Part One:

I'm getting GTFO vibes, but people wear animal-skull-masks, and if you wear one from the same species as the masks your teammates wear, you can eventually form some sort of psychic connection. I was this black guy and my other teammates had been doing this much longer than I had. One lady was wearing a big cat mask, so I chose a big cat mask as well. She sorta rolled her eyes at me but let me do it. I got the feeling that I was honestly trying really hard to be a good member of the team and get better at....whatever we were doing, but I hadn't earned much respect from the others yet. There were lots of sci-fi, tron legacy-style motifs and gadgets everywhere.

Part Two (actually set as a video game in the world of the first part, but I'mma make it separate):

Basically a big gladiator battle fight ring kind of thing. Main character is a girl who is a good fighter but was put there against her will, kind of like Thor in Thor Ragnarok. She's much more fierce and angry than Thor though, more like Hulk lol. In the first part, they send her in on this sci-fi flying snowboard thingy, which she can't control, and at first she tries to use it to escape. However, there's a force field around the place and she can't fly out. Eventually, she crashes to the ground and the snowboard breaks, leaving her on foot with no weapons and barely any armor.

Luckily, the fight of the day is done with a magical power kind of like waterbending, but they don't use water. They use this glittery liquid gold stuff that also has black liquid mixed in. The gold parts kinda act like sand sometimes as well. Turns out, the girl can "goldbend" fairly well, so she stands a chance against her opponent: the ring's reigning champion. This lady is a bit older and dresses like an off-brand Japanese empress with long red robes and I think a headdress. She's an excellent goldbender. She laughs and mocks the mc as they fight---or rather, as mc hurls attacks at the champion while she casually blocks them and throws out a mild attack once in a while. 

But mc doesn't give up. She is a beast. She is a fiery demon of rage and sheer raw brute force. I remember actually twitching back and forth in my sleep as she fought (I was her at that point but like from a 3rd-person view). She hammered away at the champion's shield without respite, hitting harder and harder. In my half-awake moments, a little bit of my brain kicked in and I thought of how she would win: She distracted the champion so much with full-on attacks that the champion's rear shield was weakened. Then she formed a spear of gold behind the champion and pulled it towards her suddenly, running the champion through. It was very savage and also immensely satisfying. I love the mc and I think her title as the new champion of the fights was the Beastess.

Dream 2:

They were a family of mages and fishermen/women. They lived on an island or peninsula to the south, and they hunted for troublesome sea creatures together on their special boat--the boat with two decks and a motor and two cannons and harpoon launchers. In the center of the boat was a special tank that cut upwards through both decks and brought in water from the sea. It would hold the bait, and whichever of the men was holding the fishing rod, so it was harder for their prey to attack them or pull them off the boat. 

The boy and his little brother were the sons of the best fisherman in the family, and their mother was the most skilled mage. They often went along on hunts with their parents and aunts and uncles and cousins because it wasn't safe to leave them alone at home for some reason. They played no part in the hunt, only carefully followed their mother's commands and actions as they stayed out of the way of the others.

The boy's father was famous because of his great fishing feats as a boy--namely, the event everyone talked about was the day when he was the first to see the fabled 'beefcake moon', which no one had bothered to explain to the boys. Apparently it had been the body of one of the biggest, most cunning, most elusive creatures of the sea, and he had almost managed to catch it--but not quite. Since then the creature had been terrorizing people unstoppably, and was feared by many. Today, the boy's family set out to finish the job. 

His father was in the tank, along with a massive amount of bait and a magical fishing rod. He was older now, and leaner, but he still wore the same nervous, completely focused expression from his youth. The boy's grandfather steered the ship, his aunts were ready to play lookout and magically ward off any attacks, and his uncles helped by manning the nonmagical harpoons, cannons, and handheld weapons. His mother stood with him and his brother at the back of the boat, never letting go of each other, and his mother began carefully Seeking out their target and relaying information about the sudden rush of magical activity in the depths below them. 

