Outworld/The Wyrdwood

A Dark Dream

Author: Vermillion

In the depths of the Wyrdwood, there stands a castle of bone and black marble.

In the highest tower of the castle, there stands a four-poster bed, adorned with golden skulls and hung with drapes of blazing crimson and midnight black.

In the bed a woman lies sleeping, red hair bright against her pillows, eyes twitching as she dreams.

Around the bed, an elaborate pattern of sigils and symbols shows this is no normal sleep; candles stand flickering, halted mid-flame, drops of wax paused halfway through rolling down their sides.

Vermilion sleeps, and dreams, and Shapes her realm. She is too young to remember Valtaria as it was in the beginning, before the games of light and shadow; but every child born to Valtaria knows the legends, brings them to life in their imagination. Vermilion sleeps, and dreams, and the world of her childhood fantasies takes shape once more within her mind, and flows out into the portion of reality that is hers to Shape.

Her dream-self walks the forests, hunts with the wolves; soars above the fields, hearing the cries of the birds that wheel about her; stands high upon the mountains, ruler of all she surveys, with the sound of great wings beating behind her. All is as it should be; wild and untamed, a land fit for heroes to rise in and stride through and prove themselves against, a land fit for villains to reign over briefly and gloriously, and be cast down from the high places of to nurture the woods with their blood…

Around the bed, a soft glow rises; drawn to the exercise of power, the Wyrdwood’s newest denizens gather, a clutter of ghostly spiders spinning ethereal webs between the bedposts. It is their nature to appear where there is danger, as a herald and a warning; and the Carrion-Queen is, after all, by far the most dangerous creature in her realm.

She stirs in her slumber, and looks up at the spiders, her Partner’s gift to her realm. A smile forms on her lips as she falls back into her dreams; eyes already closed, she whispers words that shiver through the air with power borrowed from the ongoing working.

“I will reshape the world in your image…”

One trailing hand reaches out and drowsily grasps a strand of spider-silk, drawing it back with her into the dream.

A shiver runs through the air, a flash of power rolling out from the Wyrdwood through the Crucible of Legends.

And where it passes, the forests of legend become haunted by spiders.