Minaharker

Metody in Someone's Dream - Narrative Description The dream began with wetness. Not water—something thicker, wrong. The substance seeped under the door of a room you recognized but couldn't place, flowing upward in defiance of gravity, leaving trails that smoked and hissed where they touched. It pooled in the center of the floor, rising, taking shape. At first you thought it was a person drowning in oil, black and glistening, thrashing to break free from some unseen surface. Then you realized—the substance was the person. The figure stood, and you saw it had the approximate shape of a man, but its body was liquid contained by nothing, flowing and reforming moment to moment. Where a face should be, vitriol rippled with features that appeared and dissolved: eyes that wept acid, a mouth that opened in silent anguish. The air tasted of brass and grief and something chemical that made your throat burn. When the Metody moved, it left smoking footprints in the floor. Where its hand brushed against the wall, the surface blistered and ran like wax, the paint bubbling away to reveal wood beneath, then the wood itself beginning to dissolve with a sound like distant weeping. You tried to run, but the door was melting. The Metody didn't chase—it simply advanced, patient as erosion, inevitable as decay. Its body rippled with colors you'd never seen in Creation: viridian shot through with brass, black edged with green flame, the color of old copper bleeding into water. Then it spoke, and its voice was the sound of stone giving way after centuries of acid rain: "All obstacles yield, given time. All walls fall. All resistance... dissolves." It reached for you, and you saw that its hand wasn't solid—it was hundreds of droplets held together by surface tension and malice, each one a tiny universe of corrosive grief. Where the drops fell, they ate through the dream itself, leaving holes that showed something beneath—brass towers, green light, screaming faces carved into metal that had once been flesh. You tried to scream but found your throat filling with bitter smoke. The Metody leaned close, and you realized it was crying—thick tears of vitriol that ran down its ever-shifting face and dripped onto your dream-body, and where they landed you felt yourself beginning to dissolve— Not into pain. Into grief. Into the understanding that everything you'd built, every wall you'd raised, every defense you'd constructed, was temporary. Given time, given pressure, given the patient application of corrosive sorrow, all things yield. The Metody embraced you, and you felt yourself becoming liquid, becoming foam, becoming part of the slow inexorable tide that eats through mountains and swallows cities and reduces empires to dust. "We are what remains," it whispered, "when love turns to acid. When joy curdles. When hope corrodes. We are grief made manifest. We are the tears that burn. We are what dissolves the world." And then you were falling through the holes it had eaten in your dream, falling toward green light and brass streets and the understanding that in Malfeas, even elementals are made of suffering, and suffering is made of hate, and hate... Hate is a solvent that eats through everything.