//------------------------------// // 959 - Nisha's Story // Story: Lateral Movement // by Alzrius //------------------------------// My mother’s dreams were always beautiful. Every night, when we’d go to sleep, I’d make sure to stay awake long enough to watch them. She never liked talking about her adventures – “getting lost in the past means losing sight of the future,” she’d always say – but she must have seen so many incredible things to have dreamed so vividly. Skies that would turn orange and pink as an orb of light crept over the horizon. Endless expanses of water that were bright blue. Lush fields of green bordered by mountains of the same color. It was a never-ending variety of wondrous sights, all the more so for the fascinating creatures that inhabited them. Some of them were mesmerizing, like the huge red bird that was surrounded by fire. Others were funny, like the field of little plant people with pumpkins for heads. And a few were frightening, like the massive purple worm that burst out the ground and swallowed everything in sight. I couldn’t get enough of them. Compared to the endless, murky shades of black and grey that made up our home – the Shadow Plane – and the ugly monsters that shared it with us, her dreams were an escape that I always looked forward to. One time I made the mistake of asking her why we had to stay here, when there were so many nicer places we could live. She laughed, asking where I thought would be nicer, and I eagerly described the beautiful lands that I’d seen while she was asleep. She stopped laughing then, instead getting an ugly look on her face – the same kind that she got whenever she saw something too dangerous for us to fight – and told me never to do that again. I tried to do as she said, but I couldn’t help it. After seeing something so many beautiful things, no one would resign themselves to living in a world with nothing but dullness and danger. Especially since by that time I’d figured out that I could nudge mother’s dreams so that she’d show me the parts I wanted to see the most. I don’t think she realized at first. She usually dreamed about places she’d been and things she’d seen, so if I’d kept pushing her dreams to be about those, she probably couldn’t have caught on for a while. But I made another mistake that tipped her off. I tried to make her dream about my father. Ever since I’d learned that families were supposed to have a father as well as a mother, I’d been curious why it was just mother and me. But she’d always refused to speak of it, no matter how much I begged or cried to howled at her. The only thing she’d say was that I hadn’t taken after him, whatever that meant, and that she was glad for it. Anyone would have been curious after being told something like that. In hindsight, I should have realized that there was a reason mother had never dreamed about him before. Or at least, I should have known that something was wrong when she – for the first time ever – started fighting me when I tried to make her dream what I wanted. I wish I could say that I pushed back because I was curious, or stubborn, or even just too young to know better. But the truth is that I was angry. I resented her refusing to tell me why we had to live in the gloomy lands of the Shadow Plane – roaming through bogs and ruins and forests – instead of in the bright and wonderful places in her dreams. Telling me her dreams were off-limits only made that worse. Her refusing to tell me who sired me, though...that was more than I could take. So I made her dream about him, despite her trying to stop me. In the end, though, neither of us got what we wanted. All I saw were glimpses and fragments. Even if it’s easier to talk about “seeing” dreams, it’s not just visual; in dreams, you can hear things. Smell them. Feel them, physically and emotionally. And what I got from her was broken mixture of all of them: A deep growl. Being knocked to the ground. The sight of a dark moon that was blacker than the surrounding sky. Teeth around my/her neck. Pain. Pleasure. Shame. When she woke up, mother was angrier than I’d ever seen her. If not for the fact that I was already as big and strong as she was, despite still being a child – the only way I was like my father, I’d figure out later – I think she would have attacked me right there. Instead, she stared at me in silent fury as I whimpered and apologized and begged her not to hate me. Her response was to turn and leave without another word. I followed her, of course. What child wouldn’t? But she didn’t acknowledge me. Not one word, not one look. She hunted for her own food, leaving me to do the same, and she didn’t so much as glance back if I ever fell behind. The only time that changed was when it was time to sleep. When I approached her so that we could curl up together – sleeping in pairs was always safer than alone – she bared her teeth at me, hackles rising. It was something I’d seen her do countless times before, sending a clear message: come closer, and I’ll attack. The only dreams I saw that night were my own, and they all involved my mother abandoning me. But when I woke up and went back to where she’d laid down, she was still there. Looking back, things didn’t stay that way for very long – it was maybe nine or ten days at most – but at the time it seemed like an eternity. I was just beginning to wonder if things would ever go back to normal, not realizing that we’d ventured far outside of our normal hunting grounds, when we came to a part of the Shadow Plane that I’d never been to before. A city. Cities are rare on