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As a seer of blood, you never slept well.
Your name is Kankri Vantas, and since early trollhood, you were unfamiliar with restful nights and refreshing sleep. Every time you drifted off to your slumber, surrounded by sopor slime and stripped down to your underwear, visions would haunt you. Never mind prospit as some of your friends (?) mentioned to have woken up in, you almost never knew anything about this prospit, much less woke up in, and the few times you did, it was once every astronomical highlight and nothing close to regular. It was the few nights that brought you empty hopes that, perhaps, next night you’d wake up in prospit again, that you would look up to the sky and walk through the streets and have something resembling freedom outside of your culled and overcontrolled life.
You were always wrong.
Every night after, you’d wake up again in the same room you went down in, in the same hive and under the same care of the imperial drone whose sole purpose was to cull and over coddle you every time you were on sight. You despised every second of it, treasuring with all you could the portable husktop you managed to buy with stolen money (something you are seriously not proud of, but that paid off nevertheless) and hide from the drone. It was your only access to the actual world outside of the confinement that your everyday life brought you, and even so, it didn’t stop you from not knowing much in the end about what actual beforan society was. Sometimes, you wished your visions had been of that.
What you saw in your every night was haunting, eternally engrained in your brain, and something you couldn’t manage to escape. It told you that, in another world, in another sequence of events, the world you were in was destructive, out to kill and filled with violence all because some trolls had a blood slightly off hue. You saw trolls die countless times, you saw yourself be captured, chased, tortured and murdered so many nights you can’t count them. It wouldn’t have affected you so bad had they not felt so real, had you never woken up with the pains of stabbing all over your chest, the burning around your wrists, the soreness of your throat after you yelled and screamed. This only got worse when the game began and both prospit and derse were destroyed, now no longer with a means to have at least a night of relief, and when you and all of your friends died and woke up in a dream bubble, it really only spiraled from there.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a time sequence in the dream bubbles – night and day do exist, the only difference being that, in the bubbles, daylight isn’t so intense it’ll kill (humans do exist there after all, and can you really kill the dead?), and you all are, still, beings, even if you’re no longer alive, which means your bodies still work as they would’ve had you kept on living, had Beforus not been destroyed, which means you need to sleep. No longer in the sopor slime, though, it’s not so easy to come across, but rather on concupiscent platforms, and it really only makes it worse for you, doesn’t it. Perhaps that is the point. Without the hope of dreaming about prospit and with the timeline you were once in destroyed, the visions have transformed into something different, for the worst. They’ve become personal, directly involving the people close to you, the people you know and that you’ve now got as company in the eternity to follow.
Tonight’s vision is of what Cronus’s future would’ve been like had everything gone like it was supposed to in Beforus, had the game not existed, had Meenah grown and matured to become Her Imperial Condescension. You see him little sweeps before the adult molt, 16 sweeps old, perhaps, and part of one of the numerous royal ships, in specific, the one commanded by the then Orphaner. They are under attack, it seems, by wild lusii in the midst of a storm, some other men of the seas look to be trying to keep the ship afloat, others seem to be trying to fight off the attacking lusii in the middle of everything. Cronus is one of them.
They’re talking, you can hear, yelling orders at each other or shouting out, but it’s not easy to make out – beforan and alternian are different languages, after all, even if they’re derived one from the other, so while you can make out a couple of words that resemble beforan words, most of it is confusing, cryptic. The tones only tell you it’s a bad situation, the cries of pain of many parts of the crew and the squeals the lusii provide giving you enough to work out both parties are losing and gaining over the other, an ever-changing balance that can’t sit still.
You’re at a loss at what to look at for a moment, before you see back again that a particular lusus seems to be particularly violent, aggressive and that looked like it was getting too riled up to that point. It’s Cronus who notices it and tries to fight it off from how it’s hanging on to the ship’s border, sinking it’s claws into the wood to hold on, but the water and humidity isn’t exactly helping. Cronus is holding a spear, attempting to get it off the ship, and when it looks like it’s working and now only a claw is holding on, when he’s midway through stabbing the beast, you see violet blood splatter from his face, the lusus deciding to not go down without the last blow and using the closeness as an advantage to strike its opponent across the face, before falling and sinking down to the oceans to be the royal lusus’s next meal.
But that’s not the focus, is it? No, it’s not; the focus here is the gravely injured crewman you know personally to be named Cronus with violet blood dripping from his face and down to the ship’s floor. He shouted out something when the beast struck him, but it wasn’t enough to drag the attention of anybody, it only was when he collapsed down on to the ship’s floor and a puddle of blood began forming to his side. There are a couple of seconds where the outside sound begins to muffle itself out, where all you can see is the dying face of your friend with a bleeding wound across it. Two parallel scars now cover most of it, gushing violet blood out, and the seconds feel like eternity until a crewman yells a sentence with his name in it and its loud enough somebody else without their hands full answers to the yell and takes Cronus’s body away.
And that’s when you wake up, jolting up right and panting and sweating and with his name stuck in your throat.
