Nightmares

The following paragraphs are a collection of nightmares, written for a fellow Dungeon Master who was running a group through Tomb of Annihilation, in which there is a group of creatures who intensify dreams. Three of them are in two parts. Please keep in mind that these stories take place in a medieval fantasy setting.

Sweet

You wake to the smell of something sweet. Rubbing your eyes and pulling yourself from the warm blanket and comfortable bed, you stumble downstairs to the kitchen. Sitting on the small table is a plate heaped with pancakes, smothered in syrup and butter, with a tall glass of juice next to it. You sigh happily and sink into the chair waiting for you, picking up the fork to dig in. As the first bite hits your tongue, your mouth fills with warm, fluffy goodness, soaked with sweet sticky sugar. You hum in pleasure as you munch your way through the first one in the stack. The taste of melted butter mixed with the honey sweetness brings back happy memories from your childhood, warm meals with your family surrounding you, the excitement of a special day ahead, even a sense of childish wonder.  You cut into the next pancake, and slide the fork between your teeth. Biting down, more maple goodness squeezes out and you roll the taste around your mouth. Something hard crunches, and you frown momentarily, but swallow and move on to the next fork full of food. This is the best plate of pancakes you’ve had in your life, and you reach out to wash it down with a large gulp of ice cold juice. As you set the glass down, you run your tongue along the inside of your mouth, savoring the taste combination. Your tongue finds a hole, a gap where there wasn’t one before, and you frown again, probing the spot with the tip of your tongue. Yep, there’s a hole in your gums where a tooth used to be. You shrug, and dig your fork back into the plate of food in front of you. The sweet spongy pancake practically melts in your mouth as you shovel in forkful after forkful. You feel another crunch against your teeth as you bite down into something hard, and instinctively swallow the chewed food in your mouth. This time you feel the hard lump slide down your throat with the food. You open your mouth for the next bite and hear a tiny clack! as something hard clinks against the plate. Looking down, you see a small white chunk sitting next to your pancake. You pick it up and take a closer look, then wrinkle your nose in disgust as you realize this is one of your teeth. Sliding your tongue along your gums again, you find a tooth that is barely sitting in place, and it tumbles out of your mouth and down your chin before you even realize what’s happening.  You stick your finger in your mouth and gently run it along your teeth. One…. Two…. Three….Seven….  Somehow in the course of eating these pancakes you have managed to lose eleven of your teeth, all in different places. Pushing back from the table, you go to the mirror hanging on the wall. You smile widely, and see the strange dark holes littering your mouth, like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing forever.

