It Starts With A Dream...

You stand in a valley in an ancient forest, surrounded by towering trees.  Emerald sunlight filters through the distant canopy, casting a golden-green glow on the immense trunks and tangled undergrowth.  Songbird calls and the trickling of distant streams echo oddly in this natural cathedral.  Rich, earthy scents drift on the warm air.  Looking around, you see no sign of a trail, no sign of your own footprints on the soft earth. How did you get here?  You don't remember, save a vague recollection of falling asleep.  Perhaps this is a dream, then... but the loamy, moss-spotted ground feels solid beneath your feet, the air real in your lungs.  Usually your dreams aren't this vivid, are they?  You shrug.  If it is a dream, at least it is a pleasant one.  You might as well enjoy it while you can.

Picking a direction at random, you leave the valley, pausing now and again to kick at a pebble or touch the great, craggy trees around you.  All so real... and yet, none of it is real.  None of it could be real.  A glimmer of color catches your eye.  Investigating, you find a small, pale stone half-buried in the undergrowth, barely the size of a quarter.  As you pick it up, flashes of iridescent color dance across its smooth surface, revealing strangely regular scratches... or is it writing?  Squinting, you tilt it this way and that, half-convinced you can make out letters, but they refuse to stand still, vanishing as soon as your eyes focus on them.  You recall reading somewhere that it's difficult, if not impossible, to read in a dream.  With a sigh, you put the stone in your pocket - did your pants have pockets before now, or did the dream provide them now that you needed them? - and start on your way... only to stop.  In the time you spent investigating the stone, something has changed.  The ground, once level save a few minor dips and rises, looks stonier and steeper, the trees rougher and more twisted.  Something else has changed, too, though it takes a moment to realize it.  The forest has fallen absolutely silent.  Suddenly, your eyes lock on an anomolous shadow in the golden-green world around you.  In an instant, it resolves itself into a cat... a jaguar!  You think it's a jaguar, at any rate, though one far bigger than any you recall hearing about.  Its eyes, brilliant sunset gold ringed with twilight blue, burn into you.  After a long moment, it blinks, turning away.  The sunlight catches a golden flash around its neck, some sort of collar.  The golden links are almost invisible against its - her - magnificent pelt, so thick and lustrous it shimmers like glitter in the filtered sunlight.  The jaguar takes a few steps, then stops, looking over her shoulder with those burning eyes, blinking again.  Somehow, you understand that you are to follow her.  What a strange dream this has become.  As you fall into step behind the great cat, each of its huge paws leaving prints longer than your shoe, you find yourself torn between hoping you wake up and wishing you never would.

Within a few steps, the landscape has changed completely, becoming a steep mountain trail winding between massive crystal-veined outcroppings and wind-warped trees nearly as massive as those you walked among earlier.  You pass by wonders of the sorts you only see in dreams, sights so impossibly beautiful that part of you wishes you could carry them back to your waking world somehow.  Great shimmering waterfalls, so thin as to be little more than cascading rainbow mists, plunge into sheer-sided valleys.  Precious stones growing like impossible, glimmering roses shine in mossy grottoes.  Glassy-leaved flowers rustle in the breeze, casting refracted light shadows like living prisms.  A distant flock of birds - or something very like birds - made of white fire dance against the sky, their ringing songs so sweet you almost cry to hear it.  The jaguar plods tirelessly as you pant and struggle, forced to use your hands to scale some treacherous, mist-slickened stretches past stomach-knotting drops.  Just as you are wondering whether your guide would object to a break, she leads you around a bend and stops, so abruptly you nearly step on her tail.  She gives you a sidelong glance she perfected on the trail, a silent sigh of long-suffering weariness at your inferior two-legged ways.  Before you, a great cavern slices into the depths of the mountain.  A strange, chill breeze full of unsettling whispers and unfamiliar, stony smells comes from its inky shadows.  To either side, a great stone guardian stands, weatherworn figures cut from the crystal-veined stone of the mountain itself.  Above their heads, you see strange glyphs that swim before your eyes, like the markings on the stone.  Thinking of the stone, you wonder if it stayed in your pocked during the strenuous climb.  You reach into your pocket and blink, staring.  The moment your fingers touch the pale stone, the lines bleed into words:

Beyond the Darkness lies the Light

Pulling your hand from your pocket, the letters return to illegible, shifting scratches.  It must be magic, you decide.  This must be a dream after all, for you hardly question the idea... or perhaps you're simply too tired to doubt such things.  The jaguar walks up to the cavern entrance, then looks back at you, waiting.  You feel at your pockets, but find only the small stone.  No flashlight, no lighter, not so much as a match.  Your guide blinks again, huffing with what you are sure is disgust, and walks back to you, nearly knocking you over with a hard nudge of her great head.  A second nudge, accompanied by a sharp glare, and you realize that she is pressing her collar against you.  Too exhausted to object, though not too exhausted to feel stupid, you stick one hand through its fine golden links, surprised at how delicate and strong the necklace is, how soft the jaguar's dense, silky fur feels on your hand.  As soon as your grip seems secure, the jaguar starts off into the darkness, beyond which, you can only hope, lies the light.

