>>5159267In your dreams, you find yourself in darkness—a hot darkness, humid and muggy, clinging and insistent. It feels as if you are burning up from a fever, trapped in a boiling pot. You struggle forward against the darkness, calling out for Irinnile to awaken—to lend you her sight, so you might guide yourself.
‘I’ll do ya’ one better,’ you hear her say.
A hand clasps yours, and gradually the world fades into focus as she guides you forwards. It would be sweet, almost comforting, if she wasn’t guiding you into a nightmare.
Before you rise terrible spires topped with cages of stone; inside these, shapes grip the bars, reaching through or attempting to squeeze betwixt them. You can hear their cries from what must be hundreds of feet below, distant wails. Between the spires winds a river, dark and viscous—black from some angles, red from others, almost semi-solid. You approach, but Irinnile pulls you back before you can draw too near. Lucky she does: a hand, followed by a hundred more, reaches out of the ooze to grasp for the shore where your foot just was. Overhead, you hear cackling and conversation. You look up, and see three bat-winged shapes flit overhead, trailing long, fork-tipped tails and clutching a dangling shape between them. It does not struggle—it is resigned.
“Where are we?” you ask.
“You know,” Irinnile replies. “My, uh, hometown. Well, the Plains Forsaken, anyway. It’s where loose souls roam.”
“Loose souls?” you ask. Realization hits, and then fear follows. “The Hells? Am I… I can’t be dead!”
“No, no, shhh, calm down Lispy,” Irinnile soothes you, petting your hair and rubbing your back. You realize belatedly that you are naked. “You’re good, we’re good. You’re just asleep.”
“This is a dream?” you ask.
“I, uh, didn’t say THAT,” Irinnile says with a nervous laugh. “you’re wandering a little. I caught you before you got too far.”
“Why am I here?” you demand. “What caused my ‘wandering’?”
“I, uh, think it’s that niggling little thought you’ve been thinkin’, ‘bout our girl Chika.”
You glare at her, awaiting clarity. Irinnile grins nervously and shrugs.
“It was kinda’ my theory, ya’ know, that this might have been what happened when Pavlov kapowed her outta’ time ‘n space. Sent her pakcing bodily into a spec of blood, and her soul to… Well, where’s a demonologist banish the things he fights, right?”
You stare at her. “Chika is… here?”
Irinnile just shrugs again, and says “Maybe? Possibly? I dunno’. But you know… You really shouldn’t be!”
“On that, we agree,” speaks a voice beyond sound—a voice which quakes your very being, which resonates with the stone below your feet. The ground trembles, and the river winds away like a sidewinding serpent, fleeing the sound.