Rage Through the Nightmare

On a mission for the Order of the Undying, a vampiric order of knights and planar antiquarians, Brennon Fulburton tracks down the daedra called Bloodbeak, his former master's new deadly servant to put him down within a pocket of Vaermina's realm.

Contains: Violence, Blood.

Go forth!

Brennon opened his eyes and looked around as he squirmed on his back, struggling to get to his feet as his senses swirled. The sky was a beautiful myriad of cosmic wonders, vast nebulas and twisting waves of stars across a red canvas. Brennon finally sat up, sand falling from his shoulders as he looked to the red-skinned figure in front of him.

The figure was female, her lithe, muscular form framed by a purple, open robe that fell down to her thighs like ribbons of ink, leaving little of her body to the imagination. She appeared to be a pale-skinned, dark-haired shrike of Evergloam She narrowed her dark-red eyes down at him and smiled.

“Hello, Brennon Fulburton.”

Brennon groaned slightly as he tried to get up. He could still feel the Vaermina’s Torpor sloshing around in his stomach, and he felt noticeably less stable than he felt last time he was thrust into Oblivion.

“Hello...” Brennon said as he finally got to his feet. “Do you have a name I may use?”

He looked down and around and realized part of his problem with standing up. The ground was a sea of sand, dunes rolling across the ground like waves in an ocean. The pale figure folded her almost skeletal hands as she stood on a stone pillar that would show itself every now and then when the sand would dip below it.

“You may call me Malvir. I assume, since you’re here by way of Torpor, that you know where you are?”

Brennon looks around. Questions filled his mind, but from somewhere inexplicable, he somehow knew all he needed to in that instance. He looked back at Malvir as she stood lazily upon the stone pillar. 

“I’m… viewing the Dreamstride… through my own dream but I’m in Evergloam.”

Malvir grinned, baring sharp, uniform teeth. “Partially. You are in the Void as much as you are in Evergloam, child, and thus in the Dreamstride as much as you are here.”

Brennon frowned at her as he struggled to maintain his balance. 

“So what’s your role in all this? Here to kill whoever isn’t killed?” He asked.

Malvir giggled, covering her mouth with her hand as she did so. “Why mortal… how brutish of you. You’re correct though. I’ve come to ensure that the instigator you know as Bloodbeak is dealt with. His presence here offends my mistress, and on a personal note, I don’t like him, and would love to see him writhe in the endless dark.”  

Brennon growled in irritation slightly as he stumbled to one knee, his footing coming out from under him in the rolling waves. “So why let me kill him?” He asked as he stood back up. “Why come here at all if I’m already here to do it.”

She opened her arms and gestured with her fingers, the cosmic bodies above mimicking her gestures with divine beauty. “I have been offered as host of your battle. The lady who owns this soothing veil upon which you both dream. I will be among you, but as to who my presence will benefit, is up to the two of you.”

Malvir vanished as a wave of sand washed over where she had just been.

Her voice echoed from all around him. “To bend the nightmare is to bend your grasp of reality. Find your foe, Brennon Fulburton.”

Brennon clenched his fists and closed his eyes as a large wave came rolling towards him, large enough to pick him up and throw him some distance. He willed himself to stay where he was, as if he were asleep, and blocking out the noises daring to wake him up. The sand passed around him as if weightless, unable to push him up over.

Brennon opened his eyes and grinned as he ran up through the backside of the dune and out across the sand. As if reacting to his meddling with the reality of the dream, the sand suddenly turned to water, the cosmic sky overhead turning to black storm-clouds. Brennon fell through the water and tumbled through the waves. He willed himself to fall to the ocean floor that he knew must have been there, not giving way to the fear of being either crushed by the water or of there simply being no floor at all. 

As soon as his feet lighted down on the stone floor he pushed the water away with a shoving gesture of his hand, the water flying off and away like a blanket had just been pulled off of him. He ran across the stone with inhuman speed, each step propelling him effortlessly faster. 

The stone fell down around him except for a narrow path upon which he was running. All around where the stone floor had fallen, the same cosmic sky from before was below him. Compelled by some burning curiosity, one that he knew was dangerous, he cast his gaze up from the stone path he had been watching to look up. Above him was pitch black, a sort of haunting, sickening black that pulled at him. Suddenly, millions of eyes opened in the darkness, each looking at him with both alarm and lethal intent. 

The stone floor suddenly pushed him up towards the eyes. Brennon looked back down, shoving his hand like a claw into the path only to realize the path was now the tail of a colossal, pale, reptilian beast. A cacophony of horrible screams filled the air around him, as countless flying monsters of unknowable shapes and sizes flew all around like a murder of crows pecking at dead flesh.

