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Chapter 80: The Waking Scheme
🕑 Added 2025-06-29 04:08:47 +0000 UTCThe Acedia Estate did not boast like other faction halls.
There were no fountains flowing with molten silver, no windows of gaudy glass, no perfumed courtyards of exotic hel-lilies or rare dream-lotus. Instead, the estate was quiet. Unnervingly so. Low towers rose like fingers from the estate, cloaked in grayish-blue ivy, their windows shaded with silver-etched wards that dulled sound and masked presence.
The Dream Faction was built on control, nothing more.
And today, that comfortable control would begin to falter for the first time in centuries.
A soft jingle passed through the inner courtyard. The sound rippled through the noiseless sector.
She had arrived.
Uninvited.
Unannounced.
Hannya stepped across the estate’s threshold in her black kimono, rose petal hem dancing just above the floor. Noh walked behind her like a phantom in pale silver. Shela, ever the blade, flanked her opposite.
The doors parted of their own accord.
They entered, wordlessly.
The guards, if they noticed, did not stop them.
They couldn’t, or at least, dared not too.
In a tower of cold paper and memory crystals, Lazmer the 22nd Acedia, leaned back from the work table, hands hovering in a wide splay over dozens of memory threads connected to mana stones densely packed with information, his expression unreadable.
Until a knock on the inner door was heard.
“She's here.” a clerk whispered, peeking through the door's gap.
He didn’t answer.
He had felt her enter through the estates wards thirty seconds ago. He was calculating already. Models of encounter probability, emotional pressure response, social collapse thresholds. He had prepared for assassins, emissaries, even military demands.
But this?
No. Hannya arriving here, without declaration. After the purging of his shadow demon agents six months ago? After her cult fought off an ambush not too long ago?
‘Is she baiting something?’ he thought. ‘Or testing my silence?’
He stood with restrained breath, brushing a gray lock of hair behind one ear. His robe bore the Dream’s hourglass crest and subtle defensive sigils woven into its trim. As head of the Dream Faction’s advisory council, he answered to few, and commanded many. And right now, those many didn’t know half of what he had done in the shadows.
Especially not about Ragescar Valley.
Moments later, in the crescent library hall, the Dream Faction's senior archivists paused mid-step as the doors to the inner sanctum opened of their own will.
Hannya entered with no fanfare but her presence made the air thicker than normal, with the kind of awareness that demanded stillness, attention.
Eyes turned toward her.
Yet none challenged. Many had heard or seen her ruthless display during the ceremony.
Lazmer descended the spiral steps from the upper tier, hands folded neatly before him.
"Lady Hannya," he said calmly. “An honor... though not one I expected.”
“No one ever does,” she replied casually. Her voice was soft, unhurried. “Dreams always come so suddenly, don't they?”
His jaw tensed slightly.
He gestured to the chairs beneath the tower's great time sigil. A formation that allows for leisure time to be spent at a much slower pace without the worry of procrastination.
“You’ve come with questions?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve come for someone. Your Protector.”
He paused for a moment before answering, the obvious answer coming to his mind.
“...You mean the Eversleeper?”
Hannya’s eyes, those soft pink petals spiraling behind her veil.
“I’ve heard of your faction’s guardian. I wish to meet them. Today.”
Lazmer didn’t answer immediately.
Inside, his mind burned with questions.
‘She knows about the Eversleeper? And wishes to speak with him? That can’t be a coincidence. And after the purge? After the attack I staged against her? And No mention of it?’
His face darkened slightly before smoothing back to normal.
‘She’s either planning a long game, or, somehow, she’s already won.’
Those were the only conclusions he could come up with.
And yet…
She wasn’t demanding.
She wasn’t accusing.
She was just… asking.
And in that, Lazmer found the tiniest breath of relief.
‘So, she’s not here to kill me like some savage.’
Not today.
He exhaled slowly.
“Very well,” he said. “But be warned. Our guardian does not… wake easily.”
She nodded once.
“I’m patient. He doesn’t need to speak. I only need to see him.”
Lazmer turned to lead her, his mind filled with questions, but his heart more at ease.
This simple request would cost him nothing. He was sure.
…
…
The walk down into the Eversleeper’s sanctuary felt like descending through centuries of fog. Noh and Shela had been left behind, for ‘security’ reasons.
