Elfborn

Astor

Concentrating hard, Jase bore down, keeping his jumps shallow and quick as he bounded across the empty landscape. Here and there he caught glimpses of movement out of the corner of his eye, the movement vanishing before he could focus on it. Again, just as Lash had described.

So he was quite astonished when he rounded the low mound of one of the larger hills, one with a watchtower on it, to find a man standing by himself in the middle of a field. Slowing slightly, Jase watched the man carefully as he knelt and took a handful of soil, crumbling it between his fingers and watching the dust with some interest. Then, as if satisfied with what he saw, the man stood.

And promptly disappeared, leaving Jase trying to puzzle out why.  Thankfully it didn't take long for him to reason it out.

Judging by the man's clothing and mannerisms, he was obviously a farmer. A landowner at the very least. And, as the man had slipped into the dream world, he had gone to that which he knew best: his fields. Jase pursued the thought to its logical conclusion as he continued to hop along like some giant rabbit, clearing the tallest trees without effort.

If the farmer could slip accidentally into the dream world, then it wasn't closed to ordinary people as he had first thought. That would also explain the movement that he caught now and again out of the corner of his eye. They were other normal people, slipping in and out of the dream state as they slept. Occasionally they slipped deep enough to enter the dream world entirely, as the farmer had done.

Of course this was all conjecture until he could find somebody who knew the dream world and how it worked for sure. Until then, his assumptions would have to do.

Jase continued on, pondering this as he hopped. An entirely complete world, with its own sets of rules and laws. It was almost too much to deal with by any one man. Oddly enough one of his assumptions dealt with the fact that there had to be somebody out there that knew how the dream world worked and how to take advantage of it. 'Burn me if it isn't true, but I would dearly love to meet that person, whoever it is!' he silently exclaimed.

Once he got the hang of hopping, Jase found that he could virtually cruise along without putting much thought into the act, letting his legs do all the work. This left his mind clear for both processing what he saw, and for pondering various thoughts that came into his mind.

He was in the middle of all that pondering when he hopped over a range of low hills. And found himself looking at a blocky castle sitting on a bluff overlooking a small town. Almost instantly he knew what this place was: Nor Avilon. Not because he had seen it before.

No, it was the sensation of the blackest evil, felt as soon as the vision of the castle came to his eyes, that emanated from the blocky structure. An evil intelligence that brooded in the darkness as it contemplated horrible things. It was almost as if a dark and foul cloud, dirtying the sky around it, surrounded the castle itself, and polluting the ground it sat on.

Feeling that evil bite into him like a palpable force, Jase killed his forward momentum and dropped to the ground. If anything, hopping around would capture that thing's attention.

But, as he touched down on the ground, Jase could feel the malevolent intelligence focus on him, much as the dark force in the blasted land had found him. In that instant, he knew that the two intelligence's were one and the same.

"Hello, Jase," that oh-so-familiar voice spoke, the one that had talked to him in the blasted land. Jase felt a chill travel down his spine as he slowly turned around to face where he had heard the voice come from.

And he felt that chill sink into his bones when he found himself facing the figure in black, its robes moving around it as if being stirred by an unseen wind. A wind that Jase couldn't feel.