A Vision From the Void

A vision granted to the bearer of a small shard-like tablet with baffling runes carved into it, looted from a Class-C Nautiloid “Juggernaut” by the extraplanar mercenary group Tasha and the Voidthieves

A thousand years of conquest rocket before your eyes. A million splintered visions, cascading over your mind’s eye and flooding you with the weight of the infinite. You see, hear, smell, everything that has come before. All the fractured, miniscule lives of your kin and ken, of your own life, coalescing into something grander. A tapestry like no other. And in each vision, across the millennia of memories you are able to draw on and sift through from the Collective, one fact stands out glaringly clear:

Soilborn are often more trouble than they are worth. 

These wretches are no different. Loud, reckless, and pungently odorous. Their sub-collective calls itself “Gr’dge’s Friends”– perhaps this ‘Gr’dge’ is their Elder Link.

No matter. They will not best you again. You bear the memories of your kin’s failure, the one who first encountered them when the Rift opened and access to Terren was granted at last. Long have you waited to drink deep of the planet’s resources, to purge the scattered minds and draw them under one banner of absolute unity. These ants will not impede your progress again.

You managed to ambush them this time, just as they approached the Ancient Steward’s den. You learnt from your kin’s arrogance, and did not go alone. Slar’spiri’iri of the Fear Eaters joined you, and even now keeps the soilborn sedated. They whimper and writhe as the dream overtakes them.

Together with Slar’spiri’iri, you craft the dream, breathe life into the fantasy, color its edges to your perfect design. You need to watch these mortals. They are in the midst of some conflict, small in relative scale, but if one of the Ancient Stewards are involved, perhaps there is something bigger afoot. Certainly, you don’t want to gain the Steward’s attention. So you will plumb these weak minds for what answers you can find, then devour them and discard the husks.

You place them in a standard vision. You fulfill their wildest dreams, placing them amongst that which they desire most. Guildmasters, Lorekeepers, Woodwardens all. You want to see how they react to power. How strong their ties are to each other, even when they no longer need each other to accomplish their goals. 

But Slar’spiri’iri is contemptuous. The Fear Eaters do not carry themselves with the same discipline that you and your kind do. They are fickle, impish, and often impulsive. What else would one expect from a race that feeds off of a heightened emotion?

Still, your pact with the Fear Eaters should hold Slar’spiri’iri in place, but they push and bulge against the boundaries of your contract. Already they have peppered in small horrors amongst the idyllic scenescapes the soilborn are trapped in. The Child of the Ancient Stewards sees himself razing a village of innocents. The Guildmaster sees refugees writhing in flames, scattering to ash. The Bodyguard sees the mutilation of a stranger, and believes it to be her own work. This makes them scattered, nervous, paranoid. Looking for answers. That is counterproductive to what you–

One of them has woken. The hellfolk, stabbing himself in the dream. He is a product of faith, a subject of divinity– and so you’d already been keeping an eye on him, in case one of the High Ones deigned to intervene. You put him back to sleep, shoving him deep inside the fantasy, muddling his mind and severing connections of certain synapses to keep him from waking again. 

Angrily, you lash out psychically at Slar’spiri’iri. Even now they continue to toy with the other adventurers, letting terror seep into the corners of their mind, drinking deep of the uncertainty swirling inside them as, in the dream, they gather with local dignitaries for a council meeting.

Stay on task, you do not speak the words, neither do you think them– rather, the shape and form of the command is blasted into Slar’spiri’iri’s consciousness. They shudder, their form undulating and shrinking to a size meant to indicate subservience. But then, as you return to your journal to catalogue the mental states of the soilborn, you feel a thread snaking towards you, a manifestation that Slar’spirir’iri projects into your vast consciousness. 

You see yourself standing before the Elder Link and the Voice of the Collective, along with a thousand gathered kin and ken. Ashamed. A failure. Begging piteously for your life. The Voice condemns you in front of the gathered host, and they shun you even as the Elder Link blasts your sentience into a thousand scattered pieces. 

You stagger back from the pain of the vision, your hold on the soilborn loosening. Slar’spiri’iri clicks and groans in satisfaction, and you realize you have been betrayed. Fear spikes through you, and Slar’spiri’iri drinks it up hungrily. They mean to wake the soilborn, and watch you fail, then feed off of the terror of having to face the Collective in defeat.

Already the soilborn are stirring. Slar’spiri’iri has cut you off from the vision, but last you saw, they were in a grand receiving hall, where wanton violence was beginning to break out. Several of the soilborn started turning on each other, clearly trying to wake themselves. Slar’spiri’iri appeared in the dream, near the end, now clearly trying to help the soilborn– though it doesn’t seem clear to the soilborn themselves, who continue to fight against Slar’spiri’iri, even in the dream.

They rise. So be it. It seems that for all the help Slar’spiri’iri provided, they are still seen as your ally, the soilborn’s enemy. Good. Let them waste their efforts and energies on the traitor. You will watch the Fear Eater’s essence get ripped away to nothing, and then you will flee this place, once you’re sure they are dead. 

Twice. Twice these fat little tongue-flappers have impeded you. It matters not that you didn’t operate the body during the first failure– you are of the Collective, and every failure is all your failures, every success all your successes.

Though, in a moment of startlingly mortal panic, you wonder if the Elder Link and the Voice will truly see it as a failure of the Collective– or if Slar’spiri’iri’s dream whispered the truth, and you alone shall be blamed.