Dreamworms Book 1: The Advent of Dreamtech by Isaac Petrov (drm ebook reader TXT) 📕

pikeman. Oh Goah, it’s heavy! Edda’s anxiety turns to panic as she fails to move the unwieldy pike with nothing but her own dream muscles.

Yog sweeps easily past the pike tip and throws her four limbs at Edda like a hungry octopus at a crab.

Edda yelps, drops the pike and leaps sideways behind the trunk of a large oak in a last desperate attempt to flee.

But it is too late.

Yog’s four appendages clamp Edda’s arms and legs in four unshakable grips. The sudden contact and Yog’s forward momentum push her body off balance.

Edda falls on her back, shrieking. Yog doesn’t let go, her four extremities firmly attached to Edda’s, the stance of a spider, the eagerness of a leech. Her alien face is but mere inches from Edda’s. Those eyes, white and empty, lock on hers without a hint of emotion.

And then Yog opens her black mouth.

Terror strikes almost instantly. First as a sudden gnaw at the edge of Edda’s consciousness, but quickly crawling up her spine and drowning her innards in ice and dread. She cannot take her eyes off that mouth. So hungry. It’s black folds twitching and contracting with the urge of the feed.

Edda wails without control. Her mind is sinking in the quicksand of dread.

Ximena leans forward with morbid fascination to look at the moist blackness of the alien maw. There are things there, sharp things inside—things that yearn—and plead. Reminds her of a mosquito gobbling not blood, but soul. Goah’s Mercy, the nightmare.

Edda’s awareness wavers, shocked to its foundations by that bubbling drainage of reason. Waves with the sweet promise of the wake deform the texture of the dreamscape as the nightmare reaches its climax. She is slipping away, her mind all but lost, there is nothing left to grip herself onto.

“Ground yourself, Redeemed van Dolah.” Rew’s voice splashes on Edda’s vanishing mind like water on mud. “Recall your discipline.”

Discipline. Edda’s mind whirls around the word. Discipline.

“Fear engulfs you,” Rew says. “Do recognize its texture, its slippery quality.”

Fear. Edda gasps. Discipline.

“Do seek its inner truth, Redeemed van Dolah. Pain is a mirage of the mind. Reach for the truth beneath fear. Embrace that truth. Without truth, there is no reality. Without reality, there is pain—and extinction.”

Truth. Discipline. Edda gasps as a thought strikes her mind with clarifying brutality. What is the true purpose of fear in the dreamscape where nothing can truly hurt you? Edda chuckles at the sudden realization. It is not only pain that is a mirage, is it? Fear is as well! Ximena feels Edda’s mind centering on that thought. A fucking mirage. Yes. A relic of her lizard mind.

And it can be squashed like a spider.

Edda’s discipline kicks in with unconscious ferocity. Her training snaps back in place, in the high layers of her mind, draining all lower emotions away in an instant flush of lucidity. Well, not all lower emotions. She keeps her anger, burning thickly under her skin, as she moves her eyes away from Yog’s suffocating proximity and scans the surrounding forest with all her senses: the great oak next to her, rising solid and tall; beyond its thick roots, the fallen pike, and a thick carpet of ferns and grasses spreading uphill to a line of birches; spotless blue skies shine over the naked canopy of the winter forest.

“You have vanquished your fear, human servant,” Yog’s voice reverberates so close to her it threatens to drown her thoughts. “Remarkable. I can see Walker Rew’s imprint in your instruction. But how long can a human resist pain? Even dream pain?”

Yog opens her mouth further. Ximena, and not few of her fellow students across the amphitheater, gasp at the sight of Yog’s black, wet jaws, where rows of razor-sharp teeth shake in spasms of raw desire. Edda seems to ignore the horrid vision, Ximena observes with admiration, even though a mere inch separates her tender brown flesh from that horror.

But Edda is elsewhere now, Ximena realizes. Her thoughts have changed. They are clear now, almost as sharp as those black teeth. Fear is thankfully vanished. Now she is planning, like this were yet another wargame where she needs to muster her pieces before throwing them into battle.

Yog buries her jaws in Edda’s throat, and rips a piece of flesh off with such savage violence that were this the wake, she would have been instantly killed.

Edda utters a cry of piercing agony. But she skillfully hammers it away with the heavy blow of trained discipline, transforming it into naked rage before it even has a chance to fog her thoughts.

Muster her pieces.

Edda eyes the blue sky, shuts her eyes, and when she reopens them an instant later, a heavy overcast of dark clouds hang menacingly over the naked winter branches. They cast a dark, oppressive shadow over the forest, and gusts of stormy wind shake the foliage with brutal fury.

Yog, still chewing Edda’s meat, raises her head at the sudden change, but keeps munching the bloody meat in slow, focused delight. Oh, how Edda hates the arrogant bitch! Ximena feels her own blood boiling.

Edda eyes the pike lying harmlessly nearby, and her will raises it over the ground, where it floats hesitantly as it begins to rotate, and to aim. Then, Edda’s will unleashes it forward like a whip, driving its iron tip deep into the oak’s bark.

“You did miss, human,” Yog says. She is not so distracted as it seems, Ximena thinks. “And had you not, the canceling of wills should have—”

It happens so fast—just two glances—that Yog doesn’t have time to react. Edda’s first look goes towards the pike that sticks out of the damaged oak next to her. The pike’s wood turns into solid iron.

Throw them into battle.

Edda directs her second look at the sky, which shatters into a sudden spark of lightning that hits the iron pike in an instant, cracking the oak open in a deafening explosion.

The wind does the rest, blowing the enormous trunk forward, tipping it towards Edda and Yog, casting a growing