It takes you a moment. A good, long moment for you to fully bring yourself down from what you had seen unfold in front of you and to fully take in your current situation. You’re in your room, sitting on your concupiscent platform, looking around and seeing that the sheets have a thin layer of candy-red sweat over them (it’ll be a pain to wash that out) and that everything is everywhere. Half the sheet you used to cover yourself is on the floor, a pillow is backed to a corner and another right behind you, the covers are almost coming off… you definitely still move in your sleep, even after dead.
You normally only feel comfortable coming out of your room and being around others when you’re wearing everything you normally do: turtleneck sweater, gloves, pants and boots, alongside your bag, of course, but normally, you don’t have the vivid image of your dying friend replaying every time you close your eyes, and you’re normally not overwhelmed by this so much that it makes you second guess everything, so in the knee length shorts and t-shirt you’ve taken to use as pajamas considering there is no otherwise use for it, you make your way out of your room and walk, barefooted, through the bubble, in the hopes it’ll rid your mind of it.
You walk, and walk, and walk, and walk, and a little bit of your conscious shouting at you about how this could be triggering to some to suddenly see somebody out of their windows late at night because what if they’ve got a past with stalkers? What if they think you’re a stalker? Kankri Vantas just how dare you do this. You ignore it, to the best of your ability, and try to simply focus your mind on nothing, on turning itself off and simply focusing on walking, on taking in everything around, on using itself to do anything but remember the vision that you had just escaped from, which works, to some extent, and for the first time in a while you appreciate the midnight breeze and the sense of true freedom, for once.
Somebody calls to you.
“Kankri?” You hear from above, and it’s not so much a question but rather a confirmation. You are taken out of this focus, realizing how far you’ve wandered off from your hive, and finally look to the right up to you and see Cronus, the troll you saw almost die in your dreams tonight, looking down at you from the balcony of his, if you’re honest, stupidly luxurious hive. He clearly has just woken up, probably because of you, perhaps a sound you made you didn’t realize.
You don’t answer the question, you don’t have enough time for it before he has made his way down from the second floor of his hive and to the front door, which is only then when you take in how he looks. He’s wearing a matching set of pajamas and has some sort of robe on his arm that he brought along. He’s got no makeup on (a rare sight, really) and it’s when you ever actually get a chance to see him at his most natural, physically speaking. You never realized the scar was drawn on.
“Your scar is drawn on?” You say, still not fully grounded.
“It’s not the time for questions about me when you show up in the middle of the night in front of my hive all of a sudden.” He says, taking the robe and putting it on your shoulders. You let him. You aren’t too sure why you do. “Wanna come in ‘n explain what happened that you’re here right now?”
You take the robe he technically borrowed you and put it on properly, the feeling of your arms being covered fully making you feel slightly more comfortable in your own skin. “Sure”, you answer, and he lets you come in before him and up to the kitchen, where he takes out a glass and serves you some water. When he asks again what happened, you tell him, holding the glass between your hands but not exactly drinking from it, and you think in retrospective this is the first time you’ve let yourself be vulnerable in front of one of your friends – you don’t think you’ve even done this with Porrim, but right now you’re shaken up and you’ve heard speaking of what’s got you shaken up helps, so you tell Cronus about the visions, about how they’ve always been around and that you can’t get rid of, about the one you had now and about how it’s now got you here, sitting across from him in his kitchen, talking his ear off about it. You don’t expect him to actually take it seriously at all, you expect him to tell you off about how it’s a ridiculous thing to be pent up about, until he takes out a cigarette and starts talking (does he always keep them on him?).
He begins talking about anything and everything. The conversation goes from an anecdote he remembered from heart when he was younger to the storyline of his favorite human movie, and you don’t realize you’re been talking about that until the last topic, which was regarding beforan fashion and shops (you didn’t even know how difficult it actually was to get clothes that weren’t plain was back on Beforus), ends and you’re left in silence, seeing that the glass of water he had given you is now almost ¾ down being drank and besides you that it hits you.
“Why…” You start, for once in your life not finding the words on how to ask the question. “Why are we doing this?”
“Doin’ what?” Cronus asks back, tapping away the ash of the cigarette on to the ashtray.
“Talking about a planet that doesn’t exist anymore.” You answer. “Talking about the past, I assume.”
He takes a drag from the cigarette before blowing off the smoke and trying to make it away from your face. He’s aware you’re not particularly fond of it. “So that you get that they’re the same as the past we were talkin’ about. Sure, it happened, but it happened on another timeline in another planet to another me.” Cronus says. “I’m as alive as a ghost can be, chief, and so are you. Try to keep that in mind, will ya?”
“Huh.” That’s all you answer before you finish off the glass of water. You talk for a little while after that, before he walks with you back to your hive and lets you keep the robe he gave you. “Take it as a gift” he said, and he’s very much aware you’ve never been too keen on refusing those.
The next time a vision stresses you that much again, you go to him, as he off handedly said you could, and it turns out it also helps to have somebody there to bring you back down from the high.