A Journey Into the Dreamveil

Another installment of Lirael Glimmereye's journal as he progresses as a Yuan-ti Cleric of the Twilight Domain/Rogue. He is a character in a D&D 5e High Fantasy home brew adventure campaign. Today's installment is the first installment of our last session where we entered the Dreamveil and is slightly out of sequence from some of my other out of session entries. Which meant that I had to do some creative writing to have it make sense. 

Past Journal Entries:

1. Lirael Glimmereye - Backstory
2. The Prophets of Minwa
3. The Silent Struggle
4. An Answer Well Received

A Journey Into the Dreamveil

Now to get back to writing in my journal, the past few days have been a flurry of excitement, adventure, traveling, and yes, dreaming. Enough has happened that I needed to sit down and write out the next series of journal entries a few days after they actually happened and hope that my memory is such that when I go back to them that the order they are found in this journal, that they will make some sort of sense. 

After the long journey and then all of the disclosures in the Hall of Mirrors and conversations with Gilderay and Minwa, along with meeting Landriss and Varrin, I was tired and a bit overwhelmed. We had decided to sleep in the same room, it was after all a black moon night and too many things that shouldn't walk but do. Landriss being an elf volunteered to watch over us as we slept and I quickly fell asleep.

Within in the sacred halls of Minwa's temple that a vision unfolded before me, a tapestry woven in the threads of dreams and with what I know now, possibly time. I found myself within a room half-shrouded in shadows, where the figure of Varrin emerged beside me from what looked to be an ornate mirror. 

Within the room an elderly woman lay there, her life's fire obviously fading to nothing. We moved quickly to the side and hid behind a piano, an armored man opened the door and came into the room and she says to him "Tell me another story."

What Varrin uses as his primary face and the one that we've been told is the Shadowed Man's as well
Image created by Bing AI Image Creator - 2023

The man, bearing Varrin's countenance, stopped, looked into the mirror, which cracked into multiple pieces, but all the shards stayed within the frame. He sighed a frustrated sigh, and then approached the side of the bed, sits beside her with a sad look on his face and says "400 years and it doesn't look like you've aged a day". 

She looks up, smiles and shakes her head and says "I can't get up and go on the adventures with you anymore." 

In that moment the man started to talk of a beautiful flower, but somehow I can see into his mind and a vision of a war torn battlefield, with thousands dead or dying, and he looks down on the battle scarred field and picks a beautiful undamaged lily and only talks of that beautiful lily in the field.

They sit together for a time, and each story told I see there is a horrible scene that the story emanates from, but he only tells her of the beautiful parts of the scene. He tells her, to him she still looks like she did when she was in her twenties. He says that he's now 640 years old and she's only 400, yet she is dying. She sighs a sad sigh and looks at the man and a tear escapes and rolls down her cheek. 

He smiles sadly, wipes away the tear, and tells her that "When you close your eyes this time you are going on an adventure, one that I will not be able to follow you on, it is time now for you to sleep."  and lovingly touches her cheek. The woman sighs contentedly and closes her eyes and appears to fall asleep. 

When he gets up from the bed, he turns and for a moment it feels as though he is looking at us both and sighs another deep sigh. I see centered on his suit - a Lilly etched into his armor, with vines creeping from the center of the chest plate.

Before he leaves, he turns to look directly at the two of us. Then he uttered words that echoed in the hollows of inevitability, "Strange how you lot cling to a life knowing it must end. Creating only to be destroyed anyway." 

After that he turns and walks out of the room and the last thing he says is "I'm sorry." His apology lingered in the air as he walked quietly away despite wearing heavy plate armor. Leaving the room to be claimed by shadows.

In his wake, a chilling darkness quickly enters the room almost as if it had been impatiently, yet expectantly waiting outside for the man to leave. When I looked closely, it was a being more than a shadow, but less than a man, I recognized the face from Minwa's card, then he extended his hand towards the woman's chest. He lightly touches her with a finger, a blackness runs down the finger into the woman, ushering her into the embrace of the eternal night. 