Fly

It’s finally your turn.  The familiar children around you laugh and push you forward, encouraging and urging you ahead.  You grin back at them, then run to the massive oak tree that grows in the center of the village square where you have spent your short life. Excitement runs like electricity through your body as you grip a hand around the lowest branch and pull yourself up, using a foot to kick start your momentum.  Reaching higher, you plant a foot against the trunk of the tree, digging your shoe against the bark and pulling up to the next branch. Climbing this tree is a challenge, a rite of passage known only to the children of your village, and today you are more determined than ever to be the one to make it to the top branch.  The current record is held by Edward, a cocky almost teenager who stands to the side of the group of cheering kids with his arms crossed in front of him, a smug look on his face.  Adrenaline rushes through you as you climb, higher and higher. You feel as light as a squirrel, and the warmth in your muscles as you pull upward feels good today, rather than painful and scary the way it has on your past attempts. Don’t look down, you tell yourself, shimmying around the trunk of the tree to find a closer branch to inch you higher and closer to your goal.  Every other time you’ve tried this, fear has frozen you about halfway up, because this tree is truly massive. Not to mention, there is a constant wind blowing across the upper half, a cold cross wind that comes down into your quiet little valley from the mountain range to the west. Not today, you think. Today is YOUR day to shine, and you can’t wait to see that stupid Edward lose his stupid smile. You practically fly up the branches, quickly passing the halfway point where you normally begin to falter. The wind is shaking the branches up here, but you are very focused, your eyes searching quickly for the next, sturdiest step upward.  You step onto a branch and feel it give a little under your foot, then hear a cracking noise as you pull your foot away and up to the next branch. Making a mental note to avoid that branch on the way back down, you pause for a moment to catch your breath and look out. From this bird’s eye vantage, you can see the village laid out below you. It looks like a child’s toy set, like blocks set in the dirt with tiny little figures moving around the square below, ants in your giant’s view.  The wind shakes the tree and you grip the branch you’re holding tighter, feeling the roughness of the bark against your fingers.  When the wind slows a bit, you begin to move again, climbing higher into the branches. Very quickly you reach a point where the branches thin and the trunk of the tree has tapered to a point that it will not support your weight anymore. The sound of cheering reaches you, and you peer down through the branches to see the group of your friends screaming in excitement. You catch a glimpse of Edward, his arms now dropped to his sides and a look of astonishment on his dumb face. You raise a hand and pump it toward the sky, hollering your victory to the sun. Suddenly, a massive gust of wind hits you hard, and you lean forward. Your foot slips off the branch holding your weight and you fall. Managing to hold tight with one hand, you claw at the branch with your other, trying to get a grip as you dangle a hundred feet in the air. Fingernails scratch at the wood and your sweaty palm begins to slip. Your fingers lose their hold and you fall, gravity betraying you at last, pulling you down the insane height you’ve scaled to the hard ground, where you will surely splat like a dropped egg.

Scratch

You are trudging through the jungle, heading vaguely uphill. Your legs burn with the exertion, your breathing is slightly labored. All around, you can hear the sounds of wildlife, the birds calling, monkeys screeching in the distance, something large moving off to the right, but not near enough to be of worry. You wipe the sweat off your forehead, taking a deep breath and releasing it in a huff. The worst part isn’t the constant oppressive humidity, the dirty water that caused some digestive issues when you and your party first arrived here, or even the fact that nearly everything here has or will try to kill and eat you. It’s the damn bugs. High pitched whining in your ear that stops for a few seconds when you wave them away, then are right back at their game of driving you insane.  The second night you spent here, you woke up and found that some blood sucking insect had attached itself to your neck, digging in with its jaw, fat and distended, full of your blood. You slapped it away, too late realizing why it was swollen, causing it to explode in a splash of red. Since that night, you’ve taken to sleeping wrapped in netting to protect against the plentiful insect life, but during the day, there’s only so much you can do. And it seems that something with poison in its bite has found your left calf.  You swipe at your leg with the tip of your walking stick, trying to lightly scratch the swollen bite through the fabric of your pants. All this manages to do is make the itching increase. You call to your friends, asking for a water break and a rest on the hike.  You plop down onto a rock near the path, hand immediately reaching for the small dot on your leg that STILL feels like something is crawling on it, poking some poison into your skin, a constant deep itch. Nails digging in, you find some deeply satisfying, almost primal relief from the itch. You look at your companions, sitting nearby, one telling a silly joke to blow off steam in their own way. The others listen with various expressions, tolerating the idiocy, grinning and giggling at the dumb punchlines, eye rolls.  The problem is, every time you still your hand, the deep itching returns almost immediately. So you close your eyes and just keep scratching, ignoring the sharp little pains when your nails go a bit too deep, concentrating on the satisfaction of an itch well scratched. Coming out of the haze of concentration, you realize the conversation around you has stopped. You open your eyes and see your companions, all staring at you, with expressions of horror on their faces. One begins to scream and points to your leg. Terror clutches your heart, and in dread you slowly tilt your line of sight down, to where your hand continues to dig at your itchy spot. You stare at your hand, covered in blood and gore, continuing to scratch, deeper and deeper into the hole in your leg, the mess of veins, sinew, dripping blood and chunks of skin and muscle, digging into the white exposed bone, wrist deep into the flesh that used to be your left calf. 

