The Nightmare is not a game...

Another orc warband, purely in Dream, across a blasted heath where nothing wanted to live or move. Boar-faced yellow-skins littered the ground, bleeding yellow-black stuff onto the ground, burning away with vivus.

The lads were looting with moderate enthusiasm. Orcs rarely had much in the way of wealth, mostly carved ivory or crude things of gold.

“You Won Again!”

I paused to look around automatically, but naturally a disembodied voice had no source.

“And I will continue to win. You’ll find it very hard to kill me now.”

“You-You Have To Get Out Of My Dreams!” the voice answered. Sounded like a young girl, petulant, angry, almost desperate.

“Oh, that is definitely going to happen,” I agreed. “I don’t like being trapped here, either.”

There was a long moment of pause. The nearest of the boys were looking at me oddly, talking to the air, but I just waved them back to checking the dead or the ashes they’d left behind. The current main topic of conversation was that the meat from their dire boar mounts wouldn’t last long enough to be cooked up. Pork this-and-that recipes were flying back and forth sword-quick.

“Trapped?” the voice asked, hesitantly.

“Yes. By you.”

Mists began to swirl, and the men straightened up, their spoils in hand or heaped on the wagons. The dream ended as Renewal came up to start another one.

------

“Was that who I thought it was?” Tremble asked from behind my waist, while we waited for the slain to come out of the mists and start the downtime workday. Over the many months of these battles, I’d managed to teach quite a few helpers how to work things in downtime, to the point that all of them had certain things to do or help with.

There were alchemists at work on Potions and consumables, using up whatever we could scavenge for comps. They’d just be journeymen at a guild, but I didn’t care, the simple stuff was what we needed. Artificers labored with the smiths to upgrade weaponry, make the magic arrows we used up constantly, and organized the Investing and Infusing.

The Powered generally worked on special permanent items, often taking the Craft I worked on and completing any Infusions needed, to extend their downtime.

A lot of the boys had Named Weapons now. If they couldn’t use Slaughter or Arsenal or optimal configurations, that was fine. Some had Vivic, to dispose of the dead. Some had Blooding, to make sure regenerating things couldn’t heal. Some had Flaming, Icy, Acidic, or Lightning, in case we ran across foes vulnerable to those things.

A lot of them had Enmity to Evil, since it was a broad category and useful against basically everything we fought, save for some beasts. Other than that, however, there were a few small groups of specialists with Banes on their Weapons, able to go toe-to-toe with those creatures in straight-up combat, but mostly that was something left to the archers and specific quivers of Arrows we’d amassed (and which were used up at amazing speed when the time was right) or by the very popular Baneskull collections we had.

Magic Weapons and Armor on every single one of the lads. It was an amazing accomplishment, and made a huge difference when fighting. Replicating this level of built-up power just wasn’t easy for the Curse, which basically had a set amount of energy to spend, by what we all could tell. In contrast, the strength of my lads accumulated over time, and all death did was slow it down some.

I retired for my two hours, thoughts flicking this way and that to assign specific duties, and leaving it to the officers to find anything I didn’t specifically address.

“What does it mean, if the Curse is talking to us?” Tremble asked in a low voice, after our services to Sylune and Aru, as I sat in the shadow of the wagon that held the base tent.

“My guess? The persona is getting old enough that being Forsaken is starting to wear at the Curse, and the barriers between us are getting thinner. Having a Ten soul and a Vajra worth of ki running through her is only going to accelerate the process. Even if she’s got no Levels and none of my Stat mods from them, she should be rocking a 23 Con, and with my Masteries and such, she’s already sitting on at least a 22 Null. That’s enough to beat even an Epic Curse, eventually, and it’s only going to go up as she gets older and tougher.”

“So… she’s killing herself.”

“By getting older, although she doesn’t know it.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“Why not? The Curse is screwing the persona at least as bad as me. She would end up a Hag, and me a Hag’s soul. We’re in this together way more than the Curse.”

“If she’s willing to die.”

“The Curse prefers all its victims sweet and innocent. The more innocent they are, the more wicked a Hag they become. But it also means they don’t want to become Hags. If they actually have the choice…”

“Ahhhh… the Curse leaves them no choice…”

“I’m leaving them no choice, either… but I’m not going to be preying on her family, and that’s a big difference. Her only option to deal with me is kill herself, the Curse, and me. All I have to do is be heroic and worth saving, and she should be good, right?”