Throughout the next few long, harrowing hours, the boy never got a clear image of their prey. It was as if he was instinctively afraid to look, or perhaps his own magic wasn't strong enough to resist the creature's own illusions. Beneath the water, it was too murky and chaotic to make anything out, and even when the creature sometimes flew high above the waves on a taught fishing line, the sun was always in the boy's eyes when he tried to look at it. He was the only one who seemed to have this problem. His younger brother was too scared to even look up.

The sea creature was powerful, not just in its own right, but because it could command other creatures to come to its aid. They came in waves. First the "fishmen". Again, the boy never got a good look at them, but they were fleets of wedge-shaped swimmers that launched themselves onto the boat and tried to stab the family. When this happened, the boy's mother pulled herself and her sons into the water, surrounded them in protective spells, and swam near the boat until the aunts had fought the fishmen off. Then there were the underwater attacks from magical animals--maybe seals?--that the boy never saw. They just had to stay out of the way for those. Then finally there were the attacks from the creature itself, which was both massive and very small all at once. It was massive when its amorphous limbs beat against the boat's keel and sought to knock everyone overboard, but only the size of an egg during the rare moments when the boy's father managed to send it flying over the water. It was somehow explained to the boy that the small thing was the heart and brain of the creature, and that all the rest was just magic. If they could catch and contain that one small part, the creature would be powerless. 

But it was far from easy. The fight lasted all day, from dawn to the beginnings of dusk. The family was getting exhausted and desperate, but were trying not to show it. Finally, something happened to shift the balance--maybe they ran out of bait, maybe the line broke, maybe the boy's father was hurt or passed out from weariness. The boy didn't know. All he knew was that suddenly, something struck his head, hard. The next thing he knew, the whole family was huddled in the lower deck, looking scared and bone-tired. The side of the boy's head was squishy and tender, and he felt incredibly odd, although he could still walk and talk without too much trouble. He didn't realize he had brain damage. He wondered if maybe they'd won, but he couldn't see his father anywhere. 

The adults were muttering to each other, trying to decide what to do, when the sea creature returned. It was inside the tank, which was somehow much darker and deeper now. The mages heard its whispers before they saw it, and the boy's mother realized the sound was coming from the speaking tube connected to the tank, which had been covered. It also came from the hatch in the lower deck where the boy's father had climbed into the tank originally. She uncovered the speaking tube, fearful but made reckless by her worry over her husband, and demanded to know who was there. Somehow the hatch came open as well. The boy, misreading her voice and thinking she was mocking the creature, decided it was safe for him to do so as well. 

"Who's there," he taunted, stepping closer to the hatch. "Who's speaking?"

Instantly pale, wet hands reached out and snatched him into the darkness of the tank. They cradled his head, and merely by touching him they twisted his face, making it warp and spiral. His mind was snared by the creature now, and his family had no way of knowing whether he was alive or dead anymore. Their magic and weapons were spent, and they were helpless, not daring to even utter a word, let alone try to rescue the boy. 

His body sank out of view, and a moment later, the head and shoulders of another person appeared--the creature. It was not the creature's true form--the skin was woven from the skin of other forms before it, and the head was a swirling mess of eyes and mouths that still somehow resembled the boy's freshly stolen face. It was calm, knowing how little the family could do to hurt it now. 

"Hello," it whispered. Its voice was not a voice with any features of its own, rather it was the combined echo of many other voices over the rumbling undertone of the sea. They were fools to ever try catching this creature, as it was an Old One with ties to the roots of the ocean itself and power drawn from the countless men and mages it had devoured over thousands of years. It didn't care about the family in front of it and only sought to play with its meal a bit before absorbing them all into its life force. 

But the ship itself was still layered with heavy, powerful spells, and that meant the creature couldn't enter it completely, or smash it against the waves. 

"Come closer," it soothed, reaching out with its many arms towards the boy's younger brother. Instantly his family pulled him out of reach and huddled over him in the corner of the boat, silently becoming their own single unit by sharing what little scraps of strength and magic they had left. They would not let the creature take another child. 