Scratch 2

It’s so hot. You pull air into your lungs and it feels like the thick,creamy soup that your nan used to feed you when you’d stay with her in wintertime. It sticks in your throat and in your lungs, making you fight harder to get enough oxygen into your body. You can feel a river of sweat making its way down your back, gluing your shirt to your skin. The ever-present high pitched whining of the insects, the thing that was the worst part about this jungle is now an afterthought. Every single step you take is agony. You feel the thud of your heart beat, a little too fast, massive heat and pain radiating from your left leg. The open wound was a nightmare to clean up, only one of your companions had the nerve to look at the exposed bone and destroyed soft tissue long enough to rinse the bloody mess away and bind it tight enough to stop the flow of blood.  You should have gone to a healing temple to have it fixed properly, but no one in your party has access to teleportation and so here you are, trudging through the hot jungle with a poultice packed onto the still seeping hole in your leg. You’ve put on a brave face in front of your friends, telling them that you are strong, you can keep going, you aren’t going to slow them down. But as every hour passes, the heat of infection and the stink of rot grows stronger.  The last time your group took a break, you gently peeled back the bandage to take a peek, and pretended not to notice the blackening and swollen tissue and the tell tale streaks of red running just under the skin up your knee and thigh. You had very gently probed at the edges of the wound and had a horrifying moment when the flesh melted under your fingertip, like perfectly cooked meat sliding off the bone. Breathing heavily in the humid air, you’re slowly coming to realize that you’re going to die here. If only you can fight off the fever and pain long enough to make a difference in this mission, it may even be worth it. You suddenly have a coughing fit, stopping the trek for a moment so you can catch your breath. Slumped against a nearby tree, breathing steady short breaths and sipping water, you feel hyper aware of the fact that the non-existent chunk of your leg STILL itches. Then you feel something inch up your thigh, across your hip and then cross over your abdomen. In a panic at the crawly feeling and the implications of yet another insect bite, you rip open your shirt to find the offender and make sure you can see it dead. You run your hands over your torso, not feeling any bug, only heated and sweat covered skin. Except… you never had this bump before. The fingers of both hands find the spot, a lump about the size of a coin just under the hard edge of your bottom right rib. You feel around the edges gently, then press one finger in the center…. And the lump moves.  It flees your pressing finger and slides up your ribs under your skin to hide in your armpit. You can’t help it, you scream, prompting your friends to come running. In short screeching phrases you attempt to explain what just happened, as you tear your shirt off completely and try to reach where you can feel it moving across your shoulder blade now. Your terror is barely contained and most of the noise coming from you is unintelligible screaming as you claw red lines into your skin, trying to stop the thing under your skin and get it out of you. The panic and screaming induces another coughing fit, this one so intense that you think you may choke to death before you catch your breath. Finally you feel something loosen in your chest and you bend over to spit the mucus on the ground. As one of your friends gives you a pat on the back to help you breathe, you have the distinct horror of feeling his hand squash the thing under your skin inside of you and in the same terrible moment noticing the small wormy thing crawling out of the hunk of saliva that just came out of your mouth. 

Dark

You wake to the sound of a loud thud. You open your eyes, but it is pitch black, so dark that you can’t actually tell the difference of your eyes being open or closed. Reaching your hand in front of your face to find some vision of your hand, instead you find resistance. A rough, wooden wall stands about a foot in front of you. But wait, you are laying on your back, aren’t you? In the immense darkness, you are losing perspective on what directions are, the way you’ve felt once before when, as a child you leapt off a decent sized cliff into a deep lake, and as the initial shock of the cold water left you, disorientation hit and you had no idea which way was up, which was down. That day you relied purely on instinct to kick your way to the surface of the water and find 

