Chapter 29: Dreaming

Inside the dark bedchamber, Lucien slowly raised his index finger to his mouth, licking a dollop of strawberry jam from his skin.

DING!

A tiny, silver window flickered in the pitch blackness before his eyes:

[SHADOW CHESS: MOVE 1]

[Pawn Deployed: Silas Nightingale (Involuntary Courier)

Target Acquired: The Astra Vanguard (Cassian Valemont)

Objective: The Purge of the Corrupt Roots

Narrative Divergence: +2.4%

System Assessment: Host’s malice toward the original plot is refreshing.

Countdown to Awakening Ceremony: 4 Days.]

Lucien closed his eyes, sliding down beneath the heavy silk blankets with a satisfying sigh.

Outside, the gears of the empire were beginning to grind.

Cassian Valemont was about to embark on a righteous crusade of holy destruction against the corrupt parasites of House Crowe.

And Lucien Alaric Everhart?

Lucien pulled the duvet right up to his ears, nestled his head into the feather pillow, and drifted off into the deep, glorious slumber of a completely innocent, bedridden salted fish.

***

The psychological descent into slumber usually involved a gradual dimming of consciousness, a warm unraveling of physical tension, and perhaps a drifting mental montage of whatever carbohydrates one had consumed before turning down the oil lamps.

For Lucien Alaric Everhart, however, falling asleep felt less like drifting off and more like being shoved down a flight of spiral stairs into an ancient cesspit of historical grievances.

One second he was nestled under six hundred thread-count Egyptian cotton, smugly basking in the satisfaction of having used Silas Nightingale as an unwitting courier pigeon against the corrupt logistics department.

The next second, the comfortable, lavender-scented blackness behind his eyelids violently folded in upon itself with the sickening sensation of a high-speed elevator cable snapping mid-descent.

Thump!

Lucien landed on both feet.

Or, more accurately, his consciousness solidified onto a flat surface that definitely was not his plush Persian rug.

He stood in the middle of a sun-baked thoroughfare paved with irregular, river-worn cobblestones that smelled of horse dung, woodsmoke, roasted root vegetables, and the distinct, unwashed musk of human civilization.

Above him, the sky was not the pale, crystal-blue dome of Astraea’s floating plateau, nor was it adorned with the humming, iridescent magical wards of the modern capital.

It was a canopy of dusty cerulean, scorched by a brassy sun that lacked the golden celestial geometry of the modern empire’s patron goddess.

"Oh, this is wonderful," Lucien muttered, looking down at his hands.

His hands were there, pale and slender, but when he brought his fingers up to his nose, he realized they lacked density.

If he squinted, he could see the rough grain of the dirt street through the translucent silhouette of his knuckles. He was wearing his charcoal-wool dressing gown, but the hem wasn’t picking up any dust.

"A lucid dream," he diagnosed out loud, his voice producing zero reverberation in the bustling atmosphere. "Fantastic. My subconscious has decided to punish me for eating four almond pastries before bed by generating a historical reenactment. Where are the flying pirate ships? Where is the talking cat that offers life advice? Why am I in a low-budget period drama?"

Nobody answered him.

In fact, nobody even blinked in his direction.

All around him, a teeming mass of people moved with frantic vitality.

These were not the tall, mana-rich citizens of modern Sol-Aeterna with their manicured ringlets and enchanted brooches.

These people were shorter, stockier, their faces weathered like cured cowhide, dressed in rough-spun tunics of undyed hemp and patched leather smocks.

A broad-shouldered butcher with a stained apron slammed a heavy iron cleaver through the spine of a roasted boar, shouting prices in an archaic, gutter dialect that sounded like a cross between low German and someone choking on a chicken bone.

Two barefoot children in grease-streaked pinafores sprinted directly through Lucien’s left hip, their phantom collision producing nothing more than a faint chill across his spectral abdomen.

"Rude brats," Lucien murmured, stepping out of the way of a donkey pulling a wooden cart laden with terracotta amphorae of sour wine. "Watch the silk, you gremlins."

He strolled forward, his hands tucked casually into the pockets of his dressing gown.

It was actually quite fascinating from an anthropological perspective. There were no mana conduits running along the gutters.

No streetlamps powered by luminescent moss or fire-elemental crystals. The iron pots for sale in the stalls were rough, hammered by hand, bearing none of the geometric stabilization runes that every modern blacksmith slapped on a frying pan to prevent grease fires.

’Whichever era it is... This predates the Dungeon Burst,’ Lucien deduced, his inner database of The Astral Sovereign’s Dawn cross-referencing the architecture.

The square stone arches, the absence of elemental crests, the primitive heraldry featuring a crowned vulture instead of the imperial dragon... This is the pre-cataclysm Western Marches.

Roughly eight or nine hundred years ago.

The era of the fragmented warlords.

He took another three paces toward a stall selling dried figs, wondering if his brain would allow him to taste the fruit if he concentrated hard enough.

Then, the cobblestones took a breath.

It wasn’t a metaphor.

The earth beneath his slippers literally shuddered, a deep, rhythmic percussion that made the terracotta amphorae on the donkey’s cart begin to chatter against one another like chattering teeth.

Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

Lucien frowned, looking down at his feet. "Did the tectonic plates back then have an irregular heartbeat, or is my digestive tract vibrating in the waking world?"

The bustling noise of the market didn’t just fade; it dropped off a cliff into pure terror.

The butcher froze, the cleaver suspended mid-air.

The laughing children skidded to a halt in the dirt. An elderly woman clutching a basket of turnips dropped it, the pale roots rolling uselessly across the stones.

THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!

The vibration wasn’t geological.

It was the iron-shod thunder of four dozen warhorses galloping at full cavalry charge, channeled through the narrow stone funnel of the village’s eastern gate.

"They’re back!" a voice shrieked, raw and tearing with animal panic. "THE HOUNDS OF THE LORD!"