Promised Land

[29] A Prayer To Saint Michael

"I'm so, so sorry, Ranboo. I'm sorry I just pulled you like this--"

He blinks, slowly, disoriented. His head is spinning a bit, but he can recognize a neon green hoodie anywhere.

"...Dream?"

There's not much left of him. He's missing his left arm, he's just a torso and a head and a right arm, but he's standing. Or floating.

They're in a room, actually. A big one. It looks like what Tommy talks about when he mentions a school gym-- though, it's a bit smaller, because half of it is caved-in, but there's a lot of animal carcasses around, and a large mound of--

Oh.

Oh, Ranboo doesn't like to curse, he was raised to not, specifically, by the Sisters, to never take the Lord's name in vain, but he feels like God would forgive him because he's somehow in the same room as the fucking King of Dreamons.

It's large, with limbs sticking out of every direction. Not just four normal limbs, but Ranboo can see human-like arms and legs sticking out of its back. He can see bird wings, smaller than the rest of its body, curled up. It has seven different tails, but it doesn't move.

One of the limbs falls off the King, hits the ground with a gross splat. Ranboo is so glad he can't smell it, but he gags reflexively anyway, as he watches two horrifying things at once. The spot regrows the limb almost instantly, and the fallen-off body part begins to swell up. It grows another limb-- horrifying, because it's another set of human-like-arms, and the two more, and it forms a body and scampers off, a newly-made dreamon.

"Ranboo, look." Dream's voice breaks him out of the horror. He turns to the man, and sees two of him. Except one of them is fading from existence, and the other is wrapped up in dreamon-gunk human arms, twisting around his body, keeping him captive. His hair is a little longer and more unkept, his clothes are dirty from dreamon body gunk, and his body is limp.

Breathing, but limp.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do this to you. I'm waking up, and I don't have a lot of control over anything right now..."

Ranboo nods, listening to him prattle off. He glances through the apparition-Dream to the real life Dream. His mask has been abandoned, and he can see, despite the fact that he's been asleep this whole time (or, well, for a long time), Ranboo can see how thin and tired he is. Not how his sleeping-form would present itself, but he can see how it raged a mental and physical war on him.

He glances around the room again, at the dreamon. It's large. Bigger than anything he's ever seen, not as large as giants or leviathans that he would read about but still, big. Most of its body is a solid mass of whatever it is that the creatures are made of, with the limbs sticking out in every angle, but it doesn't look like it moves.

At all.

It snores, even-- he notices it because it sounds like the roll of thunder in the middle of a storm, but it doesn't move. Except for the limbs occasionally detaching, and forming a dreamon, and it's gross but he can't help but stare at it.

It's like a queen bee.

His memories flash back to one of his school lessons-- a weird, merged science class that goes over the basics of environmental science stuff, one of the first science classes he's ever taken-- and how one of his classmates did a project on bees. He wrote it down to tell Tubbo about it, because Tubbo likes bees.

The King is what makes the dreamons-- and the dreamons are its workers. So it basically does nothing. He'd hardly call that a threat.

"Ranboo, I--" Dream sighs. He rubs at his face, which even in his apparition state, is now becoming thin, tired, and weakened. Blotchy, too, from crying. "No one's died, right?"