air. Now, you close your eyes, or at least you think you do, and try to instinctually determine what position you are lying in. Another loud thud, this time you hear smaller thuds that come just after the initial sound. A mystery that can wait a moment, you decide, and concentrate on your body awareness. You determine that you are lying horizontally, at least according to the way gravity pulls you. The air here feels stale, but the strong smell of raw, still wet split pine surrounds you. Reaching back out with your hand, you feel along the wall, finding seams every hands-width or so, until you reach the end of that wall, and find another. This wall runs perpendicular to the one before you, and on both sides of your body. You press both arms outward from your torso and hit the wood with your elbows, so that your upper arms make a diagonal line between your shoulder joint and the sides of this box. Thud. This time you hear whatever is making the sound land on the other side of the wooden surface in front of your face, and immediately find yourself blinking as bits of grit fall into your eye. Suddenly your mind starts to race, piecing together the information, and a looming dread fills you. You press hard against the board in front of you, and as the wood separates a bit at the seam, you feel the small trickle of more dirt hitting the side of your face. The small gasp of fresh air that came in with the soil holds the unmistakable smell of freshly turned earth, cold and a bit wet, likely six feet below the surface. Immediately your fighting instinct kicks in, and you begin to hit and kick the wood in front of you, at least as much as the severely restricted movement of this small box allows. Several painful, agonizing minutes go by as you beat your hands bloody against the pine lid, until you realize there is no way out, and even if you could break the wood, you can sense the weight of the tons of soil now sitting on top of this box that would surely crush you as soon as you breached the wooden barrier.  No, you whisper to yourself, using all of your will not to gasp for air, not to scream. Breath is a luxury you can’t afford to waste now. You lay still, counting your breaths, listening to the thuds that grow quieter as the dirt piles onto your final resting place. The air in the coffin starts to run out, and you begin to feel woozy and tired. You fight to keep your mind focused, but as you drift in and out of consciousness you hear the slithering of something moving in the soil to your left beyond the confines of this wooden box, and then, the faint knocking of knuckles on the wood, as if something wants to be invited in.

Dark 2

You wake again in complete darkness. You have a flash of the panic you felt when you dreamed you were buried in a wooden box, and try to move your arm to feel in front of your face, just to reassure yourself you aren’t actually in a coffin under the ground. But your arm does not respond to your mental commands. You don’t feel as if you are restrained in any way, your body simply refuses to do what you tell it to.  Feeling this might be worse than the box, you internally demand your body listen to you, trying to bully your limbs into movement.  For the first time in your life, your body rebels, and the seed of fear you felt when you awoke in the dark blossoms into full blown panic. You feel the scream start down in the pit of your stomach and come clawing its way up your throat, your jaw drops open and a horrifying wail comes loose. The fear inside you builds and builds, your screaming seems to go on forever. All you feel is the oppressive weight of the space around you, once again trapped in the dark with no hope of redemption. The shrieks that seem to come from some deep part of you that you never knew existed grow more and more insane and animalistic, until something in your voice breaks and the screams become silent. Finally you lay in the still darkness, feeling the tears running down the sides of your face into your ears. As panic subsides and resignation and numbness take its place, you wait.  Suddenly, you hear a familiar knocking to your left and all the breath leaves your lungs. The knocking of knuckles on wood, this time you can also hear a scratching of a fingernail against the pine. An oddly raspy and at the same time thick and wet whisper comes through, “Hello?” Terror stabs at your heart again and you hear a hand full of long fingernails scratch against the barrier next to your head. “Are you there?” A sigh, lonely like the winter wind rattling through the dead branches of trees, and then, slowly and with drawn out words, “Please. I’ve been alone for so long.” You can do nothing but lay there defenseless, breathing as quietly as you can, trying to control the horror rising inside your throat again. You hear a low, dry growl, and a sudden loud rap on the wood that makes you gasp. “Selfish. Keeping all that warmth to yourself. I’m so cold.” The voice has started out sounding almost forlorn and childish, but with this, it sounds angry and pleading at the same time. Once again you hear the fingernails against the pine, but this time they are digging in, splintering the thin panels that separate you from this creature. You try in vain to get your body to respond as the thing tears a hole in the side of your coffin. From the corner of your eye, you see a glimpse of something lighter in the darkness as the bone white arm reaches in. Your nostrils fill with the stench of death and a skeletal hand with bits of flesh still clinging to the bone gently caresses the side of your face. Your brain shuts down as you feel the long jagged fingernails slide down to your neck and the rotting dead voice says, “Just let me in, it won’t hurt much. Then we can be together and I won’t be alone anymore.” The slimy flesh still clinging to bone presses against your neck and then bursts in a juicy splash as the hand grips down with an unnatural strength. You begin to scream again, wheezing sounds as your new friend strangles the life out of you. Panic rises, and you fight with every scrap of will you have, trying to force your body to fight back. No part of you reacts, you lay motionless, crying in the dark as the warmth and life begins to leave your body.

