A'arob'lth

[Cherny]

"N-no!" A hasty protest, eyes wide as the pair voice their suspicions, turn their accusing glares upon him. "I, I d-don't know why I'm h-here! I'm n-not meant to, to be - you b-brought me here!" Not his fault, not his fault, how could he be here to harm them when it was only by their arts he'd come to this place?

He might protest more, might make desperate appeals to reason, but the sight before him steals his words, steals his thoughts; the wall at his back is hard, rough through the fabric of his nightshirt, pressing bruises against his bones as he shrinks back from the nightmare before him; the dirt floor is grit and coarse sand against heels that scrape across it in his unthinking effort to escape, retreat; it feels real, it feels real, and yet the awfulness before him cannot be, must not be so.

They-It cautions him, rebukes him even as they loom closer, even as they swell monstrously. He would beg them to stop, would plead for them to let him go, would swear to whatever their demand; he would, but fear has stolen his words, has dashed aside his reason, and patient Words roil and slither from their prison behind his breastbone, unfurling in his throat and seething at the base of his tongue. Cruel light and furnace heat sears his back he opens his mouth to shout, to wail in horror--

---

Cherny awakes amid a tangle of sweat-drenched bedding in silence and darkness; his heart hammers against his ribs, the roar of vast bells in his ears.

Behind numb and tight-pressed lips, a dying echo of Song still shivers in his teeth.

[Rance]

The boy screamed, a cacophony that was physical and destructive, blasting against the walls of the conical chamber like a lashing scourge. Stones shuddered in their ancient pockets and rock-dust long settled in cracks and niches blew free as though the earth itself was giving out a desperate, wheezing breath.

The creature -- for They-It had shed their sweat-blackened humanity, their Jernoan ruse, their wrinkles, spectacles, and clobbered skulls -- staggered back, forced away by the otherworldly presence of the cry. A knee struck the altar. One of Stone-Eyes's arms sliced through the air, the fingers twisted into a knot. A burst of force sprang forth, a modicum of will propelled outward, a throbbing pulse. Their twisted voice chanted, "Never return!" as--

The nightmare faded.

* * * *

In a bag under Cherny's pillow, there is a femur.

The rotting sponge within, wrapped like swaddling around the hardened marrow, expands just enough.

...a dying echo of Song still shivers in his teeth, and accompanying it, the throbbing pulse of power dragged out of foul dreams slithers through the tear that separates dream from reality.

In a bag under Cherny's pillow, there is a femur.

A hair-thin crack appears, splitting through the whiteness in one of the Dreamwaker's bones.