“That’s a tall order…”

“The Curse can’t keep me here. She’s going to have to come to terms with that. She determines how she dies. She’s been watching me for years. She knows what I am, who I am. Now she has to determine if I’m her demon, or something else.”

“You think the Curse is twisting her perceptions?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. But it’s going to be less and less able to do so as her Null progresses.”

“It does mean we’re closer to getting out of here, aren’t we?” he asked wistfully.

“Damn straight!”

“Am I going to get out of here, Sama?” he asked uncertainly. “I’m not afraid of dying, but, you know…”

Sparkie popped up next to me. “You’re as much a part of me as Sparkie here, created from my Soul Essence and Karma, just like Stand and Fall. You’ll all be coming out with me, one way or another. I’ll have to find new homes for you, that’s all. It’ll take some time, but I’ll get it done. No way I’m leaving you here.”

“What about the lads?”

I lifted my gaze to the dream-soldiers that were following me, who had wisps of real Karma clinging to them, and were all Marked by me.

“They’re made of Dream, they can’t leave. Without me here, they’ll fade away quickly. Maybe they’ll remember me in the real world, but they exist in this Nightmare, which exists because of me. No me, no Nightmare, no them.”

“Cruel…”

“Aye.” They weren’t real, they didn’t really have independent thought, and they forgot details from one day to the next… but they were my lads, and we had literally waded through blood and gore together. I would miss them, when it was time.

I closed my eyes to Meditate, rest, recover for two hours. Recenter, stabilize, and sanitize my head against this insane lifestyle.

---------

“You Won Again!”

“Of course.” I bent down to pick up a gold hoop, punting the head of the hyen it was still attached to, and ripping it from its ragged ear.

“How Did I Trap You?”

“I am your soul.”

“Wha-What?”

“I am trapped because the Curse ate me when I was a child, and made you to take my place. You and the Curse didn’t have a soul, so you took mine.”

“You’re Lying!”

“I am your soul. You could tell if I was lying to you.”

“I Don’t Believe You!”

“Yes, you do. You’re just denying it. Talk to you tomorrow.”

--------

“I Will Beat You!” I cracked open the hieracosphinx’s chest and extracted its heart, followed by its pinfeathers. A few flying Potions or a Belt would be an unwelcome surprise to some of our aerial attackers…

“You don’t sound very confident. But keep trying, I don’t mind.”

“Why Do You Seem So Old, If You Are My Soul?”

“You ate my present incarnation and destroyed it, for all intents and purposes. Guess what incarnation I reverted to?”

“Your Last One…” Almost a whisper.

“I don’t remember a lot of that life, but I remember enough to know that I don’t like being eaten alive, and the Curse is going to pay for it.”

“But… Shouldn’t My Soul Be ME?” she protested.

“I’m a Null Forsaken. My soul could never be yours while I retain my own identity. I’m trapped here because the Curse is trying to scrub my identity free of me, and impose yours on me. As you can tell, that’s not going to happen.”

“Then… What Am I?”

“Tell you tomorrow.”

---------

A sound like a fist hitting a table. “How Do You Keep Winning?!”

“Experience. Nice try with the demons. Did you go studying them? Couple new varieties there, and you actually brought in a real marilith to Warlord them.”

I drove Tremble through the skull of said marilith, currently missing all six of her forearms, the lads scooping up the… eclectic set of stupidly exotic Weapons she had been wielding in said severed limbs. She writhed a bit as I fed her to my right arm’s Philosopher’s Might, doing double duty as a Binder Seal. I thought about thanking her for doing this, but decided it wasn’t necessary.

She probably hadn’t come across the lilitu I was looking for.

“I Found A Book Describing Them…” she trailed off, as if caught doing something naughty.

“Knowing your enemies isn’t a problem. Of course, the Curse doesn’t want you to know them for that reason…”

“You Said You’d Tell Me What I Am, Since You Aren’t Me...?”

I watched the vivic fire pouring along the length of the marilith’s twitching body, pouring real Karma into my Philosopher’s Might, helping brand them on my soul.

“You’re a Persona.”

“What’s That?”

“It’s a mind without a soul. The Curse made you up so that it could betray you in the most cutting manner possible.”

“Betray Me? What Curse? How?!”

“Because we’re a Hagchild, and it wants to make you into a Hag.”