Cold

A splash of briny water hits your face, and you gasp at the cold. The ground beneath your feet seems to rock slightly and through the loose weave of the burlap sack that covers your head, you can see and feel a hot sun beating down on you. Your bound hands are jerked suddenly, prompting you to stand and be pulled forward. Your bare feet are dragged across a rough wooden surface that you instinctually take in as the deck of a ship. As you are moved, you take in the strong smell of the salted sea, but mixed in undertones you get a whiff of burning wood, something like meat rotting, the fishy smell that lingers on all boats, and the unmistakable metallic taste of spilled blood. A barking voice rings out in a language you don’t recognize as you are pulled along. A silent pause as rope is added around your ankles, and then the rope holding your wrists is suddenly jerked straight upward. Something in your shoulder joint rips as you are yanked off your feet and left dangling in the air for a moment. Then, the sudden free fall of rope released and sliding through the pulley, and you plummet down into the sea. Holding your breath, you try to get your bearings, and begin to kick toward what you feel is the surface, but the rope around your ankles begins to pull you down. Down, but then a jerk to the side and you are sliding sideways through the water in short bursts. A thought blooms in your head, a faint memory of a story told late at night by a sailor while you were both deep in your cups. You had dismissed it at the time, a sick story to scare young adventurers, not something one would do to another sentient being, surely. You suddenly slam into the side of the ship and the little breath you had held in your lungs bubbles out into the water. Panic rises inside you and you realize horror stories are true. The rope continues pulling, dragging you down the side of the ship. Maybe you are lucky in your attire, because at first the barnacles are only shredding the thick fabric of your uniform, but your luck doesn’t last long and you feel the first slice against your back. You spend all of your energy trying not to cry out, the automatic fear of drowning overriding the pain of being pulled across the hull of this ship, at least for now. Another sharp slice finds your flesh, then another, and another. You feel sudden coldness on one arm, as part of your shirt is ripped away, and your exposed skin is immediately shredded like a raw piece of meat against a cheese grater. Gravity shifts, and you are upside down being pulled out of the water by your feet. You breathe in short gasps through the soaked burlap that managed to stay on your face. They dump you unceremoniously onto the deck like a sack of flour. The air stings all over your body, salty wind blowing on every gash in your skin. There are a few deep lacerations that you begin to feel deeply now that the immediate shock of injury is past. But then, your feet are pulled upward and you scream out as you are dumped headfirst into the drink. The force of hitting the water with your face this time causes the fabric covering it to be ripped free. The tugging on your wrists begins but this time you can see the dark hull of the ship beside you, the multitude of sharp creatures pointing from the wood waiting and hungry for your blood. This time the ropes pull your front along the hull, scraping the skin from your face, ripping away the rest of your shirt to slice your torso, skinning the top of your feet to the bone. The pain is massive, so immense that you feel the urge to give in and take a deep breath of the water around you. And then, while you are so distracted by the all-encompassing pain and feeling the life literally flowing out of you, something…alien… presses against the barriers that protect the innermost you. The walls around your mind fracture, and something wet and slimy invades. The pain you felt from the torture along the keel of the ship is nothing compared to this freezing agony that explodes and consumes your soul, ripping your memories apart, pressing inside the heart of who you are, forcing its way in. As you fade away you feel its thoughts, inquisitive and HUNGRY. 

