A Tale Wrought In Silver and Blood

He had a silver knife; a long silken robe of white cloth woven from the essence of broken dreams, and a coruscating sphere of light hovering over his free hand. That was all he needed, she knew. Satrina realized she was dreaming the moment she saw the ephemeral figure. Or, to be more accurate she supposed, she knew she was having a nightmare. Before she noticed them, she had been wandering about a long and cavernous hall that never seemed to end, instead stretching on and on and on into what seemed to be infinity. As was the way of normal dreams, Satrina’s avatar didn’t seem to find anything wrong with this. Dream Satrina just wandered on, listlessly, her mind caught in a fog that prevented coherent thought and instead enveloped her awareness in empty bliss. Nothing was wrong, and nothing had to be so long as she continued walking, walking, and walking. Until she saw the figure. Dream Satrina had been visited in her dreams before, and in this dream-scene in particular, if one considered caricatured representations of real life figures suitable stand-ins for ‘visitors’. She had seen and spoken to her mother, father, siblings, chimeric abominations symbolizing the many pets she had kept over the years, a legion of werewolves at one time bowing down and swearing undying allegiance, and even a naked eidolon of Aren Lykard, the popular reigning champion of the Lycan Blood Sports. She had seen and spoken to all of these and more in these halls, these halls that seemed to stretch ever eternally into the depths of the realm of Somnus. One particular visitor out of all of them always stood out though. She couldn’t see his face. None of the people or creatures she saw in her dreams ever looked right or normal, unless they appeared in the particularly powerful precognitive visions occasionally granted to her by the Moon Mother. There was always something wrong with how they looked, how they appeared. Their faces especially were usually indiscernible and blurry at best, horrifically disfigured at worst. Sometimes the uncanny details were even more surreal, though. She might see someone with two heads, too long arms, flapping mouths speaking a language that should’ve been nothing but incomprehensible gibberish but somehow managed to be perfectly understandable. It was but the way of dreams, she believed. When one treads the border between inchoate unreality and physical reality, the things that one encounters should not be expected to conform to their narrow expectations. This had never happened to the figure, though. Whenever they appeared, they were always perfectly rendered, sometimes so perfectly and so starkly that in comparison to the undefined caricatured world of dreams around them, they seemed all the more stranger and alien. The dream went on as expected. When she saw the figure, Dream-Satrina began to run. Her heart pounded, and even in the dream she could feel the cold and foreboding fingers of terror reaching down to her heart to squeeze it to the point where she wouldn’t be able to breath. The scenery around her flashed and shifted with alarming alacrity, dissolving into streaks of color that one might see around them when they were moving sufficiently fast enough. Curiously, Dream-Satrina did not feel as if she was running. For while her legs, imagined though they were, were moving with a speed borne of desperation, she could scarcely call to feeling that state of propulsion that should have gone through her. Instead, her legs moved and the world around her moved in tandem with it. Then they came on to an arena of sorts, and here she knew the dream would soon draw to its predestined end. She called it an arena because the place in her dream world was so wide and cavernous, but in truth it most likely wasn’t. Not that she could really tell now, could she? Everything was still shrouded in that undefined, blurry state of dreams. The only things she could make out with any clarity was the pool of silver that shone in the middle of the arena, and the figure that still made its way towards her in that sedate, almost malevolent pace of his. “No! I shall not fall here!” She yelled in defiance, her voice echoing and multiplying eerily in the arena, and she felt her body begin to call upon the gift of the Moon Mother characteristic to most Lycans. She grew taller, the clothes she wore stretched to accommodate her increased bulk and frame. She felt her bones contort, and when all was said and done, she knew that she had gone from looking like a seemingly innocuous looking girl into a bipedal beast that stood seven feet tall at least. This was the strongest stage of the werewolf transformation for Lycans, only achievable during full moons and even then only to the most skilled and powerful of their kind. For most others, it was either the human form, human with some bestial characteristics, or the full wolf form. This form was a perfect blend of speed and sheer overwhelming power. Not that it would help her. It never did. They met in battle, Dream-Satrina and the figure. The scenery around them dissolved into a kaleidoscopic deluge of color and sounds. Time seemed to lose its meaning, as only time in dreams can. She wasn’t aware of the intervening moments that delineated the beats of the battle. All she knew was that one second, she was fighting tooth and claw to the death, and the next… pain. She looked down. She knew what she would find. A silver knife through the heart. Silver, the metal most attuned to the werewolves due to their association with the Moon Mother, which was ironically also their greatest weakness. Pain. She fell, and fell, and fell. She could’ve fallen for a second or for a thousand years for all she knew and could discern. The only thing she could be sure of was that she fell, and when she was done falling, she was swallowed by light. Bright silver light that set her body on fire and at the same time calmed her, strengthened her. The pain grew all consuming. She could see her blood, stark crimson against the light. At the end, all she could see was silver and blood. She woke up.