More dreams

You dream Akri

After centuries of training and nearly a millennia of practice, you had never been in a war.  The old ones regale people with stories of of their cunning and daring as they defeated the greatest foes that anyone could meet, the Fetch Souls of the Primordials.  Their story's inspire the troops and the Terrestrials look up to them as mentors then they turn to you and you have to turn away.  The only battle you fought was the great cat that gained you an exaltation.  You are the lesser brother of greater men and everyone knows it.  Creation has been preparing for lifetimes for the next great battle.  You have a Daiklave who has no equal, a Warstrider of your own design, and a warship that cruises the skies, whose only service it seems is to provide afternoon shade for the wealthy of towns across the East; its essence cannons have never been fired in anger.  This will change.

It has been in the works for about twenty years, the war machines have been retooled and made ready.  All that remains yet to be determined is the when.  There have been hold ups in the Deliberative to get it approved, all is ready.  The Deliberative is where the hold up has been.  The arguments as been that nothing has been tested in real battle since the end of the Primordial War and if something should come, Creation will not be ready to repulse any invasion, unless we are sure that it will work.  It is a hollow argument, all the Solars know it, the elders point out that they had nothing like the war machine we have now and they won a great victory.  The elders are diminishing, though and it is the Lunars that are holding us back now.  The Preservation group is lead by the woman who shares your bed now, your mate, who is sly as her totem animal is and more a veteran of e Primordial War.  The last vote is to be held tonight, and her vote has been the tying vote for the past few attempts.  She has humiliated you enough now, you are being called her young pup, by your faction. Deal with her they tell you.

She told you last night that opening the walls of Creation to an invasion of Rakasha, is a betrayal to all the millions of people that will be killed, just to test a few weapons out on real foes.  You can blast away on mountains to test your cannons, everyone knows they work.  "You are just looking for personal Glory, that can only be found defeating a foe, that you unleashed yourself on the people you are defending.  If you vote for that, you are not worthy of that Exaltation you wear, your predecessor was clearly a better man."  You apologized, that was not your intent.  The makeup sex was the best you ever had, perhaps because it was the last you were going to have with her.

You stabbed her under the chin into her head as she slept.  Looks like you were going to get your war.

You Dream Practitioner

It was her last wish that you lay her to rest in the forest of her youth; her last wish.  She had been a loyal lover and Lunar Mate.  She was a survivor of two Solar Mates of the Primordial War.  She said that she did not get to know the first well as they were constantly training and then fighting.  When he died, it was another tradgedy of war.  The second was a better fighter and lived through to the end, but she was cold to her and uninterested in her at all.  Such was the luck of exaltation.  When she died unexpectantly and you exalted she was not sure what was going to happen.  She said that it was a surprise that you two were so perfectly matched.  The last few centuries were the happiest of her life.

The stand had been her home for nearly two thousand years.  The great tree in the centre was the focus of the great Demesne and it was tall, filled with many rooms that made up her living palace.  The birds that only lived in its branches were painstakingly bred by her to sing in a haunting melody of her youth, she said it was the song that her mother sung to her when she was a baby.  The runes carved in the trunk with sorcery, written in a secret language that she taught only you, described how much that she loved you and only you.

She wanted to be buried in the roots of her tree, where she would provide nourishment to it.  So that you would always know where to find her, when you were lonely.  It was her last wish, her only desire of her husband and the only thing she ever asked of you.

The Manse you designed made use of the powerful Dragon lines that met there,  a line of Wood and one of Solar.  Under the roots of the great tree you found a rich deposit if Orichalcum and Green Jade.  The wood of the tree was used to make a rustic road through the newly cleared land.  The birds were wonderfully tasty.  The Hearthstone would grant you immortality and she wanted to be buried there, ha!

You Dream Jaguar

The waters of this northern coast are windswept and barren.  No one lives there on purpose, except for the inhabitants of a small island a few leagues off the coast.  There a village sits making a living in the dreadful weather.  They clamber and bow to you as your cloud rests on the beach.  After a few questions they point you towards their village elder and priest.  After a few minutes of speaking with him you are able to determine that they worship a local sea god, a walrus headed god who in exchange for worship ensures that the people her never starve.  The local herd of walrus hunt off shore and that action scares many of the fish into the shallow waters where the fishermen catch them.  The excess is left to the walrus and the older walrus are easier to catch, their blubber provides oil for winter heating and the ivory is used for trading.  The God, the people and the walrus benefit from this arrangement, but the problem is that that does not suit your purposes.  