Cold 2

You open your eyes and see darkness. The tugging sensation on your tied wrists seems to come from a million miles away, until you slide against another barnacle and the muted sensation brings you fully awake.. As your flesh is still being shredded apart by the barnacles on the bottom of the ship’s hull, a real struggle for survival is happening in your head. “Get out!” you cry. There is no answer, but a massive wave of freezing cold washes over your mind, making you retreat back, curling inward to protect your small bit of heat.  The cold recedes for a moment, and you stretch your consciousness back out, but find yourself surrounded by frozen glass walls. You watch through the wall as your eyes open, and you look down into the water beneath the ship. Horror grips you and you scream, as you see deep in the sea beneath the massive tentacled being, its eye larger than the ship you are scraping along. The giant yellow eye blinks at you, and an extended tentacle caresses your face as you are dragged out of the water.  Inside your mind, you sink into your frozen prison, watching and feeling as the other being who is now in control tests your physical limits.  You sense a slimy satisfaction in the strength of your limbs, and another wave of cold passes over, solidifying your mental glass prison. You watch, helpless, as your eyes, now controlled by this alien mind, search the beings on the deck of the ship. Your arms pull tight against the restraints, causing more blood to flow from the multitude of cuts. The strange language that had been barked at you before you were dumped into the water the first time comes again, words that you don’t understand.  In answer, the thing presses your rope bound wrists against a particularly deep gash in your chest, rubbing into the wound. You cry out internally, the burning sensation cutting through the walls of your glass mental cage, shattering them.  You press outward, filling your mind with your own familiar consciousness again, but there is a lingering presence, like a wet, slimy coating all around your brain. Once the ropes are soaked in your blood, you feel your wrists rotate inside the binds independently of your control, back and forth, loosening within the rope, slippery with your blood. You fight again for control, but it’s no use. One hand breaks free, then the other. Your feet are dragged toward the side of the ship once more and you feel splinters digging and pulling open the cuts across your body, but this time your arm reaches out and grabs the leg of a sailor nearby. He falls to the deck, sliding along with you as you hold onto him with unnatural strength. Through the slimy haze in your mind, you can see the terrified face looking back at you. Green skin and yellow eyes, long pointed ears and a strange nose, but the fear on his young face is very easy to recognize. The pressure on your legs releases as they stop the pull of the rope to free their companion. In an instant, your body scrambles on top of the captured sailor, piloted by this other entity. Another wave of cold passes over you, but in this wave you can taste something RED. Murderous intent tints the air in this mental space, and you realize your invader is going to kill. Your hands take a fist of his long hair, gripping tightly in your fingers, so tight that you feel strands come loose from his scalp as you pull his head up, then you are bashing his head against the rough wood of the deck. You pull his head back up, then smash it back down into the floor, over and over again. Black blood pours from his upturned nose and mouth, and he screams in pain. You’ve felt slightly vindicated until now, hoping for a taste of revenge, but looking at his pleading, almost childish face, you have a moment of regret, a second where you would stop and trade his life for your freedom. Unfortunately, you are not in charge, and the beating continues. As other hands reach for you, trying to pull you off, the murderous rage washes over you again, this wave hot instead of freezing, and your teeth sink into the soft flesh of your victim’s neck. You gag, as you taste his dark blood fill your mouth and throat. Your hands and teeth are being used as murder weapons against your will. The hands pulling you back dig into the multitude of wounds on your body, reopening the slices in your skin. Nerves are exposed and bright hot pain overtakes you. You instinctively retreat back inward, longing for the numb feeling again, freedom from pain.  You scream internally, but nothing comes out of your mouth as you look down into the fading eyes of the young sailor you have beaten to death.