Dreams of the Bleeding Moon

Four uratha - Atlas, Jerome, Michael and Winters - have been haunted by shared dreams of the moon wounded and bleeding since the first stirrings of their Changes. These are those dreams.

The First Dream

“

Night time on the streets, snow and ash are falling, pooling about your feet as you walk. Its cold, bitterly so, the chill like a knife in your chest with every breath. All around you the buildings rise tall and thin like crooked grey teeth, lightless and dead. The only light from motes and sparks from a distant fire, hidden beyond the twisted shadow buildings. And the moon. The moon looms huge and brilliant, close enough to see a twisted whorl has been hacked into its surface, lambent quicksilver blood seeping up from the wound and dripping down onto the world. And then you wake up...

”

This was the first sign of the Change to come, a dream that haunted all four for days before their fateful encounter with Jacob outside the Goodwill.

The Second Dream

“

Nighttime. The streets are cracked and grey and crumbling, snow and asha nd black sand cling like tar to your bare feet. Each icy breath fills your nose with the tang of fresh blood and the sour-sweet stink of spoiled meat. Something his hiding behind the soot black sky, beyond the twisted tendrils that once were buildings. So large and so distant that the fire motes suggest only a presence. A shapeless immensity, nothing more. And above it all, the moom hangs huge, rivers of quicksilver blood spilling from raw wounds unsettling similar to the shape of Jacob's body, falling onto the world like rain...

”

The Second Dream came the night after the encounter with Jacob and the otherworld below the Goodwill.

The Third Dream

“

The streets are rubble and ruin, black sand fills the yawning gaps in broken concrete, grasping at your feet and trying to pull you down. The air is life-stealing cold, wrenching blood from eyes and nose and throat as a cost of merely trying to breath, and thick with the stink of hunger and blood and need and fire. The moon is split open and bleeding out, the livid scar lines of wounds upon wounds cracking the pale white circle into a crooked eggshell maw. And tendrils reach down from the endless night beyond, sipping hungrily on the lambent blood still oozing forth.

”

The Third Dream came after the encounter with the Smiling Man in the Diner and Marius Steinfaust's impossible Tarot readings for the four at Die Welt.

The Fourth Dream

“

Night. Cold cracked ground beneath your feet, split by blood-slick weeds pushing through the asphalt and concrete. The air is void-thin and bone-chillingly cold, each breath tastes of your own frozen blood and steals another sliver of precious irreplaceable warmth. Icy silence is broken by song, a dissonant duel between two choirs - a hundred keening voices singing a wordless, howling ululation, half-drowned by a deep, clangorous din that rises from all around, words rise like drowning men in the storm-tossed sea of sound and slip beneath the surface before they can be heard. You look up, following the sound, and the fulgin black of night explodes into cold light as Luna's radiance blazes down on you, caught in the strangling branches of twisted black trees that reach out from the endless vault of night.

”

The Fourth Dream came after Atlas's Change and the violence at the BCPD station, on the first night Atlas, Jerome and Michael spent in Dekker Street. The deep, clangorous din that "rise like drowning men in the storm-tossed sea of sound and slip beneath the surface before they can be heard" are The Words, first noticed by Michael.