Brennon snarled as he tore through the creatures as they came within reach, but suddenly felt himself flying towards the back of the pale beast, a familiar form pushing him through the swarms of monsters. Bloodbeak, still in the vague form of a wraith of crows, but still with his glowing red eyes and assortment of needle-like teeth within his beak screamed furiously as he shoved Brennon down onto the back of the beast. 

The beast roared in a mix of indignation and pain from the blow, blood splashing around Brennon as his body crashed through the scaled back. He felt bones break as his armor crumpled inward. He thrashed blindly, bashing Bloodbeak’s jaw and kicking him off. Bloodbeak flew backwards before slashing his claws across at Brennon, a wave of blood tearing through the breton’s face. Brennon felt very brief, but immense pain followed and a lack of feeling in his face, as if flesh had been torn away from bone. 

He floated up in the air, as if both he and the beast were falling, or simply perhaps as if gravity had ceased to exist in the dream. Bloodbeak clawed again with his other hand, as suddenly the dragon-like head of the pale beast swung around, opening its mouth filled with lamprey-like teeth before closing down around Brennon.

He was suddenly frozen. He couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t feel at all. His consciousness drifted through pure darkness, devoid of all shapes and meaning. Some part of him knew that the Vaermina’s Torpor was wearing off. His mind was growing farther and farther apart from his body. Where was his body? What did it matter? The thought of his castle flooded his mind for reasons he couldn’t know in the moment. It had been his home for so long, his mind seemed to rest there. So beautiful, for all it's macabre decor. So dark... it faded from his vision, slipping away from him like water through his thin fingers. So… gone.

All faded to nothingness. It was the end. Brennon could not think, but somehow acknowledged his death here in the space between realities. He closed the eyes of his mind and laid himself down as he continued adrift in the dreary dark, apathetic and weary.

Then, like a volcano shooting up out of an ocean, a feeling gave way to an intent. Rage. It did not boil up, it tore up, like a jagged harpoon through flesh, stopping neither to catch on tendon nor bone. He felt once more: a body, eyes, lungs, a mouth, clawed hands. He opened his eyes and his mouth and screamed unholy rage, his whole body quivering as he floated in the darkness. He willed the darkness to give way, great tears ripping through the darkness as if it were a cloth shroud, the red cosmic bodies appearing once more.

Brennon screamed again, his eyes blazing brightly as red lightning coursed through him. The rest of the darkness shattered as if they were frail timbers knocked away by a mighty explosion. Brennon clenched his jaw in a hateful snarl as he bent the cosmos around him, willing the dream around him, which, for all it mattered in that moment, might as well have been all of existence itself, to bend and flourish at his every gesture, as if he were some dark god, conducting these cosmic bodies like an orchestra.

Brennon suddenly brought his hands down and the cosmos down with them, bringing him down to a stone floor with a deafening crash, as if the action shattered some aspect of reality. Bloodbeak recoiled at Brennon as if horrified. Brennon unfurled a long whip of red lightning, thrashing it around before slinging it around Bloodbeak’s neck, forcing him down to his knees. Brennon tore his hand through Bloodbeak’s jaw, tearing it off before raising his hand up, summoning the pale beast to come crashing down upon Bloodbeak as a beam of destructive energy. The stone platform they were standing upon crumpled upward, like a reverse mushroom-cloud as the explosion enveloped the three. 

Suspended in mid-air again, everything seemed to slow down, but time still seemed to race forward. Bloodbeak slowly reached out towards Brennon screaming in rage as the lightning whip coiled around his entire torso.

Brennon’s teeth still bared in his snarl, he turned from the disintegrating Bloodbeak towards the spot where the beast had crashed. Malvir smiled warmly, and almost smugly at Brennon, as if she had either foreseen or simply hoped for this outcome. He looked back towards Bloodbeak and simply saw himself, floating in place a few paces away from him. Confused, he cast his gaze towards his hand, and saw it was in fact a long-shadowy claw. 

Brennon looked back up and saw nothing, not dreary and bleak like before, but simply saw nothing there. He looked back down at his hand, and saw nothing. He suddenly ceased to resonate with his own perspective, seeming to perceive his presence from outside his body, and yet he couldn't see his body anywhere either. He still felt all three beings, Malvir, Bloodbeak and himself. And then only Malvir, and himself. And then only Malvir, her face, no longer visible to him, yet still exuding the maliciously delighted energy. A smile.

And then Brennon’s eyes snapped open, the shattered bottle from the potion in hand as he laid on the floor of the cave in Evergloam. He hurriedly pulled himself to an upright sitting position as distorted visions layered across his waking vision. Brennon’s mind calmed as the visions departed. His mind started to drown in a sea of emotions. Surprise, confusion, excitement but also anger and bitterness. The man that he and his parents had looked up to as a man of wisdom and strength was now the man he was going to kill. The vampire lord, Caspias Faro.