Corpse Candles - A Dream

You stand at the end of a procession of your forebears: giants who march into the depths of a dark and endless cavern. They carry torches, but the line extends well past the point where you can distinguish anything more than shadows stuttering along the cave walls. In a solemn voice, the giant immediately in front of you begs you not to follow down below, but you are already in motion, moving up the line, incapable of stopping or looking back.

You clamber over difficult terrain until you reach a precipace and peer into a wide expanse of these torchbearers marching into the darkness.

"Not your place," says the giant, placing a massive hand on your shoulder. The hand is warm and comforting. "Not your time. Another tomb."

"Another corpse, but not yours."

The giant hands you a torch: an unwieldy staff that you struggle to hold aloft even using both hands. There is a faint hint of a smile at the edges of the giant's mouth as they nod, turn, and retake their position at the end of the line. They march until you are unable to see them, and gradually the torch becomes less of a burden. You raise it to get a better view and wake, clutching a small wooden match, fully burnt.

-

This dream appeared in Volume 1 Issue 1 of my ill-fated zine, THE BIRD OF PASSAGE, and it is something I return to again and again. It inspired an EP worth of anarchist and antifascist dungeon synth in my music project, In The Vast Forest. And I think it's just kind of nice and spooky. I am a big proponent of in-game dreams as a play-within-a-play for a character; a chance to monologize about in-character concerns and potentially get a piece of symbolic information. Or maybe just something cryptic and nonsensical. Or maybe something that didn't really mean anything to me, the game referee, but does mean a lot to the player or character or both. 

An in-game dream takes an already complex dynamic of shared storytelling and both simplifies and explodes it into a moment that ideally distills those complex feelings into a singular image stand-in and memory trigger. The next time that character handles a matchstick, whether accepting or giving one, they will feel the parallel of their dream-giant. Are they the ones marching into darkness? Are they lighting the way? Are they waiting for the correct corpse?