In the same sliver of night‑cycle, thousands of Force‑sensitives drifted into a chilling shared dream. Each sleeper felt the temperature of mind and marrow plunge as blinding snow swallowed every horizon. The storm carried whispers in a hundred extinct tongues—battle cries, burial rites, archivists reciting half‑erased manifests—yet no single voice could be picked apart. Instead, the murmurs braided into an uneasy lament that seemed to echo from the ice itself.
Beneath their feet, the snow‑crust was unnaturally thin. Frosted panes revealed motion below: rows of cadavers preserved upright like macabre soldiers at parade rest. Some wore armor pitted by ancient claws; others bore the tattered robes of scholars. Whenever a gust shifted the drifts, skeletal hands thumped against the underside of the ice, as if petitioning the dreamers to remember forgotten names.
A crimson fissure erupted without warning, carving the glacier from end to end. It pulsed not forward but in reverse—eighty‑one counter‑beats that rattled teeth and bones. With each backward surge the dreamers' own heartbeats followed suit, hammering the same inverted cadence. At the final beat the fissure clamped shut, resolving into a frost‑encrusted stone archway surrounded by towering funeral masks. Frozen tears hung from the masks' eyelids, chiming like dull bells in the wind.
Beyond the arch a spiral staircase sank into pitch darkness. Inside that well shuffled reanimated silhouettes—students, knights, and tyrants alike—forever climbing yet never cresting the first landing, compelled by some unseen conductor to reenact their futile ascent. The wind eased for a breath, revealing half‑buried spires on a distant ridge: the collapsed skeleton of an academy long ago consumed by frost and plague.
Just before the blizzard reclaimed everything, a glyph flared atop the arch—an inverted triangle pierced by a single, true line, as though etched in brittle necrotic flesh. The dream shattered; every sleeper jolted upright, skin rimed with real frost and that same glyph raised in angry crimson along wrist, throat, or temple. The welt fades within hours, yet burns whenever its bearer studies star‑charts of a snow‑choked moon once infamous for restless dead and forbidden laboratories lost beneath the ice.
Among archivists and scavengers, a rumor now spreads: somewhere far south of daybreak on that haunted world, a hidden artery of Blood still beats in defiance of time—waiting for the bold, the desperate, or the foolish to follow the backward pulse and unlock what the dead were forced to guard.
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.