the Shadow Plane. Grouping together is the most basic way to stay safe, but mother had always said that large groups negated that benefit. That was because the stronger monsters were attracted to large gatherings of people – “obvious targets,” mother called them – and having a fixed living place meant that if you ran away when that happened, you couldn’t be part of the group anymore. The second reason there aren’t many cities is because of how easy the undead pop up there. Although that’s true anywhere on the Shadow Plane. For whatever reason, sometimes dead things don’t stay dead there. It doesn’t happen all of the time – or even most of the time – but it happens often enough that you get used to it after a while. You’ll kill something, and a little while later it’ll get back up and try to kill you if you’re still around. Sometimes it’ll be wearing what’s left of its body, other times it’ll be a wraith or a ghost or some other spectral thing, but either way it’s another reason not to stay in one place; you kill something, eat it, and move on. But not in a city. Since they’re big enough that it’s possible for someone in one to die without anyone noticing, the undead are a threat from within the same way monsters are from without. So naturally, I was shocked when mother – speaking for the first time in a long time – said, “we’ll be living here from now on.” For just a moment, I thought she’d forgiven me. Then she continued speaking. “There should be plenty of other victims whose dreams you can force your way into here.” I think that was when I realized that she was never going to forgive me for making her relive what had happened to her. Living in a city was strange, compared to our old lives. For one thing, we had to stay in our two-legged forms all the time there, instead of just using them when we wanted to lure in smarter prey by pretending to be helpless travelers. Mother explained that our kind – which were apparently called names like “flicker wolves” and “shadow worgs” by the bipeds, since we could not only shape move through darkness, but shape it – weren’t known for being able to change shape the way she and I could; apparently, we were special like that. And since mother couldn’t look at dreams, and wasn’t as physically powerful as I was, I was apparently that much more special. Being special, as it turns out, is something you need to keep hidden. But having to hide what I really was – along with learning so many other customs and practices, like wearing clothes all the time, using small round pieces of metal to acquire things, and marking out what words look like on thin pieces of bark – was worthwhile, since mother turned out to be correct. There were many, many other dreams for me to look at there. Most of the time, they made mother’s seem tame. Castles, ships, and caravans were all things I learned from the city’s dreamers. So were knights, princesses, and wizards. The new foods of the city were as nothing compared to what people remembered in their dreams, and songs that no one seemed to dare to sing aloud in the dark alleys and smoke-filled taverns. Every time I laid down to rest, I learned something new. Especially when it came to those dreams that involved love. Having reached the age where such things became of interest to me, I indulged myself in the memories and fantasies of everyone around me – except my mother – using their dreams to learn about what I liked. A seamstress who lived down the street from us, and whom I’d barely ever said hello to except for when I needed new clothes, showed me how it felt when a handsome prince asked for a dance. The woman who served drinks at the tavern, and who’d helped me learn how to read, taught me of the wondrous heartache that came from trading vows of eternal love on your wedding day. A guardswoman who never had a smile for anyone who passed her on the street still dreamed of how her heart had soared when the boy she liked had smiled back at her. And all of them, along with many others, had dreamed of the more physical ways to express love, answering a lot of questions I’d had about what exactly had happened to my mother. But even knowing the circumstances of how I’d been born didn’t change the fact that dreams were rapidly becoming unsatisfying. I didn’t want to keep stealing glimpses of someone else’s life; I wanted to start living my own! I eventually got my wish, but in the worst possible way. While I’d been spending my time learning about life outside of the Shadow Plane, my mother had been working to provide for us. Having joined the city watch, she’d gotten used to spending long hours manning the gates, patrolling for disturbances, and watching the canyon that the city was built next to. That last one was apparently considered a cushy assignment, since it had apparently been quite a long time since the last time anything besides bats or insects had come out of the massive trench. Until one day, something much worse had appeared. Later on, I found out that it was called a nightwalker. But at the time, all I knew was that a creature larger than a giant – its body composed of shadow, with horns like a ram and arms like blades – had hauled itself up the side of the canyon and over the city wall. Almost completely immune to magic, hundreds of people died before the city watch brough it down, and they lost almost half of their number in the process. Mother was one of them. There was no body to recover, no remains to lay to rest. The creature had been sent hurtling back down into the canyon it had come from, and more than a few