From the moment that Barbades had sent her into the heart of evil to wrest the fragment of The Rod from its grasp, Asha's life had become a trial. She had been victorious, but the cost had been great. The Ytrewtsuite had rent open old wounds that had only just started to heal when he taunted her with nightmare images of her fallen husband. He had probed into her mind and used her every fear and weakness against her. Somehow, likely only through the aid of her god, she had remained staid against his torments, but they had left her raw. She had relived the horrors of her past and looked into the face of her every fear, and her spirit recoiled from the images. One hundred and sixty-five years of life was time enough to come to terms with one's past, to slowly accept it and move on. Three months was a pittance, by comparison.

Of course, it was to this she attributed her nightmares.

The follower of Ytrewtsu had plagued her with nighttime terrors, assailing her when she was both awake and asleep in an attempt to weaken her, to break her. When she at last freed herself from his grasp, for a time, it seemed that the dreams had gone away. Sometimes, on the edges of her memory, she thought she could recall a voice in her sleep that whispered of unsavory things, of horribly seductive things, but she discounted such fancy. Her nerves had been frayed, and she had been thrown into confusion. Surely the voice was but a memory from her time in captivity.

After Glenn had given her the box, however, the nightmares returned. Slowly, but certainly, they returned.

At first, the taint to her dreams was subtle. Everything would be garish, or muted and bleak. Pleasant dreams became dappled with chaos, unrest, and, at times, longing.

Over the course of the months, the intensity grew. Each night when she went to bed, she did not know if she would relive Ellis's death, or her descent into the Abyss. She did not know if it would be one of the few nights in which she was blessed with restful slumber, or if she would be cursed with a twisted image of things she had once cherished. Thoughts of her husband used to bring her joy, if tainted with sorrow.

Now they only brought her grief and terror.

It was supposed to be a quiet evening for the Dreamwalker. Make the rounds of the various dream worlds of the city, check to be sure there were no incubi or succubi or other similar beings out and about, and try to help the poorer and lonelier souls of the city sleep just a little bit easier. It was this charge that brought him to the RhyDin Orphanage after dark, and after a couple of hours spent helping them endure their nightmares, he was ready to call it an evening. Feeling a little more tired than usual from his journeys, the Dreamwalker decided to take a shortcut. Someone was asleep at the church across from the Orphanage, and he figured that the dreams of clergy and holy men would be calmer than those of the orphans. He grasped the knob to the front door of the church and a sensation akin to static electricity enveloped his body. Though the door had been physically locked when he first touched it, the gateway to the realms of perception opened quickly and quietly, as he stepped inside.

***

He immediately realized his folly, as the hellish inferno he encountered made his usual outfit entirely too warm. With a thought, his astral form projected new clothes on his body and obscured the tattoos and scars that normally marred his flesh. His plain gray hooded sweatshirt and khaki cargo pants were replaced with a black tank-top and brown cargo shorts that went just below his knees, and his hair was now jet black. His accessories and shoes, though, stayed the same. A pair of cheap black sunglasses, leather steel-toed boots, and what looked like half a gas mask, covering the bottom half of his face and giving him the appearance of two small cylindrical tusks jutting out from either side of where his chin was. His skateboard in one hand, a baseball bat covered in neon orange Sanskrit runes in the other, he started to walk through the reddish dust, taking in his surroundings.

At first, the Dreamwalker had been tempted to open another door and leave this dream for a more pleasant one. After all, his motives for traveling this evening weren't entirely chivalrous. The night before, he had stumbled across someone who was a fellow Californian, or who at least dreamed of things that reminded him of California, and was hoping to make his way back there for a moment or two. But there was something about this Hell that was...different. Wrong. His skin crawled, the hair on his arms stood at attention, and goosebumps were quickly forming, though the heat was still almost too much to bear even in his shorts and t-shirt. Shaded eyes glanced out and upwards, and he clenched his bat tighter in his left hand as he saw the myriad of demons standing watch, but his grip relaxed shortly after. They weren't paying him any attention, and they were apparently merely figments of this sleeper's imagination. He followed their crimson gaze, towards the blonde-haired...woman? "No, elf," he corrected himself in his thoughts. Pointy ears and all. As if pulled by some invisible, malignant force, she walked slowly towards a pair of pillars, and the bloodied, beaten body of a man whose blue hair was clearly noticeable, even from a distance. Intrigued, he decided to follow in her footsteps.

