The Loving Gentleman

You dream of laying in your bed, wrapped safely under your covers. The false-summer heat leaves you tossing and turning, trying to fling your sheets off, but they stay tangled around you. Warm, smothering and suffocating. The sheets are tightening around you, pressing to your face. You press your hands to the fabric, trying to dislodge it. It distorts under your hands, pushed outward. It's only fabric, after all. For all it tries to constrict you, your claws shred through it and leave clean edges.

You slice the silken cocoon apart from the inside. When you emerge, your wings are sticky with sweat, but the thin membrane dries in the cold howling wind. It's bright. You have never seen such a brightness before. You think you hate it. It is an insult to you, and it sees you, and it's Judging you.

You are quite used to the sensation.

You leap from the clinging and cloying embrace of the cocoon, which even now beckons you back in, and drop like a stone in the dark towards the surface of the black pond that is the Unterzee. It roils, roars, and splits apart at the seams, bursting with its beast. No. Wait. That's your reflection.

There's no splash when you collide with the water. You are buoyed and cradled, and your eyes are open. Water slips through the gaps between your fingers, sweet and soft. You lift a hand to the surface of the water where you are submerged. A long, thin claw traces a curling line against the mirror, and your reflection bleeds. It drips onto your nose and your cheek. You write a word that glows against the black, and then press your tongue to it to lap at the blood. Your tongue burns.

You waken up with a hand at your throat and your fingers pressed flat to your tongue, desperate to stop the burning which you have already begun to forget. Your sheets have fallen off the end of your mattress. Your pillow is soaked with sweat.

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Having Recurring Dreams: The Hungry Silk has increased to 1!

A Nightmares increase has been aggravated because of an item you're wearing (The Walls are Wrong).

Nightmares has reached 6!

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The Tailor is trembling when they sit at the cramped desk in their tiny room above the shop. It is so late even the latest party-goers in Veilgarden have made it home if not to a honey-den, yet not early enough that the bakers in Spite would be beginning their work. Even the pubs at the docks would be, if not empty, then only full of sad and quiet drunks.

London is not often quiet. But it is quiet now. It only unsettles them further. Their hand shakes over the poorly lit paper.

Write down one of your nightmares. Especially if a particular vision proves to be recurring. … If a dream repeats, there is a kernel of truth in it, and it’s better to be aware of what it’s telling you.

Do they know this dream? Will it return?

Do they... want it to?

They stare at the blank page, brows pinching together. This dream feels like a secret. It's theirs. They want to keep it.

Silk. Claws. Light/dark. Water/reflections. Burning.

What had been the word written on the mirror? It hadn't been in English, but if it had been proper Correspondence, they wonder if it would have burned its meaning into their brain.

It had tasted so...

good.

...is misty in the Marshes. There's a fog that rolls in from the zee, cool and damp. Do things move in there, or do your eyes play tricks? Perhaps it's both. Listen for a rustle. There.

Something is fighting in the dark. There's the sound of snarls, bestial, mean. The splash of a disturbed pool of water, the flash of a muzzle-shot. A pained yip, then the squelch of a sharp implement thrust into something fleshy. The rip of it being torn away. Agonizing silence.

What comes out of the darkness into lamplight is dragging a filthy pelt, unmistakably white under the grime. A marsh wolf is no easy prey, much less a white one. The thing dragging its body is dressed in much darker colors, if only a little cleaner. Most of the muck is constrained to the boots, and to the long coat, though the knees of the trousers are stained from hours of kneeling and crouching in the mud.

The Tailor is sliding the strap to their harpoon back over their shoulder. The thing gleams, tip still coated with blood. The fellow's face has a streak of dirt on one cheek, and their hair hangs loose over their un-notched eyebrow.

Tonight they are a Monster Hunter. It's a secret they guard from their companions, who seem not to recognize their peligin eyes as anything more than natural color. No reasonable individual in good standing would be in the Marshes, they've found, but then, most individuals do not work for Mr. Inch. 

Other things move in the dark. They can hear it. A leather glove stays on the strap of their weapon.