I was queueing up for daily rations. My stare was focussed on the ground; hoping it would bore a whole into the tiles with all my will. They couldn't punish me if it worked surely. It was all grey. Everything. The floor, the ceiling, the walls, the furniture, the food... even the windows were tainted grey with a grey sky outside.
Everything resembled a grey scale, silent movie but there was some sound. Nothing any normal person would want to hear though...
The screams and the cries filling the halls and the tunnels. The canteen was the only place to get away from it. The silence was unbearable here after a while. However, going back down was less pleasant.
Time was spent working in the mines, climbing the tower, eating, working in the mines, climbing the tower, receive rations for dinner, sleep, repeat. A girl went up and down with me. At first we never spoke. Mainly because the people around me were fuzzy. It was like they didn't exist and words were drowned out. So were the screams which all just melted into a sea of suffering.
It was on my second day that whilst mining, I looked at my hands and became lucid. There was something odd about my fingers so the habit I had been building of making regular reality checks kicked in and the realisation hit me. After becoming aware of my surroundings, people began to introduce themselves.
Jess was of course the girl who stayed close to me. She was happy to see me again even in this grim dream which filled me with confidence since I wanted to be as optimistic as her. I admit she was a much stronger fighter with the vikings. My strength only came from my lucid powers.
I had a feeling this tower was something erected by the darkness. This freaked me out a bit because it meant it was getting smarter. The darkness had gone from simple demons who infected my dreams like parasites, to an organised army to what was now a visible collective society of demons. Constructing a tower? Possessing dream people to run it? Enslaving more dream folk to carry out manual labour? Why did they need us for that?
After trying to retrieve every memory of every encounter with the darkness, I came to several conclusions. They couldn't summon items like me so they must need to enslave people to make items for them. Another realisation was that some of the powerful demons still had a limit to how many people they could possess. Otherwise why would they only have possessed some guards to watch the slaves? They would just need to possess the slaves instead.
I knew what I had to do. Feelings of cowardice and dread filled me for what I was about to do. This tower was so tall and the overseers were all just people but I had to kill them now to succeed in my plan. My mind began to wonder as I recalled the basketball tournament when I was powerless and could only submit to the torture.
But that was a long time ago now. I'd had hundreds of dreams now and although only a small bunch were worth telling, my experiences have crafted me into a dream warrior. I could become lucid faster, my will had grown more powerful and I had a better hold of my powers.
After regaining my composure, I clenched my fists and with a raw sought of magic, shattered the chains of every slave on the same floor as me. Metal parts flew everywhere and the chains unravelled onto the floor like dead snakes. The sound of clinking echoed throughout the chamber.
Our floor's overseer shouted something and ran in my direction. Not leaving me with any time to think, I struck out sending the chains flying into his stomach like missiles. Using my telekinesis, I bound him so he could not escape. Jess and a group of rebellious slaves had already walked over to join me. The rest of the slaves continued to mine like nothing happened.
That might just be because of the weird way my head worked in dreams but it was more than that. It was as though they'd seen equally powerful people try the same thing only to fail before. I could tell because of the hopelessness in their eyes. No light existed in them at all...
Deciding to come back later for them, my new friends accompanied me to the next floor. We stopped every time to free the slaves and either kill or tie up the overseer. I tried purging the darkness from them but I could feel a darkness blacker than black binding the demon to them. A new level of darkness even the darkness I'd fought was afraid of.
Slowly, I began to accumulate an army of those who hadn't lost all hope yet. Every floor had a number but reading in dreams was nearly impossible so I tried counting them instead. I knew I hadn't started at the bottom but I had a feeling we were about to reach the one hundredth floor soon.
In no time, we'd arrived at two dark grey doors. A demonic rune was set into the centre and as the doors opened outwards, it split in two. Most of the people who came with me were wearing armour we'd acquired from overseers but most only had a pickaxe to fight with.
Jess revealed a battle axe, a bow and a quiver of arrows from the viking world. She told me that world was sealed off from the darkness now and although she didn't have my abilities, she could call upon items from worlds they had saved.
I summoned a shining sword emanating blue light with a blade forged of a blue steel alloy. I imagined it being light and easy to move around and soon enough I was wielding it as though it were a practice bokken. In the dark chamber open to us, was a door in the corner leading to an empty room. Completely pitch black. An endless void.
It was then that an old man we hadn't noticed who was standing to our left stepped forward. He said something that made me step back...