The steps were lined with dreamsteel railings, etched with flickering runes that shifted shape if stared at too long. At regular intervals, shimmering magical constructs hovered motionless in alcoves. They showed no movement, still, until one of them pulsed with light and launched a silent bolt of pure disruption mana across the chamber.
It hit something.
A flickering antlered hound, made of dream mist and warped memory, disintegrated before it fully formed.
Then another emerged behind it.
Reality in this place... had loose borders. In a sense, this hidden chamber was a light projection of the chaotic inner world of a dream fissure.
Hannya slowed as they entered the inner chamber, gaze lifting at last to the slumbering devil who rested at its center.
He lay on an immense platform of silk covered, bedded marble and memory crystals, surrounded by suppression rings and mechanical pylons. The ceiling arched high above him, studded with floating wards and orbiting rune lenses, designed not to wake him, but to keep his dreams from escaping.
He was tall even in sleep, his limbs wrapped in shifting silks and cloth that glimmered between light teal and deepest black. His breathing was slow, but each exhale sent ripples across the air, tangible folds in space and law. Around him, glowing cracks sometimes formed midair, bleeding short-lived dream beasts, floating beasts with crescent wings, extra limbs, or too many eyes. Each one instantly vaporized by the monitoring systems embedded in the walls.
And he didn’t even stir.
The Eversleeper.
The ancient 6-star devil of the Dream Faction.
They called him Somnus, a word he sometimes spoke during his slumber.
Somnus 6th Acedia.
It was the name his faction decided on… in hopes the acknowledgement would keep him asleep.
To them, his times awake were far from… controlled.
A correction they have yet to find a stable solution for.
Lazmer bowed slightly as they entered the threshold.
“Lady Hannya,” he said, voice softer now, more careful. “This chamber has not received guests in over a century. The Eversleeper’s breathing alone, if allowed to go unchecked, can tear rifts between dreams and this world.”
“I know, dream fissures are difficult to close.” she murmured. “That’s why they used to let Baku sit here.”
Lazmer flinched.
But Hannya had already stepped past him, walking forward slowly, her veil hiding the dark gleam in her eyes as she looked down on the sleeping titan.
‘In the novel,’ she thought, ‘this scene never appeared. But the footnotes were there. The hints. The rumors from the Dream exile arc, when the Acedia exiles moved their facilities to the elven forests. Elf Bradley’s little XP farm.’
‘He’s been asleep for nearly eight hundred years… ever since the last Great Fissure Tear.
And Baku, the only devil strong enough to eat his stray dreams without being devoured, left when the council turned on Somnus’s family.’
She looked around at the defensive arrays, the polished control stones, the armed constructs hidden behind illusion walls. All this infrastructure wasn’t meant to protect Somnus.
It was meant to contain him.
‘Half his family were exiled,’ she thought bitterly, ‘cast out to the western wastelands like garbage. Not because of his mistake, but because they were 'natural' devils and not ‘Devil Unions’. They were devils born without fusion, iterations, without designer traits or synthetic pairings.’
She shook her head in her heart. Another power crippled by the machinations of weaker devils.
‘It was Lazmer who pushed that vote. He called the natural-born a regression. An… inefficiency. And now they’re building dream reactors in the Wastes, their progress slowed but outside of danger. Outside politics. Outside the council's reach.’
She looked down at Somnus again.
She held back a snort with practiced ease. ‘He sleeps through the collapse of Hellnia.’
He slept on, utterly still. But around his body, the space shimmered, he dreamed without control. With Baku gone, no one could devour his dreams safely. So the council locked him here, behind prayers and containment machines.
To sleep forever.
‘And yet,’ Hannya thought, a flicker of amusement crossing her eyes. ‘he still breathes now.’
A pulse of mist rolled from his mouth, light as fog, and for a moment a dream beast bloomed midair, a twisting infant of clouds with wings. It blinked at her.
Then one of the floating constructs shot it through the chest.
Gone.
Behind her, Lazmer’s hands were clenched behind his back.
“You’re not here to wake him.” he said carefully.
“No.” she answered simply, still watching the mist roll.
“But you’ve come to remind me he could,” he said. Gauging her answers. “If you wanted.”
She didn’t respond.
Because they both knew the truth, so it appeared.
Somnus hadn’t stirred for centuries.
But now… Hannya had come.
And something about her silence, her gaze, her weightless poise…
To Lazmer, It felt like a silent threat, a subtle promise even.