He instantly regretted his decision when, eyes intently focused on the pair of people in front of him, he didn't notice a large rock wedged into the ground at his feet. He tripped, pitched forward, and had to drop his bat and skateboard to the ground with a clatter in order to brace his fall. The walking woman turned around to face him, and it was at that moment that the Dreamwalker realized...there was another woman there, too, a twin to the one who had been approaching the bleeding man (no, he was also definitely an elf), except her eyes were like the demons watching the scene unfold. On hands and knees, he scrambled to pick up his things, then felt a familiar, awful sensation. The first woman's mouth opened wide, and the world around him started to fade out, replaced by black. He frantically tried to scribble a doorway in the sand below, but it was too late. She was waking up...


***

Without even knowing what had happening, he opened the door to a bedroom. Too disoriented from the abrupt exit from slumber, he fell onto the side of his head, cracking it against the stone floor. His sunglasses flew off his face and slid a short distance across the room, over near the shuttered window. His bat and skateboard hit the ground with a *whump*, as the Sanskrit writing on the Dreamwalker's makeshift club started to glow a faint orange in the dark conditions. He was back in his usual uniform, most of his face covered by the hood and mask he wore, the rest of his body by his pants and sweatshirt. He crawled across the floor, picking up his sunglasses, and looked about ready to try to crawl right back out of the room, when it hit him. His vision started to swim and blur, then not even the light of his bat seemed to reach his left eye. It was soon accompanied by dizziness, vertigo. He tried to stand, but only made it onto one knee before the spinning of the room was too much for him to bear. The nausea followed soon after, as his stomach roiled with sickness. He was in deep trouble, but as he turned to the bed in a desperate attempt to explain to...whoever's dream it was that he'd invaded, the words didn't come out. First, his mouth opened, but no sound came forth. Then, there was speech, but the words spoken were babble, gibberish that even he couldn't understand. Finally, he stopped talking, as a more pressing need arrived. He clapped his hand over his mouth, frantically scanning the room for some sort of container, but his search was in vain. He removed the hand, flipped his mask down, fell onto his hands and knees, and vomited all over the floor. After that, he collapsed against the chest, incoherently mumbling and barely conscious.

The Dreamwalker slouched against the chest, cradling his head in his hands, as the sleeper in the room woke up. Panic and nausea were soon fighting for control of his guts, as he futilely tried to summon the strength to make one last break for it. His pounding head, spinning vision, and sick stomach soon impressed upon him the fact that he was completely and utterly at this person's mercy, and wasn't going anywhere for a while. As they approached, he tried to speak, but the words came out garbled and incomprehensible once more, even to his ears. He shut his mouth, wincing and drawing back against the chest as much as he could as she (she? It was hard for him to tell in the dark) raised her hand near him. Eyes squinted shut, waiting for a slap, a backhand, some sort of physical attack. None arrived. His breath had been faster when she first approached, but once he managed to relax, it slowed to a more normal respiration rate. There was a slight wheeze, though, to each inhalation, indicating that something he had breathed in recently (or over a period of time, perhaps?) was affecting his ability to take in the proper amount of air. His pulse was strong and steady, though. Aside from whatever was wrong with his lungs, the bump on the side of his head that was quickly raising up, and his vomiting, he seemed to be in good physical condition.

At first, when she tried to pull him away from the chest, he had resisted, taking advantage of his larger build and height to stay still. Eventually though, after insisting several times that she was not, in fact, going to hurt him and only wanted to help him, he relented. He let himself be pulled off the chest, with the healer carefully dragging his frame to the nearby pallet she had laid out. As soon as he was settled down, she removed the mask from where it dangled around his neck, laying it near his pillow. After wiping his face clean with a damp cloth, she left the room. For a moment, he thought he had been given his opportunity to escape once more, but the bursts of white that attacked his vision when he tried to sit up soon had the Dreamwalker re-thinking that notion. When the healer came back minutes later, clutching a mug full of something steaming and warm, he greedily took it, once she'd it offered to him. He was parched, and even though the honey couldn't quite remove the bitterness of the white willow bark the tea was made from, he didn't seem to care. He gulped it down, then held the mug up towards her. After a few moments of mush-mouthed stammering, he finally forced the words through his dysphasia. He couldn't help but wince at the sound of his own voice, both the volume (which wasn't actually all that loud) and the meek childishness of it. ?Th-thank you.?

With that, the Dreamwalker buried his face in the pillow, the better to (hopefully) hide his appearance with. He kept the hood up over his hair as best he could as he quickly fell asleep. Despite the less than ideal sleeping situation he was in (on the floor, in the room of someone whose dream he had been caught invading), he appeared to be sleeping all right. Though even with his mouth and nose muffled by the pillow, his snoring was clearly audible. He laid there, completely motionless in his rest, until the mid-afternoon arrived. A soft moan and stretching of his arms indicated that he was slowly waking up.