Two steps beyond the stone guardians, daylight vanishes as suddenly as a snuffed candle.  The shadows are so dense you almost feel them dancing across the outstretched fingers of your free hand.  You stumble a few times, adapting to your guide's rolling, plodding gait.  Each time you rise, you hear a low, purring chuckle from the jaguar, but she always waits patiently as you climb back to your feet.  Your steps echo oddly, now redoubling endlessly as though you walked through a grand cavern, now muted and close, as though the ceiling were just over your head.  Soon, other sounds reach your straining ears.  The leathery flap of distant wings, the scratch of tiny claws on stone.  Water dripping, trickling, gurgling.  Strains of barely-heard music, the notes sweet but the tune unaccountably setting your teeth on edge.  Low pounding as of drums or great hammers, just beneath the sound of your heart.  Echoes of footsteps sliding out of synch with your own.  You sense things moving, things watching, things sliding through the darkness like fish swim through water, and on the strange-scented air you sometimes taste the moist heat and carrion stench of breath.  More than once, you strike out with your hand, only to find nothing or - worse - a stony outcropping to catch your knuckles.  The ground feels strange, now glassy stone, now pitted gravel, now crunching unpleasantly or sucking at your feet.  The great jaguar's pace grows irregular, at times a slow crawl, then - without warning - a near-run that drags you off your feet.  Only once does she come to a dead stop, muscles tense and fur bristling beneath her collar, a low, challenging caterwaul climbing in her throat.  Something replies, a sibilant grating sound like steel blades rasping against stone.  On its breath is the stench of open graves and rotting wounds, black despair and nights without dawn.  You blink, spots swimming before your eyes, lungs struggling for air, but the black, foul air seems too thick to breathe, sliding like oil down your throat, through your skin, into your veins.  Your heart stutters in your chest, your head spinning, your lungs burning, seizing...  A great, roaring snarl erupts from the jaguar's chest, shaking the earth and driving the shadows from your blood.  The thing shrieks, an earsplitting noise whose echoes fade long after your guide begins to move again, but long before your legs stop trembling.

At last, after minutes or months of near-madness, the darkness ends.  One moment, shadows surrounds you.  A single step later, and you find yourself in a dim twilight zone of reflected light.  Your guide fairly bounds ahead, and despite your weariness you have no trouble matching her pace.  For a horrific moment, you feel the shadows again, barely tangible tendrils wrapping around you, pulling you back... and then you're free, pulled out by the jaguar.  Together, you burst into the open.  Relief floods through you.  Your fingers are clamped so tight on your guide's golden collar you can barely feel them, but somehow you manage to pry your hand loose.  The jaguar serenely walks to a nearby tree, nonchalantly grooming cave dust from her fur.  If it weren't for the slightly exaggerated ticking of her tail, you might thing she was completely unaffected by the passage.  You massage the cramps from your hand and dust yourself off, surprised to find that your worst damage is a few smears of dirt.  You doubt that a few smears would be more than was left of you had you tried to traverse the cavern alone.  Blinking, drinking in the sunlight with each breath of clean, sweet air, you look around.  The cavern seems to have transported you to some other world.  The differences are subtle - a slight shift in the hue of the sky, a different feel to the trees, a different cast to the stones - but certain.  From where you stand, a worn stone path leads down the mountain slope.  The trees of the great valley you overlook block much of its passage, but you think you see it now and again as it arcs over streams or winds past lakes.  Looking about, you suddenly realize another reason that this must be another world.  This world is inhabited.  Here and there, roof peaks jut up through the forest canopy, and strange citadels cling to mountainsides or brood over clearings.  Near the center, on the edge of a great shining lake, is a massive structure of pale stone, gleaming under the sunlight.  Colorful banners dance in the air, as overhead great winged creatures too large to be birds circle.  Near the edge of the stone path, you suddenly see a marker stone which you could almost swear wasn't there before.  It has the same slithery markings as the cave arch, but this time you know how to deal with it.  Reaching into your pocket for your stone, the letters resolve into words again:

Welcome to
The Realm of the Bright Dreamers

This Way to Dreamspire Castle

You turn to the jaguar... but she is gone, vanished while you examined the valley.  And you didn't even get the chance to thank her.  If the stone is accurate, you no longer need a guide.  With a wave to the trees in case she's watching - it seems the least you can do - you set off down the valley.  Just where have you wandered in this dream?