Welcome to Gaia! ::

Kostya was already asleep when his glasses cracked on the nightstand. The sound of it startled him out of a familiar dream, the fading sounds of battlefield din replaced with echoes of shattering reverberated across the basement. The abrupt cacophony of windows falling to pieces trickled down from upstairs, playing a melody of destruction that tapered off into a harsh silence. The masses soon began to investigate, but not Kostya.

His dreams were where he wanted to be.

They were so full of potential, so full of dark promise, that the insignificances of broken shards was not enough to rouse him. Instead, he slipped back into rest, slipping down the rabbit hole into a world where he ruled with an iron, blood-soaked fist.

Every other hunter might find their dreams of darkness and revenge unusual, but these dreams were the sort that had chased him for months and months. They wore him down and sharpened his claws in one, fell swoop. They were sentient, seeking out a susceptible mind and carving out a place for the shadows to live and fester like a parasite unchecked.

And fester they did, in vivid technicolour.

After returning from the mission, it was as if the night terrors had been excised from him: still nights, pleasant mornings, a quietly content disposition. But the dreams had not changed: it was Kostya that did.

Even though they chased him through the real world, the dreams no longer bothered him. They had taken on the shape of a throne that forced him to bend the knee, controlled an ill-tempered woman wearing someone else's skin, formed alliances the form of nondescript hunters with hidden agendas, and granted him clones that wore his ally's face to raise and groom.

The dreams were more than the sum of their parts. The dreams were important in a way Kostya could not deign to grasp, serving a purpose he could not place. But it was a purpose, ringing truly and clearly in every possible way. He'd felt it in that castle of luxuriant black, knees pressed to the tile and a cold force pressing down on him from above.

Serve, it had demanded, without words or intent. Serve, it had desired, without reservation. Serve, it had insisted, and it was not the pressure itself that made Kostya drop, but the overwhelming desire to obey.

(That was, in fact, why he was so scared: obedience was a boon granted to an ally whose worth he had determined to be significant. This desire to obey came implicitly, with no requirements from within himself, just the all-encompassing need to.)

He would. He would do whatever was necessary, no matter the cost.