Lazmer watched her with a strategist’s calm.
Hannya had said little. But she had seen everything.
The defense systems. The dream-fueled disruptions. The soft pulses of sleeping catastrophe wrapped in silk bindings.
More than anything, she had looked at Somnus like a memory she had been waiting to confirm.
“You knew him,” Lazmer probed. Trying to find the answers to the questions swirling in his mind. “From before the exile vote.”
She could be posing as a young devil, veiled in innocence and a blank slate. It wouldn’t be the first time. Nomads loved such games. So he shot out that guess, acutely searching for a rattle in her calm demeanor.
“I know of him,” Hannya replied. Her voice remained quiet, almost bored. “He’s history wrapped in sleep. Power chained in stillness.”
Lazmer’s lips tightened. “Poetry. We can’t afford poetry.”
“No,” she said, her eyes still on the sleeper. “But you could’ve afforded loyalty, right?”
That word landed like a heavy blade. Lazmer flinched, just enough to betray it.
He stood motionless at the perimeter of the containment circle, and the walls responded, humming softly, mistless and serene.
But across the room, just in front of the sleeping Somnus, Hannya’s real body stood, silent and still, as the thin dreammist of her [True Dream Body] rose gently from her sleeves and hem.
The mist was nearly invisible, shimmering only in sharp light. It sparkled faintly as it spread, curling into a projection, a delicate facsimile of herself placed before Lazmer, a hallucination rooted in reality.
She wasn’t speaking to him with her voice.
She was speaking through mist and charm, just as she had during the duel in the plaza a day ago.
And now, in the deepest chamber of the Dream Faction, she did it again.
Not just to trick him.
But to free someone.
Just behind Somnus, the massive, golden surface of Narcissus’ Envious Mirror stood tall and waiting.
Hannya’s real body approached it without sound, her bare hand brushing against the black marble frame.
“Mirror, mirror,” she whispered, voice soft and close enough to taste, “look up to him.”
The mirror rippled like disturbed honey.
The gold tint shimmered, then deepened into a near-molten gleam.
Then an image of the sleeping devil appeared within, the colors inverted on the colossus’ reflection.
From Somnus’s arms, his chest, and beneath his robes, twelve hidden curses began to glow, sigils buried deep beneath the containment wards etched on him.
They weren’t part of Dream Faction’s basic protocol.
These were older.
Intentional.
Laid over centuries by careful hands afraid of what might wake.
‘Curses built to hold the mind still, his blood tepid, and soul hazy.’ she realized. ‘To make sure his dreams never align with his will.’
One by one, they burned away in threads of low light, drawn directly into the mirror. The frame pulsed once, and the sigils vanished along with the reflection of the devil.
The mirror housed them all, silently, obediently.
Somnus stirred… slightly.
A single twitch of his fingers beneath the silk. A breath that rattled like something newly alive.
Meanwhile, the mist-formed illusion of Hannya kept speaking to Lazmer.
“You banished half your bloodline,” she said, “because their births didn’t follow your designs. Because they were born raw. Natural. Ugly, to you maybe, but whole all the same.”
“They were unstable,” Lazmer said. “Prone to inherited madness. Devil Union models offer less imbalance, compatibility-”
“And pride,” she interrupted. “Convenience. False Vanity.”
The illusion’s voice, fed by mist, held just enough texture to feel present before him, but not enough substance to fully hide the truth.
Yet Lazmer didn’t notice.
He wasn’t trained in sensing illusions or dreammist projections.
He was an Advisor, a tactician, and a scientist.
But not a fighter.
And while he stood there, arguing logic and lineage...
The Eversleeper breathed a bit differently than before.
And the mist around his platform began to subtly curl inward.
…
…
“You’re not one of them,” Lazmer said cautiously. “You’re not an exile nor a Nomad.”
“No,” she said through the illusion. “I’m something different.”
For some reason, that answer chilled him far more than any other confirmation. From an instinct he didn’t recognize mixed with a pulse of curious deja vu.
As her mist figure turned, the real Hannya took one last glance at Somnus. He still slept. But something beneath his brow... twitched.
She knew what would happen now.
Not soon.
But soon enough.
She stepped away, hem brushing marble, and cast her final words through both voice and mist.
“You know what the tragedy of sleep is, Lazmer?”
