Chapter 2:Tapestry of The Weaver..
The first breath was a shock of cold air waltzing through new systems. He felt the frantic palpitation of a heart, the rhythmic flow of blood, the pressure thrumming against fragile vessels. He clenched a fist, his subconscious tracing the signal as it traveled from brain to hand.
"Twenty milliseconds... not bad," he muttered to the sterile silence.
So this was a mortal body. This was life in all its fragile, fleeting glory—each pulse a measure of time that made him feel... diminutive. His existence was now bound by constraints created by a Creator he had predated. He severed the thought. Let the Creator bask in glory; for now, he was living a mortal life. No longer Dream, The Nameless.
He was a named mortal: Memphis Meredith.
His eyes scanned the room, noting the conspicuous absence of parents beyond these walls. But that was a concern for later. First, he had a more pressing task: the Existential Archive. The Omniversal Sentient Tree recorded the details of all creation in the Library of Pale Beginnings, and as Dream, he held some authority over it. He needed the concise description of the mortal vessel he now inhabited. He had never paid much attention to mortals before—they were a stress to his sentience—so he had let the Tree do its job.
"O' Sentient Tree," he intoned, his voice resonating with a power that belied his mortal form. "It is I, the Dream, The One Before Creation, who deemed you the visual Archetype. I seek the record for mortal number 544,345,764,091: Memphis Meredith."
The air around him congealed, growing still and heavy. Time itself loosened its dominion over the space. Then, a latent, glowing screen shimmered into existence, its light piercing the room's darkness and illuminating every corner with an unforgiving, sterile luminescence.
The Sentient Tree had answered.
"TRUE ARCHETYPE
RACE: Mortal
STRATA: MegaNova 206
PLANET Valen..1008
NAME: Memphis Meredith
SOUL IDENTITY: His Lordship... Dream
EXISTENTIAL ORIGIN: Landsbrough,Valen
Empire,Continent of Terra
ATTRIBUTES :None .
FLAW:
DREAMLESS: Rejects the Constraints of all Somnis Imagination. An Anomaly indeed.
FATE BOUND: Bound by the Crimson Threads of Lady Fate. Rejected by Mother Luck.
DEMISE: The clutch of Death shall embrace thee at the fraught age of 18. As Judged by Death.
MORE INFORMATION NEEDED..??.."
"No," he muttered, slashing a hand through the air. The hologram winked out of existence.
His fists clenched, knuckles bleaching white with the strain. He drove one into the bed, and the entire frame convulsed with a splintering groan. His teeth ground together. Fate and Death. He could accept being a whim to Time itself, but not to lesser entities like them. They dared to limit his mortal lifespan? Where had their reverence gone? Had they grown so pompous in the fleeting hours since his demise as Dream?
His hands raked through his dark hair, his breath coming in deep, measured exhales. How spiteful.
He would pay them a visit. He would reassert their place in the existential hierarchy and shred from himself this impending stench of Death and these crimson looms of Fate—dictators of the worst of lucks.
"I summon you, Dear Crow of the Beginning. Vortagem." The words were a whisper, yet they commanded the darkness. A perpetual shadow, deeper than the star-flecked night outside, warped the room. It swirled and condensed, retreating to form a crow of pure void upon his shoulder. A spherical silhouette of a dark orb, pulsing with latent power, warped into his waiting hand.
His current power was a mere fraction of what he truly encompassed, a consequence of his descent. Rewriting the very rules of this realm would mean rewriting the reason he had descended—to see through the eyes of mortals. But that would come after he settled his score with Fate and Death.
"En route to the Tapestry of Fate," he muttered, the subconscious command enough for Vortagem. The crow dissolved from his shoulder into a convoluted orb of shadow—the ethereal sphere of dreams. Using the imaginative energy of dreams from all beings, it dreamt a passageway, crossroading the world of mortals and the Tapestry of Fates. And Reality, pliant as clay, obeyed.
The air before him tore open with a sound like ripping silk. Through the rift, a corridor of shimmering, unstable potential yawned, its walls a kaleidoscope of half-formed thoughts and sleeping desires. Vortagem materialized back on his shoulder in a swirl of dark mist as Dream stepped through. His feet transcended from solid stone to a divine cadence, his steps sending ripples across a colourless sea of glass beneath a sky woven with countless threads—golden, pristine, crimson, and black. Each thread stretched into oblivion, the Looms of Fate binding all beneath them.
And to his profound irritation, he could see one—a glaring crimson strand—looming from his own chest.
He clicked his teeth, the sound a sharp punctuation of his disdain. His body dissolved into a swirling dance of black and incandescence, like the lingering whisper of a forgotten dream. He reformed inside the castle from which the looms emanated, a cathedral of woven destiny.
A river of molten gold, spun from the golden threads of manipulated destinies, flowed on either side of him. Towering above were twelve pristine statues of mortals, their faces etched with ecstasy, singing silent praises to the sky as they held aloft crystalline instruments. He paid them no mind. His path led between them to a shrine of decadent onyx, where a woman sat. Her hair was a cascade of white, her body a colossus bound by the very threads that speared from her form into the cathedral's heights. Her eyes were woven shut.
He felt diminutive, staring up at a being multiple levels beneath him. The irony was not lost on him.
A dull ache in his mortal legs signaled it was time to stop standing. A subconscious signal to Vortagem was all it took. The crow dissolved once more, its ethereal blackness swelling to drown the sanctuary in a brooding, glorious shadow. From the spreading dark, a throne coalesced: a magnificent structure of pulsing, root-like legs and armrests embedded with orbs that contained swirling wishes and thoughts, sparking like captive stars.
Dream settled into it, crossing one leg over the other. He rested his face on a palm, his elbow vested upon the throne's armrest. In his left hand, the dark orb from which Vortagem had emanated now rested, cool and familiar.
"It is quite an entrance... Dream Lord." A feminine voice, of a beauty so profound it felt sharp, laced the entire realm. The cathedral quaked gently with her words.
He sighed, a smirk gracing his lips as his eyes gleamed with liquid silver.
"It has been a while," he said, his voice a low reverberation that shook the foundations of her domain with equal ferocity. "Weaver."