"Hello Chase. Our conversation is long overdue. Come sit."
There was a table as well as two chairs. They'd appeared from nowhere and I couldn't differentiate the point in time at which they had spawned into existence. I didn't move though. Sitting seemed wrong after all these people had followed me devotedly up the tower only to remain standing. The stairs had worn everyone out.
The old man sat and didn't invite me a second time. "Do you want to know what's inside that room?" He asked me.
"There's noth-"
"It was a yes or no question. Not a guessing game." The man sighed. "That right there is the darkness." Gulping in a dream feels so odd that I must imagine my body is trying to do it in my bed.
"What do you mean? The darkness is everywhere. It's all these entities that invaded the dream world. It's not an empty room at the top of a tower!" I barked in frustration.
"Why can't it be?" The old man took a sip of tea. I shook my head trying to remember when the tea had even come into existence. "Right here in this dimension. Just a small part of the dreamverse. This place is the darkest part. It's where the darkness entered and its also where the darkness came from." He paused for a second to cough into a handkerchief. "If you follow it back far enough you will find the roots."
"Roots?" Jess asked with a puzzled look.
The old man gave her a small smile before explaining, "yes it's the birthplace of the darkness. You could say the heart. You'd have to travel an infinite distance to get there however and no one can do that. It's similar to finding the end of the universe."
"Why? I have lucid powers there has to be a way."
"Not with your brain capacity. Soon reaching 8 billion humans, all who have experienced dreams at least once in their life, only a small percentage including you have managed to reach this level of lucid dreaming. Your ability to manipulate dreams are limited by the strength of your will. Answer me this, can you process infinity? Can you comprehend the depth?"
"I-" I couldn't help but try to picture Infinity. How far... how deep... how wide... was it even three dimensional? Eventually I gave up. "No..."
"Neither has the most talented lucid dreamer in this world. Some of your people believe in Gods or the Buddha and say they are enlightened but not even collective minds as those have accomplished this. Some of them are merely the ideas of humans to begin with... stories..."
The man continued to ramble on about reality until I stopped him to ask, "what about you?"
"What about me?"
"Who... what are you? How did you make it to the top of the tower?"
The old man laughed hysterically. "I'm not from the dream world if that's what confuses you. I'm not a slave or an overseer here. I'm part darkness but I'm not an invader. I just came here to observe the newest addition to the lucid dreamer community!"
"So are you someone who can help me? Help US?"
"I can do this," he responded and before I could stop him, everyone around me vanished. The tower crumbled to dust in a brief wave and just as demons were clawing there way out of the dark room to investigate why their tower had been overthrown, they too were swept from existence.
"Jess? Jess! What have you done?"
"I reset your dream space. Every world, person and enemy is gone."
"Not all of them were bad!"
The old man raised an eyebrow. His table was still standing but the sky had finally unravelled leaving a blank void of white background. "You can summon her back if you wish. She was just a part of your world. Haven't you figured it out yet? The darkness, the people, the dreamverse, your friends, Jessica etc. They were all made up by YOU."
"No... Jess was different. She... she could think for herself." I was overflowing with rage at what the old man had done. His appearance was obviously a visage just to make me complacent and let my guard down.
The old man began to laugh again. "I'm not your enemy. Don't look so angry. Listen. Your loyal FRIENDS were a desperate cry for help, the darkness and the way you wielded your powers were your hero complex at its fullest, Jessica was your loneliness. You imagined them yourself to forget your real life."
Finally understanding the old man's words, I took a second to calm myself. "And what are you then? Another part of my imagination? An even more evolved form from my ego to coach me? My wake up call?"
"Ahahaha! I don't know! Maybe!" The old man cackled. A worryingly wide smile spread accross his face. "Maybe you did indeed create me. Everything I'm saying might not be real. I have the ability to think therefore from my point of view I exist." He scratched his grey stubble.
"I think therefore I am," he quoted a second later. "Hundreds of years later. Still no one can prove the existence of anyone else. Only their own existence to only themself."
Immediately, my body began to compress in on itself. The old man smiled again and dark water poured from his eyes. It was all too much! TOO MUCH!
My legs gave in and I screamed into the void. Tears blinded my vision until the old man brought me back with a hand on my shoulder. "You're going to wake up now. Sought out your real life before you come back. If you want to be an epic hero and live your ideal life then go for it but what you're doing now isn't healthy."
And with that last thought left to haunt me, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling nothing but despair...