After a few minutes of negotiation you swear an oath that you will provide the god a better source of worship than the small enclave of humans could provide and the the humans would be relocated to a city in the South Seas where they will never have to be cold and will have better food to eat.  You sanctify the Oath to the the Unconquered Sun and everyone seemed to be happy.  

That was a year ago.  The Manse that you are erecting will be done soon, the former God's Sanctum lay empty after you brought trumped up charges on him for violations of breaking his authority.  His Starmetal remains were divided up between the gods that sentenced him.  One has to be careful when they make an Oath with you, there are always loopholes.  The people have been taken care of, they are servants in your estates, and the god was worshipped well for a few days before his execution.  One has to be careful not to claim a sanctum above their stature.  This manse will make a fine addition to your many.

You dream Nix

The last couple of encounters with the Wyld Hunt had been close.  It had taken all the skill you never knew that you had and a very large amount of Luck.  It was luck.  You will have to make an offering to the Goddess of Luck if you have time.  Your Father had been very insistent that in mercantile trade, you made your own luck, but he had never been trying to evade a professional band of fanatics whose only goal was to hunt her down and kill you with religious devotion.  Your father always told you that it was best to avoid religious fanatics, they could be very profitable clients, but erratic and prone to betrayal.  Your luck came in the form of a flash flood that filled the stone canyon they were chasing you with churning water and bouncing boulders.  One person traveling light could evade, many in armor, no such luck.  Still it was doubly lucky that you collapsed outside this town and they took you in.

The people were kind and they had a natural distrust of Dragon Blooded and the Realm.  The town was founded by people who fled a rebellion of a local Satrapy and were paranoid that the Realm would one day come to take them back.  The village had been isolated for a century and had grown slowly but steadily with people fleeing oppression, but as far as you knew, no-one knew that anyone was out here, the common people even had an idiom, Running to the Sands, meant a hopeless situation where death was the only possible conclusion.  No one was looking for these people.  You knew that your pursuers would soon be following you and they would catch you for sure unless you made your own luck.

You wove them a story that told the people that the town was well known for its opposition to the the Realm, but the Realm had not known where to strike before.  Word had gotten out that there was a small group of elite scouts coming this way and they were going to report the location of the town as soon as they found it.  The citizens of the Satrapy were determined to keep the town, the glorious dissidents of the Realm a safe haven and sent you to warn them.  The only hope was for the town to destroy the scouts utterly to prevent it's discovery.  You burned enough essence into the story that it seemed plausible and more to make them desire to stand and fight.  

You told them that you would take their children into the hills for protection while they fought.  The Unconquered Sun shone down upon your story and they quickly determined that this was the only option they had open to them.  That night you took their children with you as you fled the town.  Near dawn you used your essence to scare the children in every direction so that you could flee.  Your small betrayals would let you live long enough that you might get someplace where you would be safe.

Messenger you Dream

The rules that you played by are simple, never use your social charms to intice people to break the laws that you will convict them of.  Your mentor showed you how that was possible, that she convinced a mortal that he would be safe if he threw himself off a wall into crucible of boiling metal.  The sickening sloppy impact served all these years to remind you that you could convince mortals hot was cold and cold was hot.  So you never did that.  You cam into a city and worked beside the common folk for a few months and became their friends.  Making friends was one thing you justified as an ethical use of Social Charms. Once you were friends, you introduced them to the tenants of demon worship.

Sometimes, they turned you in and you revealed yourself and thanked them for doing their civic duty.  Mostly they did not.  Mostly they tried to distance themselves from you, but sometimes they listened to what you had to say.  These were the moments that you worked for.  There was an invisible chink in society that needed to be gently prodded so that it could show itself.  Once discovered it only took a little bit of extra time spent with these people to allow them to flourish.  From there you were able to expand the cabal from you and that person to three or four, from there it would expand quickly until it reached a critical mass.  From years of practice you could suss out the best candidates, the ones most open to corruption.  Single men in there thirties.  Most often the best route to opening them to corruption was to places where there were single women.  You got your best successes when you took the appearance of a young woman, but not always, sometimes a youthful male worked best.  

Strangely, the most frequent emotion you saw on their faces was disappointment and their most often excuse was they were doing it for me.  Clearly, they were deluded and weak that they would betray Creation for someone they only knew for a few months.  I uncovered these weaknesses before they could do real damage and their execution would serve to remind people to be always vigilant.