makes sense, since magi of such skill and power would not be in the lowlands with the people who haven't so much set a foot on the Ascent.

    (You realize with a jolt that where you are on the Ascent, you might run into magi of that caliber. It's a bizarre feeling, to consider such a master your spiritual peer.)

    The Golden Prince looks thoughtful for a moment, and then his expression brightens. Literally: his eyes are more radiant than they were. "I know!" He turns away from you, towards the campfire (and now that you're close, there's something strange-looking about it), leans down, and before you can do more than reach out an arm in mute protest he grabs the fire in one hand and swings it up and over his shoulders. Your eyes adjust: it wasn't a campfire at all, there was no fuel being burned. It was just the fire itself, now being worn like a cloak, which had been dropped in a pile on the rock the way a child might discard his jacket on the floor instead of putting it away neatly. He lets it settle, then takes hold of the edge and starts picking at it before looking back to you. "Here!" he says, holding out his hand, on which rests five flaming feathers. "Wear these, and then we can fly together!"

    You accept them cautiously, barely suppressing a wince at expected pain -- but though you can feel their heat, they don't burn you or your possessions, and the heat doesn't actually hurt. Your nerves are just reporting the experience of "this is very hot," wholly decoupled from the experience of pain. It's bizarre, but you table the incredulity for later while you run the quills of the feathers through the buttonholes of your shirt. You undoubtedly look ridiculous, but the Golden Prince is clearly impatient waiting for you to be ready, so you're not going to take more time on it. "Got it. So, how do I-"

    The fire on the Prince's back spreads into a pair of tremendous flaming wings, and with a single beat like the gust of a sirocco, he's rocketing into the air. You gape for a second. Now, how are you supposed to-

    Oh, that's how, you think as you feel a matching set sprout from your back, and with a flex of your will you follow after him.


    You and the Golden Prince fly together for what feels like hours.

    (The analytical part of your mind, which never quite turns off, is absolutely flummoxed by the fact that his magic not only gave you the capability to fly, but the capability to control your flight. Even the great masters from apocryphal stories needed practice, and here you are zipping around like it's nothing. This is utterly beyond anything you've heard of a human practitioner doing, and he did it with casual ease upon a moment's thought. More indication, if you needed it, that the appearance of a human child is deceptive and this is in truth one of the great powers of the dream which has decided to bless you for reasons of its own.)

    (Unless it isn't a deception at all, but a truth being simultaneously hidden and revealed. Food to think over later, but you've been noticing a lot of that sort of thing in the dreaming-realm.)

    You marvel at the land stretched out below you, so like what you saw from the Shrine of Celestial Winds and nonetheless made incredibly different by the lack of any land under your feet. You race the Golden Prince from landmark to landmark, twirl around each other in a burning helix, and perform all sorts of insane maneuvers. You divebomb an omen vulture that you can't swear is "yours" but, since it would be very funny if it were, you choose to believe that its squawk of startlement before you veered off a collision course was familiar.

    One thing you don't do is break through the cloud cover above you. The Golden Prince avoids it, keeping a lower altitude ceiling without comment, and you follow his lead. The last thing you'd want to do is spoil this incredible experience by giving some offense -- or, worse, disrupting whatever magic is keeping you safely alight. But, alas, all good things must come to an end, and this is no exception. You sense it as the feathers go out, one by one. When the last one starts feeling like it wants to dim, you catch the Golden Prince's attention and gesture to the mesa beneath you, then begin to descend. Once you've landed, stumbling as you regain your land legs after impossibly maneuverable and effortless flight, he joins you, far more gracefully. "Do you have to go?" he asks, not quite pouting as he does.

    "I'm afraid so," you say, collecting the four exinguished and one guttering feathers and offering them back to him. "The magic you gave me to fly is running out, and I need to keep up my Ascent. But thank you very much; I've never flown like this before, and I'll never forget it."

    "You're welcome!" he chirps. "Thank you for coming on an adventure with me, Ash. It's more fun with a friend, and it's sad when you don't have anyone to share your adventures with."

    "Yeah," you say, nodding, before you do a double take. "Wait, do you-"

    He vanishes in a puff of smokeless fire. Fucking greater dream-entities, you grumble to yourself, but you can't help but smile as you pick your way across the mesa, your spirits lighter and your mind awhirl.


    FOUR OF PENTACLES

    Not having wings anymore sucks.

    You huff and puff as you make your way across the rocky and uneven terrain. You've had to backtrack several times when your initial approaches turned up without a viable path, and every time just sapped more energy, not to mention morale. Not for the first time tonight, you think about the degree to which your physical fitness is reflected in your dream-self. Is it a true mapping of one to one, where you have a real spiritual analogue of your actual body, or is it just based on what you expect? Or, if you were sufficiently good at altering your unconscious expectations via doublethink or similar cognitive nonsense, could you arrive in the dreaming-realm as an incarnation of strength and endurance, regardless of what your waking reality is like? Marshaling arguments in favor of one hypothesis or the other is a more pleasant use of your attention than what you're doing, so you let that divert you for a while until you are interrupted by a very welcome noise: running water.

    You orient yourself, moving back and forth and listening carefully, until you're confident that you've triangulated a bearing and approximate distance. Then you circle around, finding a traversable route that will lead you in that direction, more or less, and repeat the process until you lay eyes on a large mountain pool, fed by water cascading from above and running off down the slope in a brisk stream, the other side from where you came. There's even flowers sprouting around it, and a little island in the center...

    Your steps slow as you notice that all the flowers are lotuses, and that the "island" is a granite slab of a size fit for an adult to lie down on, and you realize where you are.

    The Ascent is grindingly tiring. All dreams are tiring. One seldom gets the chance to get any real rest while exploring the higher realms. What are you going to do -- sleep while you're asleep?

    That is precisely what you can do, if you lie upon the Bier of Lotuses. Simply wade into the water, lie upon the stone, close your eyes, and: sleep. Dream of a world beyond this dreaming-world, stranger still. It is supposed to be very refreshing, and perhaps instructive. But occultists speak of the Bier of Lotuses in wary tones. Is the other-dreaming-realm a truer dream, or just a dazzling falsehood, and how could you know the difference? When you slumber in a place of such power, how sure can you be that you will be the same when you awaken?

    You consider your options, weariness and wariness at war with one another, curiosity and caution the same.

    [] Take a breath, and move on: Gain this card as an Aura.
    [] Spend 1 Willpower: Add this card to your Pneuma and reveal the top card of the Ascent Deck. If it is a Two, Three, Four, or Five, Lose the winner of the [ANTE] vote from your Pneuma, or gain a Supernal Experience if it is anything else. Then shuffle the revealed card into the Ascent Deck.

    [][ANTE] Write-in a card from your Pneuma
    Remember that you can ante the Four itself.

    [][ASCENT] Keep exploring.
    [][ASCENT] Wake up, ending the Night.


    Decks and Resources: Character Sheet
    Night-specific information: 2/max 6 Explorations
     
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