As she dies another vision unfolds—the armored man with Varrin's face appeared in all the milestones of the women's life as her friend and confidant. A silent guardian at every crucial juncture. It was a mesmerizing scene to watch unfold before us. We were privileged to watch her last moments when our lives pass before us.

Then the not quite man leaves the room and quietly shuts the door.

A strangeness comes over me at that point, a sudden shift in reality, we go from spectral observers to being a part of this reality.

We looked at one another and quickly took advantage of the situation. We started looking around the room. Varrin gestures for me to go the two cupboards and the piano. While he went toward the bed where the woman now dead was laying. 

In the first cupboard I see a golden spider and when I touch it, I see a vision where Landriss is putting the spider into a slot which opens a strange door in a place that didn't look familiar. I put it in a pouch on my belt. In the second cupboard, there are music sheets, a spell scroll, and a small journal. I want to show them to Varrin, to see if he recognizes them since he is a bard, and motion for him to come over before he has worked up the nerve to search the dead woman and the area around her.

He quickly comes over, looks at them, and whispers that they are to be played by a violin and piano duet and that the song was known for how it was played in a popular play called "I Want to be a Canary." Very mundane items, but they might have relevance later and I put them into my bag of holding.

Then I move to the piano and as I passed the cracked mirror I noticed there is an array of light emanating from it, but I don't stop to investigate. That can wait.

When I search the piano and find more sheets of music, but for a different play "The Crossing of One's Path" - a popular story that even I had seen. One of needing to go your separate way in life. Knowing that you probably won't see that person again, and if you do they will be different when you next see them. 

Then I found a secret compartment on the side and inside was a dark ceremonial dagger in a sheath, and a larger journal which I quickly thumbed through and saw that it was probably from somebody named Helena Garland's. I put everything I had collected in my bag of holding to investigate more closely at a more opportune time.

While I was searching the piano, out of the corner of my eye I was saw Varrin going over to the body and pulls on the necklace, snapped the chain and twisted her head off to the side. I just shake my head whisper to him that it would have easier to have found the clasp and undid it. He didn't need to do that.

I was getting the feeling that our time here was almost at its end and I wanted nothing more than to be gone from this place, I started thinking about where I would hide if anyone decided to come into the room. Then suddenly, I hear footsteps outside and the door knob starts to turn. I jump under the bed and attempt to make myself as innocuous as possible. When I look around for Varrin, I don't see him, so I hope that he's turned himself invisible. While I'm under the bed I find another leather bound booklet that I quickly shove into my bag of holding.

As the door opens, I briefly see I a knight wearing thorny black armor. As he comes into the room. I hear him say "That was overkill Hassan" Then the man walks over to where the mirror is and pauses then I hear him mutter something and hear him strike the mirror. Later when I talk to Varrin, he told me that when the knight looked in the mirror a monster looks back, not the expected golden locks and handsome face. 

I can hear the knight drawing his sword and he moves to standing beside the bed. I'm not sure what he's doing, but I make myself as small as I can. The black knight suddenly put his sword through the woman's corpse and down through the bed striking the floor just missing me. I notice that it has a black blade and am very glad that it is not sticking through me as well. I can feel the magic emanating throughout the room as he chants some very powerful words.

A few moments after he withdraws the sword, I can see the bed starting to move as if someone is attempting to get out of it and hear movement on the bed. I try to make myself even smaller and then suddenly there is a second set of black armored feet on the floor. Silently they both walked out of the room, I didn't bother to look, I was having enough difficulty holding back the scream of fright that was begging to come forth. Thankfully, the door shuts behind them and I hear a lock rattling in the keyhole.

At that point I decide that it's time for me to get out of here, especially without Landriss with us, exploring wherever we are further is not a great idea. With the amount of magic we've seen within this one little room, we are in way over our heads. I silently move out from under the bed.