of the guards had fallen with it. Between the fall and the fact that the nightwalker lived down there, plans to search for survivors were nonexistent, as the people in charge decided to focus on rebuilding. Instead, there’d been a brief ceremony honoring the fallen, and that had been that. Just like that, I was an orphan. Except, I’d realized once I’d gotten done crying, I wasn’t. My father was still out there. Even if I didn’t know anything about him, I had a few clues to go off of. The first was my own strange power to view dreams; if my mother didn’t have that ability, then it had to have come from him. The second was what I’d seen in my mother’s dream: the pitch black sky with an even darker moon hanging in it. I don’t know what I was expecting – I knew that the circumstances of my conception meant that my father likely wouldn’t value me in the slightest, let alone what had happened to mother – but I was desperate. I wanted to believe that someone out there still cared about me. Even more stupidly, I thought that maybe I’d have a grand adventure in the process. I had to spend almost all of the money mother had left me researching those two clues, and it took long enough that the city had well and truly recovered by the time I got an answer, but eventually I found a name: Darkest Night, the realm of the pony goddess known as the Night Mare. I suppose I could have taken things slowly and made better preparations, but the truth is that I was eager to leave. I’d long since grown sick of the Shadow Plane, and living in the city seemed hollow now that mother was gone, as though the entire place had become a testament to how I’d permanently damaged our relationship and spent the rest of my childhood using other people’s dreams to hide from that. So instead of working a job and saving up the money for a proper expedition, or even conducting more research, I used the last of mother’s funds to pay a wizard to send me there. A one-way trip to the home of my father, where I was determined I’d finally turn my life around. I’m still amazed I survived. As it was, I almost didn’t. The creatures in Darkest Night aren’t like those in the Shadow Plane, and while my powers still worked there, I wasn’t prepared for how harsh of a place the Night Mare’s realm was. Or how harsh the people were. If I had known then how Eigengrau was run, I would have turned around the moment I caught sight of its walls. I’d thought it was like the city I’d grown up in back home, where the guards kept a modicum of order and everyone otherwise ignored each other in quiet tension. But Eigengrau was different, and my initial attempts to enter the city went...badly. Then White Wraith showed up, and things got much worse. I don’t remember most of the fight, at least not once he started using “aristeia.” I suppose the fact that I was able to push him far enough to use that was a victory, but it didn’t feel like one, since after he’d laid me out, he dragged me inside the city for what he’d called “proper punishment.” I’d gotten past the walls, but not the way I wanted. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he did after that, but I know that it somehow broke my ability to look at dreams. It didn’t just prevent me from using it on others, but now I couldn’t stop using it against myself, twisting my own dreams into nightmares not only when I slept, but speaking to me even when I was awake. Even after I somehow escaped into the wilderness, there was no peace for me. I don’t know how long I remained like that, but I had just decided to try and kill White Wraith again – which, in hindsight, was another way of saying that I’d decided to try and commit suicide – when I saw him. Lex Legis. There are no words to describe what I felt when I watched him approach Eigengrau from the safety of the trees. That he had wolves with him – white wolves, admittedly, but wolves nonetheless – was intriguing. That they announced him as being a prince, just like in those dreams I’d spied on, was shocking. But what happened next was what won me over. He humiliated the pony who’d humiliated me. If it was just revenge by proxy, I doubt I’d have fallen in love with him the way I did then. But everything else about his actions – the tenacity he displayed, the concern for his companions, the complete and utter lack of fear even when White Wraith crippled him – drew me to him. This was the handsome prince that I’d seen in so dreams back home. This was the strong, compassionate warrior that I’d wanted to meet. And as he walked through the gates of Eigengrau, triumphant where I’d been defeated, I prayed to the Night Mare to bring us together, so that at last I could start living my own dream. Together with my prince. I never expected her to actually grant my wish. Nor for him to reject me after she did. It was my fault, of course; like a child, I’d thought that he'd simply take one look at me and sense the depths of my feelings for him, immediately reciprocating like in the dreams I’d peered into. Instead, I insulted the depths of his bond with that white wolf, and he threw me away... But I understood the hidden message in his rejection. After all, he gave me a ring when he sent me back, which I’d learned was the universal symbol for an engagement. He hadn’t rejected me at all; instead, he’d told me to wait until I was worthy of him, and then he’d come for me. It was the only thing which sustained me after Grim Darklight found me, knowing that no matter how much pain I was in, or whatever torture he put me through, my prince would come. And now, at last...