Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
Anitra has a mission to finish, within the twisting dreamscape of Tiffany - who now lies comatose after a ritual meant to turn her into a vessel for the Goddess Fortuna. An important task, to be sure, though who could blame her if she were to linger within the dream for a short time, enjoying some of its perks? Besides, even if she accomplishes her mission and returns to reality - how could she know for sure that she isn't still dreaming? Especially if 'reality' happens to include an improbable and long-awaited encounter... well, perhaps the bonds of True Love can help steady her mind.
Proofread, as usual, by FA lquian
This is a preview of the full story, which can be read in its totality on my Discord-server. A bot-proofed link can be found on my front page.
Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
– Chapter 23 of the Legends of the DragonRider
Anitra slowly opened her eyes. There was no need to jolt awake – her senses and instincts were signaling, quite clearly, that she was somewhere safe. Somewhere… familiar. She could hear the distinctive cries of jungle-birds… the distant, muted roar of a waterfall… the sound of someone quietly setting a table nearby… and, right behind her, the steady breathing of a large, sleeping creature. She was… home. And, sure enough, once her eyes did fully open, and she'd rubbed the gunk outta them and pushed herself upright, she found herself looking around at the familiar contours of the Champion's Quarters of the Utopia.
A wave of disorientation washed over her. Was this… where she was supposed to be? A lot of bad things had happened… had it been just a nightmare? Lingering trauma from her short sojourn into Hell, some years back? Certainly, there was no old elf sitting beside the nest, nor any Tiffany sleeping upon it – just Blake, rolled up in catlike fashion as usual. And, over there, Melora and Direza were setting the table for… breakfast, presumably? It looked a bit much for it, though. Dinner, then, perhaps? Had she been napping beside Blake in the afternoon? It was hard to tell if the reddish-golden sunlight that streamed through the large windows was morning- or evening-light.
Direza had noticed her stirring, though, and left Melora to finish with the table to instead swiftly approach and… dip down to one knee with her head respectfully bowed before her. Was this some new game they'd started playing, and which she'd momentarily forgotten? "My Lady – your breakfast is almost ready. Would you care to bathe before your meal?" It was Direza's voice, all right, but that… distant, polite tone sounded really unlike her. Sure, she was always respectful, but never without an undercurrent of arousal and… closeness, for lack of a better term. "Ah… no bath, no…" Anitra hesitantly replied, feeling subtly off-balance.
"As you wish, My Lady…" Direza replied, in the same clipped tone… but, she always called her 'Mistress'! And now she was somehow shuffling aside without getting up, gesturing grandly towards the table. "Pray, be seated – we will have the final dishes in place in a moment, kindly forgive our tardiness…" Nodding jerkily, Anitra rose from the nest and crossed to the table… noticing, only then, that there was but a single chair beside it, which Melora was now hurriedly pulling out and offering to her, eyes downcast and neck bent.
Seated at the table, she looked across its contents. Dozens of small, exotic, expensive-looking dishes. Pitchers of sparkling fruit-juice in various colors. Loaves of freshly-baked bread in various styles, all smelling heavenly. And, apparently, all just for her. She wanted to point out the absurdity of it, but… actually, now that she thought about it, she was famished. Felt like she hadn't eaten in months! And so, she dug in, hungrily – finding it all as tasty as it looked, though the sheer strangeness of it all continued to niggle at her. Melora and Direza were standing beside her chair, practically 'at attention' – clearly prepared to rush to the kitchens if she found anything to be unsatisfactory or insufficient. Normally, they all ate together! Except sometimes Direza, of course, if she was currently enduring some punishment or other humiliation that prevented it…
None of that, however, could quite stop her from wolfing down the extravagant breakfast – or, at least most of it – and finally sitting back with a full belly and a sigh of contentment on her lips. Only then did she stop to really consider herself. She'd apparently slept in her armor… that wasn't so strange, though. After so many years, it was practically a second skin for her – she barely even noticed when she was wearing it. But… there was a strange, opal bangle on her wrist, wrapped around her left bracer. It seemed familiar, and… important, somehow.
As she was contemplating this, she heard a massive yawn behind her, and half-turned in her seat to see Blake stirring in his nest, rising and stretching before stepping off and approaching the table. "Ah, I see you have already partaken in breakfast, my beloved…" he remarked lovingly, leaning in to caress her cheek with his tongue while she blinked in surprise. "I trust you rested well? Surely, a busy day awaits the foremost DragonRider in the Utopia… and its greatest hero." His eyes were full of adoration as he gazed down at her… and, suddenly, she couldn't help but laugh. Indeed, she practically collapsed across the table, laughing uncontrollably, holding her sides as the sheer absurdity of it all finally sunk in.
