The stench of smoke hung in the air.
The cloying stench seemed to reach deep into him and force him awake. In the unreal haze of death dreams, Yamou felt the heat and pain again, bleeding. The knot of fear in his stomach twisted, and he was forced from the maelstrom of anger and pain to 'awake' again; awake yet not, forced to watch and feel but not to participate.
He saw again his death.
The mask muzzled him, caged like an animal. He saw and felt his body pushed onto his knees on the ancient wooden platform. He saw again the deep marks in the wood, claw marks older than the deep woods. Claw marks of fear and indignation.
Not here again.... not again....
Sharp pain shifted his vision. Wooden spikes dug into his wrists, biting into his fur and skin. Two Vondoon stepped into his blurry vision, standing and looking down at his knelt form. He could not make out their expressions or features, the dream-haze obscuring every detail into a smudge. And yet he could feel their anger.
Red and
White they were clad. The colours of death.
The vision shifted again and he felt his knees ache, scraped against the floor as they dragged him to another platform. Embers flickered past his vision and the sounds of hurrying footsteps back and forth, as if they were in the middle of a battle, which of course, they were.
Yamou was not so addled as to forget the context of the memory-dream. They were going to send him to his death, as quickly as possible, telling themselves it would win them this war. But Yamou knew better; he had started a literal and metaphorical fire that could never burn out. The tribe, if not all Vondoon, would be changed by his actions. And the elders and Wardens hated it.
Time seemed to move at an erratic pace, fixing itself as the memory reached its final destination. He was flung to his knees again, now in front of a large, long bench of steel. There sat four elders (where normally there would be five). They watched impassively, their weapons still wet with gore, as Yamou's body struggled to pull himself upright. Yamou's consciousness watched from afar, noticing with dull interest at the movements he had seen a hundred, a thousand times.
The elders' wore masks of wood and bone, adorned with the symbols of the clan.
"
Yamou, once scion of the tribe of Hyam and Warden of the Vondoon. You are brought before this council to answer for your crimes," a voice boomed from on high.
"
Have you not... already heard my answers," Yamou spat.
"
We have," another of the elders spoke. "
And we pass summary judgement on you now."
Wait. This was wrong. This was not what happened. A recursion that broke the script.
The elders were saying something, but Yamou could not understand the words. It sounded like traditional Vondoon, but the words were coming out wrong, twisted, like someone immitating the speech.
The voices were wrong. Almost immediately Yamou felt himself dragged into his dreamself, and as he slammed into his body he saw the dreamworld twist, break, warp. The colours were wrong. The materials were wrong.
The sensation of his body seemed to change. His leaden, injured limbs seemed to heal. The dream made no sense now: the floor seemed to give way, but he remained stationary. His vision cleared, and a stray thought put out the flames licking the life trees.
A realisation hit Yamou. The dream was broken... he could break out. It made no sense, for why would he want to break out of sleep, especially since he died? But something deeply primal in him forced his limbs to move.
His muscles seemed to grow unnaturally strong as he broke the restraints, drawing on... something. The pain of the spikes digging into his flesh seemed to clear his mind, even as he acted on instinct, swinging his arms to punch the faceless guards charging him:
I'm not dead.
Fully awake now, Yamou swung a blade (he had no idea how he got it) at the elders, who pushed the table off them, sending it flying at Yamou. The blade cleaved the steel in half, and for the first time in an eternity, Yamou felt his face contort in an almmost forgotten expression.
He was smiling.
A primal smile griped his face as he charged forward, even as the ground gave way and gravity seemed to go haywire. He could feel the power source that broke his dream feeding him, more and more. He could almost feel its physical presence.
Yamou roared in satisfaction as his polearm smashed into the skulls of the elders, cleaving them in twain. A power seemed to grow in him, the power the Wardens and Ren both used, and he lashed out, bolts of energy slamming into the hundreds of guards that appeared from nowhere, flying at him.
They were on solid ground now, but not the loam and dirt of Endor. It was a cracked, sizzling thing, but gave off a cool prickle as he walked across the ground, slicing his way through. The Vondoon was caught up in the moment, laughing deliriously. Freedom.
He wanted more. He could feel the power source. It was real, realer than the dream, anyway. It was almost like a radiating heat source, and Yamou fed on it. But he needed more, he knew that. He felt it a distance away and ran towards it, his steps sprinting like never before, buoyed by the dreamlogic of his trapped state and the very real power that he absorbed. The path led him through a cacophony of light and magic, as if the very air and ground had become solid and yet not, and he crashed through-
>Initialising diagnostic
Status: stasis hold
Runtime: [ERROR]
Status: stasis breach. Error code: pending...
On the shores of the afterlife, an organic cocoon wraped in steel broke open as Yamou jolted awake and fell out.
The Vondoon hacked and coughed as he fell onto the broken earth of the Netherworld, his fists grabbing sand that fell away into nothing like a breath. Yamou got to his feet, feeling sensation in his limbs- real sensation, in his real limbs- for the first time in... in...
How long has it been?
But beyond thoughts of where he was in the land of the dead, was the hunger. The gnawing void to consume the power that had briefly brushed him awake. The words of the Knights of Ren jumbled in his head, but he already remembered how to use the Force to traverse this place, chaotic as it was. With mere application of concrete thought the swirling non-mass around him coalesced into something resembling solid ground, a rocky path winding around a knoll towards the direction of the power source.
Driven by instinct and hunger, Yamou began the hunt.
Ara Sheridan
