Welcome to Gaia! ::

Of all the dreamers in all the worlds, this one called. It was like a constant knocking, like the pull of something hypnotic, and it stretched far and wide. Most were deaf to its summons. Locked in their own dreamscapes, they battled their own monsters and indulged their own fantasies, oblivious to the triumphs and struggles of even their own bedmates. The ability to hear others' dreams and enter them was a skill held only by a select few.

This dreamer might have possessed such a gift, but he was drawn by his own magnetism. The gravity well of his dreamscape was so deep he was trapped inside it as surely as any ungifted dreamer, oblivious to the dreams and existences of others. He had no knowledge of dream travel or travelers. He knew nothing but his own dreamworld and nothing of the possibility that another might enter it. He did not even know that door existed, much less that it was open, or that it shone like a beacon into the great beyond and summoned and invited someone who could travel through dreamscapes. Yet there it was, his invitation, persistent and beckoning, like the sweet and sticky maw of a flytrap.

It was like stepping into a maelstrom. Tumultuous whirls and pulses of black and red and hints of gold and green spun before Galleai's eyes, webs of energy swirling and clumping in a chaotic mess of visual anomalies, dangerous but beautiful. Horrible noises assaulted her ears. The deepest, darkest thunder rumbled and ground around her as if the earth and the heavens both shook. In the distance, a faint throbbing pulse encroached through the massive rumblings, almost like a low boom: dh-dh-dh-dh, dh-dh-dh-dh. The same sequence of four beats endlessly repeating, so soft it was barely audible, but there.

It felt like she had stepped into a veritable storm that threatened to consume her, but that was all it was: the appearance of storm and chaos. As near as the maelstrom seemed, it was beyond reach and did not affect her. Not a thing stirred in the air. All those booms and rumbles, all those swirling pulsations, all of it seemingly distant yet near. This was a dream. Such impossibilities were basic facts.

In the midst of it all sat a boy, not much bigger than Galleai was when awake, and a pile of small, smooth pebbles of dark gray color. He was intently focused on the stones. He picked them up one by one and put them down again, moving them mere inches from where they started. No matter how many of them he moved, the pile seemed the same. He moved each stone in perfect time, a beat as steady and constant as the ticking of a clock, totally removed from the thunderous noise and distant dh-dh-dh-dh pattern.




((For your visual edification, rather like the red bit from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyECUqfbV4c&feature=related but they'd be stationary and not moving ;3 ))

"Stop!" The shout was immediate, furious. The boy glared at her angrily. His hands kept moving the stones in perfect time, only now when he put them down it was with some force, loud enough that his constant beat drowned out the faint beat in the distance. His lips moved slightly with each motion. He was counting the stones under his breath.

For a moment, the anger was drowned out by a flood of desperation. "Stop it, no!" He reached out to try and grab the stone, but missed, his fingers clutching at nothing. The dh-dh-dh-dh in the distance grew louder. The boy had stopped counting. His fingers, reaching for that missed stone, tightened into a claw. Dh-dh-dh-dh, louder again. It was like a pulse that tore at the underpinnings of serenity and stirred up the oceans to a boil. The desperation fell from his face as fast as it had come, replaced by a grimace of pained rage. DH-DH-DH-DH. He reached down, grabbed a handful of the stones, and threw them at Galleai with an angry scream.

DH-DH-DH-DH

But the boy wasn't paying her any attention. He could not even hear her any more, so loud was the pulsing beat in his ears. It made the universe seem to vibrate and shake. He covered his ears and screamed silently.

DH-DH-DH-DH

Each beat, when magnified so, seemed to hold a dozen voices, calling and yelling and laughing and screaming and all of them angry, so angry. Murderous, violent voices, blended so the words were lost and only the impressions of their bloodlust was left.

Violent shafts of energy began to shoot up from the floor, sudden surges of darkness that sprouted like tiny geysers and receded again a second later. They began at the edge of the little pocket of space and moved inward towards the boy and Galleai, an ever-tightening circle of disruption and calamity with the boy at the very center, a wave encroaching on all sides. There were dark hands in the spikes, gone so fast they almost felt like a trick of the imagination. They reached and strained towards the boy, riding the wave and the rise and fall in strange time with the four-beat pattern.

DH-DH-DH-DH

It was too much, the encroaching madness, and the boy cowered on the ground with his hands over his head trying to hide but there wasn't anywhere to hide and they were surrounded and the walls were crashing in and he could not stop it --

A man's voice cut through the madness, firm and deep. "Merroth!"

Like a boat breaking through the waves, the boy heard his name and clung to it fiercely, over every other noise in the universe, and answered. He shouted into the ground as loudly as he was able, then more quietly, his voice receding into sobs. "One! Two! Three. Four, five, six..." The ground quieted and the drumbeat of manic voices stumbled and crashed into itself. His voice was a whisper now. "Seven, eight, nine," and then the numbers were not audible at all.

Merroth was still facedown on the ground, hands over his head, nose pressed into whatever passed for dirt in this strange place. He breathed in time to his counting, four numbers to each breath, slow and easy. Finally he spoke again: a single, painful question directed to Galleai: "Why?"

Merroth jerked, almost as if he could feel her hand there without her touching him, and moaned into the ground, "Go away, just go away." He did not know what he wanted her to say, but that was not it. All he knew was that here was some sort of a monster, who came to torment him when he was already tormented in a place where he should have been alone with his torments, and she would offer up no explanation. He was not sure what was worse -- the fact that any of this had happened, or the fact that it had happened for no reason. The reasoning was clearly the lesser of the two issues but it nagged at him all the more greatly, like a little piece of sand in his sock between his toes. He had been impaled with a dagger and he was more upset about the sand in his socks. He offered up one more line to Galleai: "I hate you."