#anyway my thoughts on moon stuff is that if the sun can’t reach the neath neither can the moon

[peligin-eyed]

Dreams and Nightmares

(Kind of a backstory continuation touching on Liam’s early days in London, spoilers for the Bloody Wallpaper)

London may be strange but you're figuring it out, with time. You meet some friendly artists and musicians, try your hand at writing some poems and lyrics of your own. You find places where they want people who can put up a good fight and aren't afraid of going after beasts. Even with your bad shoulder, you’re stronger now and you’re much better at tracking and hunting things. It frightens you how easy it is.

You take solace in dreams. Sometimes you have the same dreams, of being back in that forest, but sometimes you have unfamiliar new ones about water and fire and dead men. There's a type of honey down here that sends you off into dreams and lets you forget about your life for a while. You start frequenting honey-dens and on occasion you meet some nice people, like a charming young heiress. She flirts with you in dreams, and a bit when you finally meet in the waking world, but you know it would never work. You don't trust yourself to get close to people now.

For about a week, you have dreams about a shadowy beast tracking you through the streets of London. It's distinctly different from the Surface beast that still haunts your nightmares, but the mark it leaves on you and the way it pursues you are hauntingly familiar. You wake panting and sweating from those dreams, its mark itching and your old scars burning, until you manage to defeat it in your dreams.

You learn that moon pearls can tell you the phase of the moon, and you studiously keep track on your growing little store of them. You can tell when the full moon is coming. You don't know what you'll do, maybe go wander out into the marshes with your pets locked safely inside your cottage and hope for the best, but it turns out that someone else has other plans for you.

There's a man you see sometimes. He wears a coat with bright brass buttons and has an unusual number of fingers. He disconcerts you when you pass him on the street, and after dreams of red and gold you learn that he is the manager of a rather elaborate hotel down here.

You weren't expecting to receive an invitation to the Red and Gold Gala. You're new and you hardly know anyone, let alone the sort of people that would be invited to that kind of thing. You're willing to serve at the event, though. You're good at following orders and you figure it'll be a memorable experience, if all the gossip you've heard is to be believed.

Well, it certainly is memorable. You'd met some strange types down here, like the nice rubbery chaps and the talking rats, but they mostly seemed like decent sorts, just a little odd. You like odd, you're a bit odd yourself. The people you meet in this hotel, however, as you're bringing them unsettling meals and carrying about their bloody linens, they seem like a kind of dangerous you don't understand. Something is off about this place, perhaps even more off than is typical for London.

The work itself is tedious and degrading, though hardly worse than some of the things you had to do in the army. Between the fumes and the continual stitching of your smile and the endless up and down of the lift and the stairs and eventually the opium, you end up feeling quite dizzy and dazed. By the time you find yourself in the nightmarish jungle, you keep seeing it flicker to a different place, a cold pine forest, in between blinks. That goes away when you peel off the wallpaper at least.

In the end, you're pretty sure you've done your best and you at least made sure your fellow staff got some kind of compensation. When you wake up the next morning achey and exhausted with some concerning holes in your memory, you're not entirely convinced that your time in service actually happened. Maybe it was just a dream while…something else happened. (Well, you know it was a dream, sort of. You think.) But you're at home, still in your nightclothes, and free of unexpected blood on your person. At least there’s that.

Whatever really happened, the one thing you're sure of is that you would be quite pleased to never have to run into the Manager again if you can avoid it.