"Ah, I can't reach you. What about over here?" The creature sank below the ship and circled to the small window, pressing its eyes against the glass and slowly magicking it open. The family quickly shrank away, pushing the window-shutters closed. The creature only had enough power to break the walls if it could see them. They had to block up several other openings in the ship, some of which were harpoon slots and some of which were holes smashed in during the battle. The creature circled the ship patiently, whispering in everyone's heads, patiently waiting. It knew they couldn't hide down there forever.

The boy, meanwhile, was not dead, but his Self had still been almost completely disconnected from his body. The body floated in a nest of pale arms just above the water, and the Self floated within the chaos of the creature's far vaster Self. He was barely able to compute his situation, but he was conscious enough to realize that he could finally see the creature's heart/brain. It was an eye made of heavy iron, sightless and encrusted with lime and sea rot. It was an unknowably powerful artifact, but still it could have sat like a golf-ball in the boy's palm. He understood it, and was close enough to easily reach it if he'd had enough magic or control over his body, but he had neither. He could only listen to the slow, multilayered, mind-melting flow of the creature's thoughts swamping his own. He could only watch, with no physical ability to care or fight back, as the creature patiently waited for his family to fall into its open mouth.

Then I woke up.

Intunera have written much on the subject of death, being creatures that are cursed to experience it many times over. Although most writings have been lost to time, some--particularly the texts of Hungarius the Healer--still remain in libraries across the world. Hungarius wrote--among many other things--of a certain phenomenon he called the "divine echo". He describes the idea that mortal wounds, those that kill the victim, are distinct and identifiable on an energetic level, and they offer a brief connection with the Viti that flows all around us. In his own words:

"When one has suffered repeated deaths by violent means, there comes a growing familiarity with the killing blow. It is accompanied by something unlike a sound or vision, more a fleeting stillness of all but the rare senses. The material melts away and becomes meaningless before this inner moment. In my many hundred lives, I have come to believe that this moment is when the soul is detached from the body and returns to its natural place in the flow of the Viti, which creates a ripple. The Viti is in all its forms divine, and this divinity gives off a certain unique tone that cannot be heard by living ears. It is an echo, a word of silent thanks from the Viti for the return of a soul that it had never wished to part with. Before my body dissolves and I return to the Inviti, I have often tried to respond to this divine, but death is less about being and more about knowing. I am already forgetting words and thoughts by the time I register the Viti's embrace."

Lucid death

Today i was walking down the way and i saw a silly little cat with calico fur. It meows at me. What a ridiculous tubby creature haha

I was at my grandfather's house.

I was a little kid. I didn't know any of the other people who lived in that part of the country. The farms and the village. My aunt took me there with her to see the family. To clean out the old house, maybe. As soon as we got there, she sent me outside to play, and that was the last I saw of her. 

There was another kid my age outside, maybe ten or eleven. Boy or girl I couldn't say, anymore than I knew my own gender. They were a bit untamed from living out here in the hills all their life, a little slow to accept me, but I did my best to be friendly since I had no one else to play with. I asked them to show me around, although I dimly remembered the layout of the man-made treeline on my grandfather's property. We walked there, through the trees that were only alive at the very tops where the sun hit them, through the ruined and abandoned farm equipment long swallowed by decades of mulch. Still, it was much less dense and overgrown than I remembered. My new friend said they were finally clearing everything away, and moments later we saw a light in the window of a tiny trailer house, in which a stuffy looking woman was sorting through piles of dirt-crusted trinkets and ancient children's toys. She didn't seem to want us there in the woods, and anyway it was getting dark so we moved on. 

It was always getting dark after that. We would walk and talk and forget about it for a while, then look around and think (but not say) 'it's getting darker out'. I had asked my friend to show me to their own family's farm nearby, and the soft grassy countryside on all sides was turning from gold to red to blue-grey. I didn't much feel like wandering off the gravel road anymore. But it was so very serene and silent here, and beautiful. I could hear distant voices from a house somewhere in the gloom---people calmly preparing for the night. 

Then, without any clear reason, everything changed. 

"My aunt is sick," I said suddenly, thinking of her curled up somewhere alone, in pain. I don't know how or why it came to me, but I knew it was true. It filled me with a very muffled, very controlled unease. 

