Author’s Note: These Dream Sequence stories each start with an actual vivid dream I had. After I finish writing the details of each dream, I use Sudowrite artificial intelligence as a collaborator to continue the story in an attempt to connect all of the dream sequences somehow. Each story is a mix of human dreams, artificial intelligence, and conscious storytelling.
Previous dream sequence: Leap of Faith
The chamber was cavernous, lit with burning torches spaced evenly along the walls. A musty mix of rot and death hung in the air. The voices of dozens of orcs and goblins rang against the walls, echoing down the corridor in which we now stood.
“All we have to do is sneak up behind each of the bastards and slit its throat from behind, eh?” Grundel whispered.
“You go in first and clear the way,” I replied, seeing past his endless sarcasm.
I crouched down and inched forward, then carefully peered into the room. The orcs and goblins stood in clear view. They were talking and joking among themselves, waiting. They were obviously not expecting us to follow them into the dungeon so soon.
I withdrew back into the corridor and whispered loudly in frustration, “How do we get past them? There’s so many!”
Grundel patted the pouch on his belt and smiled a sly smile. He opened the pouch, reached in, and pulled out a smaller pouch. He loosened the drawstring to open up the pouch, then upended it over the palm of his other hand. A few dark-greenish clumps fell into his hand. He then held the dark clumps out toward me.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“I never thought I’d find a use for dragon crap. Now hush.” He pushed past me and strode out into the chamber.
“Wait, what are you doing?” I said.
Grundel ignored my protests and kept walking. The orcs looked up in surprise and quickly drew their weapons. The goblins gave each other confused glances. Undeterred, Grundel kept walking and stopped about twenty feet from the monsters, then tossed the handful of clumps at the floor near the orcs and goblins. He whispered, “Plant.”
As the orcs began to charge toward Grundel, weapons in hand, a patch of moss appeared on the floor beneath the clumps. It spread outward and upward from the sides with surprising speed. The orcs stopped in their tracks as the moss quickly turned white and expanded into large columns. The columns grew taller, and taller, until they grew taller than the orcs, then they began to expand. After only a few seconds, the magical moss had grown into giant mushrooms, with their stems growing especially fat such that the orcs could not pass through. The orcs looked up in confusion and awe.
I drew my sword and began to rush into the chamber, just as Grundel ran back in. As he passed me, he grabbed my arm and yanked me back into the corridor with him. Just then, I heard dozens of whistling sounds, grunts, and thumps. “Deadly spores,” Grundel said, as he charged back into the chamber. I charged in after him.
The devastation in the chamber was a sight to behold. A line of giant mushrooms grew so tall that their caps jammed against the ceiling of the chamber, perhaps thirty feet up. In the thin spaces between the thick mushroom stems, I could see piles of dead orcs and goblins, pierced and poisoned by the spores. “Dragon crap does that?” I exclaimed in amazement.
“You’re too gullible,” Grundel replied, as he crouched down to retie the laces on his boot. “It’s a wonder you’re still alive. We better go.” He adjusted one of the daggers in his boot, stood up, and quickly made his way toward the next corridor.
***
“The old man said ‘prosper,’ not ‘prosperity.’ It must have been ‘pro-sper,’ which is Oldish for ‘to produce.’ The ‘sper’ is short for ‘per spirem.’ I don’t know what the hell that means.” Grundel continued to whisper under his breath what sounded to me like nonsense.
He abruptly straightened up, as if coming to a conclusion of his thoughts. “I think it means ‘by spirit,’ in some sort of ancient Oldish,” he remarked confidently, while he stared at the old, weathered book we had managed to find in the ancient ruins of the city. We were kneeling on the ruins of what might once have been a marble floor just inside what must have once been a private residence, with no idea how to read the ancient text that we had found in the ruins of the city. The ruins themselves were covered in moss and ivy, the empty structures that still stood filled with cobwebs.
“Maybe the snakemen came from the ruins,” I said, while I pulled one of the cobwebs away from my face.
Grundel grunted in thought, then cocked his head, as if listening to something. “Did you hear that?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I blurted out before realizing that I did perhaps hear something.
We both turned our heads toward the large ancient fireplace at the center of the room. Was it distant screaming they had heard?
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