poly_chromatic | [ нуρиσρσмρι¢ || иιиє ]

[A traveler might, some night in a dream, happen upon a desert road. It lies in sunset light, and the road stretches away into the distance like a black river, like black ribbon. Beyond are hills and cliffs and stones. They rise against the flatness of the desert before them and the order of the road below them. It is sunset, but the heat of the day still rises from the road and the air still shimmers with the heat a while yet. Behind the traveler the sun squats on the western rim of the world in the blooming colors of the red clouds.

Let the traveler walk along the road a while. The road progresses. The road moves.

In the utter austerity of this landscape all shapes and things are given a strange equality and no one thing living or dead or never to live nor die nor bird nor tree nor plant nor animal can make a claim of superiority or ownership. The very clarity of these things inverted their familiarity, for the eye of man understands the whole of a place beginning with some first part and here was nothing brighter than another and nothing more shadowed and in the lucid and luminous democracy of such places all preference is made irrelevant and a man and a stone find between them unexpected and hitherto unknown shared blood.

This is a place where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish.

The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lie like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and the traveler will pass lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of beasts who had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them.

Cross now a vast dry lake with rows of dead mountains that ranged beyond it like the works of enormous insects. To the south lie broken shapes of stones from some fallen or ruined mountain as far as they eye could see.

Strange how fast the night falls. Strange how quickly the darkness descends. Strange how the darkness swallows up stones, sky, all.

The hills and cliffs rise up in the dark, drawing closer now. The shadows lie blue and black in the stone folds of those corrugated mountains. Beyond them there must be more, crushed in butcherpaper folds or standing blue and footless beyond a field of salt. The ribbon of road curves and draws the traveler on along now, snakelike, writhing. The road moves but the road does not move.

It is dim, but not dark. Against the last light of the sky, there rises the line of smoke from a fire, etched and straight in the still air and an answer to the road--indeed its twin, for both straight, black lines are signs of man (are they not?).

Go into the hills. Seek the brightness of a misplaced star among the hills. Find then, traveler, a fire and come into its light.

It is built from the dried wood and dry desert plants and the wind moves the embers as though with the heartbeat of some immense beast dead and eviscerate upon the ground. Go it all the same. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be. For fire does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles.

The traveler shares this fire with a man under a black hood who sits on a stone on the opposite side of the fire and says nothing at first, but only shuffles a deck of cards and waits.]

[ooc: This is an open dream post, with no requirements for continuity or reason. Fletcher (Flagg) will be present in this dream, but it won't be clear that it's him (that hood is staying up!). To be quite honest, dreams are kind of his "thing," so he's actually rolling along with all this fairly well. In the context of this dream, if you would like, he'll turn over some cards and tell your character's "fortune" (or tell something, at least) because it's been a while since he's been The Man In Black in the desert. Ping me if you want something specific to turn up. Furthermore, based on the turn of the cards, the dream could go from dream to nightmare and the nightmare could itself be based on the turn of the cards. As before, ping me or leave an OOC note and we can make it happen~ Sweet dreams~]