Night found every meditater, scout, and unsuspecting adept sinking into the same impossible architecture: a single, towering rust‑red spire that seemed to bore straight through the planet's crust, its surface pitted by rain of ages. No sky. No horizon. Only the spire—and a gravity that didn't know which way was down.
Dreamers materialized on staggered planes: some standing upright on the floor of a winding passage, others clinging to walls or ceiling as though these surfaces were "ground" for them alone. The passages spiraled around a central gyroscope the size of a shuttle, its rings spinning so fast they blurred to molten streaks. With every rotation, dust cascaded upward, sideways, downward—directions swapped in a dizzying rhythm that threatened to unravel balance and stomach alike.
At three equidistant archways the spiral split, each throat lit by a different hue: ashen gold that radiated calm, midnight violet that pulsed like a war drum, and a cool verdant teal that flickered between the two. From each archway stepped a different shadowed figure—one cloaked in the serenity of the Light, one crackling with the Dark, one robed in tentative Balance. They argued in silence, gesturing, pacing; no words carried in the vacuum hush, yet every dreamer understood the stalemate. Without warning the three silhouettes merged, folding into a single bloom of blinding white that poured into the gyroscope's heart.
The gyre halted—abrupt, absolute. Rings locked at a very precise slant, and an unseen choir whispered the numbers "twenty‑nine… thirteen…" before fading like breath on glass. A metal taste flooded every mouth; frost rimed eyelashes even in the absence of wind. Far below, through a fracture in the floor (or was it the ceiling?), the dreamers glimpsed the spire's root: a vast lattice of rusted gears frozen in a stasis that felt wrong, mis‑aligned, as though the world waited for one decisive click to set its rotation right again.
A final pulse rolled through the structure, branding each witness with a fleeting welt over the sternum—half compass rose, half broken circle. The mark cooled to nothing the moment they jerked awake, yet billowed hot whenever the name Tythos Ridge, Polar Meridian, or any map referencing a forgotten poleward temple was spoken aloud.
Historians whisper that somewhere in the oldest strata of that polar spire sleeps a lattice‑loom—a Celestial axis capable of nudging space‑time back into alignment for one critical hour. But the dream's geometry insists no single path reaches it: Light, Dark, and Balance must complete their spirals in tandem if the gyroscope is ever to turn again, tilting twenty‑nine degrees, thirteen minutes toward a future none can yet chart.
OOC: Feel free to claim one of these visions as hints to how to complete a soon to be dropped mission. Whichever seems the most interesting between BLOOD, ECHO, AXIS, and CALLADENE.