My friend seemed to know something I didn't, and not something good. "It's getting dark," they replied, and all at once it really *was*. The hills around us were visibly sinking into a black night. No stars came out, no moon. Just a draining away of color and a gathering of heaviness in the air. It was some kind of slow, rainless storm, and it was almost upon us.

"My aunt is sick," I repeated. We were too far from my grandfather's farm to get back quickly. "Do you know where we can go to get help?"

My friend was knowledgable and distracted by that knowledge. They didn't share it with me. But they said, "my house is just here" and led me onward.

We couldn't go to their house after all. As soon as we got close, we knew that everyone there was sick as well. They were silent, we didn't see them, but we both refused to approach without needing to discuss it. Maybe the storm was making them sick, I thought. 

"The doctor lives at the next farm," my friend said, and began to run. I followed, sensing the night coming behind us like creeping floodwaters. I could feel sick people all around us. Far away, but I could feel them all the same, living in the dark and not knowing anything of who they used to be. All the adults were sick. Maybe everyone everywhere would be soon. It was as if something had happened miles from here in a more important place, and now the world was going to end.

The only sound was my friend, talking to bolster our bravery. The doctor was a good doctor. The farm had lots of people, and dogs and pigs and a big cart horse. It was just here, at the top of the hill. We ran up the grassy path in a rush, half-climbing parts of it that sloped almost vertically. The wind came, just a single hiss of it, hinting at the nature of the booming wrouring drone that wasn't thunder on the horizon behind us. And we reached the doctor's farm at the exact same moment that the last light left. 

If you've ever stayed outside until dusk in the country, you'll know that at first you'll still be able to see pretty well once the sun goes down. But at some point, without warning, your eyes fail you and the world soups into useless blobs of shadow. This was the scene now, and any recognizable shapes in the gloom could've easily been made up by two young minds scrabbling for signs of danger.

We weren't completely blind, however, as we entered the farmyard. Firstly, my friend had been there many times and was prepared to navigate us both to the house. And secondly, a single flash of lightning lit up the whole sky as we arrived, allowing us to get at least a summary of the land before us.

There were buildings, and silos, and a few leafless oaks. I only had eyes for the horse. It was rearing up, without a sound, hooves striking at the groaning air. It never came back down. It didn't move at all, except when the breeze ruffled its mane. Around it, I sensed other animals, milling along the ground but not moving either. Nothing moved or made a single sound, but I still somehow knew they were there. 

I knew there were people here too, somewhere very close. Unmoving.

"This isn't right," my friend said, and trotted foward, ducking right beneath the horse and lightly brushing their hand against its belly as they passed. Instantly, the horse broke loose of whatever had been holding it, dropping its front legs to the ground and backing away. Still silent. I went around it to catch up with my friend, not thinking on the significance of what I'd just seen. But any hopes I had that we could find help here were dashed as soon as I reached my friend and saw what had made them stop so abruptly. 

Again, sight was nearly impossible now. Everything was in shades of black. But we were standing in front of a large barn, its doors wide upen. One of the people who lived on this farm was in there, just a few steps away.

They didn't move. At least, I don't think they were moving, or if they were, it was very slowly. Just enough to make their edges blurry against the yawning mouth of the barn. And they were already sick. Something about their head, their face, was entirely wrong. I'm not sure they were anything but a slog of bone and skin anymore, and yet that was just the thing. It was too dark to tell. For all I knew, they were perfectly fine, and the storm was simply playing tricks on me.

My friend did not have any such doubts. Unlike me, their instincts hadn't been softened by a life in the city. They shrank away in fear, eyes wide, arms curled into their chest, clearly loath to get close to that shape of a person. I was still free of real panic, being naive enough to think that nothing really bad could happen to me. But even so, I too was sure in my gut that if I touched the sick creature slowly unbending from the shadows, it would---like the horse---become much less easy to outrun.

And I didn't need to hear the rapid, tearful breathing of my friend to understand that it wasn't the only thing here that was sick. *Everything* was now. Everything, except the two of us, alone and stranded in the not-storm, in the wrong-night.

https://twitter.com/xdetune/status/1325852533257097217?s=20