After catching my breath and attempting to control my heart beat. Varrin suddenly  reappeared at my side and made me jump and utter one of those ever so manly "eeps" that escape without control. He chuckled and I glared at him. 

We both quickly decide that we need to get out of wherever we are as quickly as possible. He pulls out the necklace and goes over to the mirror again. As he approaches where the black armored knight had punched the mirror, it begins to repair itself. He quietly tells me that he's going to concentrate on what our room at Minwa's temple looks like and if it appears, that the mirror is our gateway out of here.

As he begins to focus, we notice our room coming into view in the mirror and Varrin put his hand through the mirror and simply said I'm going through and you need to come through as soon as you can. I did one last scan around the room as he went through and then I followed him.

Once back we catch our breath and look back at the mirror we came through. It is now simply a mirror. When Varrin attempts to use the necklace again nothing happens. 

We hurriedly tell Landriss what happened. While telling him of our adventure, I pulled the golden spider out of my pouch and it comes alive Landriss tells me it's a Midas spider. It crawls up my arm and sits on my shoulder. I attempt to cast Animal Friendship on it but of course it fails - it's not a serpent. Then he attempts to talk to it and takes it for a moment, when it turns back to its other form he hands it back to me and I put in my belt pouch.

According to Landriss he also had a midas spider come to him while we were sleeping. He friended it and it gave him a dream which seemed to go along with the card that Varrin received from Minwa. A kobold in its hand - has a crown and another moment in a treasure hold of the crystal dragon. 

The little journal from under the bed belonged to an Elf named Lenore - I quickly read through it and the one we saw wearing the lily armor showed up during the woman's birthdays for around 400 years. The thing that she always ends up asking him - puzzling - he doesn't seem to age. He always looks the same. At the end of the journal she was writing that "I'm getting tired, had children, life on the farm is good. He has all the stories and no one to ever accompany him in them and my life has turned out to be more satisfying than his. I know that he only tells me the good parts, not the sad part of any of the stories, and never the rest of the story...and from there the journal is blank.

The Big journal from the cupboard - is a map with a room design and placement, along with the layout of a tower, that you go down into, not up. It is similar to the what rumors we've heard of the current King's tower which Landriss confirmed, but in the opposite direction. I quickly made a copies of the maps and other things like names and events that seemed important from both journals in the back of my journal while we were waiting for the dawn. 

The other journal that I found in the piano seems to belong to Helena Garland, I haven't had time to look closely at that one yet, but do believe that I'll have time later today during the first part of the carriage ride to Inverness, which is about a day and half away.

Varrin looks at the music sheets from the piano and says that the play was originally done in Nocktail, which might be a clue that this is where this tower in the maps or even where we just were might be located.

Then Varrin casts an Identify spell on the dagger. It is a ritual knife and used to to create monsters, it transforms the essence of those freshly killed along with whatever essences are stored within it with it into monsters - powerful demons or devils. Landriss said the we should give it to the king and let his people destroy the dagger. We might get a reward for turning it in. 

After all that had happened it was only a couple of hours to dawn, yet I felt strangely refreshed as if I had slept all night. But I'm not an elf and after I finished copying the maps and writing down the other information, I decided that even though I had so much going through my mind and the choice I had made regarding my future earlier, that I needed to just relax for a while. Needless to say, I was surprised when Landriss shook my shoulder to wake me up what felt like minutes later.

Dawn was breaking and we needed to get going. There was a small breakfast prepared for us, which we quickly scoffed down and headed out to the carriage to begin our journey. The Ratfolk driver was about as friendly as the Prophets of Minwa were on our journey here and we simply got in the carriage and departed.

I was too keyed up to focus on reading or anything else because I knew that night I would either be free or dead. Nothing serious. Yeah, I was more than a little scared of what would happen this night, but knew there was not really any other choice.

So, I sat and watched the forest go by and thought of the life I've lived so far and the future that I so badly wanted.