The longer he talked, the more it would seem evident that the speech patterns he was using were a facade. He paused to think of words, and seemed to deliberately choose others, so that he came across as confident, strong, and heroic. He reached for the mask once she had taken the tea back, but decided against putting it back on, returning to his more upright seating position on the pallet. "I hope...that you do not want a name. My real name, anyways. I call myself...the Dreamwalker." He had to stifle an urge to laugh, before he spoke his next words. This was serious business, after all. "I...walk through people's dreams, for lack of a better term." He pushed the sunglasses up on his face a little more, with his right hand.

Her eyes widened a touch as she listened to his explanation. Naturally, she didn't make known what she expected, though perhaps this answer hadn't quite been it. "Wait... so it was you? The figure I saw in my dream? Who... wasn't supposed to be there..." Though her tone betrayed a touch of disbelief, it wasn't so much doubt as unfamiliarity. Dreams and reality, while sometimes related, were ever disconnected. Yet here this so-called Dreamwalker bridged the gap. The next question came unbidden to her lips, though she did not regret asking it. "Why? Why were you in my dream?"

He scratched his nose with his left hand, the index finger poking its way out of a hole cut in the glove, unlike the rest of the fingers on that hand. "Yes. That was me." The Dreamwalker turned away from Asha, towards the door, glancing over there for a long second before slowly turning back. "I walk through dreams, but I also guard them. Patrol them. From those who would disturb the sleep of the...innocent. Night hags. Incubi. Succubi. Nightmares." He gestured toward his baseball bat, laying with the rest of his things. "If necessary, I fight them and send them back to where they came from." He paused briefly, before continuing. "I...can sense when evil beings are messing with things. I...felt something similar to that in your dream. But I could not find anything physical there to fight. The demons...were not real."

She blinked at that, seeming momentarily confused. "Of course they were not real. It was just a dream." However, her tone was shaken, the words spoken by rote. Still, she launched into an explanation, as if that would serve to normalize the occurance. "It... it was a memory." She frowned slightly, and her eyes downcasted as she looked away from him. "Many years ago, I... was there. But... but it was... wrong, in my dream. The memory was twisted." Asha set the mug aside and scratched the back of one of her hands as she hesitated. "I... I thought they were just dreams. Ever since that man... I... You sensed evil in my dream? It was not because... I was dreaming about a very evil place?"

His hands started to pat down each of the various pockets on his khaki cargo pants, clearly searching for something and not finding it. The Dreamwalker sighed, then muttered to himself. "God, I need a cigarette..." After a moment, he remembered where he was, looking up at Asha once more. "Sorry. I am...sensitive to evil beings. Incubi, succubi, yes, but even those that do not harm those while they are sleeping are...clear to me. Even when they hide what they look like. I sensed...something similar in your dream. But could not find anything present there. Nor was there anything present here, when I...came in." He took a look around the room once more, as if to confirm his suspicion. "I am...confused."

"Something... evil..." For the second time that afternoon, her eyes went wide. The whisperings? "No... no, it could not be. I... I sealed it." Her voice was barely more than a whisper itself. She turned from him then, abruptly, sending the mug scuttling across the room as she kicked it. Laying down on her stomach, she reached deep under her bed, her fingers barely able to scrape the edge of the box she had secreted beneath. She nudged the corners of the container, urging it closer until she was able to draw it out. As she turned to face the Dreamwalker again, she held between her hands a simple, wooden box, well-made. The lid was carefully carved with the same symbol she wore about her neck. It radiated an aura of holiness, such which conflicted with her following words. "This... it contains a fragment of an object of such evil that it splintered the Creator Goddess of another world... But... I sealed it behind the blessings of my God." That last sounded less like fact and more like a plea.

He swallowed, nodding slowly to Asha, hands now placed and folded in his lap. He watched as the elf took the box out from under the bed. The aura of holiness wasn't immediately visible to his eyes, but he could feel it, the familiar thrum and heat in his blood that accompanied him whenever he would commune with his Goddess. There were questions that came to his mind, as she talked about Creator Goddesses and other worlds, but they were secondary to the issue at hand. "Something went wrong..." There, he could feel it! Beneath the warmth and goodness of the box, a small, needling blast of cold and darkness that seemed to be seeping out of the edges, leaking like water through a faulty roof.

