It had been the same old dream. The one that ended with a thundercrack, and a feeling like a horse's murderous kick striking through her head. As with each time before, Hayden awoke with a gasp, as if it were her own last, desperate breath. She had been having it for as long as she could remember, as far back as when she was born in fact. In fifteen years, she had never really gotten used to it.

Tears clung to her cheeks as she pushed herself from her bed, bracing against the cold. The young woman, born and raised on this rocky patch of farmland in the middle of the remote Artsk region, was sure she had never seen so many spindly spires in her waking life, and was even more certain that she had never stood within their walls. Yet the nightmare never changed, and indeed, each time she suffered it, she recalled more and more details. After she had turned five, she began to recall details that hadn't even been in the nightmare - memories of schooling and travels and an entire life that had not been her own.

Had it?

She fumbled in the dark for a few moments to light a candle, and by its flickering light, she dressed in a coarse, grey sheepskin gown and leather boots. The sun had not yet risen, but she was sure she would not find sleep again until it had. It was just as well. The birds needed tending to, fresh water needed to be drawn, breakfast made. Chores she had been handling all her life - often enough, she mused, that she could not help but dwell on those frightful phantom memories as she carried them out.

Hayden took the curved ring of the candleholder in hand, and braved the morning chill with a quiet shudder, hoping the cold might help to wake herself properly. Birdsong rang distantly but she could spy only the dull orange embers of the fireplace as she passed by her neighbors' thatched houses. It would be a lonely walk to the well at the center of the village. She set on her way.

The nightmare, and the alien world in which it had seemed to take place, were now as familiar to her as her own life. Perhaps even moreso. The concepts and realities of the phantom recall mingled and merged with what she knew to be real, and she occasionally caught herself speaking of these as though they were truths to her increasingly baffled parents. She had spoken of merchant god-kings and the total ruin they brought to the world, and the terror of being stuck on a dying planet while its murderers laughed from atop their castles of ivory and stained glass. She had known how to read and even write, and how it had seemed to mean so little, and she recounted the vivid memories of the vessels of metal and noise that could cross the skies on wings as broad as houses.

To Esmelda and Rikkard, the phantom memories their daughter regaled them with must have seemed to be the endearing babbling born of a child's overactive imagination. Hayden yearned to make the same distinction, but even now, as she approached her maidenhood, it could be difficult to tell where the nightmare ended and her waking life began. Would that she could write it all down somewhere - it might have made an interesting book, were it not so terribly sad. The real trouble was how the nightmare - rather, the vivid memories it had thrust upon her - had sapped her of the precious little joy and wonder that a peasant girl who lived in the frigid steppes could have hoped for. Those who knew her would often call her an "old soul," or remark on the perplexing sadness of her gaze.

Perhaps it was some arcane curse, she mused bitterly, watching her hands work to draw up water from the well, as if she were a spectator to her own body. The water's surface shone like black ice by the light of the twin moons. She set the bucket on the lip of the well, and cupped some in her hands to drink deeply, washing away the cotton plaguing her throat. With relief came a terrible shiver - the village center was bitterly cold. She gave the moons a wary glance over her shoulder.

Since before her time, it had been said that the moons were the baleful gaze of the Spurned God. Under His watch, pitch darkness would fall, the ocean swelled, and terrible blizzards would stir. His unblinking stare was a grim reminder of one of Man's greatest follies - to forget His name.

Hayden felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise slightly, flinching away from the Moons' glare. In the Bygone Nightmare, there had been another moon - albeit just the one. She had known it to change the tides, too, and she wondered frequently if any of the Gods of this realm were truly more real than those of her dreams. But it was a certainty, she knew, that there were terrors in the Waking Nightmare that she could scarcely conceive of in the Bygone. Creatures that stalked the forests and unpaved paths, baying thirstily for childsblood. Sorcerer Kings whose terror was kept in check only by fearsome, perpetually hungry Empires and the paranoid agents of the various Faiths. A truly vengeful God or two seemed at least somewhat plausible.

Just to be on the safe side...

She uttered an old litany of self-admonishment, entreating the Spurned God for patience before setting on her way home. The litany had been taught to her by her parents, though they, like most of the village, worshipped the Muse of Mercies, Aethona. As Hayden understood it, most people worshipped and prayed to a singular God or Goddess of the Eightfold - but everyone in the world knew to beg for the Spurned's mercy regardless. Such was the way, when His wrath was so indiscriminate.