Once she'd convinced the three of them that she hadn't suddenly gone crazy, and left the remnants of her extravagant breakfast behind, Anitra took the time to look around the Champion's Chambers some more – and, as expected, found various inconsistencies. After all… this wasn't the real room. This was a copy of it, within the dreams of Tiffany, who was currently asleep on the nest in the actual version of the room. And, while Tiffany had visited the place often enough to faithfully reproduce the main room – the first time being for her baby-shower, as Anitra recalled, but there'd been several times after that too – she'd never really had a chance to look into the side-rooms, and thus had filled them out with her own assumptions, preconceptions and pure flights of fancy.
Direza and Melora's rooms were rather more sparse and bare than in reality, for example – which went nicely with their more distant, 'servant-like' behavior, of course. Tiffany hadn't had the chance to really get to know either of them, after all, and they did tend to turn up the servility a bit when there was company over – so, she clearly didn't realize that, in private, they tended to be rather more friendly, almost like a family in some ways. And of course, she'd never really spoken to Blake either - so she'd apparently just… filled in her own idea of how he'd behave around her.
The real clincher, though – which threatened to send Anitra back into paroxysms of laughter – was the storage-room. In reality, it contained all manners of junk – souvenirs from her and Blake's adventures, their old saddle, cleaning-supplies, disused bondage-furniture, and on the more useful end, the weapons and armor that Melora, Mel and Direza used when they tagged along on dangerous adventures. In this version, though, it was a grandiose and rather overwrought bedroom, featuring a magnificent four-poster bed, a vanity stocked with various cosmetics Anitra didn't even know how to use, and a huge walk-in closet filled with splendid (and tremendously impractical) dresses and shoes. Apparently, Tiffany couldn't imagine that Anitra preferred to just… sleep on the nest in the central room, next to Blake, and so she'd conjured up a bedroom suited for her standing.
Indeed, that seemed to be the theme throughout – Tiffany, it appeared, had some specific, and rather childish, notions about what Important People did, wore, ate, lived like, and how they were treated. And she'd clearly filed Anitra under Very Important Person, which was… flattering, and not necessarily inaccurate, as far as the Utopia was concerned, but the devil was in the details. Anitra had never felt any desire to be fawned over by everyone around her, and while her old self might indeed have been delighted with the contents of her dreamed-up wardrobe, she'd left behind such fancies when she became a DragonRider. Though, some of the dresses looked like Arsinde might like 'em!
Come to think of it, the fact that Arsinde seemed to very much wear her Important Person credentials on her carefully-tailored sleeve might have helped solidify Tiffany's mental image of what Anitra had to live like – even to the point of directly contradicting stuff she should have known about, like the fact that she never wore fancy dresses or high-heeled shoes. Closest she'd ever come was that rather luxurious fur coat she'd acquired during her adventures, for use in colder environments – not so much because she'd needed it to stay warm, as to hide the fact that she didn't need it. Walking around in a snowstorm with that much skin showing was bound to raise some questions, after all! Ironically, while that fur coat was stashed in the storage-room of her real chambers, it was nowhere to be seen in the wardrobe of her dream-chambers… since, after all, Tiffany had never seen it.
Regardless of such misapprehensions, though, it did not seem as if there'd be much opposition to deal with on this Layer, Anitra judged as she emerged from her 'bedroom' and headed towards the balcony. She did hold significant authority and respect in the Utopia, after all, and Tiffany's imagination had clearly exaggerated it even further, so she'd probably be able to do pretty much whatever she wanted here! And have a pleasant time of it, while she was at it – even if she didn't necessarily feel like eating a 20-course meal every morning. Of course, there was still the question of locating the Distortion that she'd come here to find in the first place…
As Anitra stepped out onto the balcony, she froze and stared, swallowing. The Distortion was definitely on this layer. The old elf… what was his name? It was so long ago now that she'd met him, she couldn't recall. Anyway, he hadn't been able to tell her what exactly it'd look like, only that she'd know it when she saw it – and, as it turned out, he hadn't been wrong. Back in reality, the view from the balcony would've included the shimmering, sapphire-blue waters of the crater-lake, the crater-edge itself – which included a number of 'beaches' that had built up along the edges over the centuries – the mountains that rose above the crater-rim to the north and, to the south, the Great Bridge that connected the Citadel to the western rim of the crater. That… wasn't what she was seeing now.
Instead, the waters below the Citadel just kept going – a vast and infinite ocean, disappearing into the distance, along with the Great Bridge. And as she looked to the horizon, she realized that what she saw there weren't sea and sky meeting… but sea and sea. The heavens above were simply another flat, infinite expanse of water and, as she looked up into it, she saw another Citadel, hanging from this glittering surface, right above. It wasn't just a reflection, either – as she turned and craned her neck, she could see that some of the taller towers and spires had merged in the middle, like stalactites and stalagmites coming together into solid pillars. An entire upside-down Citadel, suspended above them, with both caught between two impossible oceans. A distorted world indeed. It was here, for sure… she just needed to find the actual core of it.
What rests at the core of this twisted dreamscape, and how will Anitra get there? To find out, seek the full version of this story on my Discord-server, using the link found on my front page.