"I- wait! No, please do not leave. I am... afraid." Though the word came hesitantly, she wasn't ashamed to admit it. "I have been charged with this fragment, and there is not a single person in Rhy'Din with the power to destroy it, or surely Lord Barbades would have sent me to seek him or her out. It drives people mad with power. It is the cause of the splintering of Fjiorim. It destroyed Sainos and Gedria and Kiara and Vallien, and we are but mortals! This is but a splinter of the Rod of Destruction, but nevertheless I am very much afraid..."

He had risen into a crouch, when Asha's words hit his ears. Immediately, he sat back down again. "O...kay." He wasn't quite sure who or what all of those names were, but intuition seemed to suggest they were probably the names of the gods that had previously been killed by the Rod in its full form. "Well, I don't think I am the person to destroy it, but I can buy you some time while you figure it out. Help you sleep sounder at night. And perhaps-perhaps it might be confronted in your dreams?" The whole situation was new to him. So new, and so utterly alien, that he wasn't quite capable of fully appreciating its severity. All he had to go on was the lingering aura of evil and her panicked words. The fact that it had killed gods unknown to him didn't even register in his mind.

"If..." Asha paused to vehemently shake her head. She was done questioning him. "I would be most grateful for any assistance you could provide to me."

"Alright. I'm...going to start visiting your dreams on a regular basis. And visit you in person here as well. We need to get you in control of your dreams, as much as we can. Are you familiar with lucid dreaming?" The Dreamwalker favored her with what might have been a curious, questioning look, if his eyes had only been visible.

"Lucid dreaming? No, I- Wait, you mean to tell me that a person can control his or her dreams?" His look might have been questioning; hers was downright skeptical, though she did not phrase her doubts. Asha was aware of the eggshells she tread before him, and if he could help her, she would not chase him away. "I have never heard of such a thing before. I always thought dreams were just... dreams."

"With training, yes," The Dreamwalker replied. "With proper focus, it shouldn't take you too long to learn. You need to start keeping a dream journal. When you wake up after a dream, you need to start writing down everything that happened in that dream. Everything you saw. Everything. This will help you memorize cues that will let you know you are dreaming. I will...stop by regularly, to help you out as well. Once you are able to realize you are in a dream, and take control of where and what happens in your dream, I think...we will be better able to take on whatever it is that is bothering you." The Dreamwalker paused, glanced down at the box, then corrected himself. "That rod splinter, I mean."

She nodded a little, running her fingers over the lid of her box again. Her question was sudden, and it seemed a bit out of the blue. "Is that why you were in my dream, then? Because of the evil?"

"Yes." It was a simple, heartfelt answer.

At last, she let a smile cross her tired features. The expression brightened her face and chased away the illusion of age that often besought the young elf. "Thank you. I will trust you, then, and trust that you can help me in this."

April 5th, 2008 - Early morning

Asha had awoken before dawn, but no maleficent dream was to blame. Birds chirped tentatively outside her shuttered window, beckoning the sunrise. The early spring was cool, and a fine mist hung in the air that would fade as the day pronounced itself. She should have roused herself and began her chores about the church, but today... Today was special. She clambered out of bed, slipping her feet in her shoes and giving her dress a cursory straightening. Her bedding was left in disarray as she grabbed her cloak and hurried out into the street. The city faded behind her, towering buildings replaced by trees, cobblestone roads by dirt paths. She lost herself in the woods, surrounding herself with greenery and quiet.

The forest always evoked memories of home, even if such recollections were empty. The elf trailed her fingertips along the trunk of a tree as she passed. She knew the forest was alive, budding, and growing, but it felt dead to her. She heard chirping, chattering animals all around, but it only heightened the silence of the vegetation. Perhaps any other day, she would have lingered on the silence, on the past voices of Eahaasae. But today was special. A day of remembering. Of reflection and passage.

Six years, she had been in mourning. And every time she thought she had begun to move on, she had been mistaken. Her heart refused to let go. Asha thumbed a leaf, sending a cascade of dew falling into the underbrush. She had blamed herself, and she clung to the pain because she was certain she deserved it. Barbades had seemed to all but forsake her, and her mind had been ravaged by nightmares and unrest. The Dreamwalker had set the latter to right, appearing to her nightly and instructing her in the ways of lucid dreaming. It was difficult, at first, and she was surprised he didn't lose patience with her more often than he did, but she had caught on aptly enough. Her dreams were her own now.

Barbades was still silent, but she had accepted that. He had not taken His blessings from her, and she knew in her heart that He was yet with her.

Just as she knew that Ellis was at peace.

The sun began to filter through the forest, lighting up the foliage a vibrant green. As she stood in the dappled sunlight, on the anniversary of his death, she let go.

And peace was waiting for her.