>>6256371When you open your eyes and behold it, the Dreamscape is not so different from the waking world. It is fuzzy, foggy, as if you were perceiving everything through a veil of tears induced by a stinging smoke. Your eyes don’t hurt here, though, and there are patches of brightness and of clarity when you sit up and look around you. Each bright spot is centred upon a sleeping companion: Zith-Zi, Murbal, Xoldur, Dura. You look towards An-Yii’s empty bag and decide it might be wise not to look towards Yeb-Uit’s—they, uh, still ain’t sleeping.
(Plus, gobs aren’t s’posed to have much connection to the Dreamscape anyway…)
Curiously, Nermal—like Hershy—has only a faint, ephemeral halo of light around their eyeless, feeler-faced noggin. As Ayla had explained it to you, it was a matter of <span class="mu-i">xīn</span>. Among Eastern cultivators, the Dreamscape was called <span class="mu-i">Xīnjiè</span>, and was regarded as both an aspect of the self and a spatial dimension—<span class="mu-i">“like a demiplane,”</span> she’d said, but you didn’t really understand what that meant, either.
What you took away was that it’s a sort of space-between-spaces or a layer of reality, not unlike where True Fey went when they ‘disappeared’ and became aethereal, except anyone (or anything) with sufficient <span class="mu-i">xīn</span> (which was something like imagination, aspiration, or self-awareness) can access it! Because animals live most in the material world and do not reflect deeply on the past or future, or have the same vivid imaginations as intelligent races, their connection is weak. Goblinoid races, with their ‘soulless’ nature and spell resistance, typically have an even more distant connection. But humans, elves, orcs, and all sorts of beastmen and such? Their unconscious selves drift into the periphery of the Dreamscape, when they sleep, and the interaction produces dreams!
<span class="mu-i">“But those of us with one foot in the realm of aether—of immaterial spirit—can access it most easily and deliberately. Even MORESO, for those of us who cultivate our </span>qi<span class="mu-i">.”</span>
You steal a glance at your sleeping body. In your sleep, your features drift and droop slightly, deprived of conscious control. Your jaw sags open, tusks protruding slightly for a thickened lower lip. Dull and grey in the Dreamscape, your rough-looking skin attests to the greenish pallor you must now possess. If your eyes were open, you bet they’d be aglow.
“Soon,” you whisper to yourself, as you reach down to stroke your face. When you see that your fingers again end in wicked, battle-ready meat hooks, you withdraw the gesture.
<span class="mu-s">“So you are the new game-piece, upon my brother’s board?”</span>