He didn’t respond.
She looked down at Somnus one last time.
“It’s that sometimes… dreams can’t forget what they were.”
And then, now replacing her illusion, she turned and left.
Lazmer stood alone.
Somnus’s breath deepened.
And from his lips, barely audible, a whisper escaped, like a word returning after centuries of stillness.
“...Baku.”
…
…
A long while passed, and Lazmer stood there in the dreamforged sanctum, a single line of sweat trailing down his spine.
The containment chamber was unchanged.
No sirens. No alarms.
Somnus remained asleep, visibly inert, his breathing slow, steady, and shallow.
But something was… different. He was sure.
The dream-tinged air, usually dense like velvet stretched too tight, had loosened. The subtle hum of overlapping seals no longer vibrated at the edge of the chamber. He'd been here enough times to gauge an…offness. It felt like walking into a room after something had already happened.
‘She didn’t just visit. She did something.’
He couldn’t sense it, but he could feel it.
He turned and walked out swiftly, his boots clicking softly against the polished floor. He didn’t look back.
He descended into the lower foundations of the estate, passing through two security systems and a locked mind-loop array before reaching the threshold of the inner vault.
The Memory Crypt.
Few within the Dream Faction knew it existed.
Fewer were allowed to enter.
Here, forgotten projections, dangerous bloodline research, and centuries of sealed dream models were stored, hidden beneath layers of denial and misdirection.
Lazmer moved quickly to the central pillar, where only black-tier scrolls were housed, those associated with internal heresy, family betrayals, or sealed theoretical magic. He scanned for one name.
Somnus.
And there it was.
[Vault Record 9b: Deviant Awakening - Pre-Gula Fragment.]
It had not been touched in centuries. Or so he thought.
He reached out.
Paused.
Nothing about the casing was visibly different. The clasp remained sealed. The case itself bore no smudges, no magical residue, no recorded tampering.
But still… something felt off…again.
He released the seal and opened the scroll.
A faint shimmer of dream pollen, invisible to most, drifted into the air, sparkling only briefly before vanishing into the vault’s null wards.
Lazmer stared at it.
That shouldn’t have happened.
‘The scroll’s enchantments are one-way binders. No pollen leaks unless it’s been opened recently.’
And yet, there were no signs of a break-in. As if the seal was effortlessly bound and rebound without a trace.
The thought made his stomach tighten.
He bent over the scroll and read quickly. Inside, theorized materials detailed Somnus’s deep-sleep cycles, [Lucid Dream Body] feedback loops, and the rare possibility of mythic bloodline extraction during unconscious states.
He skimmed to the final warning.
[
If subject recalls a deep relational anchor (ie: the dream-eater, exile ‘Baku’), emotional ignition may bypass containment layers and lead to uncontrolled dreamforming.
Mythogenesis event likely. Systemic collapse possible.
]
Lazmer closed the scroll.
No evidence. No message. No physical intrusion.
But she had been here. She had known about this. She’d spoken Somnus’s name with certainty.
She hadn’t asked if he was stable.
She had come knowing he wasn’t.
‘But what did she do?’
That was the part he couldn’t answer. He hadn’t seen her cast anything. He hadn’t noticed any shift in the chamber’s wards. No artifacts. No offerings. Nothing.
Just her voice. Her gaze. Her silence.
‘If she somehow bypassed the vault’s protections without leaving a trace, then…’
He returned the scroll with care, and for the first time in his tenure, the weight of his own ignorance settled like a collar around his throat.
She left no threat, no demand, no trace.
Only questions.
Back above, Somnus still slept.
But his breath was longer, slower, deeper.
A dream beast flickered into life at his side, a drifting fog ribbon with eyes like moons, and for the first time in years, it was not immediately destroyed.
It curled around his fingers and disappeared into his palm, like a loyal hound finding home.
Comments
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter
Butch Perterson
You’re right lol I didn’t really describe them. I just had them a default bright blue in my head. But I like that idea! If they all had different colors would the distinction mean something about the memories? Or maybe just a type of labelling system? For levels of importance?
ShadowTycho
What color are memory crystals? They make up a lot of the imagery but I find my self wondering what they look like. As I was reading I imagined soft blue of varied brightness and shape. Afterwards I thought it would be cool if the all had different color but all glowed making the light in these quiet halls a kaleidoscope of color despite the stillness.
