Unending Nightmares

When an entire bloodline of bloodmages bounds themselves to an eternity of guarding, one might know there is something deeply wrong in the physical realm of Koria. And there is, the Nightmare Weaver. Its name is incomprehensible for most minds and those minds who can comprehend it... melt. Quite literally.

But the Nightmare Weaver is sleeping, bound by a spell so powerful it took a massive toll on generations, got payed in blood and in the future of the bloodline. While it sleeps, it dreams. No, you don't understand, it dreams, and while doing so, the Weaver alters reality. One of its powers is just that: alter reality on a whim, a wish, or because it wants to annoy us.

While dreaming the Weaver uses its reality-bending powers unconciously to manifest its own dreams - which are literal nightmares for mortal beings - into reality. It wasn't a problem for a long time because the prison was way below the Emerald Planes and the caverns and tunnels, but at some point the nightmares found a wall, broke it and churned out into the tunnels.

Hungry, with teeth, tentacles, mouths, warping powers, corrupting auras, they flooded the underground tunnels and caverns and met the first settlements of the Magmakin dwarves, devoured them and continued, sure of more flesh to consume, only to be met by fire, fists, and the unrelenting anger of said dwarves.

What the Magmakin dwarves just consider "the enemy" is an embodiment of eldritch creatures, filling up entire caverns and tunnels. They come in screaching, with malovent eyes which wants only be the thing which they are born: be a nightmare.

Once a dwarf has hit them hard enough and they "die", their bodies and fluids are slowly evaporating on the grounds of the caverns. They are just dreams after all, aren't they not? So they return to their imaginary state of being unprocessed fears and hopes of a being which is not allowed to awake.

A few tomes in the palace library of the Longardir in their palace in the city of Oldrir tell from the times as the bloodmages were battling the Nightmare Weaver in a frantic, violent, desperate time. One paragraph depicts the way the Weaver moved and that its reality-warping capabilities were moving with it, not staying in its path. The remains of the chaos still lingered, but the warping moves with the Weaver.

Over time the bubbling nightmares might be a larger problem, but the sheer presence of the Nightmare Weaver and its corrupting, outerworldly influence melts the stone, the irons, the runes surrounding it. Not just the way magma melts, but in an oozing goo where new nightmares with teeth-filled mouths ascend from the depths of the bubbling, liquid abyss. Those mouth speak. They whisper, they utter words close to making sense. It sounds like gibberish, but then it does not and if one listens too closely trying to understand and nearly grasping their meaning, their brain descends into madness. If they aren't consumed by the mouths or the Weaver itself before.

The more acute problem are the eyes. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. It does. With eyes made out of teeth, hate, anger, hunger. They tear into your soul, your mind, try to dissect it and tear it apart into smaller bits for easier digestion. They lure you in with the promise of glimpsing the truths behind the world, how it works, how things are, how they came into existence, but behind them is just hunger and madness, more often both.

Dreams and nightmares consists of the same material. Hopes, fears, love, anger, hate, dread, longing, desperation. They hunger for it, they want to come into being. One are cruel, trying to suffocate us in their sweet nectar, in their kindness while giving us sweet release from reality. The others are cruel with their unrelenting, cold, hard truth. You decide which are which.

Such is the law.