The Gaming Den

The river winds quite a lot, but at least it remains a river in your dream. You walk along the left bank. You have no idea of time: you could have been walking here for a minute or a year. The surface of the water is occasionally broken by some monster; nothing attacks you, but the general atmosphere is one of fear - of expecting something unpleasant to happen at any moment.

Over to your left you see a silver tower. Its architecture is weird and unfamiliar: it looks as though many rings have been placed one on top of another, with the largest at the base. Although the sky is overcast, the tower glints as if it were reflecting sunlight. There is something at the top of the tower, but you cannot see what it is. A weather vane, perhaps. Will you go over towards the tower or carry on along the river?

When you get close enough to the tower, you can see what is on top of it, even though the pinnacle seems to be kilometres above you. It is a dark sickle moon. While you are looking up, something crashes into you with extreme force. You have been hit by a corpse, which is hanging from the moon by a long, long rope and is whirling around the circular tower like some demented puppet. Before your eyes, the tower shrinks and changes into a gallows; the corpse stops swinging and jumps lightly to the ground: its agility seems the most frightening thing of all. Its face is now a skull, with its teeth chattering in anticipation, as it tries to embrace you in kinship. You struggle to get free, and your struggles propel you back to the river-bank. Lose 1 POWER and turn to 192.

But you are no longer on a river-bank. You were about to enter a copse of weeping willows, where strange fairy lights flickered and beckoned, but before you got there the scene changed. You see the village of your home, but all is far from peaceful. Your family and friends have gone berserk and are rushing around slashing at trees, animals and one another. At first you are just watching this scene, with mounting horror, but then you find yourself among your folk, trying to restrain them. They turn on you, and somehow all their bodies merge and form the head of a fearsome tiger; the arch of its sabre teeth has the same shape as its sluggish, serpentine body. Will you fight the monster or not?

You hesitate to strike a blow against your family and friends. But these are not really your family and friends, and the serpentine, dream-spawned cat sinks its fangs into you. Lose 1 POWER and turn to 231.

#

You find yourself back on the river-bank, among the willow trees; the fairy lights still flicker on and off. You walk through the copse, but it becomes more than a copse; you lose sight of the river and are lost among dense undergrowth. A clinging, claustrophobic feeling clamps down on your chest. The fairy lights have become baneful, yellow eyes glinting in the undergrowth. Your gaze is drawn to one pair of eyes in particular, and your eyes lock into these yellow ones. An unspoken voice seem to suggest, quite calmly, that you remain where you are. You feel inclined to obey. Will you give in to this inclination or press on?

As you gaze into the eyes, you become hypnotized, and seems to fall into them, or rather through them. For a while you seem to float under a hot, yellow sun. Then, as if you were an eagle in the sky, you look down on an awful scene. A strange people are camped in a fork between two shallow rivers; their skin is coppery-red in colour and out of the tops of their tents stick the ends of the poles which form the frames of the tents. Some people with lighter skin are bearing down on them on horseback; sabres flash in the sun, and magic sticks deal death from a distance. The image is brief, but startlingly clear; you know that the red people will be massacred, and you know that scenes like this one have occurred and will occur again all over the surface of whatever world you are seeing. But that is all you have time to see and know, before you are sucked back through a vortex.

You find yourself walking in a garden, where all is peace and tranquility. After your recent experiences, you are at first suspicious of such surroundings. Will you explore the garden or leave it?