Kobold Life

Chapter 14: Stremond

The dream dragged on far past the bounds of my phone dying. I was still in the void for what felt like hours. Usually, the dreams were cut short at inconvenient points, but occasionally they persisted leaving me trapped in emptiness until I awoke.
For the first hour or so I called out attempting to get the attention of any other entity which might be present. I had met two in prior dreams, a feminine and formless voice, the closest thing to someone who knew what was going on with me. The other was an only partially fathomable being of coalesced starlight and darkness with a voice of a thousand giants. While one was certainly more intimidating than the other, neither had harmed me in the times I had entered their presence and these dreams rarely lasted long when they were present.

I walked and called aimlessly for a while, before deciding it was unlikely that I would find anything. So I tried to pass the time another way. For a while, I practiced my common, though, with no one present to help or provide new words and phrases, it likely did little good. I had picked up the language quickly, but there was no solution to expanding vocabulary except exposure.

When I grew bored of that, I weighed the benefits of sleep. Would I lose consciousness and wake when my body felt ready, or would I enter a new dream recursively and extend my time stuck in sleep even further. I thought to try it before realizing, that if I was to enter a dream within a dream I would have no way of knowing, and I could worsen my situation to an indeterminate amount. The only way to be sure is to never try.

My brain felt muddled enough without worrying about telling the difference between reality and fiction, so I avoided sleep to prevent the risk.

I considered working out to at least gain some benefit for my time, but considering that I wasn't even in the body that would need it, I doubted any physical change would carry over even if this dream by some chance could affect me. What was worse is since I couldn't remember most of the dreams while I was awake, if I made some sort of mental growth I likely wouldn't even know when I woke up.

In short, I saw no benefit to the time I had here, and thus for once since I got here I had a moment to consider entertainment. It was a shame that I was stuck here alone. Having someone to engage with would make it much more bearable. I drifted between word games and mental hoops, stories and character concepts, all things that had been common sources of entertainment if I was alone in my old life when preparing for DnD. Of course, it helped to have a computer or even a pencil and paper to keep track of my thoughts.

Finally, in the grasp of monotony, I resorted to attempting to practice magic. I was trying to perform some of the more basic spells Rose had tried to teach me. It took what felt like hours of repetition, but to my surprise eventually, it worked. From the tips of my fingers, a small flame flickered into being. It danced across my hand as I moved it, lacking the control and form Rose had demonstrated, but it seemed to linger in my hand as intended. I tried to shape it, and mold it into an ideal form, but it seemed to resist desiring to form into a natural shape burning around my fingers instead of contained within my palm. Then I tried throwing it, to see if I could turn it into an offensive capability. I pitched it like a baseball without concern for aim, only the fire didn't leave my hand, instead, it flared with intensity as my hand moved through the air before snuffing itself out against the otherwise stagnant air.

Now boredom was the last thing on my mind as I feverishly tried to recreate the magic I had performed a moment before. After several attempts, a new spark flickered into view. I tried six or seven more times to create a suitable flame and throw it, making only a small bit of progress in each. On the last of the attempts, the flame finally flew free of my hand traveling a short distance while retaining the shape of my hands before it seemed to coalesce into a sphere of short-lived flame and dissipate.