Terra Preta

Dreamweaver

The earth beneath his feet rippled, a liquid mosaic of colors that made no sense but felt oddly familiar, like memories viewed through a shattered lens. The world around him dissolved into a sea of shimmering particles, each one a tiny universe unto itself. The sky above was a boundless ocean of stars, their light piercing the darkness with an intensity that both terrified and exhilarated him.

Ahead of him, a warrior emerged, his form wasn't solid. His body fractured and shimmered, bending in impossible ways, limbs too long, too thin, then too short and thick, his armor rippling as if it were made of smoke and glass. His voice boomed, yet it came from nowhere and everywhere at once, the sound vibrating through Orion's very bones.

"My god doesn't accept prayers from anyone who kneels." Orion's mind recoiled.

The warrior's voice echoed and multiplied, becoming a chorus of whispers that swirled around Orion like a swarm of insects. The words fragmented and reassembled, their meanings shifting and morphing. The ground beneath him pulsed with a life of its own, tendrils of energy snaking upwards, reaching for Orion like grasping claws.

"True power," the warrior boomed, his form expanding until he filled the horizon, becoming a mountain, a storm cloud, a raging inferno, "is not bestowed, but earned. And it is not found in kneeling, but in rising to meet your own potential. To embrace the power within, not the frailty." His eyes, no longer eyes but shimmering portals to other dimensions, pulsed with an energy that defied comprehension.

The ground beneath him dissolved into a sea of molten rock, bubbling and churning as if alive. Suddenly, Orion was no longer standing—he was falling, but also standing. He was both anchored and adrift, tethered to an unseen force that held him suspended in this paradoxical state.

The ground beneath him crumbled, collapsing into a swirling vortex of dust and debris, the shards, glowing with an eerie luminescence, drifted upwards like embers from a dying fire, their forms shifting and morphing as they rose.

He could see himself from above, and below, and within. The warrior loomed larger now, his body a reflection of an entire battlefield, and yet a reflection of nothing at all. The battlefield morphed, flickering between jungles and deserts, oceans and endless voids, where faceless soldiers marched on all fours, serpentine arms raised to the sky.

The warrior spoke again, but this time his words felt like a physical force. They bent Orion's vision, splitting the world into infinite shards, each reflecting a different version of the battlefield—one covered in flowers, one on fire, one submerged underwater where fish swam lazily around frozen soldiers.

"My god demands not prostration," the warrior said, his face now composed entirely of shifting landscapes—forests on one cheek, deserts on the other. His voice came in waves, rippling through the air like a distorted radio signal, "but might."

The sky opened up, peeling back like skin from a wound, revealing an infinite abyss—a deep, churning void where stars were born and died in mere moments.

"What is honor or righteousness," the warrior asked, his arms spreading wide, elongating unnaturally, until his fingers brushed the horizons of every possible version of the battlefield, "if it is built upon the shifting sands of another's whim?" His arms stretched further, bending reality until the sky curved, until space itself distorted around him, ripples of time warping in the fabric of the dream.

As the warrior's words took shape, Orion felt himself torn between dimensions. Faceless soldiers marched forward, their bodies blending with the wind. They melted into the ground, their shadows continuing to move without form. The earth below Orion surged upward in chunks, forming spires that stretched toward the heavens—no longer solid, but fluid, as though the very air was becoming liquid.